Day 1

Session 1

Gigantic Follies? Human Exploration since the Paleolithic

John McNeill

This presentation considers the long history of human exploration of new environments and the significance of the Space Age in modern world history. The great explorers of human history were nameless Paleolithic people who discovered and settled almost every habitable corner of the globe. While we cannot know for sure what inspired their efforts, a likely candidate is social conflict.
Exploration of unpeopled realms has had an undistinguished history since the Polynesian expansion that ended a millennium ago. That it has revived since 1957 in the form of the Space Age is cause for reflection. Defeatist though it is, the best conclusion is that it is too soon to say what the significance of the Space Age might be. Its impact to date on human affairs seems small compared to some of the momentous twists and turns of contemporary history. It might, one day, appear as a mere footnote of the history of the 20th and 21st centuries. But that depends on what is yet to come.

Building National Capability Through Regional and International Collaboration:
The European Experience

John Krige

Space is a platform for regional and international collaboration for the countries of Western Europe. By pooling financial resources and industrial capacity with one another the main countries on the continent were able to develop together a significant presence in various domains of application satellites (notably meteorology), as well as acquire independent access to space with the highly successful European launcher, Ariane. By collaborating with the United States, they were able to gain much-needed experience in project management, as well as a jump start into the space age in the 1960s through space science collaboration with NASA.

Collaboration involves a dilution of national soverignty, a considerable loss of control over the course, the organization, and even the cost of large projects. For Europeans that dilution of sovereignty was the price to be paid for having a significant presence in space. It also provided them with a resource base from which to strengthen their national capability, and to establish limited, parallel national space programs of their own.

This paper will draw attention to the very different physiognomy of a collaborative space program, like that in Europe, and an independent space program, like that of the world leader, the United States. The motives for entering space at all, and the priorities that shaped the regional, international, and national programs, will be explored, and contrasted with some of the major drivers of the American space effort. For 50 years Europeans have pursued a space program whose rationale and objectives are very different to those that have inspired NASA and successful administrations in Washington DC. As space programs proliferate internationally, it is important not to be trapped in an Americo-centric view as to why countries enter space. The 'conquest of space' can have quite different meanings as seen from washington, Berlin, London, Paris, or Beijing, and we ignore those differences at our peril.

National Aspirations on a Global Stage: Fifty Years of Spaceflight

Asif A. Siddiqi
Assistant Professor of History
Fordham University

The launch of Sputnik fifty years ago not only represented the beginning of the Space Age but also starkly symbolized the notion that space would be a domain for national competition. For much of the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union were locked in a struggle for preeminence in space, a dominance that was manifested in both symbolic and practical achievements—a piloted lunar landing in the former case and military space activities in the latter. Yet, the claims for mastery over the cosmos always contained within them a built-in tension: on the one hand, they were about national technological competence, while on the other hand, they represented achievements of a fundamentally global import. This tension was more than simply a rhetorical byproduct of the Space Race, it was fundamental to it. The Space Race, I argue, represented at a basic level a clash between ‘technological nationalism’ and the global imagination. Both superpowers saw their space programs as extensions of their national prowess, yet both sought simultaneously to appeal to the universal significance of their achievements. In this paper, I trace the historical roots of this clash and show that it played a crucial role in the authority of each nation in a discursive battle over space achievements. At the same time, I show that despite the end of the Cold War, this clash between the national and the global remains a fundamental motif in the early twentieth-first century. Although many play lip service to the social, economic, and technological forces of globalization, national pride continues to play the most significant justification for the increasingly visible space programs of China, Japan, and India.

Session 2

Creating a Memory of the German Rocket Program
for the Cold War

Michael J. Neufeld
Chair, Space History Division
National Air and Space Museum
Smithsonian Institution
neufeldm@si.edu

The history of rocketry and space travel was largely founded in the early Cold War by space advocates in the U.S. and Western Europe, many of them German or ex-German. Among the latter were the science writer Willy Ley, the rocket engineer Wernher von Braun and his ex-boss, Gen. Walter Dornberger. These pioneers wanted to tell the exciting story of German rocket development from the Weimar amateur groups through the creation of the V-2 and its export to the U.S., but were also compelled to provide a cleaned-up history of Nazi rocket activities palatable to Western audiences during the Cold War. Because of the central role that von Braun’s German-led engineering team played in American missile development in the 1950s, it became important to justify the obvious continuities between Nazi and U.S. rocketry. After Sputnik, when the space race became a major public concern, popular writers supplemented the pioneering efforts of Ley, von Braun, Dornberger and others with books and articles built on that foundation.

