The Heavens and the Earth

[I]n 1997, the fortieth year after Americans named Sputnik I a "technological Pearl Harbor," who can deny that the space program has been a profound disappointment? Indeed, what surprises me now about ... the Heavens and the Earth is not whatever prescience it may have shown regarding the flaws of the technocratic approach symbolized by NASA, but rather how much I still wanted to believe as late as 1985 that the Space Shuttle might usher in a second Space Age of ineffable potential. In short, I should have been even gloomier than I was.

From today's vantage point the Space Age may well be defined as an era of hubris. Not only did it become obvious in the 1960s and 1970s that "planned invention of the future" through federal mobilization of technology and brainpower was failing everywhere from Vietnam to our inner cities, but that it even failed in the arena for which it had seemed ideally suited: space technology. In the years following Sputnik I, experts assured congressional committees that by the year 2000 the United States and the Soviet Union would have lunar colonies and laser-armed spaceships in orbit. The film 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) depicted Hilton hotels on the Moon and a manned mission to Jupiter (January 12, 1992, was the supercomputer Hal's birthday in the film). In the late 1960s, NASA promoters imagined reusable spacecraft ascending and descending like angels on Jacob's ladder, permanent space stations, and human missions to Mars-all within a decade. In the 1970s, visionaries looked forward to using the Space Shuttle to launch into orbit huge solar panels that would beam unlimited, nonpolluting energy to earth, hydroponic farming in space to feed the earth's exploding population, and systems to control terrestrial weather for civilian or military purposes. In the 1980s, the space station project was revived (to be completed again "within a decade"), the Strategic Defense Initiative was to put laser-beam weapons in orbit to shoot down missiles and make nuclear weapons obsolete, and the space telescope was to unlock the last secrets of the universe. By 1990, a manned mission to Mars by the year 2010 was on the president's wish list, and research had begun on an aerospace plane (the "Orient Express") to whisk passengers across the Pacific in an hour and land like an airplane in Asia. None of it came to pass. Instead, the dream of limitless progress through government-sponsored research and development began to fade even before astronauts stepped on the Moon.

[...]

But the foibles of Space Age technocracy have been most strikingly exposed in the fate of the regime that made technocracy its founding principle: the USSR. Not only did Soviet space programs keep even fewer promises than the American programs, but the Soviet Union itself crashed and burned. Nothing has changed our perspective on the political history of the Space Age more than the end of the Cold War. In the 1980s it was still possible to imagine the United States in a mortal race for the "high ground" of space and to argue the pros and cons of the "Star Wars" program. Today, with the Soviet empire gone, the Space Age seems almost coterminous with the Cold War itself. That age was born in the initial competition between the Americans and Soviets to get their hands on Nazi V-2s and their designers. It accelerated in the 1950s as both sides raced for an intercontinental ballistic missile. It took off with Sputnik I, climaxed with the Moon race, declined with detente, and died when the Soviet Union died. [from the Preface to the Johns Hopkins paperback edition, 1997]