L. Billings November 5, 2012 FINAL DRAFT Wowing the Public: The Shuttle as Cultural Icon From first flight to the present the Space shuttle has been an important symbol of United States technological capability, universally recognized as such by both the American people and the larger international community. NASA’s Space shuttle remained until retirement one of the most highly visible symbols of American excellence worldwide. This chapter will consider the evolving place of the Space shuttle as a cultural icon from its first conceptualization until the present. From 1982 to 2012, the space shuttle was the public face of NASA. In a way, for people outside the space community, the space shuttle was NASA. If people didn’t know what N-A-S-A stood for, or why the U.S. had a space program, they all knew about the shuttle. They saw it on television and on the front page of their daily newspapers. They heard its astronauts talk about their trips into space. They read books about the shuttle to their children. They bought shuttle posters, shuttle toys, shuttle T-shirts, you name it. They shared in the national pride over this impressive technoscientific achievement. And they participated in the national mourning over the loss of two shuttle missions, crew and spaceships destroyed. The space shuttle means something to people – but exactly what does it mean? How did we experience it? What does it stand for? What is the legacy of the pace shuttle as a cultural icon? How will we remember it? Will it endure in public memory? For me, the space shuttle means power: the brute power of a super-rocket launch, seen and heard and felt in the bones at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center (KSC) press site, a few miles down the road on the sand of Cocoa Beach, and in the mediated environment of an IMAX theater screening of “The Dream Is Alive.” For me, it stands for the brainpower invested in conceiving and building such a thing, and for the political and industrial power it took to do it. For me, it means freedom, too: the freedom of flight, freedom from Earth’s gravity, freedom from the routines of everyday life, freedom from limits. For me, it is a truly awesome thing. For most people the shuttle has been an entertaining, exciting, and inspiring public spectacle. In official culture – at NASA headquarters, in Congress and the White House – the shuttle represents U.S. political and technological prowess, power, leadership, and accomplishment. In popular culture, the shuttle carries these meanings, too, but along with other meanings as well, like adventure and escape. It may seem odd to consider the space shuttle apart from its human crews. After all, the primary reason why the shuttle is iconic is because it is a human space transportation system. However, this chapter will focus primarily on the object, and in large part on imagery of the object, since most people have known the shuttle through its imagery. The visual rhetoric of the space shuttle – that is, the messages and meanings that the space shuttle has conveyed, both intended and construed – is powerful, and worth considering. What is a cultural icon? The space shuttle indisputably is a cultural icon, familiar to people all over the world as a bright-shining-white representation of achievement, progress, prowess, power, and freedom. For Americans and others, it stands for U.S. political and technological leadership, specifically in space and more broadly in the world arena. It conveys escape from, even transcendence of “this mortal coil” – the trials, tribulations, and limitations of everyday life. So what exactly is an icon? What becomes an icon? How? And why? An icon is, simply, a picture, an image, a representation.1 One specific definition of “icon” refers to a certain type of religious object: an artistic representation of some sacred person, such as a saint, and venerated itself as sacred. Given the intense and sometimes acrimonious competition to obtain one of the four retired space shuttles (including the test object Enterprise) for public display, it is reasonable to argue that these shuttle-objects are, in effect, revered as sacred in themselves.2 The terms “icon” and “iconic” are overused in popular discourse. On any given day, news headlines will be peppered with the terms, describing people, places, buildings, and other objects – from the “iconic Empire State Building” and “Coke’s iconic bottle” to the “iconic Land Rover Defender,” “London: one of the world’s iconic capitals,” and cultural “icons” such as Oprah and Elvis.3 In scholarly research, a wide range of people, characters, and objects have been examined as cultural icons.4 In space studies, scholars have analyzed astronauts5 and space suits6 as such. The space shuttle itself has its turn here. 1 See: http:/www.dictionary.com. 2 Though in scholarly research icons and symbols are studied as different phenomena, in popular discourse “icon” and “symbol” are generally treated as synonyms, and in this chapter I will follow suit. 3 I conducted a Google News word search at 2:21 pm EDT July 23, 2012, for “iconic” and found the word in 102,000 headlines. A similar search for “icon” at the same time produced 13 million hits – for example, “Mariah Carey to be named icon,” “Alexander Cockburn, left journalist icon,” “music icon Molly Meldrum.” 