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

Abstract

This chapter introduces the historical themes and historiographical questions that contributions to the Limiting Outer Space volume address conjointly. Bringing recent scholarship on the ‘long’ 1970s into dialogue with the study of astroculture, it argues that it was after the end of the Apollo moon landings that the long-established link between outer space imaginaries and phantasmagoric visions of an imminent future in the stars loosened, not only in the United States and the Soviet Union but also in Europe. Eventually, humankind’s brief outward movement would cause a new sense of earthbound globality; the irony is that this only occurred after the classical Space Age had come to an end in 1972. The chapter suggests terming this finding the ‘Post-Apollo paradox.’