CHAPTER 2Interplanetary Men

Of Rockets and Ethics

Considering the growth that occurred in state-led rocket and missile projects during the 1940s and 1950s, it is easy to forget just how implausible spaceflight seemed before World War II. The gusto with which the trans-Atlantic rocket societies expounded their vision of the future and the energy they brought to proselytizing spaceflight obscured their limited influence before the revelations of Peenemünde. None of the interwar societies had membership greater than seven hundred. In the fall of 1929 the VfR, lacking funds, suspended publication of Die Rakete. A few years later, to project a more serious, practical orientation, AIS leaders changed the name of their organization to the American Rocket Society (ARS). For many, the technologies were too farfetched, the distances too great, and the environment of space too toxic for human travel, let alone habitation. Lasser, Ley, and other popular science writers chaffed at the label of “crackpot” or “daydreamer” that occasionally cropped up in the press. Goddard, for one, kept the AIS at arm's length to distance himself from the perceived eccentricity of organized spaceflight enthusiasts. “People must … realize that real progress is a succession of logical steps and not a leap in the dark,” he complained in a letter to the Smithsonian Institution.¹²

Just as the spaceflight movement seemed to be peaking, depression, nationalism, and political crisis forced public experimentation and dialogue mostly underground. In the new Soviet Union, where the space fad had flourished under the New Economic Policy of the 1920s, popular rocketry found itself buried amid the throes of the Cultural Revolution, the Great Terror, collectivization, and the First Five-Year Plan, which expunged cosmists from view and instead embraced the utilitarian, technology-centered rocket promoters. In Germany the public experiments so widely attended in 1928 gave way to secret government research for the army. Early in 1932 high-ranking officers visited the VfR's testing grounds, the Raketenflugplatz, to view a (failed) test of the group's Repulsor rocket and subsequently offered the society a contract for a launch demonstration. Von Braun, working on a doctoral dissertation in physics at the University of Berlin, had much of his project classified after Hitler came to power. By the mid-1930s, the interwar rocket societies found themselves cut off from one another by national loyalties, travel restrictions, economic hardship, and, in particular, government censorship in rocket technology.¹³

The war changed everything. So long a subject of rumination, speculation, and experimentation, the rocket had in a matter of months become an inescapable, tangible fact. Glittering images of spaceships and moon rockets that had recently graced the covers of pulp magazines now seemed less like cheap advertisements than prescient blueprints of machines bursting off the page into physical reality. But the rocket's arrival was a rude awakening. The state's absorption of rocket engineers legitimated their theoretical work but, at the same time, contorted it. Little time passed, indeed, between the first successful test of the V-2 to full-scale production. Once Dornberger's team (and its slave labor) proved the missile's efficacy, they began rolling out like sausages: from September 1944 to February 1945, prisoners at the Mittelwerk tunnel complex outside Nordhausen assembled between six and seven hundred V-2s per month, more than twenty a day.¹⁴ Over the same period, the German army launched more than 1,000 rockets against targets in the United Kingdom, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and on advancing Allied forces in the fatherland. They killed 2,754 people and injured 6,523 more.¹⁵ Violence and validity went hand in hand: once people witnessed the terrible power of the V-2, the once romantic and quixotic speculations of the interwar societies appeared not only feasible but imminent. The Nazis’ Wunderwaffe ushered rocketry from the margins of scientific inquiry to the very center of international politics and military policy.¹⁶

Imagine, then, the awe—nay, the stupefaction—of the average citizen as she read the daily headlines in August 1945: not only had the Nazis built a weapon capable of reaching across continents and, presumably someday, oceans, but the Americans had built a bomb that harnessed the most elemental power of the known universe. Observers immediately drew connections between the destruction wrought on Hiroshima and Nagasaki with the terror released a year earlier by Hitler. What if would-be aggressors could combine the awesome power of atomic weapons with the speed of the ballistic missile? Americans, though they could enjoy temporary comfort considering their monopoly on the bomb, shuddered to think of their two oceanic buffers evaporating. Only months after the end of the war Manhattan Project veteran Niels Bohr proclaimed that defense against bomb-tipped missiles was “impossible.” A fait accompli seemed to have emerged when in the summer of 1946 the US Army initiated tests, with reassembled V-2s taken from Germany, of missile-tracking radar over the New Mexico desert—the United States was rushing to perfect the combination of these weapons and craft a workable defense against them. By 1952 the Army would begin tests of the MGM-5 Corporal, the first tactical missile authorized to carry a nuclear warhead—it was also the first man-made object to reach outer space. “The lay mind has been too stunned by release of nuclear energy in the atomic bomb to question or doubt what recently would have been visionary forays into the ionosphere,” observed one journalist. “Hope and fear mingle in a prayer that a new world conscience and morality can overtake the leaping stride of scientific marvels.”¹⁷

Indeed, for many the coming missile age reflected a moral and ethical crisis. Idealistic notions about cooperative interplanetary travel and the unification of the species through colonization of other planets, though critics marked them romantic and implausible before the war, appeared not only viable after August 1945 but preferable to the perilous strategic environment promised by the marriage of the bomb to the rocket. In Sumerian times, the Baltimore Sun editorialized, a criminal with a weapon could do little harm outside his neighborhood. Now, roughly five thousand years later, “when the bad man has an atomic bomb as the warhead of a stratosphere-plying, radar-directed, round-the-world rocket,” new moral principles were needed. The ballistic missile called for “ethical standards as much stronger than those of Sumeria as the bomb is more terrible than the Sumerian knife.”¹⁸ The exploration of outer space deserved “a better justification” than the development of new weapons, implored another column. “It is one of the tragic paradoxes of our time that man should win such stupendous victories in the realm of science, only to see them all perverted to the uses of people intent on destroying other peoples.”¹⁹ The intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) demanded fresh philosophical insights and hopeful narratives.

