Abstract
In 1959, a small group of American military engineer-aviators became instant heroes merely through their willingness to be hurled into space. With the Soviet Union seemingly outstripping American achievements in flight beyond Earth’s atmosphere, the antidote to Communist control of the heavens appeared to lie in the courage of seven test pilots mostly unknown to the American public. Sometime soon, America’s new National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) announced, these brave men would be the first humans to fly into space. To support the growing needs of NASA’s single-person Project Mercury spacecraft (1961–63), its larger, two-person Project Gemini vehicles (1965–66), the three-person Project Apollo spacecraft (1967–75), and the Skylab Orbital Workshop (1973–79), NASA selected, during the 1960s, new groups of astronauts roughly every other year, typically choosing a dozen or so new astronauts from a thousand or more highly qualified applicants. The 1959 and 1962 selections consisted almost entirely of active-duty military test pilots. Two civilian test pilots entered the program in 1962, and operational military pilots joined the ranks in 1963. To a press and public eager for proof that America had a future in space, the earliest astronauts fit neatly into the various roles quickly assigned to them: soldier, daring pilot, and American hero.1
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
For example, Roger D. Launius, “Heroes in a Vacuum: The Apollo Astronaut as Cultural Icon” (paper presented at the 43rd AIAA Aerospace Sciences Meeting and Exhibit, Reno, Nevada, January 10–13, 2005).
For example, Jerry Bledsoe, “Down from Glory,” Esquire, January 1973, 83–86;
Brian O’Leary, The Making of an Ex-Astronaut (Boston: Houghton Miff lin, 1970);
Edwin E. Aldrin and Wayne Warga, Return to Earth (New York: Random House, 1973);
Michael Collins, Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut’s Journeys (New York: Farrar, 1974);
Walter Cunningham and Mickey Herskowitz, The All-American Boys (New York: Macmillan, 1977).
Tom Wolfe, The Right Stuff (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1979).
Walter A. McDougall, The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997).
Mindell, “Human and Machine in the History of Spaceflight,” in Critical Issues in the History of Spaceflight, ed. Steven J. Dick and Roger D. Launius (Washington, DC: NASA, 2006).
Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975).
Richard Edwards, Contested Terrain: The Transformation of the Workplace in the Twentieth Century (New York: Basic Books, 1979).
Walter Licht, Industrializing America: The Nineteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995).
Robert Zussman, Mechanics of the Middle Class: Work and Politics among American Engineers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985).
Monte A. Calvert, The Mechanical Engineer in America, 1830–1910: Professional Cultures in Conflict (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967).
Magali Sarfatti Larson, The Rise of Professionalism: A Sociological Analysis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), xvii.
See, for example, Andrew Delano Abbott, The System of Professions: An Essay on the Division of Expert Labor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 59.
Michael L. Smith, Pacific Visions: California Scientists and the Environment, 1850–1915 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987).
Chandra Mukerji, A Fragile Power: Scientists and the State (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989).
Asif A. Siddiqi, The Rockets’ Red Glare: Spaceflight and the Russian Imagination, 1857–1957 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
Sheila Jasanoff, “Image and Imagination,” in Changing the Atmosphere: Expert Knowledge and Environmental Governance, ed. Clark A. Miller and Paul N. Edwards (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2001).
Compare, Helen M. Rozwadowski, “Small World: Forging a Scientific Maritime Culture for Oceanography,” Isis 87 (1996) (scientists as undesirable passengers aboard maritime vessels.)
Robert W. Farquhar, “Fifty Years on the Space Frontier: Halo Orbits, Comets, Asteroids, and More” (unpublished manuscript, 2009), ii.
Copyright information
© 2012 Matthew H. Hersch
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Hersch, M.H. (2012). Introduction. In: Inventing the American Astronaut. Palgrave Studies in the History of Science and Technology. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137025296_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137025296_1
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-02528-9
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-02529-6
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)