The 1970s: Spaceflight and Historically Interpreting the In-Between Decade

Abstract

This chapter examines the recent spate of scholarly interest in the 1970s as a crucial period of twentieth-century change, not only in the US and Europe but globally. The purposes are twofold. One is to delineate how period theoretical works described and explained this change, and subsequently how historiography framed its accounts of the transition from the 1960s to the 1980s. The second is to argue that whether seen in terms of political economy, culture or individual-identity making, spaceflight was intimately bound up with the reconfigurations of the 1970s. The consequence is to highlight the intellectual stakes for historians generally and specialists in space history in characterizing and interpreting the 1970s and after.