Despite the sense of dread that pervaded postwar society, these were not hard to come by. As with popular discourse about atomic energy, space technology offered a weighty choice between peaceful, civilian uses and destructive, martial ones. After the war, a new generation of interplanetary writers continued to offer space exploration as a panacea for contemporary social and political challenges. With a new sense of urgency, these writers adapted the ideas of progressive-era and interwar thinkers to emphasize the ethical responsibility of governments to funnel space technology research through constructive channels. Though spaceflight enthusiasts had had difficulty persuading the public about the viability and importance of their ideas before the 1930s, in the wake of Hiroshima they finally found a receptive audience.

The regenerated “cosmic philosophies” of earlier periods found earnest expression in Britain, where the British Interplanetary Society (BIS) proved a hotbed for both technical and political debates over the coming age of space.²⁰ The BIS had been an enthusiastic sibling to the rocket groups that had cropped up in the interwar period: the AIS in the United States, the VfR in Germany, and OIMS in the Soviet Union. Although it benefited from only minor patronage from its establishment in 1933, the BIS quickly recovered from a wartime lull, its membership growing from 250 in 1946 to 2,500 only seven years later. Departing from the more experimental rocket groups in the United States and Europe, the BIS developed a reputation as a platform for discussion and speculation rather than the development of technology. From its inception, the Society's experimental efforts were hampered by the Explosives Act of 1875, which prohibited private testing of liquid-fuel rockets in the United Kingdom.²¹ The privations of war made things even more difficult. As BIS chair Arthur “Val” Cleaver recalled, the Society “organized into groups and did design studies and wrote papers…. But when it came to actually building hardware and doing the job, it was too expensive for England to undertake.”²² In the absence of resources, and without pressures to succeed experimentally, BIS members opened their doors freely to conjecture.

FIGURE 7. Arthur “Val” Cleaver envisioned an “interplanetary project” to remake international relations through human spaceflight. © National Portrait Gallery, London

Cleaver led the charge. In October 1947, spaceflight advocates, technologists, and amateur rocketeers gathered in London to hear his annual BIS address. Having served as the chief project engineer for the de Havilland Engine Company and considering his wartime research on rocket propulsion, Cleaver was one of the most respected minds in aeronautics (figure 7). The audience was keen to hear his thoughts on the technical and fiscal prospects for human spaceflight, especially in war-ravaged Britain. Cleaver supplied these in spades, but he dwelled far longer on the social and political impact of spaceflight. Indeed, delivered just a year before the founding of Celestia, he waxed on ideas and aspirations that closely resembled James Mangan's campaign for a pacific, utopian space nation (see introduction). Cleaver called it “the interplanetary project.”²³

In brief, this “project” entailed nothing short of a revolution in international relations through the exploration of space. Cleaver conceived of human spaceflight as a catalyst for world order and world peace. If motivated by curiosity and adventure rather than national aggrandizement, space exploration could supply an “outlet” for humanity's “basic instincts of aggressive and dynamic energy.” Stripped of political rivalry, it would be a “substitute for the stimulus of war.” To be sure, a restless and competitive species could find suitable replacements for conflict in many areas of science, but space exploration, for its capacity to capture the imagination, offered a particularly promising avenue for international reconciliation. For Cleaver, only a federation of states—perhaps even a World Government—could muster the resources necessary for interplanetary travel. He visualized the establishment of an Interplanetary Authority that would govern the development of space technology and ensure that activities in space were carried out in the interests of all. Grounded in the “lofty motives” of scientific brotherhood and modeled on the United Nations, this authority would represent the inauguration of a new age of global amity based on scientific and technological cooperation.²⁴

Cleaver painted a vivid picture of earthly politics once national governments had united to escape the planet's gravity. “In a world free from the preoccupations, fears and compulsions arising from the threat of war, with all the wasteful expenditure of time and money on armaments which inevitably follows,” he argued, “a truer standard of values would arise.” Wars would be waged on poverty, disease, and malnourishment rather than on rival states. Money, manpower, and physical resources once devoted to arms racing could finally be diverted to education, public health, and social welfare. International scientific cooperation in space would manifest itself back on the ground—states would transplant cosmic partnerships to disarmament, international legal arbitration, and democratic governance. “Projects having as their aim the gaining of new knowledge and experience, inspired by love of adventure and beauty and the spirit of curiosity,” Cleaver predicted, “would … absorb the attention of mankind.”²⁵

Acknowledging the violent application of space technology evident in the V-2, Cleaver called on the assembled spaceflight enthusiasts to resist militarization at every turn. It was incumbent on every person who aspired to “the interplanetary idea” to ensure that the world reject the development of space technologies as weapons of war. “We are all in this thing together, each with some microscopic grain of responsibility,” Cleaver urged. Even if co-opted by warlords like Adolf Hitler, postwar advocates must remain committed to the dream of spaceflight and strive “to save all that we can for the cause of enlightenment at any given time.”²⁶

A Philosophy of Astronautics

It was no coincidence that as with the AIS in the 1930s, science-fiction authors proved central to many of the Society's discussions about space exploration in the early postwar years. Two such authors in particular, Arthur C. Clarke and Olaf Stapledon, forwarded the gospel of spaceflight that Lasser and others had carried in the interwar period. Using much the same language as their predecessors had, the two futurists propounded a vision of spaceflight as a civilization-defining experience that would heal international relationships and unite humanity in technological struggle. Adapting this astrofuturist argument to the new realities of the weapons revolution and the Cold War, Clarke and Stapledon set the table of expectations upon which Americans would draw in the years after Sputnik.

Arthur Clarke was a true disciple of the Interplanetary Project. By the time Cleaver delivered his 1948 address to the BIS, Clarke had already written a handful of articles urging the peaceful application of space technology and had served as chair of the Society. In fact, Clarke had been in the audience that evening. Inspired and emboldened by Cleaver's remarks, Clarke stood to comment. He considered the immediate postwar moment “a tremendous opportunity.” If promoters of human spaceflight represented in the ranks of the BIS could achieve recognition as thought leaders in the field of rocketry, then perhaps they would “play a major—perhaps the major—part in the conquest of space.” Considering the devastation that the V-2 had wrought on London only three years before, Cleaver's vision, he thought, had the potential to coax this revolutionary technology away from violent application. It was not too much to hope that civilian spaceflight enthusiasts in the Society could “play our part in seeing that astronautics becomes an instrument of good rather than of evil for the human race.”²⁷ It is no exaggeration to say that in the 1940s and 1950s, Clarke was the most important figure in the attempt to see this vision through.

