Rockets and Revolution: A Cultural History of Early Spaceflight by Michael G. Smith (review)

Histories of spaceflight often compare the pioneering contributions of three countries: Russia/the Soviet Union, Germany, and the United States. Pride of place among individual pioneers goes to one man from each country: Konstantin Tsiolkovskii, Hermann Oberth, and Robert Goddard—in about that order, chronologically and perhaps substantively. Michael Smith’s cultural history argues that Tsiolkovskii and the Russians were first among these equals, at least before World War II. That priority, he argues, owes much to the Russian Revolution.

Smith is not the first to see the links between rockets and revolution in Russian and Soviet history. Walter A. McDougall, for example, remarked in … the Heavens and the Earth in 1985 that “modern rocketry and social revolution grew up together in tsarist Russia.”¹⁶ But while McDougall’s prize-winning study is a political history of early spaceflight, Smith’s is a cultural history of the prelude to spaceflight, especially in the years 1910 to 1939. He seeks to understand what it was about Russia that spawned that country’s love affair with spaceflight.

This book may interest readers of this journal because it is a comparative study of the origins of a phenomenon with some transnational dimensions. Smith calls it a “comparative, global history” (p. 10). But the story is not really as universal as this claim suggests. A powerful exceptionalism limited spacefaring to just a handful of states in the early space age and continues to constrain space activity well into the twenty-first century. Only the United States and the Soviet Union had the will and the resources to race in space, and only a handful of states today have joined their competitive ranks—even though many developed nations now have a significant presence in space. Smith does not directly address the exclusivity of the spacefaring club, but Rockets and Revolution nevertheless exposes some of the cultural determinants of national investments in space activity.

Five states played a prominent role early on. The United States, Russia/the Soviet Union, and Germany all produced influential visionaries and pioneers, leading to the development of cultural enthusiasms and amateur experimenters. The British cultivated a vibrant sciencefiction community, but failed to produce much practical research and development. France fell somewhere between Britain and the big three. No other country was in the same league with those five.

No brief review can capture the wide range of topics, authors, artists, and genres that Smith assembles in this rich and fascinating book. He covers astronomy, aviation, ballooning, physics, technology, politics, rocketry, and international relations. Authors include fiction writers ranging from Leo Tolstoy and H. G. Wells to Arthur C. Clarke and Kurt Vonnegut. Nonfiction writers fill an even larger canvas, from Nikolaus Copernicus, Issac Newton, Charles Darwin, August Comte, Albert Einstein, Thomas Edison, and Carl Sagan to G. W. F. Hegel, Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx, Henry Adams, Oswald Spengler, V. I. Lenin, Henri Bergson, Herbert Spencer, Joseph Stalin, and Charles Lindbergh. A challenging parlor game could be built around inventing a historical narrative to tie all those intellectual threads together.

Smith says that “the rocket’s parabola, that far sloping line reaching from Earth into outer space, is the central theme of this book” (p. 9). The seed of this concept appears to be Newton’s famous thought experiment about a cannon fired horizontally from a mountain-top, not a rocket fired vertically from level ground. In both cases, the projectile would follow a parabolic arc in eventually falling back to Earth. But if the projectile moved with sufficient speed, the curved surface of Earth would fall away beneath it before it could land. The cannon ball or the rocket would then fall indefinitely, balanced in orbit between the gravitational pull of Earth and the centrifugal force of its orbital speed.

But this is not the sense in which Smith uses the term. He says that his historical actors, “space enthusiasts and publicists,” saw the parabola as a...