PREFACE

“We are going.” So goes our declarative refrain promising that human beings, sometime soon, will return to the moon after more than half a century. From Launch Pad 39B on Meritt Island in Florida, NASA's Artemis 3 mission will send four astronauts on an unforgettable ride toward Earth orbit, then on to lunar orbit, and finally the moon's south pole, an alien terrain unknown to previous visitors.

No doubt a nervous energy will temper their excitement. For unlike the equatorial—and therefore light-flooded—Apollo sites, Artemis 3 will descend on blackness. The sun will linger just above the horizon, casting long, dark veils over the land. With headlamps the astronauts will venture out among soaring mountains and deep craters that combine to create regions of permanent shadow.

A similar dusk hangs over the politics of space exploration. China is scheduled to make a crewed landing near the south pole before 2030 as well, an unwelcome prospect for NASA administrator Bill Nelson, who has warned that Chinese astronauts could occupy the area “like the Spratly Islands” if they get there first. By the time Artemis 3 takes flight, Russia will have pulled out of the International Space Station after two decades of close cooperation with the United States. Since 2007 all three countries, and India as well, have tested kinetic antisatellite missiles and thereby generated thousands of pieces of orbital debris. Initiatives to ban these and other space weapons continue to languish month after month at the United Nations.

It was not until I began researching this book that I noticed anything happening in space, or looked forward to anything that would happen. I was not, and am neither still, a Musk fanboy, a Trekkie, or even a buff. And certainly, upon entering graduate school, I had not considered writing about space exploration, space technology, or space policy. So then what?

I came of age during the war on terror. Yellow ribbons lined the trees and fences of my boyhood paper route. High school peers volunteered just after graduation to empower Bush's surge. Images from Abu Ghraib seared themselves onto adolescent brains. My early education pitched the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan as merely the latest episodes of US hubris and folly, evidence of the “tragedy,” as it was often put, of US foreign policy. Marilyn B. Young, who spent most of her life teaching and writing about the subject, wrote at the time that across her long years, the sequence of US wars she studied seemed less like a progression than a continuation, “as if between one war and the next the country was on hold.” It rang true.

I was determined to illuminate some lost chapter of this still-unfolding story. Why not a history of foreign policy schools in the United States, places like MIT's Center for International Studies or Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School that trained a generation to wield global power after World War II? Or what about a full-length biography of George W. Ball, the only senior official in the Lyndon Johnson administration to object to the US commitment in Vietnam? Compelling and deserving subjects, still pluckable by future dissertators.

But imagine my surprise upon first combing through the early corpus of US space diplomacy. For all the embattled rhetoric and hyperbole of the space race, policy and law for the cosmos seemed to have developed along admirable lines. NASA successfully guarded civilian spaceflight from a jealous air force. Humanism counterbalanced the ego of the US and Soviet space programs. The two rivals even cooperated on an international treaty governing the exploration and use of outer space for all nations. This seemed not tragedy but triumph.

Of course, things are never quite what they seem. I asked: Were peaceful US initiatives in space merely low-hanging fruit for cynical cold warriors and naïve arms controllers? Did US leaders from John Foster Dulles to Adlai Stevenson, who avidly pronounced their wish for peace in space, engage in bald hypocrisy given the development of military space technology? Was the lauded Outer Space Treaty, as Senator Strom Thurmond (R-SC) put it, “nothing more than a scrap of paper”?

Here were questions demanding answers, and a story worthy of the mid-twentieth century, witness to the profundity of the atomic bomb, the digital computer, the birth control pill, and, yes, the space rocket. The ensuing research consumed years and sent me along paths that branched far beyond policy into science-fiction, engineering, philosophy, and religion. This book is the result of those rewarding incursions. I have come to my conclusions. The reader will reach her own.