Among the most noteworthy aspects of this early German rocket history are:

1. a romanticization of engineering development at the Peenemünde center as fundamentally aimed at space travel, rather just weapons development for Hitler;
2. a corresponding depiction of Dornberger, von Braun and their subordinates as apolitical or even anti-Nazi engineers driven by space dreams, a conflation of von Braun’s experience with his entire group; and
3. a suppression of almost all information about concentration-camp labor and other potential scandals.

As a result, the underground V-2 factory at Nordhausen and its attached Mittelbau-Dora camp virtually fell out of history until the late 1970s and early 1980s. This paper will examine the phases of the creation of this memory of the German rocket program and what social, cultural and political factors allowed it to flourish relatively untouched for three decades.

“Operation Paperclip” in Huntsville, Alabama

Monique Laney, Ph.D. candidate
American Studies, University of Kansas
monique@ku.edu

Hundreds of German and Austrian specialists were brought to the United States between 1946 and the early 1950s under “Operation Paperclip.” Among them were the rocket specialists who had worked with Wernher von Braun in Peenemünde, Germany, designing V-1 and V-2 rockets used during World War II. Initially, they were brought to Ft. Bliss near El Paso, Texas for short-term military exploitation. In 1950, after promises of long-term employment and eventual citizenship, the technicians, engineers, and their families were moved to Huntsville, Alabama. In 1960 most of the men joined NASA, eventually helping the United States place the first man on the moon.
Publications about the German scientists and specialists associated with this endeavor have viewed them as either the pawns of U.S. political and military strategists, national heroes of the U.S. space program, or potential “ardent Nazis” under investigation by the Department of Justice’s Office of Special Investigations. At the same time, this history has had a profound impact on Huntsville, Alabama, eliciting particular narratives about the German rocket specialists and their families in the context of this formerly small southern town, once famous for being the “watercress capital of the world,” - now often referred to as “Rocket City, U.S.A.”
The proposed paper discusses preliminary results from my dissertation research, which uses interviews conducted with German and non-German residents of Huntsville, Alabama to understand the impact of this national endeavor on the narrative construction of Huntsville’s history. These interviews along with articles from local publications concerning the “newcomers” illuminate how the Huntsville community remembers, negotiates, and interprets this controversial endeavor sixteen years after the end of the Cold War. How, for example, do WWII veterans or members of the African American and Jewish community of Huntsville remember reacting to the U.S. government decision and the resulting presence of the German group in their community? How do they perceive the group today? How did special investigations of the Department of Justice since the 1970s affect perceptions of the German group members? What do individuals in Huntsville actively remember and what do they seem to forget? How does and did the local presence of the German rocket specialists and their families affect the way space history is told in Huntsville, Alabama?

China’s Human Spaceflight Program and the Chinese National Identity

By James R. Hansen, Auburn University

This paper urges caution in drawing conclusions about the present and future of the People’s Republic of China human spaceflight program based on what we think we know about China’s past. One of the principal “lessons” of Chinese history taught by the West concerns the early 15^th century overseas voyages of Admiral Zheng He. As the lesson goes, a Confucian faction, after gaining control over the Ming court, put an abrupt halt to the grand naval expeditions. The conservatives felt that “barbarian” nations offered little of value to add to the prosperity already present in the Middle Kingdom, and, anyway, it was improper for decent Chinese to go abroad while their parents were still alive. Western historians have speculated on how differently world history would have turned out had the Ming emperors sustained a vigorous colonial policy instead.
Advocates of a vigorous American human spaceflight program have made China’s turning away from foreign ventures into an object lesson: American society, too, will stagnate and open itself to exploitation by others if it does not continue to explore space aggressively. Space enthusiast Robert Zubrin in his 1999 book Entering Space has declared, “By accepting the challenge of the outside world, Western civilization blossomed outward to dominate the globe. In contrast, the grand Chinese civilization grew demoralized in its stagnation and implicit acceptance of inferior global status and decayed, ultimately to be completely disrupted and remade by expansive Western influences.”
But Zubrin’s analysis and others like it, which suggest there is something in the traditional Confucian mindset, and within the social order of China’s “inner space,” that has ultimately worked against exploration of “outer space,” may be fallacious. Rather than any inherent Chinese cultural inertia favoring the familiar and avoiding the unexpected, the underlying factor prompting China’s Ming emperors to withdraw from their foreign ventures could have been something quite different: a geological event, a “Little Ice Age” in north China, caused major famine and social disorder. The Ming rulers were forced to end their maritime expeditions, ordering the country’s shipyards to build only barges that could navigate China’s internal waterways with cargoes of rice. If the environmental crisis had not occurred, China might very well have become the world’s dominant colonial power.
This paper will examine the current state of the Chinese human spaceflight program to see how

