SAN FRANCISCO — In the late 1950s, American space companies jumped into a headlong race to build an aerospace industry that could launch missiles across the world and rockets above it.

In her new book Another Science Fiction, archivist Megan Prelinger delves into the hyperbolic, whimsical world of the advertisements these early aerospace companies created to sell themselves.

Far from the dry, technical ads you might imagine, companies like Northrup, Ex-Cell-O, and National tried to lure the most talented young engineers into their cubicles by drawing on the mystique of science fiction. Ball-bearing, engine-part, and guidance-system companies didn't sell themselves, but rather the grand vision of space exploration as the next step in mankind's destiny.

The book is lovingly crafted and exhaustively researched. Unlike so many "big idea" tomes that skip over the details to deliver the PowerPoint version of reality, Another Science Fiction glories in the details, providing a complex portrait of the nation's spacefaring ambitions. Prelinger's analysis reaches outside the narrow confines of space boosterism to reveal the neural connections in the American psyche between the final frontier, the Soviet menace, and good, old industrial engineering.

We caught up with Prelinger at the wonderfully strange library she runs with her husband, Rick, to ogle old space stuff and discuss countercultural space utopias, alternatives to Apollo, and her hopes for a human spaceflight renaissance.

Image: Willi Baum.*

Wired.com: Your book focuses on your amazing collection of space ephemera, particularly the advertisements of the aerospace companies that eagerly lapped up NASA cash. It's kind of strange: what were they advertising for? And what tropes and themes did they tend to use?

Megan Prelinger: The companies were mostly advertising for recruitment. They were in a position of being funded to develop a civil space program that would be a nearly a whole new industry – from scratch. As well as responding to a steeply escalating Cold War that “demanded” massive missile proliferation. The companies needed to hire thousands of engineers to develop bids for NASA and DOD contracts, and hundreds of thousands of workers to build the new machines. They needed to hire those people in just a few years. And they did.

They tended to use tropes borrowed from science fiction and from mid-century modern design to convey a sense of fantasy and possibility around the process of technological emergence that was erupting. Imagery that was culturally associated with space exploration dominated, as the civil space program was the leading public face of rocket-and-missile work. Weapons development was more tacitly than explicitly expressed in the tropes and themes. The companies and NASA both wanted to inspire people, and they used whatever visual language they could to achieve that goal. Motifs of sci-fi influenced space exploration were prevalent, but also the trope of “space will be our new home,” is expressed in a lot of ways. Mostly through images of the human body in space, but also in imagery that frames outer space as an extension of the domestic environment, and a zone for new architectural invention.

Wired.com: What attracted you to this particular set of artifacts? Were you looking for stories of rocket advertisements past?

Prelinger: I’m a citizen-interpreter of the American West, a landscape aficionado, and a Cold War history buff. I was originally geopolitically awakened and politicized by the early-1980s crises in nuclear politics. When I first picked up these magazines and started to read them, I was looking for untold stories of the militarized American west and untold stories of our atomic nightmare. I thought there might be material in these magazines that would point to other interesting areas of research. I have also always been very interested in space exploration and its history, but at the time I thought I mostly knew the outline of the history of NASA. I didn’t expect to be surprised in that area.

Every discovery I made in the magazines that went into the book was an utter serendipity. I am not a terribly visual person and I wasn’t looking for the ads. I just happened upon them while reading the articles. As I gained momentum in reading the magazines, it hit me in a “Eureka!” moment: that the ads formed a visual language of their own that spoke to all the historical, ideological, and technological complexities that were embedded in the massive changes of the era in history. THAT was the story. The visual language. The idea framework for the book emerged almost overnight, an abrupt serendipity.

Wired.com: Your book seems fundamentally about the space race as an industrial opportunity. The space race here is individual and much more about career advancement than human advancement. How did companies adapt and borrow the grand themes of human advancement to support their own far more limited aims?

Prelinger: Human spaceflight is a cultural project; the mechanics to get us there are an industrial project. The ads represent the convergence of these two aims. At the baseline of course the companies were motivated by profit; at the same time the people working within industry were largely genuinely driven by a sense of contributing to an exciting period of emerging technology. I think the same can be said of our Silicon Valley giants of today. How can you separate career advancement from human advancement among the people giving their lives to Big Tech today?

