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Exploration, Discovery, and Culture NASA’S Role in History Chapter 23 Exploration, Discovery, and Culture NASA’s Role in History Steven J. Dick Introduction: Space Exploration in Context Like the facets of a jewel, the overall importance of NASA and the Space Age over the last 50 years may be considered from many viewpoints, ranging from the geopolitical and technological to the educational and scientific. But no facet is more central than exploration, a concept that encompasses most of the other possibilities and arguably constitutes one of the main engines of human culture, spanning millennia. In its simplest and purest form, the Space Age may be seen as the latest episode in a long tradition of human exploration. Surveying the vast panoply of history, historians have often found “symmetry in the narrative arc of the Great Ages of Discovery” or traced that tradition back even to the Paleolithic Era in an attempt to find a “global historical context” for the Space Age.1 1. Stephen J. Pyne, “The Third Great Age of Discovery,” in Space: Discovery and Exploration, ed. Martin Collins and Sylvia Fries (New York, NY: Beaux Arts Editions, 1993); Stephen J. Pyne, “Seeking Newer Worlds: An Historical Context for Space Exploration,” in Critical Issues in the History of Spaceflight, ed. Steven J. Dick and Roger Launius (Washington, DC: NASA SP-2006-4702, 2006), pp. 7–35, available at http://history.nasa.gov/SP-2006-4702/frontmatter.pdf; J. R. McNeill, “Gigantic Follies? Human Exploration and the Space Age in Long-term Historical Perspective,” in Remembering the Space Age, ed. Steven J. Dick (Washington, DC: NASA SP-2008-4703, 2008), pp. 3–16. An interesting exemplar of the continuous exploration theme is Richard S. Lewis, From Vinland to Mars: A Thousand Years of Exploration (New York, NY: New York Times Book Company, 1976). 587 NASA’s First 50 Years The Paleolithic Era aside, prior to the Space Age, historians often distin- guished two modern Ages of Exploration, the Age of Discovery in the 15th and 16th centuries associated with Prince Henry the Navigator, Columbus, Magellan, and other European explorers, and the Second Age in the 18th and 19th centuries characterized by further geographic exploration such as the voyages of Captain Cook, underpinned and driven by the scientific revolution.2 Some now distinguish a Third Age, beginning with the IGY and Sputnik, pri- marily associated with space exploration, but also with the Antarctic and the oceans.3 If one accepts this framework, it makes sense to compare one age of exploration with another, constantly keeping in mind the differences as well as the similarities and with full realization of the unlikelihood of any predictive ability. Here we choose to compare the Age of Space with the European Age of Discovery, in the hope of revealing symmetries and differences and casting in a new light some of the chief characteristics of the last 50 years in space. The overarching theme and structure of our argument for the primacy of exploration as a key to understanding the Space Age is inspired by the distin- guished Harvard maritime historian J. H. Parry, who 30 years ago published his classic volume The Age of Reconnaissance: Discovery, Exploration and Settlement, 1450 to 1650.4 NASA’s first 50 years may also be characterized as “The Age of Reconnaissance,” or to put it more broadly, as the first stages of “The Age of Discovery.” There have been discovery and exploration, but not yet settlement—unsurprisingly, since we are only 50 years into the Age of Reconnaissance for space. Parry tackled his theme by discussing the condi- tions for discovery, then the story of the discoveries themselves, and finally the “fruits of discovery.” A parallel tripartite structure provides a framework for examining the importance of NASA and the Space Age: what were the conditions for the Space Age, the story of its voyages, and their impact? Much of the meaning of NASA and the Space Age may be found in the context of those three questions. By drawing such comparisons we are engaging in the time-worn method of analogy, and we need to ask whether analogy is a valid framework for analy- sis, a proper method of reasoning? In making use of analogy, I am following 2. William H. Goetzmann, New Lands, New Men: America and the Second Great Age of Discovery (New York, NY: Penguin, 1986). 3. Pyne, “Seeking Newer Worlds,” pp. 7–35. 4. J. H. Parry, The Age of Reconnaissance: Discovery, Exploration and Settlement, 1450 to 1650 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1981; 1st ed., London, U.K.: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1963). 