In Part 1, we analyzed nuclear weapon and defense industry advertisements from 1950-1964 to demonstrate the fundamentally, and publically imagined, imbrications of spaces exploration and U.S. military supremacy. In Part 2 we continue with a deeper theoretical examination of technoutopian spaces imaginaries. Although in this post we make use of colloquialisms like “Space Race,” “Ocean Race,” and “Earth Race,” we do not accept the real-world separations they imply. We argue, as per our discussion in Part 1, that these spaces explorations were fundamentally aspects of the same underlying colonial and militarist processes.

Space(s) Race and the Duel Use of Rockets

The so-called “Space Race” was a key component of the violent technological, geopolitical, economic, and social competitions between the United States and the Soviet Union. As we showed in Part 1, the Space Race and the nuclear arms race—like the Ocean Race and Earth Race—were just different rooms in the same office building built on a technoutopian foundation. We argue, somewhat cynically but not unrealistically, that the space race was, fundamentally, a technocultural showcase—a theatrical performance—of what each country’s capabilities were, cloaked behind the pretense of science and exploration. In fact, until the Saturn V moon rocket, every crew-rated NASA space launch vehicle utilized converted intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs): Mercury used the Redstone rocket for sub-orbital flights and the Atlas rocket for orbital flights; Gemini used the Titan II (Dick et al. 2007).

For the astronauts riding these rockets, the military pedigree could be an unsettling physical experience. Michael Collins, a crew member of Apollo 11, first flew into space on Gemini 10, lifted above our atmosphere by a Titan II rocket. Collins (1974) described the unsettling rocking motion after lift-off—and continuing until reaching orbit—from the extreme gimbaling of the engine nozzles, a motion necessary for a missile designed to be sufficiently maneuverable to hit targets 6,000 miles away. His anecdote points to an unusually embodied experience during the highly theoretical practices of imagined nuclear deterrence, especially when it came to nuclear missiles, which were never fired against the homeland of an adversary (Derrida 1984; Grant and Ziemann 2016). The mostly imaginary nature of large-scale nuclear war encouraged a series of simulation efforts and experiments to inform planning for war and Civil Defense (Davis 2007; Oakes 1994; Rose 2001). These included the Desert Rock military exercises at the Nevada Test Site (1951-1957); public and government Civil Defense drills such as Operation Alert (1954-1961); and even a nationally broadcast nuclear test, Operation Cue (1955), that attempted to showcase the utility of Civil Defense preparations for surviving nuclear attack. Especially entertaining was Plumbbob John in 1957 in which 5 men (and one photographer) stood three miles underneath a 1.5 kiloton nuclear detonation to “prove” the safety of U.S. plans to use large numbers of nuclear weapons for continental air defense.¹

In the 1950s and 1960s the United States and the Soviet Union both began experimenting with anti-satellite weapons (ASATs), first to counter the perceived threat of nuclear orbital bombardment systems, and then to deny adversaries military use of space for reconnaissance and communications. The inaccuracy of early guidance systems, as with early anti-ballistic missile defenses, led to the use of high yield, nuclear-tipped kill vehicles (Grego 2012). The Outer Space Treaty, signed in 1967, banned the deployment of nuclear weaponry in outer space. However, the sustained relevance of space as a domain for militarily important assets (surveillance and communications satellites) encouraged the continued development of ASAT weapons by multiple nations in the Cold War and now. In 2008, the U.S. Air Force demonstrated the ASAT capability of the Standard Missile 3 (SM-3), supposedly in order to destroy an inoperative National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) satellite called USA-193. The test drew condemnations from Russia and China (Webb 2008) and also highlighted the inherent ASAT capabilities of deployed American ballistic missile defense systems. In addition, Russia may have carried out an ASAT test in 2016 and China conducted an ASAT test in 2007 that produced significant amounts of orbital debris.

