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Bibliographic Essay In the social rounds of academic life, at seminars, symposia, and conferences, an introduction to and a handshake with a stranger are usually followed by the question, “So, what are you working on?” Over the course of researching and writing this book, my answer to that question has tended to elicit one of two responses. The first, a slightly blank stare and the follow-up, “What do religion and the space program actually have to do with one another?” The second, “I can’t believe nobody has worked on that before.” These responses, though contrasting, reflect a shared surmise: that the subject has not been productive of a literature. In truth, a literature—both primary and secondary —exists, but it is diffuse rather than conspicuous. The most substantial published analysis of what space travel has historically owed to religion is contained in David F. Noble’s The Religion of Technology: The Divinity of Man and the Spirit of Invention (New York: Knopf, 1997). Noble argues that space technology exemplifies mankind’s desire to recover the divinity that it lost in the Fall. In a PhD dissertation completed at the University of Texas at Austin in 2004, “Space Rapture: Extraterrestrial Millennialism and the Cultural Construction of Space Colonization,” Ryan McMillen advanced a similar, if not identical, thesis: that the impulse toward space travel was inspired by the Christian apocalyptic, expressing a rapturous fantasy of escape from an annihilated earth. As I make clear in chapter 1, I disagree with Noble and McMillen, though my own argument has been sharpened by their provocations. Both authors draw substantially on a voluminous file of documents under the heading “Religion” collected by staff at the NASA History Office in Washington, DC. A survey of that file naturally leads to the conclusion that space exploration’s relationship to religion was consistent and intimate, because all the material it contains attests to that relationship. But this constitutes a sampling error. The operations of faith needed to be examined in context. In the course of my research for this book, I scrutinized the office files of senior NASA personnel, including Wernher von Braun (Library of Congress ), Thomas Paine (Library of Congress), Homer Newell (National Archives, College Park), and James Fletcher (University of Utah), as well as the records of the Johnson Space Center in Houston (National Archives Southwest Region, Fort Worth, and University of Houston–Clear Lake). This was a rather different research experience, an immersion in day-to-day institutional logics that were secular in essence and usually drably instrumental. In The Spaceflight Revolution: A Sociological Study (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1976), William Sims Bainbridge also reports that spaceflight was sometimes discussed by its advocates in religious terms, particularly as a source of peak experience, but he does not seem to regard religion as a determinative influence in the making of the space age. His principal case study, Barbara Marx Hubbard’s Committee 218 Bibliographic Essay for the Future, emerged only after the first two moon landings; moreover, within a few years the committee had abandoned its focus on space. Religion may not have been a primary motivation for most of those developing the means to travel into space, or for the astronauts who would actually make the journey, but it did provide an important frame within which they and others could understand what they were doing. Robert Poole’s Earthrise: How Man First Saw the Earth (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008) usefully records how commonly contemporary discussions of spaceflight made reference to its religious significance and how some of the astronauts responded spiritually to their encounter with the cosmos. However, as indicated in chapter 3 of this book, I am less persuaded than Poole that what charged the experiences of the astronauts with religious meaning was always primarily the view of the earth. For the most extensive—though still not very extensive—discussion of the space age from the perspective of a religious historian, see Robert S. Ellwood’s accounts of American religion in the fifties and sixties: The Fifties Spiritual Marketplace: American Religion in a Decade of Conflict (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997) and The Sixties Spiritual Awakening: American Religion Moving from Modern to Postmodern (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994). The most detailed historical survey of modern astrotheology is contained in Steven J. Dick, Life on Other Worlds: The 20th-Century Extraterrestrial Life Debate (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1998). Dick, however, is principally interested in speculations about...

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