Remembering the Space Age: Proceedings of the 50th Anniversary Conference (review)

The arrival of this volume strikes me as timely because of the celebration of the fortieth anniversary of the Moon landing. Thinking further, however, I realize that it would have been timely any year, because we are constantly remembering the space age. This does not mean that Steven Dick's book is without surprises. On the contrary. It shows how memory, in all its different forms, is created, reinterpreted, questioned, lived, and used over time and for different purposes. Some perspectives and conclusions are more familiar than others. Dick divides the book into two main parts, with nine and eight longer chapters respectively. In the first part, "National and Global Dimensions of the Space Age," space exploration is put into the larger frame of human history. The second, "Remembrance and Cultural Representation of the Space Age," addresses questions of interpretation and the meaning of space exploration. The book ends with four shorter essays, collected under the heading "Reflections on the Space Age."

Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, the U.S. perspective dominates, as John Krige notes in his essay about the European program. True, Slava Gerovitch and Cathleen S. Lewis treat the Russian/Soviet endeavor and Asif A. Siddiqi seeks to lift the discussion to a comparative level by treating space flight in the national imagination. This is commendable, as are the questions raised by James R. Hansen on China's space activities (though Hansen's is more of a literature overview). In addressing NASA's attempts to study the impact of the space program, Jonathan Coopersmith concludes that the effort was not without interesting results, but that it was a failure in relation to its ambition—for example, the ambition to use historical analogy, which if implemented would have raised questions about the unwillingness of historians to take part in a larger policy discussion.

The second part of the book includes some of the richest essays. Emily S. Rosenberg's on the space age in American culture is eloquent and rewarding. In her analysis, carried out in the four dimensions of the cold war, the media, technocracy, and the arts, she reveals something close to a meaning of the space age. One sees this also in the essay by Roger Launius. Although placed last in the book's second part, Launius's discussion of the master narrative and the conflicting subnarratives of American space flight is really central in the volume. Even though a non-U.S. reader like myself may have a hard time distinguishing the fundamental differences between critiques from the political left and right, the "feel-good triumph for the nation and its people" (p. 357) enabled by the master narrative of success, and the joining of forces that its counternarrative of conspiracy allows, deepens our understanding of the different meanings and uses of history. Rosenberg and Launius both omit reference to Lisa Parks's 2005 Cultures in Orbit: Satellite and the Televisual, but in general I found the references valuable even while wishing there had been a collective list at the end.

Conference proceedings challenge a reviewer because a smorgasbord renders it impossible to do justice to all contributions. Still, anyone with an interest in the space age can find something to chew on in this volume. Though I do not agree with Dick's assertion in the introduction that it is filled with provocative thoughts, perhaps this is due to our different expectations and hopes about how the space age should and could be remembered.