1. it connects with China’s national and cultural history, and
2. it is helping to foster a new national and global identity for China in the early 21^st century.

The Central Intelligence Agency and Freedom of Space
Dwayne A. Day
National Research Council

Although companies such as Virgin Galactic have announced plans to fly paying customers into space, which they define as above 100 kilometers altitude, there is currently no internationally accepted definition of where airspace ends and space begins. This ambiguity dates from before Sputnik when American officials determined that it was in the best interests of the United States if international precedent was established that objects in orbit around the Earth were not actually passing through territorial airspace. This concept of “freedom of space” was first publicly identified by historians Stephen Ambrose and Walter McDougall in the early 1980s. They traced it to the Technological Capabilities Panel established by Dwight D. Eisenhower and reporting in February 1955. However, recently uncovered documentary evidence indicates that the concept was first proposed by a CIA official, Richard Bissell, nearly six months earlier. Bissell not only knew about the scientific satellite proposal for the International Geophysical Year, but also the U-2 spyplane and reconnaissance satellite proposals. Bissell made the connection between a high-flying spyplane that would violate international law, and an object in space that might not. He believed that it was possible to establish the right of peaceful overflight by first launching a scientific satellite. The new information establishes that the Central Intelligence Agency played a primary role in establishing a fundamental tenet of space law, that the space above the Earth is not sovereign territory.

The paper will review the documentary evidence demonstrating Bissell’s involvement, as well as the legal precedents that his proposal built upon, and the legal precedents that it helped establish.

“The ‘Right’ Stuff: The Impact of the Reagan Revolution and the Conservative Space Agency on the U.S. Space Program”
Andrew J. Butrica

This paper addresses the main conference theme of “National and Global Dimensions of the Space Age.” It looks at how the rise and triumph of conservative ideology during the 1980s (often called the Reagan Revolution) changed the U.S. civilian and military space programs. This paper breaks new historiographical ground by dealing with U.S. space policy during the 1980s as a reflection of the country’s general turn to the Right. Political scientists, historians, and Reagan biographers have described and documented the country’s shift to the Right, but they have neglected space policy. Similarly, space policy and history scholarship has neglected the rise of conservative thinking and its influence on the space program.
In its simplest form, the emerging conservative space agenda had two primary goals: the arming of space and the fostering of space-based businesses. The thinkers and actors behind this agenda saw themselves as copying what Alfred Thayer Mahan had preached regarding sea power and the vision of an American empire almost a century earlier. By projecting its conservative agenda into space, the Reagan Administration brought the space program in line with the changes that the Administration was putting into place on the ground. Thus, space history became linked with national history through this ideological agenda. The core argument of the paper was made in the book Single Stage to Orbit: Politics, Space Technology, and the Quest for Reusable Rocketry (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003).
This paper goes one step further by exploring the impact of the current conservative administration on the space program. The Cold War was long over and literally a new world order seemed to reign. The technological and managerial choices of the previous decade, reusable launchers and the “faster, better, cheaper” approach, lay abandoned. The Bush Administration seemed to be adding the finishing touches to the conservative agenda, by withdrawing from the ABM Treaty and elevating the (“Star Wars”) Ballistic Missile Defense Organization to agency status as the Missile Defense Agency (MDA), but remained silent on the commercialization of space. Was the White House implementing a new conservative space agenda, or can one explicate its space policy (to the extent that one exists) in other, non-ideological, terms?

The Railroad and the Space Program: A View from the 21st Century

Jonathan Coopersmith

In 1965, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences published The Railroad and the Space Program. An Exploration in Historical Analogy. This collection of eight essays by eminent historians viewed space exploration and exploitation through the prism of the railroad in American history. As well as providing some provoking thoughts, the collection broke ground in another way, consistent with both the history of the west and space: the government provided the funding.