Perhaps one of the most ambitious plans to weaponize outer space was Wernher von Braun’s (1959a; 1959b) plan to build a lunar outpost for the United States Army that would be crewed by a task force of twelve soldiers. Although this plan was never carried out, the written reports are shit-yourself-terrifying in their stated goals of establishing a military outpost on another celestial object. Von Braun (1959a; 1959b) proposed that the base be powered by two nuclear reactors and defended by unguided Davy Crockett guns with low-yield nuclear warheads, as well as claymore mines that would be modified to puncture pressure suits.²

This intertwining of nuclear and cosmic imaginaries can result in frightening knowledge productions that, if realized, could have been disastrous for humankind. Even now the nominal President of the United States has virtually unlimited authority to mobilize these unions of spaces and nuclear technologies to rain 720+ nuclear warheads worth of Apocalypse on their targets in less than an hour.³ Large scale use of American nuclear weapons would probably kill well over 100 million people in the first 72 hours.

Hugh Gusterson (2004) discusses the importance of nuclear weapons tests as “high-tech rituals that are as important for their cultural and psychological as for their technical significance” (148). We argue that Gusteron’s theorization of nuclear testing can also be productively applied to human spaceflight. A ritual implies an (arguably) temporally static activity: it needs a beginning and an end and perhaps this is why the NASA budget dropped significantly after the moon landing. This American ritual, generated by a sense of existential competition, had been completed and was no longer necessary to flood with funding. We argue that the moon landings—from the perspectives of many (but not all) federal government elites and members of the public—were never solely (or even mostly) about scientific exploration; they were about a technocultural ritual that culminated in symbolic defeat of their sworn Communist enemy. In future work we intend to expand on this point and examine the differences between competition with nuclear weapons and military forces and the “Space Race.” Why, for example, did the U.S. crewed space program collapse after the moon landings, but spending on nuclear weapons testing, development, and deployment continue at high levels (Schwartz 1998)?

Nuking Mars into Degenerate Utopias

As a coda, we would like to point out that spaces and nuclear technoutopianism remain regularly expressed discourses in American culture and society. An especially noteworthy contemporary example is Elon Musk’s plan to terraform Mars using large numbers of high-yield nuclear weapons. The proposal, given the temporal and technological distance from currently achievable reality, seems most interpretable as a cavalier mobilization of technoutopian optimism. Even if the science behind Musk’s plan is able to drive the desired result of remaking the planet Mars in Earth’s image, there are some serious sociocultural and political questions that remain unanswered.⁴ These questions include: what message are we sending by using the most devastating weaponry ever devised by humans in order to birth a new ecosystem? What would the lasting scientific and cultural effects be? Do we deserve—or is it morally/ethically right—to take over another planet, even if it is devoid of life? If NewSpace⁵ corporations are the first to inhabit another planet, is it not inevitable that we would replicate the inequalities and violence of colonial, hetero-patriarchal capitalism that has destroyed our current cosmic home (much like settler-colonists replicating Western social, economic, and political life on Indigenous land and people)?

In an otherworldly and futuristic expression of colonial nostalgia, we are gleefully trashing our planet while simultaneously being nostalgic about what we have trashed. By projecting that nostalgia onto futurist terraforming and colonial endeavors, the underlying imaginaries and practices utilized to lay waste to the Earth—what we call Capitalistic Unquestioned Technoutopian Enthusiasm (CUTE)—are rehabilitated and the damage is justified by the use of a future tense imaginary in which CUTE recreates our lost Eden (that we destroyed) (Povinelli 2011).

