Technology and Culture

David Nye has succinctly noted that "the meaning of a tool is inseparable from the stories that surround it."¹ What are the meanings of space technology, particularly for historians? How do these meanings differ in disparate national contexts? Is it possible to conceive of a universal narrative of the history of space exploration? The fiftieth anniversary of the Society for the History of Technology—and the almost simultaneous fiftieth anniversary of Sputnik—provided an obvious occasion to revisit these questions.

In the fifty years since the launch of Sputnik on 4 October 1957, more than 6,000 functioning satellites have been launched into Earth orbit and beyond—some to the farthest reaches of our solar system. By its physical nature, space exploration has a resonance beyond national borders—at a fundamental level, it is a project that transcends national claims and appeals to the global, perhaps even to the universal. Yet our understanding of the half-century of space travel is still firmly rooted in the framework of the national imagination. Until now, barring very few exceptions, only nation-states have been able to mobilize the resources necessary for regular access to space. For most laypersons, the perceived apotheosis of space exploration remains the heady days after Sputnik, when the United States and the Soviet Union competed to trump the other in a series of progressively more complex feats in space. The cold-war space race retains its mystique, either [End Page 425] as a benchmark that subsequent accomplishments could never equal, or as an anomaly whose particular conditions could never be repeated. It has, in fact, become impossible to think of space exploration without allusion to the halcyon days of the 1960s and equally inconceivable for historians to interpret the act of space travel without the space race hovering over the very language that we use.

My goal in this essay is to offer some thoughts on the way in which the relationship between national identity and space exploration has affected our discipline's approach to the history of spaceflight—in fact, has been fundamental to it. This discussion is intended to be a starting point to revisit both the history and the historiography of space exploration and suggest some new avenues of investigation that move beyond formulations rooted in the cold-war space race. I will begin by illuminating the ways in which multiple and contradictory narratives—engendered by national claims—have been a staple of space history in both the United States and Russia, the two foremost spacefaring nations. The citizens of both nations remember space exploration quite differently, yet they appeal to the same kind of universal import. In addition, the maturation of other national space programs—those of China, Japan, and India, for example—will require us to approach space history with new lenses as more and more "new" narratives join the old cold-war-centered approach to space history. Second, by using the particular case of the burgeoning Indian space program and its postcolonial context, I will draw attention to avenues opened up by de-privileging borders in the history of space exploration, i.e., clearing the path to a potentially global history of space exploration. This line of thinking may raise a set of provocative questions concerning the motivations which lead nations to explore space, and why, in doing so, they take certain pathways that are not explicable by deterministic approaches.