This paper begins with an examination of The Railroad and the Space Program to determine what legacy, if any, it can claim. Part of a larger project by the AAAS’ Committee on Space, the book attempted to define, if not answer, five questions:

1. What were the theoretical problems involved with using historical analogy?
2. What was the impact of the railroad on American society (editor Bruce Mazlish noted this study “appears to be the first sustained effort to investigate the impact of the RR on nineteenth-century America in terms of a wide range of inquiries.”
3. Could the impact of the railroad be employed as a ‘device of anticipation’ to study the impact of the space problem?
4. Could this project serve as a prototype for future impact studies?
5. What were the difficulties involved in organizing a project of this kind?

This paper then compares two similar works, the 1977 The Social Impact of the Telephone, funded by ATT, and the 2005 Risk and Exploration. Earth, Sea and the Stars, funded and organized by NASA.

Four decades and hundreds of rocket launches later, how do these exercises in applied historical analogy fare? Did they shape space history and the historical profession, or did the ventures fizzle? Are such endeavors the historical equivalent of “Big Science,” possible only with massive state support? Are they worth the investment? What do their histories tell us about the historiography of the Space Age?

Day 2

Session 1

A Second Nature Rising: Spaceflight in a Time of Representation

Martin Collins

A crucial analytic exercise for history is periodization. In strong form, such analyses seek to identify material and conceptual bases for the organization of experience and characteristics of change in a given era. This presentation pursues two interrelated questions: As an exercise in periodization, how might we think about the post-World War II years? And, how might we situate spaceflight, in its various manifestations, in such an analysis?

These questions are exquisitely and meaningful academic. They underlie two distinct but overlapping frameworks for understanding the postwar period. One highlights state-centered action-in the US, at least, state institutions and actors invigorated by the Cold War challenge touch and reshape nearly every niche of social life. The other shifts the interpretive lens and draws attention to transnational orders of meaning and experience that arose in tandem with more robust systems of commodity and information exchange. I will explore this latter view (most fully developed in the literatures of sociology, anthropology, and critical theory) and its implications for the historiography of spaceflight.

Session 2

Lost in Space: Global Echoes of Sputnik 2
Amy Nelson
Virginia Tech

Americans’ memory of the “Evil Empire” might be fading, yet the cultural legacy of the Cold War contest remains vibrant. The ongoing cultural resonance of the Super Power rivalry after World War II is particularly evident in the enduring celebrity and complex historical memory surrounding “Laika,” the mixed-breed dog that became the first living being to orbit the earth in November, 1957. This study shows how the association with sacrifice, loss, and experimentation that fueled Laika’s immediate celebrity continues to inform multivalent echoes in global popular culture, ranging from Lasse Halström’s 1985 film, My Life as Dog, to a number of recent literary endeavors, an array of web sites, and, most remarkably, a diverse and expanding corpus of music emanating from Great Britain, Japan, Germany, Finland, and the transnational arena of cyberspace. Confirming David Caute’s observation that “a Soviet dog orbiting in space caused all American dogs to howl,”₁ this study examines the commodification, celebrity and continued influence of a dog famous as a pioneer, a victim, and a symbol of Cold War public science. Documenting the rich array of official commemorations of Laika, as well as the commodification of space dogs on postage stamps, pins, and cigarettes over the last fifty years, the paper focuses on Laika’s impact on contemporary popular music, including the oeuvre of three eponymous "Laika" ensembles, ranging from a Finnish surf band to a British electronica duo, as well as an astonishing number of musical homages to Laika (or songs referencing her story) by groups as diverse as CCCP, Arcade Fire, Divine Comedy, Gorillaz, and Akino Arai. This study shows how the “global echoes of Sputnik II” inform memories of the space age for a contemporary, global (mass) audience.

