Remembering the Space Age: Proceedings of the Fiftieth Anniversary Conference (review)

This past year marks the fortieth anniversary of the NASA history program. Since 1959, when Dr. Eugene Emme took up his duties as the first NASA historian, the history office has published scores of monographs, chronologies, translations, special studies, collections of key original documents, and edited volumes of papers presented at conferences and symposia. In terms of its value to the agency, the public, and the history profession, the NASA program is a model for other federal agencies.

This volume, edited by the current NASA historian, is fully up to the high standard established by its predecessors. It includes the papers offered at a conference jointly convened by the NASA History Office and the National Air and Space Museum's Space History Division, October 22–23, 2007. The organizing principle of this conference—to consider some of the larger social, cultural, and political questions raised by fifty years of space exploration—resulted in papers of genuine interest to historians, aerospace professionals, and space buffs.

One group of contributors—Asif Siddiqi, John Krige, Michael Neufeld, and James Hansen—accesses the impact of the space age from a variety of regional and national perspectives. Another set of papers focuses on cultural representations of space flight in music, photography, cinema, and art. Roger Launius and Jonathan Coopersmith provide useful insights into space-age historiography.

The most interesting group of papers, however, addresses the impact and deeper meaning of space flight in the broad context of world history. A generation ago, Walter McDougall won a Pulitzer Prize with a brilliant political history of the early space age, in which he argued that the first flight of human beings into space represented a saltation, an epic event on a par with the moment when the first lungfish crawled up onto a beach. In his contribution, McDougall takes at least a small step back from that view, suggesting that it is still too early to judge the ultimate impact of our venture beyond the atmosphere.

Historian J. R. McNeill takes a much tougher stance. "At the moment," he writes, "space programs, space flight, space research, all seem at most secondary next to the dominant trends of modern history" (399). Former NASA historian Sylvia Kraemer agrees that space flight "has some strong competition as a claimant to defining our world." In the case of the cold war, she continues, "space was an important salient, but not principal provocateur" (403).

John Logsdon argues for space as a key force promoting globalization, suggesting that if all space systems were to be shut down for twenty-four hours, "we would quickly realize that those systems have become deeply integrated into the infrastructure of the modern world" (399). Martin Collins goes a step further, arguing that satellites operating in near-earth orbit have been the key instruments of social, cultural, and economic change. "Spaceflight," he points out, "has been … a primary site in which prior categories of the modern—the nation state, the military, civil society, capitalism—have been refashioned and given new meaning" (200). Given the speed at which information and money move around the globe, thanks to space-based systems, even Sylvia Kraemer agrees that the day may not be too far off when "the great cities of the world will have more in common with each other than they have with their respective hinterlands." Wherever one stands on the question of space flight as an instrument of fundamental change, this volume offers much food for thought.