Abstract
In January 1972, an unexpectedly enormous group of science fiction enthusiasts descended upon the Statler-Hilton Hotel ballroom in New York City to share reminiscences of a television series whose brief run on NBC had ended in 1969, the same year Apollo astronauts first stepped on the Moon.1 The series, set in Earth’s distant but recognizable future, chronicled a thinly disguised version of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) at the peak of its 1960s influence—an organization of outsized personalities serving in a progressive, quasi-military organization devoted to exploration of the galaxy.2 Three hundred years into the future, President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society had been achieved in full—on a planet without poverty or social strife, Americans (who appeared to dominate Earth’s future) seamlessly integrated their terrestrial activities with flight into the deepest reaches of the galaxy. Space travel had brought opportunity and prosperity, including new sources of energy and wealth, colonies and allies, and knowledge exchange with extraterrestrials. Ironically, Star Trek proved even more popular after the Apollo program that had inspired it had waned: its vision progress and internationalism remained deeply attractive to many Americans. NASA, aware of their enthusiasm, answered in kind. Responding to a request from the Star Trek convention’s organizer for the loan of Moon rocks to celebrate the event, NASA offered a trailer’s worth of hardware and memorabilia.3
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Notes
Ed Papazian, Medium Rare: The Evolution, Workings, and Impact of Commercial Television (New York: Media Dynamics, 1991), 241–244.
William Grimes, “Joan Winston, ‘Trek’ Superfan, Dies at 77,” New York Times, September 21, 2008, 34;
Joan Winston, The Making of the Trek Conventions: Or, How to Throw a Party for 12,000 of Your Most Intimate Friends (New York: Doubleday, 1977), 26.
Francis French and Colin Burgess, Into That Silent Sea: Trailblazers of the Space Era, 1961–1965 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007), 266 [quoting authors’ interview with Cooper].
Michael Collins, Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut’s Journeys (New York: Farrar, 1974), 76.
Francis French and Colin Burgess, In the Shadow of the Moon: A Challenging Journey to Tranquility, 1965–1969 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007), 7, 44.
For example, Peter Wolfe, In the Zone: The Twilight World of Rod Serling (Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1997).
Don Medford, “Death Ship,” Twilight Zone (CBS, February 7, 1963).
Lewis Gilbert, “You Only Live Twice” (United Artists, 1967).
Lewis Gilbert, “Moonraker” (United Artists, 1979).
George E. Low, “Letter to Edward E. David,” October 30, 1970, Folder 004154, NASA Historical Reference Collection, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.
Stephen Cox, Dreaming of Jeannie: TV’s Prime Time in a Bottle (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2000), 58.
Tom Wolfe, The Right Stuff (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1979), 120.
On the gendering of military activities, see, Joan Wallach Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” in Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 48.
See, also, Carol Cohn, “Wars, Wimps, and Women: Talking Gender and Thinking War,” in Gendering War Talk, ed. Miriam Cooke and Angela Woollacott (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).
Howard E. McCurdy, Space and the American Imagination (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997), 91.
A s Viv ian Sobchack writes, astronauts in t he media exuded a “virgina l idea l”— sober, stolid, and sexless—that appealed to audiences who found them both inspiring and safe. Vivian Sobchack, “The Virginity of Astronauts: Sex and the Science Fiction Film,” in Alien Zone: Cultural Theory and Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema, ed. Annette Kuhn (New York: Verso, 1990), 108.
For example, Roger D. Launius, NASA: A History of the U.S. Civil Space Program (Malabar: Krieger Pub. Co., 1994), 94.
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Ralph E. Lapp, “Send Computers, Not Men, into Deep Space,” New York Times, February 2, 1969, 38.
Peder Anker, “The Ecological Colonization of Space,” Environmental History 10 (2005): 240–244.
R. Buckminster Fuller, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969); Anker, “The Ecological Colonization of Space,” 244–245, fn. 221.
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), 318.
For example, Mel Horwitch, Clipped Wings: The American SST Conflict (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1982);
Erik M. Conway, HighSpeed Dreams: NASA and the Technopolitics of Supersonic Transportation, 1945–1999 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005).
Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 69.
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See, for example, Jennifer Levasseur, “‘Here’s the Earth Coming up’: Analysis of the Apollo 8 ‘Earthrise’ Photograph” (paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Society for the History of Technology, Lisbon, Portugal, October 12, 2008).
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Seth Borenstein, “Astronauts Recall View before Earth Day: Space Travelers Recall What It’s Like to See Their Home Planet from above Ahead of Earth Day,” Associated Press, April 21, 2007.
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See, Pamela Etter Mack, Viewing the Earth: The Social Construction of the Landsat Satellite System (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1990).
John Donnelly, “Letter to James Fletcher,” January 20, 1973, p. 1, Folder 004157, NASA Historical Reference Collection, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.
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For example, Richard D. Johnson and Charles Holbrow, eds., Space Settlements: A Design Study (Washington DC: NASA, 1977).
De Witt Douglas Kilgore, Astrofuturism: Science, Race, and Visions of Utopia in Space (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 161, 165.
Douglas Trumbull, “Silent Running” (Universal Pictures, 1972).
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Molly Ivins, “Ed Who?,” New York Times, June 30, 1974, 12.
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Kim McQuaid, “Earthly Environmentalism and the Space Exploration Movement, 1960–1990: A Study in Irresolution,” Space Policy 26 (2010): 163–173.
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Edward Clinton Ezell and Linda Neuman Ezell, The Partnership: A History of the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project (Washington DC: National Aeronautics and Space Administration, 1978), 50–55.
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Martin Caidin, Marooned (New York: Dutton, 1964),
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Atkinson and Shafritz, The Real Stuff, 95–96; Francis French and Colin Burgess, Into That Silent Sea, 134; Bettyann Kevles, Almost Heaven: The Story of Women in Space (New York: Basic Books, 2003);
Margaret A. Weitekamp, Right Stuff, Wrong Sex: America’s First Women in Space Program (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004);
Foster, Integrating Women into the Astronaut Corps, 47–48; Maura P. Mackowski, Testing the Limits: Aviation Medicine and the Origins of Manned Space Flight (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2006), 206.
Brian B. King, “Letter to George M. Low,” December 4, 1973, Folder 004157, NASA Historical Reference Collection, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.
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Robert Reinhold, “Shuttle Mission Puts Focus on Research Crewmen,” New York Times, November 13, 1982.
Homer Hickam, “What Makes an Astronaut Crack,” Los Angeles Times, February 9, 2007.
“The dynamic shipboard encounter of sailors and scientists resulted in a modified and tamed version of maritime culture.” Helen M. Rozwadowski, “Small World: Forging a Scientific Maritime Culture for Oceanography,” Isis 87 (1996): 409–429.
Donald K. Slayton and Michael Cassutt, Deke! U.S. Manned Space: From Mercury to the Shuttle (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994). 314.
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© 2012 Matthew H. Hersch
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Hersch, M.H. (2012). Public Space. In: Inventing the American Astronaut. Palgrave Studies in the History of Science and Technology. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137025296_6
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