Exploring the Heavens: Space Technology and Religious Implications Kendrick Oliver, to Touch the Face of God Elizabeth A

([SORULQJWKH+HDYHQV6SDFH7HFKQRORJ\DQG5HOLJLRXV ,PSOLFDWLRQV 7LOPDQQ6LHEHQHLFKQHU Technology and Culture, Volume 55, Number 4, October 2014, pp. 988-994 (Review) 3XEOLVKHGE\7KH-RKQV+RSNLQV8QLYHUVLW\3UHVV DOI: 10.1353/tech.2014.0106 For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/tech/summary/v055/55.4.siebeneichner.html Access provided by Freie Universitaet Berlin (11 Dec 2014 11:05 GMT) 15_Siebeneichner 988–94.qxp_03_49.3dobraszczyk 568– 10/23/14 2:02 AM Page 988 ESSAY REVIEW Exploring the Heavens: Space Technology and Religious Implications Kendrick Oliver, To Touch the Face of God Elizabeth A. Kessler, Picturing the Cosmos TILMANN SIEBENEICHNER Historian Kendrick Oliver’s book on the American space program and art historian Elizabeth Kessler’s book on the images of the Hubble Space Tele- scope, although quite different in their specific objects of study and meth- odological operationalization, reflect a common interest that has attracted increasing attention from scholars of the history of technology: the religious implications of the exploration of outer space, an undertaking that has hitherto being perceived predominantly as secular. Since the ground- breaking study of David Noble on the religion of technology, which claimed that technology and religion have been feeding off each other for a millennium, more and more scholars are taking up the issue.1 Oliver’s To Touch the Face of God: The Sacred, the Profane, and the American Space Program, 1957–1975 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univer- sity Press, 2012. Pp. 248. $39.95) addresses the possible religious implications of the U.S. space program in the “long sixties”—that is, in the heyday of the space age, between 1957 and 1975. Oliver characterizes the space age during this period as an essentially charismatic enterprise, part of a long, symbolic tradition in which redemption and divinity are manifested in motions of ascents toward heaven. The author suggests that spaceflight, at least in the United States, “owed much to religious archetypes and sensi- bilities” (p. 9), and that religious hopes and ambitions were crucial in con- verting a mere space program into a phenomenon worth the term space age. Asking if Americans conceived of spaceflight as a means for mankind’s return to God, Oliver’s book thus takes up three major issues: it tells Tilmann Siebeneichner is a research associate in the Emmy Noether Research Group “The Future in the Stars: European Astroculture and Extraterrestrial Life in the 20th Century” based at the Freie Universität in Berlin. ©2014 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040-165X/14/5504-0013/988–94 1. David F. Noble, The Religion of Technology. 988 15_Siebeneichner 988–94.qxp_03_49.3dobraszczyk 568– 10/23/14 2:02 AM Page 989 SIEBENEICHNERK|KExploring the Heavens not only the story of relations between religion and the U.S. space program, but also explores religious meanings and practices in secular times, and discusses how they informed and influenced the notion of the space age. The aims of his project are ambitious and Oliver’s systematic approach is all-encompassing and, at times, convincing. Nonetheless, the overall conclusions he draws feel disappointing—not because of the author’s efforts, but rather because of the ways in which he conceives his ESSAY object of interest. REVIEW To Touch the Face of God covers both institutional and individual as- pects of this history. Oliver discusses various sorts of religious semantics, as well as spiritual practices, connected with the exploration of space. First, he addresses the question of NASA’s motivations and thus examines the role that religious values played in the development of U.S. space-exploration goals during the 1950s and ’60s. Chapter 1 focuses on NASA’s institutional culture and examines in detail the life-worlds inhabited there, and also in its installations and personnel. Second, in chapter 2, it addresses the implications of spaceflight for religious thought and belief and examines the emergence of exotheology, a discipline concerned with the epistemo- logical status of Christian cosmography, the implications of quantum advances in man’s technological capacity for relations with God, and the compatibility of religious doctrine with the discovery of intelligent extraterrestrial life. In the third chapter, Oliver takes into account the astronauts’ encoun- ters with a new and completely unknown environment and the possibili- ties it offered for (renewed) spiritual experience. Chapter 3 thus discusses U.S. astronauts as figures of existential significance not because they were the country’s champions in a fateful contest with a rival superpower, but rather because they faced an encounter with their own elemental self and the revelation of what capacities of faith, will, and judgment a man could retain in the most trying of physical conditions. Chapter 4 explores the spiritual responses to spaceflight