David Harvey (2000) elucidates this last point in relation to those that uphold the hegemonic perception that capitalism is a monolithic, eternal force and those that resist against it:

If the mess seems impossible to change then it is simply because there is indeed “no alternative.” It is the supreme rationality of the market versus the silly irrationality of anything else. And all those institutions that might have helped define some alternatives have other been suppressed or—with some notable exceptions, such as the church—brow-beaten into submission. (154)

In the “rationality of the market” all that remains are “degenerate utopias” (Collins 2008; Marin 1993). Places like Disneyland present themselves as utopic but are actually shrouding the commercial “reality”: “the Main Street façades are presented to us as toy houses and invite us to enter them, but their interior is always a disguised supermarket, where you buy obsessively, believing that you are still playing” (Eco 1986, 43). According to Umberto Eco, Disneyland’s hyperreality begins when one submits to the complete “fakeness” of the simulation in order to partake of the spectacularly tantalizing utopic imaginaries. It is through such agentive submission that the imaginary transubstantiates into “The Real.” Part of Elon Musk’s early CUTE seductions involved promulgating an uncredited Wikipedia commons created image of Mars that begins with the red planet and ends with a terraformed, Eden-like utopia of oceans and clouds and green forests: a new Earth that beckons to colonizers with new possibilities and untapped markets.

This photo is a Debordian “spectacle” that establishes and mediates a social relationship with the public through images (Debord 1994). Photos like the one above are preambles to Musk’s recent spectacular promise of 1,000 ships departing to Mars every 26 months. Even if that does not become a reality, Musk and other NewSpacers have already begun to creep into the social imaginary of space.

NASA—in its neoliberal present—is imbricated with this imaginary as well, possibly because NASA recognizes how powerful NewSpace visions can be in the sphere of public relations. However, their production of nostalgically rooted travel posters for places humans have never been are coded to invite—and exclude—certain types of futures (Messeri 2016). Namely, these futures are white, colonial, and evoke vintage 1950s–1960s travel advertisements, a period of U.S. history especially ripe with overt inequality and oppression. This serves to remind us that the political cannot be divorced from the aesthetic.

The theoretical frameworks we have drawn upon, we argue, illustrate some reasons why social sciences must take science fiction seriously and especially science fiction that does not espouse the tropes of Spencerian social theory. Science fiction writers who identify as people of color, Indigenous, women, and LGBTQI+ often challenge currently hegemonic social imaginaries through work that creates space(s) for multiple potentialities (see: Brown and Imarisha 2015; Dillion 2012; Le Guin 1974; Lempert 2014; Nama 2008, among others). The power of words, of worldmaking, of placemaking that are so inherent in science fiction writing are potential catalysts and resources for social change, especially in Earth-bound space science (Messeri 2016). Furthermore, social scientists should not only embrace the political world that science fiction inhabits, but we should be working together as a collective to actively disseminate the social science that good science fiction writers are already conducting.

References

Braun, Wernher von. 1959a. “Project Horizon Report: Volume I, Summary and Supporting Considerations.” A U.S. Army Study for the Establishment of a Lunar Outpost. United States Army. http://www.history.army.mil/faq/horizon/Horizon_V1.pdf.

———. 1959b. “Project Horizon Report: Volume II, Technical Considerations and Plans.” A U.S. Army Study for the Establishment of a Lunar Outpost. United States Army. http://www.history.army.mil/faq/horizon/Horizon_V2.pdf.

Brown, Adrienne Maree and Walidah Imarisha, eds. 2015. Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories From Social Justice Movements. Oakland: AK Press.

Collins, Michael. 1974. Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut’s Journeys. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.

Collins, Samuel Gerald. 2008. All Tomorrow’s Cultures: Anthropological Engagements with the Future. New York: Berghahn Books.

Davis, Tracy C. 2007. Stages of Emergency: Cold War Nuclear Civil Defense. Durham: Duke University Press.

Debord, Guy. 1994. The Society of the Spectacle. New York: Zone Books.

Derrida, Jacques. 1984. “No Apocalypse, Not Now (Full Speed Ahead, Seven Missiles, Seven Missives).” Translated by Catherine Porter and Philip Lewis. Diacritics 14 (2): 20–31.

Dick, Steven J, Robert Jacobs, Constance Moore, and Ulrich Bertram, eds. 2007. America in Space: NASA’s First Fifty Years. New York: Abrams Books.

