Economic and Cultural Dimensions of Space Exploration

When I was studying pedagogy in graduate school, one "icebreaker" technique I learned for getting undergraduates to talk is to ask them to share the earliest major historical event they can remember. For an earlier generation, the 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing no doubt would have come up, but when my fellow graduate students and I performed this exercise among ourselves, it became clear that a very different event stood out—the 1986 Challenger space shuttle disaster. Although the space program rarely came up in my graduate history coursework or comprehensive exam readings, it looms large in historical memory.

Whether "Generation Apollo" or "Generation Challenger" (and perhaps even "Generation Columbia" for those millennials whose historical memories were shaped by that shuttle tragedy), Americans tend to associate space exploration with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the federal agency behind the country's most impressive as well as most disastrous space missions. Over the course of the Space Age, NASA had to fight for both public and congressional support in order to attain its visions—and aside from the extraordinary Cold War circumstances that led to the Apollo moon program, it did not usually receive anywhere near the level of funding it sought.

Two new books from Yale University Press examine the challenges space advocates have historically faced in achieving their goals. Valerie Neal's Spaceflight in the Shuttle Era and Beyond: Redefining Humanity's Purpose in Space examines NASA's struggles in the post-Apollo period to win over a public and a government that generally did not share its ambitions for aggressive (and expensive) space exploration. Alexander MacDonald's The Long Space Age: The Economic Origins of Space Exploration from Colonial America to the Cold War examines funding issues from a different perspective, emphasizing the long history of private patronage for space exploration and challenging the common belief that it has historically been a state-organized endeavor.

In The Long Space Age, MacDonald starts from a different premise than most other space histories by broadening the activities that he considers "space exploration" to include telescopic observation. Long before Americans physically went into space, they were peering at the heavens through telescopes, and MacDonald examines how such "exploration" has been pursued and funded since the colonial era. His main argument is that space exploration—whether telescopic or rocket-based—has always been a very expensive enterprise, but only in the mid-twentieth century did it become primarily state supported. In fact, he writes, "the typical narrative" of space exploration as a state-sponsored enterprise "is misleading; if we look at the history of American space exploration on a longer timescale, a very different history emerges—one in which personal initiative and private funding is the dominant trend and government funding is a recent one"(p. 3).

Space historians have long recognized that the Apollo program's aggressive race to the moon was not the norm for space exploration, but rather an anomaly based on Cold War concerns. Once the United States won this race, and Cold War tensions eased somewhat by the later 1960s, the American space program settled into a more deliberate (and less well-funded) approach to exploration, to the dismay of advocates who mistook Apollo for the beginning of an era of ever-more-impressive space feats. By expanding the scope of analysis to include expensive, often privately funded telescopes in prior centuries, MacDonald argues that Apollo was an anomaly not only in terms of its cost, but also in who was footing the bill. Hence, the present-day billionaires promoting the most ambitious dreams of space exploration mark a return to a long pattern of wealthy patrons willing to fund their curiosity with enormous amounts of money—a pattern...