Wired.com:The beauty of the ads and the grandeur of space provided cover for the many military projects that aerospace companies undertook during this Cold War period. If you had to say, do you think the dual military/civilian nature of space technologies hurt the long-range prospects of spacefaring or helped?

Prelinger: Oh, that’s complicated. The military complex enabled a lot of technological transformations that wouldn’t have happened – or would have taken much, much longer– in a peaceful environment. So in a basic technological sense, the military enabled spacefaring. We wouldn’t have had rockets powerful enough to launch satellites into orbit if we had not been developing intercontinental ballistic missiles. The rockets were a side project and a surplus of the missile research. It would be nice to imagine that we could’ve/would’ve funded the development of orbit-capable launch vehicles without the stimulus of the Cold War, but it’s unrealistic.

At the same time, the militarized nature of the early space program hurt it tremendously (tremendously!) by costing it a lot of its legitimacy as a civil-scientific enterprise. Viz. the conversation with Willi Baum [creator of the top image] that is quoted at the end of the book. He doesn’t understand how I can be a naturalist and wildlife rehabilitator and a space advocate at the same time. A lot of people think as he does – that the whole civil space program is just a fig leaf for our overly militarized technological will to power. I see that it is more than that, but among the social justice community it’s very hard to convince people that there really is a hugely important civil-scientific aspect of space exploration (climate science research, anyone?). As a member of the social and ecological justice communities it’s sometimes hard for me to be “out” as a space fan. All because of this intense confusion/conflation and commingling of resources between military and civil space. That part is very regrettable.

Wired.com: The space race was intimately tied to the military ambitions of the Cold War superpowers, but you uncover and describe several more human alternatives, a kind of countercultural space program. Perhaps you can tell us what people like Stewart Brand and Princeton physicists Gerard O'Neill were up to?

Prelinger: The migration of space into the counterculture is a big story. You might be interested in Robert Poole’s book Earthrise, which is a cultural history of the image of earth from space. Stewart Brand was responsible for the integration of space themed visual imagery (the earthrise photo) into the counterculture. But back in the 1970s, through his initiative in developing the California Water Atlas, he led the cultural turn from space back toward Earth. He was really the first to notice and develop the fact that earthrise was more than a pretty picture: it stood for the emerging truth that our journey into space really made more meaning for us out of Planet Earth than it did out of space itself. He befriended astronaut Rusty Schweikart and integrated discussions about space exploration into the everyday discourse of the CoEvolution Quarterly, his post-Whole Earth Catalog magazine. Those discussions seem diffuse to me. But they definitely express a perspective that space exploration is a natural and desirable expression of a combined techno-power and woo-woo state of things. Those conversations are heavily marked as countercultural in a number of ways.

At the same time Gerard O’Neill was coming from a different place and a different perspective. As a physics professor at Princeton he was much more Eastern Establishment and institutional than Brand. But his studies of physics convinced him that human beings could, and should, colonize space in huge numbers. He believed it was technologically and economically feasible to build huge orbital floating terraria that would be hyper-verdant and would house and feed thousands of people. He formed his own node of the counterculture just by being so extreme in his views. He was well-connected enough to gain an appointment at NASA, and NASA sponsored one of his studies and published it as a government document. That document is one of my favorite pieces of space ephemera. O’Neill also popularized his vision through the book The High Frontier; the book’s ideas were so far outside most peoples’ frame of reference that they represented a countercultural ideal. It’s important to also notice that his ideas weren’t utterly different from those espoused by the ex-Nazi hyper-militarized space visionary Wernher von Braun in the 1950s. von Braun’s ideas were assimilable in American culture because they were military themed. O’Neill’s peace-and-trees version of that vision was associated (I think) with the counterculture as much just by virtue of its pacifism as by anything else.

Wired.com: In reading about the 70s space utopias, I couldn't help thinking back to the 1840s, when railroads started to open up the West, by which I mean the area beyond the Appalachians, and all that land seemed like a great place to test out all the philosophical ideas about the way to live that were bubbling out of the industrializing cities. You draw a lot of parallels between how people thought about frontiers ("The Final Frontier") and space. How was exploring space different from exploring, say, Arizona or the Antarctic?