Clarke had grown up with the spaceflight movement. Born in 1917 on England's Bristol Channel, Clarke took an early interest in science after the early death, from lung cancer, of his father, a farmer who—aside from smoking cigarettes for most of his life—had been gassed on the front lines during the Great War. Left to help his mother care for his three younger siblings, he often retreated to what was in many circles still called “scientificition”; he hungrily read Verne, Wells, and the stories of space exploration featured in US pulp magazines (see figure 8). Apart from collecting fossils and assembling objects with his Meccano construction set, Clarke built rudimentary telescopes and experimented with small rockets. He even installed an intercom in his home. It was thus no surprise that when Philip Ellaby Cleator, a spaceflight enthusiast from Liverpool, founded the BIS in 1934, Clarke rushed to become one of its first members. Many of the Society's prewar meetings would take place in his apartment.²⁸

Clarke's interest in science proved fortuitous when wartime circumstances drew British youth into service. Whereas his father had served in the infantry, Clarke joined the Royal Air Force, which charged him with leading a team of field specialists working with ground-controlled approach (GCA) radars that MIT's Radiation Laboratory had developed in the United States. His experience with radar in World War II triggered his thinking about satellite communications, what in late 1945 emerged as a seminal paper in the popular science magazine Wireless World. In “Extra-Terrestrial Relays,” Clarke proposed that radio communications could be bounced off satellites in geostationary orbit. More than a decade before Sputnik, this was a radical idea: only through telegraph and ionospheric communication could data be transmitted “over the horizon.”²⁹ With merely three satellites, Clarke suggested, radio operators could achieve worldwide coverage. The paper helped legitimate Clarke as a serious scientist and helped lend his fiction—already established by the middle of the 1950s through Prelude to Space (1951), The Sands of Mars (1951), Islands in the Sky (1952), and Childhood's End (1953)—an air of authenticity and a sense of realism.

From the first, Clarke understood the severity of the dilemma posed by the joining of the rocket to the bomb. In February 1946 he appealed to authorities to transform the V-2 from a deadly weapon into an instrument of scientific investigation. He even showed the way: a rocket capable of traveling eight kilometers per second parallel to the Earth's surface would continue to circle the planet “forever” in a closed orbit; though the “vengeance weapon” could only reach a third of this speed carrying a cumbersome nuclear warhead, with only one hundred pounds of harmless electrical equipment the missile was capable of making the mark.³⁰ A month later he published an incisive essay in the RAF Quarterly that called for nuclear weapons to fall under the authority of the UN Security Council. By law, warring nations would be able to use solely conventional weapons. Only in emergency situations could use of the bomb be authorized. The weapons would be stored in remote facilities where teams of scientists (only those with a “supranational outlook” should staff the sites) would oversee the deployment of the warheads. Rather than a military-industrial complex, this system would be a first-class international web of scientific research. It might even serve as “a nucleus around which the scientific service of the world state would form, perhaps many years in advance of its political realization.” The only defense against the bomb, he implored, was to prevent it from ever being used. Echoing others writing at the dawn of the ballistic missile, he concluded that “upon us, the heirs to all the past and the trustees of a future that our folly can slay before its birth, lies a responsibility no other age has ever known.”³¹

FIGURE 8. A bookish Arthur C. Clarke in his study, 1936. His interplanetary worldview was grounded in boyhood readings of Verne and Wells. Courtesy of the National Air and Space Museum, Washington, DC (ID: NASM 9A 12591).

Convictions about the threat of nuclear-tipped rockets went hand in hand with a certainty that the peaceful use of space technology would usher in an era of progress and international amity. On October 5, 1946, in his capacity as the new chair of the BIS, Clarke addressed a regular meeting of the Society at the White House Inn in London. His talk, “The Challenge of the Spaceship,” was a futurist jeremiad on “Astronautics and Its Impact on Human Society.” Clarke argued that the coming space revolution was one of only four great turning points in human history, all driven by the harnessing of technology. The taming of fire, the advent of agriculture, and the development of nuclear energy had been hitherto the most consequential watersheds, but none would be as significant as space exploration. Even the most rudimentary steps into the cosmos would be salutary. Research conducted in outer space and on other planetary bodies would inaugurate a revolution in astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, and countless other disciplines; satellite photography would turn the guesswork of weather forecasting (and with it the growth of food) into a hard science; space stations and communications satellites would allow radio and television broadcasting to reach global audiences.³²

These immediate technological consequences would not by themselves represent radical departures from previous milestones of progress. It was the indirect political and psychological forces resulting from exploration that would reflect true change. Copernican astronomy, Darwinian evolution, and Freudian psychology each pointed to a future in which exploration would initially have little practical use but would eventually have an incalculable effect on human consciousness. Through the “expansion of the world's mental horizons,” human societies would unleash an unprecedented wave of creativity that would unmoor political, social, and economic relationships from previous restraints. It would be nothing short of “a new Renaissance.”³³ More precisely, the mind-broadening effect of positioning Earth within a much larger cosmological scheme would make international problems seem smaller and thus less significant. It was reasonable to hope, Clarke told a receptive audience tired from war, that exploration would “have a considerable effect in reducing the psychological pressures and tensions of our present world.” Assembling the necessary resources to probe the cosmos might “turn men's minds outward and away from their present tribal squabbles.” “In this sense,” Clarke concluded, “the rocket, far from being one of the destroyers of civilization, may provide the safety-valve that is needed to preserve it.”³⁴

