Limiting Outer Space

Astroculture After Apollo

Alexander C.T. Geppert

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781137369161
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Science History
• Index: History

Limiting Outer Space propels the historicization of outer space by focusing on the Post-Apollo period. After the moon landings, disillusionment set in. Outer space, no longer considered the inevitable destination of human expansion, lost much of its popular appeal, cultural significance and political urgency. With the rapid waning of the worldwide Apollo frenzy, the optimism of the Space Age gave way to an era of space fatigue and planetized limits. Bringing together the history of European astroculture and American-Soviet spaceflight with scholarship on the 1970s, this cutting-edge volume examines the reconfiguration of space imaginaries from a multiplicity of disciplinary perspectives. Rather than invoking oft-repeated narratives of Cold War rivalry and an escalating Space Race, Limiting Outer Space breaks new ground by exploring a hitherto underrated and understudied decade, the Post-Apollo period.

Part IIntroduction

© The Author(s) 2018

Alexander C.T. Geppert (ed.)Limiting Outer SpacePalgrave Studies in the History of Science and Technologyhttps://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-36916-1_1

Begin Abstract

1. The Post-Apollo Paradox: Envisioning Limits During the Planetized 1970s

Alexander C. T. Geppert^{1, 2}

(1)

New York University Shanghai, Shanghai, China

(2)

New York University, New York, NY, USA

Alexander C. T. Geppert

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

People aren’t interested in the future any more. […] One could say that the moon landing was the death knell of the future as a moral authority.

J.G. Ballard, 1970

We are now in an interesting transition period when we can compare the realities of space with earlier imaginings of artists.

Arthur C. Clarke, 1972

¹

For much of the twentieth century, human possibilities in outer space seemed endless. Not the skies, but the stars were the limit. During the 1970s this relationship was reversed and outer space reconfigured. After the six moon landings between July 1969 and December 1972 (Figure 1.1), for many the ‘unrepeatable spectacle of a lifetime,’ disillusionment set in. ² All successes in planetary exploration by robotic spacecraft were overshadowed by the memory and legacy of the American Apollo program. Machine-generated close-up photographs of Venus, Mars and Jupiter could not outrival a human being walking on earth’s closest celestial neighbor. Against the backdrop of the raging Vietnam War and the global oil crisis of 1973/74, imaginary expansion was shrunk, bounded and grounded. With human spaceflight confined to low-earth orbit ever since the last astronaut returned to earth, the skies once again became the limit. If the Apollo era, in particular the new picture of planet Earth as its key legacy, constituted the apogee of worldwide space enthusiasm and the apex of the global Space Age, how did the latter’s demise affect space thought and astroculture? Is the argument correct that it was during this aptly termed ‘post-Apollo period’ that the long-established link between sociotechnical imaginaries of outer space and phantasmagoric visions of a collective, imminent future in the stars loosened? And that, as a consequence, outer space itself lost much of the political relevance, cultural significance and popular appeal which it had been gaining worldwide since the mid-1920s, in particular after the end of the Second World War?

Figure 1.1

Apollo 11 lunar module ‘Eagle’ as it returned from the surface of the moon on 21 July 1969 to dock with the command module Columbia. While a smooth mare area is visible on the moon below, the half-illuminated earth hangs over the horizon in the background. Command module pilot Michael Collins (1930–), the NASA astronaut who took this picture when the lunar module ascent stage was about four meters away, has sometimes been described as ‘the only human alive or ever to have lived not contained within the frame of this photo.’

Source: Courtesy of NASA.

Limiting Outer Space has a triple focus. First, it zooms in on a particular time period, situated within a specific geographical setting, and foregrounds a clear-cut historical question. Concentrating on the 1970s – according to the late New York University historian Tony Judt the ‘most dispiriting decade of the twentieth century’ – the book’s thirteen chapters examine this now widely debated transition process from expansion to reduction, often considered concomitant with disillusionment and disenchantment, from a multiplicity of disciplinary perspectives. Second, the majority of contributions aim to replace oft-repeated US- and USSR-centric narratives of a bipolar Cold War rivalry and an escalating Space Race between East and West with more nuanced, less formulaic and more comprehensive analyses, integrating and indeed featuring European, if not global views on and contributions to 1970s astroculture. Finally, chapters ask whether the new 1970s sense of ‘general space fatigue’ marked the end of that hitherto inextricably intertwined nexus between outer space and the quest for utopia, when widespread belief in infinite human expansion was superseded by the discovery of inner space. ³

1.1 The growth of limits in the decade of crisis

It has taken historians a while to realize the wide-ranging implications and indeed epochal significance of what Eric Hobsbawm termed the ‘crisis decades’ or, more drastically: ‘the landslide.’ With the first oil-price shock of 1973/74, the standard argument now goes, an unprecedented quarter-century-long boom era came to an end in the West. The trente glorieuses had been a long period of relative political stability that was characterized by rapid economic growth, material prosperity for larger sections of society than ever before, and a reassuring sense of having successfully overcome two devastating world wars. ⁴ In March 1972, more than a year prior to the oil crisis, the Club of Rome had published its notorious 600-page Limits to Growth study on the ‘predicament of mankind.’ Translated into 35 languages and selling 9 million copies worldwide, the book’s computer-based predictions for the future seemed to be validated by the unfolding course of events. ⁵ During the following years, a new sense of worldwide interconnectedness and global interdependence found its counterpart in the individualization of society and a withdrawal from the collective to the self. In an oft-cited article, American writer Tom Wolfe (1931–) coined the term ‘Me Decade’ to portray an ego-centered generation that had replaced ‘man’s age-old belief in serial immortality’ with a narcissistic ‘I have only one life to live.’ The golden postwar era thus gave way to a less romantic, less optimistic and much more troubled, if not entirely ‘lost,’ decade, as contemporary observers in both Europe and the United States were quick to point out. ‘In the long run,’ Time magazine forecasted correctly, ‘this decade and the next may well constitute an historical era of transition.’ ⁶