Prelinger: I’d love to have time to write an essay-length reply to this question. I did try to address this question in Chapter Four by making the point that we tried to make it like exploring Arizona, but it wasn’t. And that’s why a lot of our dreams and initiatives failed to reach fruition. We imagined we could colonize space as easily as the Europeans moved in to North America. – perhaps even easier, because there wouldn’t be pre-existing sapiens cultures to push out. Almost as if forgetting that we can’t breathe or eat or live or build in space. The “science fiction” aspect of future visualizations grossly overstepped reality by too swiftly suggesting a land-based model of colonization where such a model just could not operate.

It would have been better if space had been conceptualized more like Antarctica; a place where survival was really unlikely for early explorers, and would never be anything other than extraordinarily difficult for those who would follow them. NASA maintains research stations in Antarctica devoted not only to polar studies of planetary science, but also research into living in extreme environments. Human beings will have to adapt into extremophiles in order to live on the Moon or Mars.

Wired.com: At one point you write that "The twelve-year race between the United States and the USSR to reach the Moon was simple compared to the battle for satellite supremacy," you write. That's a fascinating statement because it goes against the entrenched idea that it was Apollo which formed the core of the American space program.

Prelinger: As soon as satellite launch technology was proven, many countries and many companies wanted to have a presence in the satellite sky. Competition was swift and multilateral. The binary nationalist “Moon-or-bust” competition between the US and the USSR was not really attainable by other countries, much less by companies. So it remained a simple binary for a long time. But the satellite sky was (and is) a much more accessible forum for crowding and competition. Apollo may have been the public face of the American space program, but we have always had a lot more going on with robotics than with human spaceflight. From a structural and functional perspective, satellites are the core of the American space program. Have been since 1958.

Wired.com: I think most people see NASA (and the American space program) as basically Vanguard to Apollo to the Shuttle. Maybe they throw Hubble in there. But you recover a huge chunk of space history where the moon shot was by no means assured and where human spaceflight seems as if it could have gone many places. Maybe not just or never to the moon. You make the argument that Apollo caused a kind of public amnesia about the competing alternative space programs that might have been. Can you describe the criticisms of and alternatives to Apollo in the scientific community and the media?

Prelinger: The criticisms of Apollo were comparable to the criticisms of human spaceflight today. The criticisms are based on a schism between space for science, by scientists, and space for exploration, by explorers. It is true now as it was then that robotic spaceflight is vastly less expensive and technologically difficult, and yields tangible scientific rewards. Scientists mocked the Apollo program because the life support system had to dominate the payload of the spacecraft to such an extent that only a few pounds of scientific equipment – sensors and sample collectors – could be included. That schism still exists, though within NASA great steps have been taken to resolve it as an internal contradiction.

Ambitious non-Apollo plans that were regrettably un-funded included a plan for a multi-planet flyby by a space probe in the 1970s. There was an alignment of the planets in the 1970s that meant a multi-planet probe could go on a “grand tour” and get a lot more bang for its buck than at any time in the late 20th or 21st centuries. Hey look, this idea has a wiki entry: Planetary Grand Tour.

Some people think that the emphasis on human spaceflight overshadowed what could have been public and political support for this Grand Tour. Other people think that it would have been canceled in the 1970s anyway, just because of the economic contraction. For the same reasons Apollo was canceled.

Wired.com: You write in your book, "With fifty years' hindsight the tone of the popular press stories of the late 1950s criticizing human spaceflight seems cartoonishly overblown." Is that really fair? It seems to me that the criticisms of the manned spaceflight program were pretty robust, the Apollo landing notwithstanding. What do you think the best argument for human spaceflight is? And do you think we should be attempting to send humans into space now?

Prelinger: I am a supporter of human spaceflight. I want to see it happen, and I will do what I can to promote it as a cultural enterprise. But it needs to be re-framed as a cultural enterprise. Our human spaceflight program was a civil public institution. Its primary functions were symbolic, inspirational, and cultural. It was a positive, non-destructive expression of the urge to explore and to “conquer” (space is un-conquerable, so space exploration de-fangs the conquering impulse). It was a positive, non-destructive expression of technological upsmanship. It was a positive, non-destructive expression of the human impulse to continuously expand our sense of territoriality. It can be those things again in the future, and I’d like to see that happen. Its most important job was to inspire young people to see themselves as junior members of an advanced, highly-accomplished society, and to identify positively and peacefully with technology. In its early years, that effect was worldwide. Space exploration has the potential to transcend nationalism. I have no doubt that the Apollo program inspired many young people to think higher than they would have without its symbolism in front of them, and I’d like to see that inspiration come back.