both in space and on earth. Although strict mission schedules and rather uncomfortable conditions within the spacecraft left little time for spiritual experiences, four out of the eleven Apollo lunar-module pilots returned with new intuitions of the sacred and their own relation to it, which they tried to share with earthly audiences. In discussing the difficulties of communicating spiritual experiences, Oliver also identifies Apollo 8’s prime-time broadcast from lunar orbit on Christ- mas Eve 1968 as one of a few rare moments he classifies as religious occa- sions in the Durkheimian sense: the astronauts’ reading from Genesis evoked “a public paused in a common sensation of sacred time, thoughts deepening into ontology” (p. 169). After having discussed NASA’s attitudes toward religion, the emergence of exotheology, and spiritual responses among astronauts as they were expressed prominently in Apollo 8’s broadcast, Oliver’s analysis of 989 15_Siebeneichner 988–94.qxp_03_49.3dobraszczyk 568– 10/23/14 2:02 AM Page 990 TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE reactions to the broadcast ushers in the fourth and final theme of the book: the way in which the survival of a spiritual dimension to the program be- came a subject of organized concern at a grassroots level. After Madalyn Murray O’Hair protested the reading of Christian prayers and scriptures from space, more than 8 million letters and petition signatures in support of the broadcast arrived at NASA headquarters—the largest volume of OCTOBER mail NASA ever received on a single topic. However, it is doubtful whether 2014 this campaign should be interpreted as broad support for religious incli- VOL. 55 nations within the space program. Oliver admits that the majority of those participating in the campaign framed their support of the broadcast in terms of support for First Amendment protections of the free exercise of religion and the freedom of speech (many, he further concedes, were prob- ably motivated foremost by the fact that O’Hair had succeeded in her pur- suit of a ban on school prayers in the early 1960s) rather than explicitly supporting religion in space. What seems to have motivated most partici- pants therefore was not so much the support of spiritual ambitions in space as much as a fear of increasingly restricted religious practice in the country, for which the space program served as a surrogate. NASA made little effort to reengineer the campaign into a basis for active support, a move that corresponds with the results of the first chapter. As Oliver concludes here, religious faith was rarely an inspiration for the project of spaceflight; it was salient mostly as a source of validation. Those engaged in these enterprises were either increasingly moved by self- interest or the secular ideologies of nation and state, while others showed a loyalty that seemed both derived from and confined to the activity itself. This mentality influenced perceptions of the ideal astronaut as well. NASA, as Oliver observes, was most concerned with psychological stabil- ity, promoting the ideal astronaut as one being reticent, rational, and stim- ulated more by the operational challenges of the space age than by the op- portunities it seemed to present for markedly new varieties of experience. Thus, as he writes, “the astronaut who spoke with sincerity of a personal questing impulse . was the least likely to be trusted with an actual mission” (p. 97). While it is undeniable that the space age introduced significant new elements into each of those religious debates discussed in chapter 3, exotheology remained a speculative prospectus, with more adversaries than supporters. By the end of the long sixties, many Americans were instead reinvesting their faith in a classical cosmos, doubting the assumption of a cosmic destiny for mankind in favor of conservative claims of conven- tional faith. If “the space age ended as an evangelical revival began” (p. 168), as Oliver argues, does this mean (as he suggests) that there was too little religion in NASA’s efforts on space exploration? Or, as the author himself puts it, “did the space age end [because] it had failed to deliver the hoped-for spiritual returns?” (p. 9). 990 15_Siebeneichner 988–94.qxp_03_49.3dobraszczyk 568– 10/23/14 2:02 AM Page 991 SIEBENEICHNERK|KExploring the Heavens Certainly, there is more to the space age than the cold rationale of in- novative engineers, eager politicians, and enlightened crowds. But the claim that enthusiasm for a “new technology of transcendence” (p. 170) is fully explained by religion (in its classic understanding) is questionable, since such an approach neglects the political framing of the space age—namely, the cold war. It seems somewhat surprising that although discussing religion with detailed theoretical knowledge and prudence, Oliver completely ESSAY leaves out the role of political religion. Of course, this theoretical approach REVIEW has hitherto been applied predominantly to totalitarian regimes.

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