Dillon, Grace L., ed. 2012. Walking the Clouds: An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

Eco, Umberto. 1986. Travels in Hyper Reality: Essays. Translated by William Weaver. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Grant, Matthew, and Benjamin Ziemann, eds. 2016. Understanding the Imaginary War: Culture, Thought and Nuclear Conflict, 1945-1990. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Grego, Laura. 2012. “A History of Anti-Satellite Programs.” Union of Concerned Scientists. http://www.ucsusa.org/nuclear-weapons/space-security/a-history-of-anti-satellite-programs.

Gusterson, Hugh. 2004. People of the Bomb: Portraits of America’s Nuclear Complex. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Harvey, David. 2000. Spaces of Hope. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Le Guin, Ursula K. 1974. The Dispossessed. New York: HarperCollins Publishers.

Lempert, William. 2014. “Decolonizing Encounters of the Third Kind: Alternative Futuring in Native Science Fiction Film.” Visual Anthropology Review 30 (2): 164–76.

Marin, Louis. 1993. “Frontiers of Utopia.” Critical Inquiry 19 (3): 397–420.

Messeri, Lisa. 2016. Placing Outer Space: An Earthly Ethnography of Other Worlds. Durham: Duke University Press.

Nama, Adilifu. 2008. Black Space: Imagining Race in Science Fiction Film. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Oakes, Guy. 1994. The Imaginary War: Civil Defense and American Cold War Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Povinelli, Elizabeth. 2011. Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism. Durham: Duke University Press.

Rose, Kenneth D. 2001. One Nation Underground: The Fallout Shelter in American Culture. New York: New York University Press.

Schwartz, Stephen I., ed. 1998. Atomic Audit: The Costs and Consequences of U.S. Nuclear Weapons Since 1940. Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press.

Webb, Angela. 2008. “Joint Effort Made Satellite Success Possible.” U.S. Air Force. Accessed January 17. http://www.af.mil/News/ArticleDisplay/tabid/223/Article/124266/joint-effort-made-satellite-success-possible.aspx.

Wellerstein, Alex. 2012. “The Sound of the Bomb (1953).” Restricted Data: The Nuclear Secrecy Blog. http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2012/07/13/the-sound-of-the-bomb-1953/, accessed 07/11/2017.

Introduction

Beginning in 1966, millions of people around the world (including the authors) have settled in front of the warm glow of a television or movie screen to watch an intrepid crew of space explorers venture through the cosmos—not for reasons of invasion or extraction, but for the more virtuous purpose of simply going where no human has ever been. We are of course talking about watching Star Trek. As we grew up and learned more about human “space exploration,” our understandings remained consistent with the dramatic imaginary of Star Trek: that adventuring into the cosmos is an inherently noble goal, pursued by good people, for inherently noble reasons. Space was the “final frontier” and humanity strode out into that glittering darkness as a matter of destiny, not conquest. Formal education during our college years initially added little nuance to our opinions about human space exploration. Sure, the space race was part of the Cold War “competition” with the Soviet Union, but “space exploration” remained pure and good in our minds.

Graduate school, that Eater of Dreams, began to change our conceptualizations as we dug deeper into these subjects. As part of Martin’s coursework at UNM, he has engaged in ethnographic and archival research including collecting nuclear weapon laboratory and defense advertising from Physics Today and Scientific American between the years of 1950-1964. Meanwhile, Taylor spent his MA years ethnographically investigating humanity’s changing perceptions of the cosmos, particularly in how the rapid commercialization of space affairs was shifting our cosmic goals from exploration to exploitation. As we brought our separate research endeavors into conversation with each other, we began to realize the imbricated natures of U.S. projects and discourses of nuclear weapons and space development.