588 Exploration, Discovery, and Culture a methodology pioneered almost 50 years ago in another classic book, The Railroad and the Space Program, whose subtitle is An Exploration of Historical Analogy. This volume, edited by MIT Professor Bruce Mazlish and populated with well-known scholars, addressed the problem of analogy in considerable detail. Mazlish himself spoke of “attempting to set up a new branch of com- parative history: the study of comparative or analogous social inventions and their impact on society.” The authors went on to give what is, almost 50 years later, perhaps still the best treatment of the general use of historical analogy. Although originally suspicious of parallels with the past, present, and future, the contributors to this volume found it a useful tool; historian Thomas P. Hughes saw “the possibility of moving up onto a level of abstraction where the terrain of the past is suggestive of the topography of the present and its future projection.”5 The authors cautioned that as much empirical detail should be used as possible and that analogies drawn from vague generalities should be avoided. Confident in the use of historical analogy as suggestive but not predictive of the future, Mazlish and his coauthors went on to elaborate their analogy with the railroad and the space program with such a degree of suc- cess that their work is still discussed today. The utility of analogy is suggested by its frequent use: throughout the Space Age, and indeed the history of science in general, scientists have been drawn to this mode of reasoning.6 The Antarctic dry valleys have been studied as analogs to conditions for life on Mars, the subglacial Antarctic Lake Vostok as an analog to the ocean of Jupiter’s satellite Europa, and extremophiles on Earth as analogs to possible alien life. More similar in kind to the railroad and the space program analogy, NASA Administrator Michael Griffin has invoked the “highway to space” to emphasize the sustaining effort required 5. Bruce Mazlish, “Historical Analogy: The Railroad and the Space Program and Their Impact on Society,” in The Railroad and the Space Program: An Exploration of Historical Analogy, ed. Bruce Mazlish (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1965), p. 12; Thomas Parke Hughes, “The Technological Frontier: The Railroad,” in The Railroad and the Space Program, p. 53, note 1. The circumstances of this volume are discussed by Jonathan Coopersmith, “Great (Unfulfilled) Expectations: To Boldly Go Where No Social Scientist or Historian Has Gone Before,” in Remembering the Space Age, ed. Steven J. Dick (Washington, DC: NASA SP-2008-4703, 2008), pp. 135–154. 6. For example, in his book At Home in the Universe (New York, NY: Springer-Verlag, 1996), pp. 13–16, pioneering physicist John A. Wheeler speaks of analogy as a stimulus to creativity. For another use of analogy in the history of physics, see Daniel Kennefick,Traveling at the Speed of Thought: Einstein and the Quest for Gravitational Waves (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007). The “method of analogy” is an important subject in the philosophy of science, for example, R. Harré, The Philosophies of Science: An Introductory Survey (London, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 1972), pp. 172–176, and Mary B. Hesse, Models and Analogies in Science (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1966). 589 NASA’s First 50 Years in space exploration. “Space exploration by its very nature requires the planning and implementation of missions and projects over decades, not years,” he wrote. “Decades of commitment were required to build up our network of transcontinental railroads and highways, as well as our systems for maritime and aeronautical commerce. It will be no quicker or easier to build our highways to space, and the commitment to do it must be clear and sustaining.”7 Speaking of the new systems being built for the current space exploration vision, Griffin wrote that “NASA will build the ‘interstate highway’ that will allow us to return to the moon, and to go to Mars.” Similarly, he has compared polar exploration to lunar exploration, arguing that the Apollo program was like the singular forays of Scott or Byrd, while the current plans to establish a base on the Moon are more like the permanent presence that several countries have had in the Antarctic since the 1950s, requiring international collaboration.8 Analogies are never perfect, but they can be useful and illuminating as guides for thought. They can also be overstated and misleading, as in the case of the “frontier analogy” so prominent in American space exploration. There is no doubt that exploration is part of the American character and that feder- ally funded exploration has been a significant part of American history.9 But the very idea of the American frontier and its meaning have been questioned, especially as popularized at the end of the 19th century by historian Frederick Jackson Turner. Turner saw many of the distinctive characteristics of American society, including inventiveness, inquisitiveness, and individualism, as deriv- ing from the existence of a frontier, and he therefore saw the closing of the Western frontier about 1890 as cause for worry.10 It was natural for Americans 7.
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