4 See, for example, Foss, Sonja K., Ambiguity as persuasion: the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Communication Quarterly 34(3), 326-340, 1986; Nelkin, D., and Susan L., The DNA Mystique: The Gene as a Cultural Icon, University of Michigan Press, 1995. 5 See, for example, Roger D. Launius, Heroes in a vacuum: the Apollo astronaut as cultural icon, The Florida Historical Quarterly, 87(2), 174-209. Public image and political reality In order to understand what the shuttle has meant, and will continue to mean, it is important to consider the cultural context in which the space shuttle was conceived, born, flew, and retired. The shuttle was a “modern” object that came into being in a postmodern world and retired in a post-postmodern milieu.7 In the heydays of modern U.S. scientific and technological enthusiasm, the nation was dedicated to conquering and exploiting the natural environment to construct a machine-made, managed world. While the idea of the space shuttle was modern, by the time that idea was executed into reality this “enthusiasm” was on the wane. The shuttle was a massive technocratic accomplishment, conceived before but born after the postmodern critique of Big Technology that unfolded in the 1960s and ‘70s.8 Thus the space shuttle was out of its time from the beginning. As Walter McDougall has explained, the U.S. space program was “part of a package that Americans bought after Sputnik in the belief that the United States must adopt the technocratic model to get back on top….” By the time that NASA was up and running, the U.S. had already “exceeded its technical and financial grasp. In time the original model for civilian technocracy, the space program, became dispensable.”9 Vested interests shaped the shuttle program in ways that, first, benefited those interests, and, second, advanced the civilian space program. While the sometimes- ugly private politics of the shuttle program are well known, at the same time the public image of the shuttle has remained relatively pristine. The Challenger and Columbia disasters seemed to do as much to rally public interest as they did to fuel questions about the shuttle’s purpose. By 2012, NASA and its constituent interests had recovered from disasters and failures and restored the shuttle program to “greatness,” with the losses of Challenger and Columbia and all the rest of the space shuttle’s lesser troubles now integrated into the cultural narrative of the shuttle. 6 See, for example, Debra Benita Shaw, BODIES OUT OF THIS WORLD: the space suit as cultural icon, Science as Culture 13(1), 123-144, 2004. 7 The cultural movement known as modernism was a response to the economic, social, and political conditions of industrial development. It has been characterized as “a socially progressive trend of thought that affirms the power of human beings to create, improve and reshape their environment with the aid of practical experimentation, scientific knowledge, or technology.” (Source: Wikipedia.) Modernism’s object of worship was science and technology. 8 See, for example, Jacques Ellul, The technological society (Translated from the French by John Wilkinson. With an introd. by Robert K. Merton.), Knopf, New York, 1964; and E.F. Schumacher, Small Is beautiful: a study of economics as if people mattered, Blond and Briggs, London, 1973. 9 Walter A. McDougall, …the heavens and the Earth: a political history of the Space Race, Basic Books, New York, 1985, p. 422. Consider, for example, these remarks to the House of Representatives by Democratic Congresswoman Eddie Bernice Johnson, representing the 30th district of Texas, on the occasion of NASA’s last shuttle mission: The space shuttle has been a source of pride and inspiration for the American people. It sparked interest in many fields of engineering and science which benefitted the United States economy, inspired successive generations, and contributed to our leadership in science and technology. We must continue to provide our children and grandchildren with a similar source of inspiration. As the chapter on the Space shuttle closes later this year, a new chapter in the book of human exploration begins.10 And consider the words of then-NASA Administrator Michael Griffin at the launch of shuttle mission STS-122 in 2008: Societies as well as individuals must be willing to risk.