We make three major arguments based on our fieldwork and collaboration. First, “space” was, and remains, a slippery and nebulous term. Rather than “space” it is better, we argue, to instead speak of “spaces” that range from atomic to extra-planetary: nuclear, oceanic, atmospheric, Earthly, and outer spaces.¹ Second, spaces “exploration” often was, and still is, explicitly conceptualized and discussed through gendered and colonial vocabularies of military advantage and frontier conquest. Third, spaces technologies and nuclear technologies were, and are, intimately connected through technoutopian imaginaries and discourse. In this two-part post we will focus on the capitalist and militaristic slippages of supposedly separate domains into “spaces” and the connections of nuclear and spaces technology as a technoutopian imaginary.

Space(s) Exploration: Peace through Knowledge!

This United Aircraft Corp advertisement, published in 1959, hints at the broad outlines of our arguments and data. It partially demonstrates the practical day-to-day overlap of skill sets involved with spaces and U.S. (nuclear armed) military missile development; the recurring appeals to an unrealized, but better, future brought about through technological conquest of a frontier; and the corporate, profit-driven entanglements of American businesses in military and spaces projects.

In an expansion on these themes, a 1955 advertisement (below), highlighting Norden-Ketay’s work on the second U.S. nuclear propelled submarine, exemplifies a post-WWII technoutopian restatement of the meliorist & Apocalyptic Enlightenment traditions. Technology, and spaces exploration, becomes salvation from, and by, threat of destruction. The services listed in the ad reveal the overlap of civilian-military technological advancement: “servo motors,” “navigational systems,” “fire control systems,” “communication equipment,” and “computers.”

The post-WWII period was, arguably, an unprecedented period in human history in terms of both the development of technology and the harnessing of those tools—in the names of “science” and “security”—to discover and control human environments. The United States undertook numerous large-scale, high-tech, and expensive projects to generate legible data about the Earth, oceans, atmosphere, and outer spaces. These projects, as the Aerojet-General (1962) advertisement below demonstrates, were often publically imagined as “vitally important to man’s [sic] future—scientific, economic, military” (11).

The Aerojet-General advertisement also offers examples of the conceptual slippage from “space” into “spaces” and the recurrent discourses of technomediated frontier conquest and exploitation. The “world of inner space” is “[a]lmost as unexplored as the regions above the earth’s atmosphere” and Aerojet-General is “a pioneer in undersea technology . . . focused . . . on the sea and its potential” (Aerojet-General 1962). The“[u]nderwater intelligence” referred to by Aerojet-General included hydroacoustic technology and oceanic maps developed in the United States significantly out of military concerns for keeping American submarines hidden while tracking Soviet naval forces.

Similarly, a 1962 Northrop ad (above) graphically and textually articulates militarized spaces knowledge across the domains of inner and outer. Nuclear propelled U.S. Polaris missile submarines—to maintain desired levels of both stealth and accuracy—relied on multiple spaces knowledge including atomic, astronomical, oceanic, and Earthly (MacKenzie 1993). The early U.S. ballistic missile submarines each carried sixteen Polaris A-1 missiles armed with W47 nuclear warheads of either 600 kilotons or 1.2 megatons yield (Polmar and Norris 2009, 56). The following map simulates the airburst detonation of a one megaton nuclear weapon on Washington D.C. (Wellerstein 2017).

The ability of each Polaris missile submarine to draw on cross-spaces knowledge to “pinpoint their exact position constantly” allowed each vessel to be “poised for free world defense” by being able to accurately launch their nuclear-tipped missiles against cities and, if we are being charitable, maybe soft-military targets (Autonetics 1961).²

An additional advertising example, from the Bureau of Naval Weapons (1963, below), points to how military actors explicitly and publically theorized cross-spaces knowledge as critical to U.S. supremacy. The title of the advertisement—“2,000 miles up…2,000 fathoms down”—prefigures contemporary U.S. military conceptualizations of integrated and cross-domain deterrence and warfare: from cyberspaces to outer spaces!