Clarke's utopian vision of a world united through the exploration of outer space stood out in a postwar moment notable for its pessimism regarding technology. As global war had done a generation earlier, the fight against the Axis powers had undermined faith in the inextricability of science and progress. Not six weeks before Clarke's address, journalist John Hersey published his harrowing account of postbombing Hiroshima in the New Yorker, setting off a storm of global criticism. The social critic Lewis Mumford, once sanguine about the potential benefits of technological revolution, considered the bombing of Japan and Germany “a moral reversal,” a selling of the American soul to technological power. He reminded readers of the Saturday Review that technology could be regressive; unbridled confidence in progress would lead to moral relativism and nihilism.³⁵ Meanwhile trials against Nazi doctors began in Nuremberg. The world learned of profane experiments designed to maximize the survivability of German soldiers in the field: prisoners at Dachau were involved in high-altitude tests to determine how crews from damaged aircraft could safely parachute to the ground; others were frozen to test the limits of hypothermia or forced to swallow seawater to ascertain whether it could be made drinkable. In Buchenwald, Natzweiler, and other camps, inmates were used to test immunizations for malaria, typhoid, tuberculosis, yellow fever, and hepatitis, or were exposed to mustard gas and phosphene to develop antidotes. Barbarism and genocide had accompanied scientific discovery.

That the world was standing on the threshold of “a new Renaissance” was even harder to believe in the context of widespread paranoia about the prospect of another cataclysmic world conflict. Throughout the 1940s, the editors of Time peppered the magazine's pages with references to and prognostications about “World War III.”³⁶ In January 1945, well before the end of the war, intelligence analysts offered predictions about when the Soviet Union might be ready for a full-scale conflict with the United States. So began the tradition of “National Intelligence Estimates” that represented what was supposed to be a synthesis of Army, Navy, OSS, and State Department analyses of the future.³⁷ From the very beginning of the postwar period, stories of an apocalyptic third world war inundated popular culture, culminating in an October 1951 issue of Collier's in which twenty authors—including Edward R. Murrow, Hanson Baldwin, Hal Boyle, and Philip Wylie—painted a detailed and vivid “Preview of the War We Do Not Want.”³⁸ Although a UN coalition headed by the United States ultimately defeats the Soviet Union in a nuclear war that lasts nearly four years, cities around the world are devastated by sustained bombing on both sides.

Fully aware of these shocking predictions, Clarke did not want to seem overly sanguine about opening space to humanity. There was always the possibility, he admitted, that exploration would open the door to “interplanetary imperialism” between spacefaring powers. The futurist offered that “the Solar System is rather a large place,” but considered it an open question “whether it will be large enough for so quarrelsome an animal as Homo sapiens.” Clarke observed that although formal imperialism was falling out of favor in Europe, there was evidence that talk of “conquering” outer space was stoking a neocolonial revival in the United States. There, only a few months earlier, a major in the army had advocated the use of Mars as a military base from which to intimidate the Soviet Union—or, in the case of a war, to destroy it. In World War II, he reasoned, it had been necessary to establish bases in the remotest parts of the world; in World War III, the thinking went, “we cannot limit such occupation to the earth alone.”³⁹ At the same time, R. L. Farnsworth, the president of the US Rocket Society (not to be confused with the American Rocket Society), reissued a lengthy pamphlet on space missiles, which he thought would blaze a “New Trail to Empire.” The American predicted, as Clarke did, that the process of exploring other planets would bring about another Enlightenment, only, he urged his countrymen—particularly through big business—to grab a greater measure of the pie before rivals could stake their claim. The moon, a possible “Lunar Empire,” was the greatest prize. “We can no longer mislead ourselves that commissions and conventions can secure peace,” Farnsworth had concluded. “Let us strive for the day when the American flag is planted firmly upon the volcanic ash of the Moon, and that thenceforth, in its entirety, it will become a possession of the United States!”⁴⁰

Clarke inveighed against such thinking; in his address he referred to Farnsworth's ambitions as “sixteenth-century buccaneering.” The pamphlet was playing directly into the hands of critics like fantasy author J. R. R. Tolkien and Christian theologian C. S. Lewis, who considered humanity too aggressive and covetous to extend its existence to space, “God's quarantine regulations.” Farnsworth and other space colonists, despite their intentions, threatened to “reduce astronautics to a laughingstock.” In a separate fulmination that Clarke never published, he expressed disbelief that those “mentally rooted so firmly in the past” could so clearly see the possibilities of spaceflight in the future.⁴¹ So strongly did Clarke oppose the notion of national claims in space that he went so far as to recommend postponing the age of space should imperial designs gain ground in the halls of power: “If we intend to inflict on other worlds the worst excesses of a materialistic and spiritually barren civilization,” he warned, “our case is lost before we begin to plead it. The ‘quarantine’ will have to remain in force for a few more centuries yet if many advocates of interplanetary travel think as Mr. Farnsworth appears to do.” If imperialism survived the dawn of the space age, it was the “duty” of every spaceflight enthusiast to “hamper and delay” interplanetary travel “whatever our personal hopes and aspirations may be.”⁴²

“The Challenge of the Spaceship” was only the first and most robust example of a “philosophy of aeronautics” that Clarke propounded from the late 1940s, one that equated space exploration with the transcendence of international politics and war. As his predecessors had argued in the 1920s and 1930s, and as so many others would continue to argue after Sputnik, Clarke considered the spaceflight adventure “an outlet for dangerously stifled energies,” a funnel through which to permanently channel humanity's “aggressive and pioneering instincts.”⁴³ Though he employed the same language of “conquering” space that many of his contemporaries used, Clarke considered the colonization of space “the only form of ‘conquest and empire’ compatible with civilization.”⁴⁴ He believed that the frontier of space, as Turner had argued of the American West at the end of the nineteenth century, would nurture within each would-be colonizer the traits necessary to sustain human society: curiosity, hardiness, and resourcefulness were common themes to both. But, unlike the violent and rapacious policies that had characterized the expansion of the United States to California and Oregon, the colonization of space would awaken cooperative rather than combative instincts. Traversing the hostile environments of foreign planets and space would require human beings to fight local conditions rather than each other and present challenges surmountable only through collaboration. “And once one has grown used to the idea of cooperation,” he suggested, “it is very hard to get out of it.”⁴⁵ Whereas racism and even genocide had prevailed in expansion to the West, a “variety and diversity of cultures” would become a celebrated by-product of interplanetary society.⁴⁶ Colonies in space would not resemble the earthly, tribal outposts of centuries past; these provinces would be as multifarious as the planets. The varied climates of the Earth's neighboring planets would inevitably shape the worldviews of their inhabitants, but all would abide by a set of coherent and universal moral principles grounded in egalitarianism and scientific rationality.