That being said, the Apollo program in particular was an artifact of a major post-war economic and technological surplus. We no longer have that surplus, we have spent it. I have to agree on a practical level with the cancellation of the Constellation programs. NASA’s robotic programs are the ones that bring home the bacon, in terms of new knowledge and important scientific discoveries. I’m sorry that we are losing it as a public program, but it will be reborn as some kind of hybrid public-private partnership. Private “new space” enterprise is hard at work developing human spaceflight alternatives, but it will be really hard for them to do that without some technology transfer from NASA. I see public-private partnerships as the way of the future.

I’m of two minds about the privatization of human spaceflight. On the one hand, I hate to see it lost as a public, democratic institution. On the other hand, the expense and the risk are utterly enormous. It seems more appropriate to me for private companies to take the risk and make the expense, rather than our heavily stressed taxpayer base. And it’s not as much of a dichotomy as it seems on the surface because even when human spaceflight was a “public, democratic” institution, the profits from it still all went to private industry.

Wired.com: One interesting argument you make is that the selection of a design for the Apollo rocketry and system actually stopped a lot of the more futuristic design proposals out there. Do you think the lack of a program of record now that NASA has effectively cancelled Constellation will re-open people's minds and allow them to imagine new paths for NASA?

Prelinger: I was just discussing this question with a NASA staffer at the SpaceUp conference in San Diego this past weekend. NASA is definitely at a bit of an identity crisis. At least the parts of NASA dedicated to human spaceflight are at an identity crisis. The cancellation of Constellation will result in a huge infusion of moneys into the “new space” companies that are developing non-NASA rocket systems. Those systems are going to be bound to the same rules of physics as NASA rockets, yet they will innovate in design and function to some extent.

As for new paths for NASA well, that’s a big subject. What NASA does best and most importantly is robotic planetary science. No one in the world does that as well as NASA. Exploring Mars, bringing back samples of Martian soil – and using knowledge about Martian planetary science to help Earth sciences people understand our own planet’s evolutionary history – THAT’s what NASA does best. Increasing public awareness and appreciation about this really important, urgent, and fascinating work is NASA’s biggest hurdle.

I’d of course love to see the breakdown of existing structures lead to a creative eruption in design and technology. That could be visually as well as technologically interesting and exciting. It remains to be seen though, how “different” spacecraft can look, now that the limiting factors of design, materials, and physics are much better known than they were in the 1950s.

Wired.com: Science fiction, the entertainment not the advertisements, seems to thread its way through your narrative as in the hilariously titled sci-fi magazine, Satellite Science Fiction, which you note "published articles about science fact alongside fiction." What was the relationship between science and science fiction in the late 50s and has it changed over the last 50 years?

Prelinger: In the 1950s, science and science fiction were close mutual contextualizers. The magazine Analog ran half science / half fiction articles in its table of contents every issue. The science fiction writer Fritz Leiber was commissioned to write a story – or a story of his was appropriated – by Los Alamos National Laboratory for an advertisement. The advertisement was actually just a block of copy from the story, with the Laboratory’s logo at the bottom. Also, writers such as Arthur C. Clarke wrote fiction that was directly based on working plans for emerging technologies, such as “The Wind from the Sun” about a solar wind ship. The relationship between science and sci-fi did not get much closer than it was during those years.

Today I think that relationship is a bit more diffuse. It has moved on to the realm of computers. The relationship between the world created by Neal Stephenson in Snow Crash and Second Life is pretty close, but not as close as the examples above from the 1950s. And of course the relationship between sci-fi literature and the real stories of technological emergence vary quite a bit with media type. Narrative film has always been more adventure-oriented than technology-oriented. In the 1950s that relationship was probably closer than it is today – the ships themselves were part of the adventure. In contemporary sci-fi narrative film I think I see evidence that we as an audience have become desensitized to the various promises offered by advanced spacefaring technology. For instance in District 9, the spaceship is very much in the background. Though to really use District 9 as an example we’d have to also look at the centrality of the “gene therapy” theme in the story which is very much out of today’s science news headlines.

In sum I’d say that the relationship is not quite as close-seeming as it was back then, but it’s still there. The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction runs occasional columns by scientists working at the Exploratorium. But that’s less than five percent of the magazine’s content.

Images: Jim Merithew/Wired.com

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