Spaces of Nuclear Technoutopianism

A 1960 Bendix ad (below) provides additional examples of euphemistically cheery slippages from “space” to “spaces” along with expressions of militarized nuclear technoutopianism. Its text reads “[i]n the all-out race for space and air supremacy the United States is developing three mighty nuclear engines—a nuclear aircraft engine, a nuclear ramjet and a nuclear rocket engine” (Bendix 1960). In this imaginary, American military and scientific supremacy springs from the control and regulation of technological knowledge across a scale of spaces, from “the atom-splitting, heat-producing process” to the “tremendously increased range” of the supposedly inevitable nuclear-powered missiles.

Particularly discordant with the glibly stated desire for American “supremacy” in this advertisement is mention of the nuclear ramjet engine that was intended for Project Pluto (see ad below). Project Pluto sought to construct what can be fairly termed a Doomsday Weapon: a supersonic nuclear powered cruise missile loaded with multiple nuclear warheads and spewing lethal radiation along its flight path (Polmar and Norris 2009). Gregg Herken perhaps put it best when he characterized Pluto as “[a] locomotive-size missile that travels at near treetop level at three times the speed of sound, tossing out hydrogen bombs as it roared overhead” (Herken 1990, 28).

Similarly baroque and militaristic uses were imagined for aircraft nuclear propulsion. The U.S. Aircraft Nuclear Propulsion (ANP) project focused on the development of a nuclear powered bomber of virtually unlimited range and unprecedented payload capability. One John F. Kennedy official, upon discovering the project was still funded, supposedly compared the experience to “coming downstairs in the morning and finding a dead walrus in your living room” (Polmar and Norris 2009, 73). Testing for the ANP program in the 1950s included a modified B36 bomber flying more than 40 missions over the continental United States with an operational—and often running—three megawatt nuclear reactor. Convair, in the ad below, highlighted its ANP work and engaged colonially gendered language to move seamlessly between military and scientific purposes of spaces exploration as it proclaimed a need for “men of vision” to make use of “tools for the future already in use at Convair Forth Worth.”

In Part 2, we continue our discussion with deeper theoretical engagement of spaces exploration and technoutopianism.

Proceed to Part 2

References

Aerojet-General Corporation. 1962. “Ocean: Vast Vital Virtually Untapped.” Scientific American 206 (3): 11.

Autonetics. 1961. “Unseen but Never Lost.” Scientific American 205 (3): 95.

Bendix. 1960. “Three Nuclear Engines in Race for Air-Space Supremacy.” Scientific American 202 (3): 6.

———. 1964. “Nuclear Control Servomechanisms for TORY IIC Ramjet Reactor.” Scientific American 211 (1): 137.

Bureau of Naval Weapons. 1963. “2,000 Miles Up…2,000 Fathoms Down.” Scientific American 208 (4): 194.

Convair. 1956. “Danger Radioactivity.” Physics Today 9 (9): 56.

Herken, Gregg. 1990. “The Flying Crowbar.” Air & Space Magazine 5 (1): 28.

MacKenzie, Donald. 1993. Inventing Accuracy: A Historic Sociology of Nuclear Missile Guidance. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Norden-Ketay Corportion. 1955. “To Peace, because the Awful Alternative is the End of All Life.” Scientific American 193 (6): 23.

Northrop. 1962. “Northrop Put the Little Dipper in the Ocean.” Scientific American 206 (5): 145.

Oman-Reagan, Michael P. 2015. “Unfolding the Space Between Stars: Anthropology of the Interstellar.” In 114th Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association. Denver, Colorado: American Anthropological Association.

Polmar, Norman and Robert S. Norris. 2009. The U.S. Nuclear Arsenal: A History of Weapons and Delivery Systems since 1945. Annapolis: Naval Institute Press.

United Aircraft Corp. 1959. “Engineers and Scientists for Complete Space and Weapons Systems.” Scientific American 200 (5): 137.

Wellerstein, Alex. 2017. “Nukemap.” Restricted Data: The Nuclear Secrecy Blog. https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/?&kt=1000&lat=38.8970394&lng=-77.0361841&hob_ft=0&casualties=1&zm=11, accessed 07/11/2017.