Clarke was particularly taken with David Lasser's work, and seconded his predecessor's forecasts about what space travel would mean for human development. Echoing Lasser, Clarke predicted that the view of the planet from space would fundamentally shepherd human consciousness away from the immediate needs of one's family or nation to those of the human family and the well-being of the Earth. “We all know the narrow, limited type of mind which is interested in nothing beyond its town or village, and bases its judgments only on parochial standards,” he wrote in his seminal 1951 book, The Exploration of Space. “We are slowly—perhaps too slowly—evolving from that mentality toward a world outlook. Few things will do more to accelerate that evolution than the conquest of space.” It was difficult, Clarke reasoned, to see “how the more extreme forms of nationalism can long survive when men have seen the Earth in its true perspective as a single small globe against the stars.”⁴⁷ When C. S. Lewis suggested that humans were not yet mature enough to explore space, Clarke wrote to him that although the humanity was still in its “infancy,” aeronautics would accelerate the development of Homo sapiens. National rivalries, he insisted, would finally appear “in their proper perspective” when seen against the infinity of the cosmos.⁴⁸

Although space exploration offered new vistas that might unite humanity, it was vital that the moral and ethical development of human beings precede the first serious forays into space, a conviction Clarke held more tightly after Sputnik. Among the torrent of new scientific discoveries and innovations making front-page headlines in the 1950s, weapons systems seemed to stand out. Few failed to appreciate that the development of the birth control pill, the videotape recorder, the passenger jet, the microchip, and a vaccine for polio had been coterminous with that of hydrogen bombs, the B-52 Stratofortress, and, of course, ICBMs. Recent history, particularly the world wars, demonstrated that if human beings permitted science to outpace the maturation of international relations, the “social system will breed poisons which will cause its certain destruction.” Clarke repeated in a number of philosophical reflections that “superhuman knowledge” should be accompanied by “equally great compassion and tolerance.” If “wisdom” failed to match science, humanity would “have no second chance.”⁴⁹

Part of the problem was that although the world had become “space conscious,” collective awareness about exploration was still tied too closely to military strength and international prestige. Clarke railed against the “technoporn” of military innovation in the 1950s, the “gleaming weaponry and beautiful explosions” featured on television and in popular science magazines. One need not have looked further than the organization of viewing parties atop Las Vegas apartment buildings to witness nuclear tests in the Nevada desert. Clarke especially regretted the fact that so many people had interpreted the world's first satellite not as an opening salvo for the space age but rather a reflection of military capability, a threatening omen of Soviet power. The fear that Soviet satellites stoked in the West helped make the dawn of space exploration a “neurotic” moment: the “decadence” of modern art, the “sick jokes” circulating in nightclubs, the proliferation of self-help books, and the pale, emaciated bodies posing at fashion shows were all symptoms of a “malaise” that had taken hold of Western culture.⁵⁰

“The opening of the space frontier,” Clarke predicted, “will change all that.” Rather than settle for space consciousness, humanity should aspire to become “space minded.” This meant abandoning “spacemanship” to embrace exploration as a scientific and philosophic enterprise undertaken by the entire human race, not a political one pursued by rival technocracies.⁵¹ If defined narrowly as the technological probing of other planets for resources, for propaganda, and for territorial aggrandizement, exploration offered no relief. If, however, humans were to embrace a more holistic definition of exploration that encompassed the betterment of human nature, the transcendence of humanity's material needs, and the strengthening of its internal bonds, the possibilities were endless.⁵² He offered satellite communications as only the most conspicuous example of how space mindedness would change the world. Even a rudimentary system would quickly become the “nervous system of mankind.”⁵³

Science fiction permitted Clarke to manifest his political ambitions for space exploration unfettered. In the tradition of Lasswitz's Two Planets, in 1953 Clarke published Childhood's End, a utopian account of an alien invasion of the Earth that, far from destroying humanity, civilizes and enlightens it. Prophetically, the novel opens at the end of the twentieth century, when the United States and the Soviet Union are competing to launch the world's first spacecraft into orbit, one that will have obvious military implications. Visitors from outer space, whom the Earthlings come to know as “The Overlords” for their superior culture and technology, arrive in futuristic spacecraft over the planet's major cities to put an end to the “space race” and to take control of international affairs. The aliens do not reveal themselves; Overlord Karellen, the “Supervisor of Earth,” speaks only with the UN secretary general. Before long, alien management of the foreign policy produces a “golden age” in human societies. Ignorance, poverty, disease, and crime virtually disappear. Education is protracted, with students attending university well into their thirties. Workers labor for their enjoyment and edification, not for sustenance, much of which the Overlords provide. Production of food and material goods are more or less automated. “By the standards of all earlier ages,” the narrator reports, “it was Utopia.”⁵⁴

It was also finally “One World.” A truly global culture flows from Overlordship. All communicate using English, literacy is universal, and television is accessible to even the remotest parts of the planet. Nationalism suffers a swift demise. The reader learns that “the old names of the old countries were still used, but they were no more than convenient postal divisions.” As memories of war fade into the past, international life comes to be characterized by amicable relations, generosity, and cultural enrichment. It was, as Clarke described it, a “long, cloudless summer afternoon of peace and prosperity.”⁵⁵ As with earlier fictional accounts, Clarke imagined space-based civilizations to be not only more advanced but also more magnanimous, more enlightened, and more moral as well. Contact with space contributes to the maturation of human societies on Earth.