1David Caute, The Dancer Defects. The Struggle for Cultural Supremacy during the Cold War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003) p.4

Cosmonauts and Cosmo-NOTS
Image falsification in the Soviet manned space program
James Oberg

The most striking falsifications of historical imagery of the Space Age involved artificial removal (through retouching and cropping) of 'undesirable' cosmonauts from dozens of official group shots and scenes of cosmonaut activity dating from the 1960’s. The motivations for such forgeries, and the clumsiness of the actual implementation of the strategy, led to widespread Western public attention (and mockery) of Soviet ‘official history’ of their space activities. This in turn encouraged serious Soviet journalists and historians to document the realities behind the charades, often many years before they were allowed to publish the full stories (and original photographs). Western interest also kept the pressure up on official Soviet spokesmen who contrived a series of inept and mutually contradictory explanations for the original forgeries, laying the groundwork for official disclosure beginning in the ‘glasnost’ years and fully flowering in the post-Soviet period. The unexpectedly positive outcome of the original attempts at official deception centers on the much higher than otherwise level of public interest on the question of the composition of the Soviet cosmonaut team and on the factors that could – and did – remove a large portion of the original candidates (a much larger portion than in the U. S.) from ever flying in space. This paper chronicles the development of the ‘missing cosmonaut’ controversy through several phases, places it in the historical context of Soviet (and non-Soviet) photo forgery in general, and along several blind alleys (attempts by some West European figures to portray the men as ‘lost cosmonauts’ on secret space missions were suspect from the start and in hindsight thoroughly repudiated by history), leading to gravesites (sometimes with gravestones as strikingly edited as the original photographs), remote dachas, and in one case a dramatic encounter on the main floor of Mission Control in Moscow. It is an object lesson in ‘amateur historiography’ that rewarded sharp eyes, deep memories, and lifelong tenacity with deeply personal human stories of the birth of human space flight -- and preserved the memories of many of the surviving 'lost cosmonauts' through private interviews before they died.

FAR OUT: THE SPACE AGE IN AMERICAN CULTURE
Emily S. Rosenberg, University of California, Irvine

Space Age culture intersected with the rival designations of the era: the Cold War, the Media Age, what Zbigniew Brzezinski called the Technetronic Age, and the Age of Mid-century Modernism. This talk analyzes how space exploration augmented the Cold War with the Space Race, enhanced the Media Age with truly amazing dramas and visual spectacularity, heightened the Technetronic Age’s moral and philosophical concerns over the implications of Technocracy and a so-called “Spaceship Earth,” and inspired Mid-century Modernist impulses that emerged as Googie, abstract expressionism and Op-Art.
Representations of the Space Age left an enduring array of creative and rhetorical resources in American culture. They promoted national pride—and placed it under threat. They forged pipelines to pump money into fantastic new projects—and prompted warnings about a “moondoggle” and an enervating dependence on government largesse. They confirmed the importance of techno-science—and stimulated new fears about “technocracy.” They encouraged the triumph of rational endeavor—and a mystical faith about the meanings of the heavens. They promised peace and social justice—and more frightening forms of war and social hierarchy. They offered the excitement of new modes of living—and apprehensions about the unknown. They inspired creativity—and created bureaucracies that could stifle it. Loaded with so many meanings, space indeed seemed infinite. In its undefinability and semiotic expansiveness, space was—and still is—far out.

Discovering the Iconic in Space Exploration Photography:
Editing through 50 Years of Robotic and Human Spaceflight Imagery
Michael Soluri
357 west 11th street
New York, N.Y. 10014
www.michaelsoluri.com

On a day in October a half century ago, the first humble thrust of humankind from earth to orbit was made. From the former Soviet Union, a satellite was launched and with it came the dawn of the space age and the consequent “race to space.” And from that moment a new genre of photography was born of rocket launches, astronauts and the undiscovered landscapes of the moon, Mars and beyond. Space photography offered the public something that it hadn’t been seen before. It introduced a new kind of imagery, visuals of things formerly only imagined in paintings like those of Chesley Bonestell or science fiction films.

With the resulting image of a man on the moon, some space photography evolved into the
iconic while others became convenient clichés for human daring and ingenuity in the exploration of the final frontier. What, for example, of that image of Aldrin or the imprint of his boot in the lunar dust? Images that are recognizable the world over. But are there — in today’s visual context — other editing possibilities? Are there other images that say “man on the moon” as well or even better than those edited 40 years ago? And what about the imagery derived from shuttle and robotic missions? Are there those that say “space exploration” or “awe and wonder” with imagination as well? Today, it is possible to re-explore the familiar and discover more compelling space exploration imagery. For the most part, I believe it is more possible in the US, than the restrictions typically
faced in Russia. China, unfortunately, remains an enigma.

