Book Review : A Political Space Odyssey Gets Beyond ‘Gee Whizzes’
The Heavens and the Earth, A Political History of the Space Age by Walter A. McDougall (Basic: $25.95) The dawn of the Space Age, as political and societal as it was technological, fundamentally changed the relationship between government and science and set the human race on an extraordinary odyssey toward the unknown. Where it will lead is still uncertain, but where it came from is now far clearer because of this scholarly work.
Walter McDougall, associate professor of history at UC Berkeley, has brought forth an Apollo project of his own, reaching for the moon in an ambitious effort to document the peculiar and perhaps revolutionary course that compelled two great nations to take infant steps toward extraterrestrial travel.
McDougall’s book is, as the subtitle says, a political history of the Space Age, not simply a recounting of past “gee-whizzes.” In a readable, balanced account, he lays out the political intrigues and the quest for national pride, both in the Soviet Union and in the United States, that led to the profound technological triumphs of the last quarter-century.
The inferiority complex shared by so many Soviets led that nation to usher in the Space Age with a shot heard round the heavens. But Sputnik was more than a technological achievement; it was a political demonstration that stunned the American people, and it was not the last shot to be fired by the Soviets.
It also shocked this country’s political Establishment, humiliating President Dwight D. Eisenhower and handing an extraordinary challenge to his young successor, John F. Kennedy.
“Four months after taking office, Kennedy asked Congress to commit the United States to go to the moon,” McDougall writes. “The decision was a product of the growing technocratic mentality and immediate political trends evident in the reverses in Laos, the Congo, the Bay of Pigs in Cuba, and the flight of Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space. The moon program was a lever by which the young President, who extolled vigor and assaults on the New Frontier, and the nation, which seemed to have lost faith in itself, could find their legs and come to grips with the internal and external challenges of the post-Sputnik world.”
That forced the federal government to take a leadership role in the development of technology and the advancement of science, a role the nation had shunned until pushed in that direction by worldwide war.
The U.S. government had “stood relatively aloof from science and technology,” McDougall asserts. “Americans loved machines, but worshipped them no more than they worshiped central government. Even for the mass of Americans technology was a means, not an end, and not something to be directed by the federal government.”
The author carefully documents the role Sputnik and other Soviet achievements played in changing that attitude, leading ultimately to U.S. victory in the lunar race, which columnist Walter Lippmann termed a “morbid and vulgar stunt.”