Similar messages pervade Clarke's next novel, Prelude to Space, published the following year. The story's narrator is historian Dirk Alexson, who recounts events leading up to the launch of Prometheus, the world's first spacecraft capable of reaching the moon. At the end of the novel, when the massive ship is set to take flight, the global foundation responsible for the mission, “Interplanetary,” issues a manifesto to ensure humanity's first forays into the cosmos are not carried out with selfish intentions. In a clear reference to Farnsworth and others who had advocated a formal claim to the moon, the manifesto rails against those who believe “the political thinking of our ancestors can be applied when we reach other worlds.” Presaging the language that international lawyers would use to debate space treaties in the 1960s and 1970s, the declaration proclaims that any world humans would reach would be “the common heritage of all men.” It even declares that if life exists on these worlds, the representatives of Earth would stake no claim for it; as a closing promise, the departing astronauts pledge they will “take no frontiers in space.”⁵⁶

As Prelude to Space, Childhood's End, and Clarke's other novels showed, fiction was a suitable vessel for interplanetary politics. Grounding their stories in a graspable technological future, science-fiction authors could conjure political worlds—governed by egalitarianism and enjoying permanent peace—that seemed equally graspable. It was to Clarke's benefit, and to the benefit of his ideas, that scientific romance had come to enjoy an even wider readership after World War II than it had in the era of Lasswitz and Wells, a fact attributable in no small measure to the development of rocketry itself.

A New Species of Man

It was through imagination that another British science-fiction author, William Olaf Stapledon, emerged in the mid-1940s as another oracle of humanity's social evolution in space. Born a month prematurely in a suburb of Liverpool, on the Wirral Peninsula in Cheshire, England, Stapledon was the only son of a merchant-mariner working on behalf of the shipping magnate Alfred Holt. He spent the first six years of his life in Port Said, Egypt, where he developed a fascination with the ships that passed through the Suez Canal. At night his father occasionally set up a telescope on the iron balcony overlooking the desert, a gaze that provided “Olaf” with an appreciation for the “appalling contrast between the cosmos and our minute home-lives.”⁵⁷

For the rest of his life, Stapledon would prove unable to shake his curiosities about either minute earthly events or the mysterious power of the cosmos. Indeed, in both his fiction and nonfiction works, he sought to integrate them. In 1905 he entered Balliol College, Oxford, where he earned a bachelor's degree in modern history. After graduation he spent six years teaching a variety of courses at the Manchester Grammar School and in the University of Liverpool's extramural program. By the outbreak of World War I, he had published his first book, a collection of twenty-four poems entitled Latter-Day Psalms, an exploration of “values beyond those affirmed by everyday experience.”⁵⁸

Stapledon was a committed pacifist in 1914. Modern warfare, he thought, was “a glib surrender of one's moral responsibility to an authority that was not really fit to bear it.”⁵⁹ Nevertheless, as a conscientious objector he served in the Friends’ Ambulance Unit in France and Belgium from July 1915 through the end of the war. In a published reflection on his wartime experiences, he wrote that as long as there was “a chance of serving those who nobly suffer through humanity's error[,] we cannot stay at home.” “Because of our oneness with humanity,” he convinced himself, “we dare not hold ourselves apart from the calamity.” Despite his personal opposition to violence, the French government awarded him the Croix de Guerre for bravery, the 1914–1915 Star Riband, and the Victory Riband.⁶⁰ After the war, he returned home to pursue a doctorate in philosophy at the University of Liverpool. His thesis was the basis for his first book, A Modern Theory of Ethics (1929), an exhaustive study attempting to integrate biology, psychology, and modern ethics in light of the growing “disillusionment” he saw in postwar society. Following the breadth of his research, Stapledon held a variety of teaching posts in history, English literature, philosophy, and psychology, but he quickly abandoned the academy once his fiction writing could support him financially.

This did not take long. Though Stapledon never achieved the celebrity that Clarke would eventually acquire, by the mid-1930s he was one of the most prominent figures in science fiction and a central influence on literary contemporaries including H. P. Lovecraft, C. S. Lewis, and especially Clarke himself (figure 9). Stapledon's first four books were smash hits. Last and First Men (1930), Last Men in London (1932), Odd John (1935), and Star Maker (1937) inspired a generation of “future history” literature that anticipated the ascent and decline of human and alien civilizations on a cosmic scale.

It was Stapledon's status as a science-fiction author that brought members of the BIS into a packed room at the Charing Cross Road Art School in downtown London to hear him deliver a lengthy talk on the evening of October 9, 1948. His lecture asked simply: “Interplanetary Man?” In a fitting succession to Clarke's address two years before, the writer launched into a detailed analysis of the reasons human beings might wish to colonize other planetary bodies.

Stapledon proposed three possibilities. First, humanity would cull the vast mineral resources of other planets to advance its material wealth. Stapledon anticipated this would be a salutary development but warned of technology-induced hedonism and overabundance. Second, human beings might colonize space to achieve greater power, both over the environment and over each other. He predicted that the “rival imperialisms and ideologies” of Earth would extend to the cosmos, a process he envisioned destroying life on other planets. The third possibility—and the one about which Stapledon was most sanguine—was the gradual evolution of humankind, which implied making “the ‘most’ of man … the ‘best’ of him.”⁶¹ He hoped that in their quest to master nature through science, human beings might shed the “diseases of infancy”—parochialism, imperialism, selfishness, violence—to become mature, adult members of first, a global community, and eventually, an interplanetary one.

FIGURE 9. Olaf Stapledon, philosopher of man and space. © National Portrait Gallery, London.

