Space and the American Imagination (review)

Culture as a major explanation of policy formulation is hardly conventional wisdom within Howard McCurdy’s field of public administration, although within the history of technology this is by now taken for granted. It is therefore disconcerting that McCurdy writes as if he were virtually the first person to offer largely cultural explanations for changing American attitudes toward space exploration in the twentieth century and for the changing public policies that followed. Still, he makes a compelling case to his fellow public administration scholars that politics, personality, and economics no longer suffice for determining the origins and fate of public policies. McCurdy’s own conversion to cultural explanations is particularly notable because he has previously published two other, more traditional public administration studies on related topics, The Space Station Decision (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990) and Inside NASA (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993).

McCurdy’s basic argument in Space and the American Imagination is quite straightforward: “The rise of the U.S. space program was due in part to a concerted effort by writers of popular science and science fiction, along with other opinion leaders, to prepare the public for what they hoped would be the inevitable conquest of space” (p. 233). By “conquest” McCurdy means not military engagements—save for possible encounters with extraterrestrial life—but rather peaceful explorations through spacecraft, space stations, lunar bases, and colonies on Mars, if not on more distant planets.

McCurdy naturally concedes that the cold war prompted the rise of the nation’s space program in the 1950s and 1960s. But he contends that America’s preexisting cultural ideals of the endless frontier, of the heroic explorer, and of progress through technology made selling the space program to policy makers and the general public much easier. Space was promoted and perceived as the final frontier for American explorers, scientists, engineers, and ordinary citizens. In addition, the evolution of American aviation in just a few decades from romantic adventure to common commercial experience by the 1950s and 1960s offered a further basis for optimism and support even though the space program, unlike aviation, was long restricted to white male professionals (test pilots).

None of these points is especially original. Most of the book’s other topics are also familiar: the disillusionment that predictably set in when NASA could sustain neither governmental nor public interest in space exploration following the 1969 initial moon landing, which fulfilled the dream of centuries; the further decline in interest as the cold war ended in the late 1980s; the eventual embrace by NASA of the space shuttle as the principal means of keeping the space program alive while debating the fate of space stations, space colonies, and other long-envisioned projects; and the uncertain future of space exploration amid shifting national and international priorities—not least a worldwide embrace of environmentalism that in some quarters likens giant space colonies and even giant space stations to earthly polluters.

McCurdy ably details the depiction of space exploration in popular culture, not only in twentieth-century America but also in nineteenth-century Europe. His wide-ranging sources include science fiction, paintings, films, television, and theme parks. If most of what he provides is not pathbreaking, the explicit connections he draws between popular culture and public policy are illuminating.

Having embraced popular culture as a neglected explanatory device for public policy, McCurdy nevertheless laments that popular opinion increasingly dictates that policy. The space program’s vaunted ability in its early years to “excite and entertain” or, with the cold war, to “frighten” (p. 233) the public led to insatiable expectations that simply could not be met by the federal government, much less by the private sector. As in the case of nuclear power, so here, those zealots who had repeatedly proclaimed the inevitability, safety, and affordability of technological progress were incapable of handling the disappointments and disasters that more realistic and less naive persons would have anticipated in one form or another.

Indeed...