The Long Space Age

An economic historian traces uncovers the story of privately funded space exploration from early 19th century astronomical observatories to SpaceX. The standard historical narrative of American space exploration begins during the Cold War, with the federal government’s efforts to beat the Soviet Union in the Space Race. Given this framing, the more recent emergence of private sector space exploration appears to be a new and controversial phenomenon. But as Alexander MacDonald argues in The Long Space Age, privately funded space exploration had been happening in the United States long before we tried to put a man on the moon. Since the early 19th century, private observatories had been making discoveries and developing technologies that led directly to NASA’s epochal 20th century achievements. And their efforts were no less ambitious for their time than SpaceX and Blue Origin are in today’s resurgent space industry.The Long Space Age examines the economic history of this centuries-long development, from those first American observatories to the International Space Station.

This volume is nearly 500 pages and topics covered include: Gigantic Follies? Human Exploration and the Space Age in Long-term Historical Perspective; National Aspirations on a Global Stage: Fifty Years of Spaceflight; Building Space Capability through European Regional Collaboration; Imagining an Aerospace Agency in the Atomic Age; Creating a Memory of the German Rocket Program for the Cold War; Operation Paperclip in Huntsville, Alabama; The Great Leap Upward: China's Human Spaceflight Program and Chinese National Identity; The "Right" Stuff: The Reagan Revolution and the U.S. Space Program; Great (Unfulfilled) Expectations: To Boldly Go Where No Social Scientist and Historian Have Gone Before; Far Out: The Space Age in American Culture; A Second Nature Rising: Spaceflight in an Era of Representation; Creating Memories: Myth, Identity, and Culture in the Russian Space Age; The Music of Memory and Forgetting: Global Echoes of Sputnik 2; From the Cradle to the Grave: Cosmonaut Nostalgia in Soviet and Post-Soviet Film; Discovering the Iconic in Space Exploration Photography; Robert A. Heinlein's Influence on Spaceflight; American Spaceflight History's Master Narrative and the Meaning of Memory; A Melancholic Space Age Anniversary; Has Space Development Made a Difference?; Has There Been a Space Age?; and Cultural Functions of Space Exploration. NASA-SP-2008-4703

Foreword by Sir Arthur C Clarke. Space exploration began with model and toy rockets. History shows that the greatest Rocketeers began their careers flying model rockets. Now in this book the story of the space race is told in dazzling colour. From the birth of models to the present day the toy rockets have often inspired the real rockets of the future. In fact model manufacturers like Revell and Aurora were frequently in trouble with the defence department for revealing military secrets! This is the Story of the Space Age, and uses the models to illustrate the way history twisted and turned to put us where we are today -- and maybe how space travel will develop in the future.

This book provides answers to the questions of why human-kind should go into space, and on the relative roles of governments and markets in the evolution of the space economy. It adopts an interdisciplinary approach to answer those questions. Science and technology define the boundaries of what is possible. The realization of the possible depends on economic, institutional, and political factors. The book thus draws from many different academic areas such as physical science, astronomy, astronautics, political science, economics, sociology, cultural studies, and history. In the literature, the space economy has been analyzed using different approaches from science and technology to the effects of public expenditures on economic growth and to medium term effects on productivity and growth. This book brings all these aspects together following the evolutionary theory of economic change. It studies processes that transform the economy through the interactions among diverse economic agents, governments, and the extra-systemic environment in which governments operate. Its historical part helps to better understand motivations and constraints - technical, political, and economical - that shaped the growth of the space economy. In the medium term, global issues - such as population changes, critical or limited natural resources, and environmental damages – and technological innovations are the main drivers for the evolution of the space economy beyond Earth orbit. In universities, this book can be used: as a reference by historians of astronautics; for researchers in the field of astronautics, international political economy, and legal issues related to the space economy. In think tanks and public institutions, both national and international, this book provides an input to the ongoing debate on the collaboration among space agencies and the role of private companies in the development of the space economy. Finally, this book will help the educated general public to orient himself in the forest of stimuli, news, and solicitations to which he is daily subjected by the media, television and radio, and to react in less passive ways to those stimuli.

The inherent contradictions of the Space Age -- the mixture of technologies high and low, of nostalgia and progress, of pathos and promise -- are revealed in Kosmos, Adam Bartos's astonishing photographic survey of the Soviet space program. Bartos's fascination with this subject led him to seek out places like the bedroom where Yuri Gagarian slept the night before his history-making flight into space, located in the Baiknour Cosmodrome, the one-time top-secret space complex in the Kazakh desert. Kosmos presents 94 of Bartos's photographs, rich with the incongruities of the history, science, culture, and politics of the Space Age.

The magnificently illustrated companion volume to the six-part PBS television series from the creators of Cosmos and Planet Earth. Space Age is a great human story, full of intrigue and global rivalries, secrecy, surprises, heroes and heroines, brilliance and bravado, huge risk and profound failure, and an increasing awareness of who we are and where we fit in the universe. Full-color photos and illustrations.

In summer 1969, astronauts landed on the moon and hippie hordes descended on Woodstock—two era-defining events that are not entirely coincidental. Neil M. Maher shows how NASA’s celestial aspirations were tethered to terrestrial concerns of the time: the civil rights struggle, the antiwar movement, environmentalism, feminism, and the culture wars.

"In the Space Age," wrote Italian artist Lucio Fontana, "spatial art." Fontana's desire to create art in space came in response to unprecedented technological advances and contemporary fantasies of space travel. Fifteen years before Andy Warhol said he wanted to be as much a part of his times as rockets and television, Fontana's large-scale light-and-space installations became a short-lived but ultimately influential art-world phenomenon. The artists discussed in Space-Age Aesthetics looked beyond the limits of the picture, exploring space, mass media, pop culture, nuclear power, and science fiction to connect new art to the dramatic changes taking place through the encroaching Space Age. Space-Age Aesthetics begins by addressing the imagery of space exploration as a field of mythical representation informed by Cold War politics and acted out in an expansive variety of media, from the picture press to comic books. Through persuasive arguments that reveal the many-layered interconnections between the artists' aesthetics and theoretical responses to the dawn of an age of revolutionary technologies, this book offers new ways to think about the historical emergence of pop, conceptual, postmodern, and installation art and serves to fill the long-neglected gap in material on the post-World War II European avant-garde.