Stapledon was something of an expert on human evolution. Though he could not speak with Darwinian authority—he was, after all, a philosopher, not a scientist—the BIS asked him to shed light on humanity's future in space from his position in the world of imaginative fiction. First and Last Men (1930), his first novel and the one to which he could most attribute his success in the genre, traced the development of no less than eighteen species of human beings across two billion years, beginning with the “First Men” living in Stapledon's time. The book describes a series of colossal earthbound wars among the First Men, characterized by aggressive nationalism, that ultimately lead to self-destruction. This species, although repeatedly reaching out toward some kind of egalitarianism, fails to develop the necessary outlook to sustain itself in the hostile conditions created by its history. “Socrates woke to the ideal of dispassionate intelligence, Jesus to the ideal of passionate yet self-oblivious worship,” the narrator intimates in chapter 1. “Each, of course, though starting with a different emphasis, involved the other. Unfortunately, both these ideals demanded of the human brain a degree of vitality and coherence of which the nervous system of the First Men was never really capable.”⁶²

As Stapledon wrote in the preface to the novel, the goal of transplanting humanity into the distant future was to see it “in its cosmic setting,” where such vitality and coherence would be possible. To escape the bewildering political and social realities of the present, he argued, human beings must be brave enough to contemplate alternatives outside the bounds of the present. He refused to believe that human morality was an end in itself, that moral behavior was simply what human beings regarded as moral. Rather, Stapledon proposed that humanity was a means to an end, an “instrument” to achieve a higher state of ethics completely dislocated from human nature in the present.⁶³ These were philosophical enterprises to which spaceflight was to prove central. By inaugurating the transformative project of space travel, human beings could escape the maladies besetting the First Men and achieve a unity between “thinking” and “feeling,” a balance between rationality and spirituality that Stapledon, ever the transcendentalist, considered the apotheosis of human development.⁶⁴ In the unforgiving conditions of space, on distant planets, and in their relationships with other intelligent species in the universe, human beings could become something “over and above” what they had been on Earth.⁶⁵ Hence fiction's metaphysical value: to those who criticized the philosopher's forays into spectacular fiction, Stapledon replied that by writing the history of the future, by using “controlled imagination,” people might entertain new values.⁶⁶

Stapledon's address before the Society received worldwide coverage, but most reporters seized on the more fantastical elements of the speech to satirize its lofty speculations. Cartoonists conjured droopy, freakish figures that had been reengineered for life on other planets. Journalists in London admired the philosopher's “high-flying thought” and his “whoosh of imagination,” but were generally disturbed by his vision of the future. In the United States, Time magazine correctly identified Stapledon as “something of a moralist,” but cast a doubtful eye on his mission to create what it called a United Solar System.⁶⁷

Yet these commentators, as one of Stapledon's biographers tells us, neglected to read the political subtext of the address. In his appeal for “genuine community” among the races of the solar system, Stapledon was commenting on the growing animosity between the United States and the Soviet Union. Humans, in their dealings with each other and with the other species in the universe, must “enter into their point of view” and cooperate with them for material prosperity and spiritual vitality. Each end of the ideological pole held some fundamental truths: a commitment to liberty in the West, for example, justice and fraternity in the East. “If war is avoided, and if in due season each side can learn from the other,” Stapledon intoned, “the result may be a far more adult and spiritually enriched humanity than could ever have occurred without this cultural clash of mighty opposites.”⁶⁸ Yet in assessing the likelihood that nations competing for influence on Earth might put aside their differences to cooperatively explore other planets, Stapledon tempered his characteristic optimism. If history were any guide, spacefaring powers would rush to annex any virgin celestial territories. The Cold War, he thought, would probably spread to Mars and beyond. “Must the first flag to be planted beyond earth's confines be the Stars and Stripes,” he asked ruefully, toward the end of the lecture, “and not the banner of a united Humanity?”⁶⁹

Stapledon's reference to the American flag was an explicit choice, for his gloomy outlook derived from strong feelings about the United States. The nation's technological sophistication, its pretention to world leadership, and its economic power suggested it would be a lynchpin of humanity's breach into space. If the pace and vigor of US rocket research were any indication, it would be the most important player in the opening of the space age. Human development orbits around American progress in First and Last Men. The United States is “universally feared and envied” for its industrial production and cultural vibrancy. Closely emulating real-world events at the time Stapledon delivered his BIS address, chapter 1 relates that in every corner of the globe, people consumed American products, local businesses unfurled from American capital, and American radios, television, and film “drenched the planet with American thought.” The fictional Americans of Stapledon's novel, as they would become in reality after 1945, believed themselves to be the guardians of liberty, democracy, truth, justice, safety, and prosperity—“the custodians of the whole planet.”⁷⁰

These pretentions would not have mattered, Stapledon wrote of the First Men, had the United States “been able to give of her very rare best.” In the end the “floods of poison” emanating from US culture corrupt the entire world. For all their accomplishments in literature, philosophy, astronomy, architecture, and organization, Americans are most responsible for the decent of the First Men into a new dark age. The most intelligent and productive members of society, those who had helped to create a modern economy and had forwarded important scientific research, were merely “a minority in a huge wilderness of opinionated self-deceivers, in whom, surprisingly, an outworn religious dogma was championed with the intolerant optimism of youth.” The United States teemed with “bright, but arrested, adolescents.” Surveying the ages, the narrator concludes of Americans: “One … can see their fate already woven of their circumstance and their disposition, and can appreciate the grim jest that these, who seemed to themselves gifted to rejuvenate the planet, should have plunged it, inevitably, through spiritual desolation into senility and age-long night.”⁷¹

A damning judgement! But not one Stapledon was prepared to revise considering the atomic bomb and the cursed totems being built to transport them. Indeed, by the time “Interplanetary Man?” appeared in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society in November 1948, the United States had fully integrated the German war booty—both the V-2 rockets and the engineers—into its own fledging arsenal, the perversion of the space rocket complete. In the initial postwar scramble for rocket programs none were left out: the Army Ordnance Department, Army Air Force, Navy Bureau of Ordnance, and Navy Bureau of Aeronautics each pursued incipient R&D agendas that covered the entire, dizzying spectrum of kinetic missilery: surface-to-surface, surface-to-air, air-to-surface, air-to-air. They contracted with McDonnell Aircraft, Martin Company, Northrop, AMC, Douglas, Bell, Goodyear, Boeing, General Electric, and Hughes. Convair won a $2 million contract to develop the MX-774B, a massive rocket capable of transporting a 5,000-pound atomic warhead across 5,000 miles: a precursor to themighty Atlas.⁷²