A majority of contemporary historians now echo these contemporaneous readings, impressionistic, unsystematic and incomplete as they may have been both then and now. Hardly surprising, economic and environmental historians were among the first to draw attention to the decade’s transformative character. The former declared the 1970s ‘of great interest for the economic and social historian,’ while the latter pointedly termed the all-encompassing reinterpretation of the man-environment relationship during these years the ‘1970s diagnosis.’ ⁷ Within the past decade or so, literature on the so-called long 1970s, usually understood as lasting through the conservative turn of the early 1980s, has mushroomed both in European ⁸ and American historiography. ⁹ Contrary to usual experience, a rare consensus has eventually emerged among ‘general’ historians that the 1970s are to be regarded as a key period in the history of the twentieth century. Standing for structural rupture and constituting an epochal caesura, they should be conceptualized as a major turning point. Accordingly, a plethora of competing labels has been created to come to terms with a decade once over-hastily described as a time when nothing happened: the 1970s as the ‘end of confidence,’ ‘the age of fracture,’ the period ‘after the boom,’ the ‘decade without a name’ that nonetheless constituted the ‘threshold of change,’ or the moment in time when all of a sudden the ‘shock of the global’ set in, simultaneously limiting and liberating. Others, somewhat predictably, have objected to any such forms of ‘decadology,’ as if historians were not well aware of their periodizations’ artificial character, necessitated by professional pragmatism to come to terms with change over time. ¹⁰ There is opportunity in every crisis, goes another trite cliché, and labeling the 1970s as a global crisis consequentially leads to emphasizing their Janus-facedness, as a period of inertia and change, when the established post-Second World War consensus was revoked while giving way to the rise of post-industrial society in Europe and the world that dominates today’s planetized present. ¹¹

As consequence and effect of such a structural rupture, not the least in contemporary self-understanding, the future changed its character during these years as well, often considered an unmistakable sign of epochs drawing to a close. ‘My children, or today’s teenagers, they are not interested in the future,’ English novelist J.G. Ballard (1930–2009) deplored in a 1970 interview with British Penthouse magazine. ‘What you see is the death of outer space, the failure of the moon landing to excite anyone’s imagination on a real level, and the discovery of inner space in terms of sex, drugs, meditation, mysticism,’ Ballard stated, thus giving expression to a frequently diagnosed assessment of the 1970s as a self-questioning time of troubles that looked neither forward nor outward but backward and inward. ¹² Retrospection replaced prospection. Continual progress, exponential growth and outward expansion – previously considered the basis of incessant improvement of the human condition by means of technoscience – went into reverse. Large-scale technology ceased to be the trustworthy engine of societal change and humankind’s betterment proved itself a problem, if not indeed its very obstacle.

Images and imaginaries of outer space and spaceflight, vastly popular and usually utopia-saturated in previous decades, changed correspondingly. Three cover images of the West German weekly Der Spiegel – published in 1966, 1970 and 1979, respectively – illustrate the shifting space-future nexus over the course of the decade. Quoting at length Arthur C. Clarke (1917–2008), British techno-prophet bar none, the Spiegel’s 6 December 1966 issue indulged in 1960s technocratic planning fervor. The future could be forecast because it was man-made and therefore controllable (Figure 1.2). Published only a couple of years later, the Spiegel’s 5 January 1970 issue denounced the formerly utopian ideal of total feasibility not only as outmoded ideology but as the very ‘trauma of the modern world’ (Figure 1.3). Scenarios of future expansion into outer space were now marginalized; the only mention of spaceflight in this 12-page feature was an image of a moon colony illustrating the article. In a third Spiegel cover story published in 1979, another nine years later, space was no longer a futuristic promise nor an irrelevant epiphenomenon but had transformed into an otherworldly threat. Dangerous debris raining down from Skylab (1973–79), the decommissioned and long uninhabited first American space station, might cause considerable damage upon re-entry, the article warned its readers (Figure 1.4). ¹³

Figure 1.2–4

From planning fervor to threat via irrelevance: changing expectations for the future over the course of the 1970s as illustrated by the West German weekly Der Spiegel. The headlines translate as ‘Futurology: Man’s Future is Being Planned’ (1966, left), ‘The Seventies: Planless into the Future?’ (1970, center) and ‘Skylab Falls to Earth: Danger for Mainz?’ (1979, right). Mainz, the capital of Rhineland-Palatinate, was the largest German city lying within the forecasted hazardous zone.

Source: Courtesy of Der Spiegel 20.53 (6 December 1966); 24.1 (5 January 1970); 33.27 (2 July 1979).

The same modernist faith in technoscientific rationalism that had propelled the Apollo program into the 1960s skies and beyond was feared to be falling from the heavens at the end of the 1970s. Ballard, commenting in another Penthouse interview conducted a decade later, agreed. ‘The world of “outer space,” which had hitherto been assumed to be limitless, was being revealed as essentially lim...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Part I. Introduction
• Part II. Navigating the 1970s
• Part III. Reconfiguring Imaginaries
• Part IV. Grounding Utopias
• Part V. Epilogue
• Back Matter