Three eras frame my paper and related visuals:

• 1957 through 1975 — the dawn of the space age and human and robotic spaceflight
• 1975 to 2000 — the eclipse of human spaceflight imagery and the ascent of the Hubble
• 2001 through the present — the odysseys of planetary and inter-planetary space craft

Space Art and Art in Space
Bettyann Holtzmann Kevles

Graphic visions of other worlds drifted into 20^th century art as space travel turned into an increasingly realistic promise. But after Gagarin’s and Glenn’s flights, art about space travel changed from imagining alien landscapes to depictions of people who traveled into orbit. This paper will discuss some of the images that were painted, sketched or created as sculpture after1962. At this time James Webb, NASA’s first administrator, realized that humanity had entered a new era that artists might record in personal ways that would complement the photographs that NASA was capturing with cameras. NASA sponsored a variety of artists from Mercury through the Shuttle. In the early 80s there was talk about carrying journalists, poets and artists into orbit, but after the death of the teacher Christa McAuliffe on Challenge, NASA stopped considering artists and poets. In the 90s, some artists arranged to send their work on Mir but no artists flew with their works. During the last ten years, artists in Europe and the United States have found a voice and arranged, under the auspices of NASA, the Russian Space Agency, or privately funded corporations to travel on parabolic flights in order to produce art in a variety of media in zero gravity. My paper describes the early works of Remedio Varo and Robert Rauschenberg in the 60s, the paintings of to Astronauts Alan Bean and Alexie Leonov in the 70s, the sculptures of Lowry Burgess and Arthur Wood in the 80s and recent works of the Arts Catalyst group in Britain and the Zero Gravity artists in the United States. As space stations and possible settlements on the Moon emerge as possible destinations, artists are an interest group who believe they have something important to contribute to the quality and texture of life in space.

Robert Heinlein's Influence on Spaceflight
Robert Kennedy

Robert Heinlein is one of the most influential science fiction authors of all time. His writings not only inspired numerous people to enter the sciences and engineering in general, and the field of spaceflight in particular, but also shaped the way that people thought about spaceflight. Thus, even though Sputnik was a strategic surprise for the United States, there were legions of young Americans predisposed to step up and get to work on the challenging task of winning the Space Race. Heinlein's influence can currently be seen in the activities of numerous private spaceflight entrepreneurs.

This paper will summarize Heinlein's works and demonstrate how they influenced the people who were exposed to them. In particular, it will focus on his earlier work including the so-called "juvenile" novels (e.g. Have Spacesuit Will Travel), stories from the "Future History" timeline (e.g. "The Man Who Sold the Moon"), the 1950 Oscar-winning George Pal movie Destination Moon for which Heinlein was the technical advisor, and nonfiction articles for general audiences (e.g. "Flight into the Future" with Caleb Laning) up to about 1950. The research methods will consist of: 1. recorded oral interviews with primary sources at several upcoming events (2007 is the centennial of his birth year as well as the 50th anniversary of Sputnik), 2. written and oral consultations with secondary sources including scholars and authors of recent biographies, and 3. citations from from the author's own extensive library and collection of Heinleiniana.

American Spaceflight History's Master Narrative and the Meaning of Memory
Roger Launius

The term master narrative typically refers to a set of sociocultural interpretations of events agreed upon by most of the interpreters of the event or age, and these are abundantly apparent when considering the history of the space age. They offer what might best be considered secure knowledge formed to delineate the trajectory of the historical event and center it in its appropriate cultural place. It may be argued that there are the four narratives that have emerged concerning the U.S. space program, one that is a master narrative and three minor variations. These include:

1. the dominant narrative of American triumph, exceptionalism, and success;
2. the counter narrative of criticism of the space program from the left, wasting funds on a worthless expense that yielded little when so many Americans could have benefited from spending on social programs;
3. a more recent narrative of criticism of spaceflight from the right of the political spectrum focusing on the program as a representation of liberal taxing and spending strategies;

and

4. a fringe narrative that sees in the U.S. space program a relationship between all manner of nefarious activities.

This last narrative emphasizes conspiracy theories-of extraterrestrial visitation, abduction, and government complicity, of denials of the Apollo Moon landings in favor of a deep-seated conspiracy, as part of a larger militarization scheme aimed at world domination, and a host of strange and bewildering conspiracies affecting the lives of normal Americans in negative ways. Each of these narratives has a place in the American consciousness as it remembers the space age. This essay will seek to discuss these four narratives and how they have interrelated over the fifty years of the space age.