What did interplanetary theories have to say about that? By the time the US military began its first serious explorations of rocket technology in the mid-1940s, the Interplanetary School of IR had, despite its European ancestry, migrated to American soil, primarily from flows of people and books. H. G. Wells had made a half-dozen visits to the United States in the years leading up to World War II, each with great fanfare. Arthur Clarke's novels reached thousands of Americans; Childhood's End sold out of its first print run. Stapledon came, too. As the only British delegate to the Cultural and Scientific Congress for World Peace in 1949, he warned Americans that if US-Soviet tensions rose any further, “there may be a war at any moment.”⁷³ American reviewers lauded the ingenuity of Star Maker and Last and First Men, and leading newspapers reported on his seminal BIS address; Cleaver's too.⁷⁴ The German dreamers, as has been exhaustively documented, made it to the United States as well. After Ley emigrated in 1935, he contributed countless articles to American science-fiction magazines and published numerous best-selling books on spaceflight.⁷⁵ Hermann Oberth would go on to author two English-language space books of his own: The Moon Car (1959) and The Electric Spaceship (1960). Von Braun's influence on the US spaceflight imaginary hardly needs explication.

But the sordid events of a middle-age twentieth century proved that interplanetary dreams, however popular or pervasive, remained just that—dreams. Clarke's technical proposals had much support among British engineers, but little beyond. The cosmic philosophies articulated at the BIS made up what were essentially a series of manifestoes, soaring yet unfulfilled in a world consumed with the immediate requirements of the Cold War. Von Braun had made weapons. Oberth had offered his services to Hitler. And Ley, though he had achieved some success in tying together the disparate European rockets groups, found himself swimming upstream amid national postwar competition in rocketry. Space technology seemed destined for the same.

What was needed, then, was theory in motion, an interplanetary praxis. James Mangan's zany crusade for the Nation of Celestial Space (see introduction) in 1949 was one fitful step in this direction. Seeing that Cold War governments were militarizing an ever-expanding realm of physical and biological space—the ocean floor, the Sahara Desert, the human brain—Mangan determined to create a government of his own so that he might stop the infection at the edge of space. “Had some existing State, in particular a high-ranking world power, laid claim to celestial space … consternation would now rule the people of all other nations,” Mangan boasted years later. “Kind destiny allowed this coup d’etat to fall to mild hands.”⁷⁶ Beyond a mere proclamation, he intended Celestia's constitution to be a legal instrument preserving a future for humanity “solely for Peace and Service to Man.”⁷⁷ Hence his issuance of Celestian passports only to astronauts with strong moral character.

But in many ways, of course, Celestia did little more than science-fiction novels had done to advance material reality. Mangan succeeded in attracting curious attention, but had “space for peace” really earned any serious political capital? Did it convince powerful states to see the error in continued conflict and instead embrace its call for “magnanimity”?⁷⁸ Certainly not.

Yet at the dawn of the missile age, one important interplanetary practitioner in the United States sought to actualize, through science and engineering—through things—many of the utopian ideas set out by “Interplanetary Men” like Clarke, Stapledon, and indeed the Celestian leader himself.⁷⁹ This practitioner may yet have fallen through the cracks, as Mangan did, were it not for the fact that in the mid-1940s, he was America's foremost expert on rocketry.

Interplanetary Praxis

Born to Czech immigrants in 1912, Frank Joseph Malina grew up just northwest of Houston, Texas, what would eventually become the nerve center of the US manned spaceflight program. Like all his interplanetary predecessors, he had come to an early obsession with space through the fantastic tales of Jules Verne. It was a passion that led him to pursue a degree in mechanical engineering from Texas A&M, which he obtained in 1934. After graduating, Malina received a fellowship to continue his studies at the California Institute of Technology, where he quickly became swept up with its Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory (GALCIT), led by Hungarian émigré Theodore von Kármán, already an internationally renowned physicist and aeronautical engineer. Von Kármán supervised his doctoral dissertation on the “Characteristics of the Rocket Motor and Flight Analysis of the Sounding Rocket” (completed in 1940) and became a lifelong friend and colleague.⁸⁰

At Caltech Malina cofounded, with his mentor's blessing, GALCIT's Rocket Research Project, through which the young engineer experimented with various fuels to develop a rocket powerful enough for high-altitude research. In the 1920s Robert Goddard had pioneered the use of liquid oxygen as a propellant, but the substance was difficult to work with and store. Together Malina and his colleagues—the machinist Ed Forman and his friend, the chemist and Thelemite occultist Jack Parsons—tried more utilizable fuel combinations. They developed and patented a hydrazine-nitric acid fuel that would later propel the Apollo Service and Lunar Excursion Modules. More crucially at the outset, they also combined red-fuming nitric acid (RFNA) with aniline, a blend that, though it ignited spontaneously—a property that gave Malina's cohort the nickname “the Suicide Squad”—was easily handled and stockpiled.⁸¹

FIGURE 10. Frank Malina with the WAC Corporal rocket at White Sands, 1945. “My enthusiasm vanishes when I am forced to develop better munitions,” he wrote before eventually abandoning work on rockets. NASA/JPL.

Malina had imagined applying his work on propulsion to sounding rockets, which would collect measurements and perform scientific experiments during their suborbital flights (figure 10). But by 1938, with war in Asia already raging and crisis building in Europe, he found himself briefing the National Academy of Science Committee on Air Corp Research—founded by the future-minded Army General Henry “Hap” Arnold to keep abreast of cutting-edge technology for military use—on rockets for jet-assisted takeoff (JATO). In August 1941, four months before the United States entered the war against the Axis, the first solid-fuel JATOs assisted a small Ercoupe plane into the skies above Riverside, California; within the year a liquid-fuel JATO had lifted a light bomber, Douglas's A-20, off the Army Air Corps Bombing and Gunnery Range in Muroc, one hundred miles north of Los Angeles. With growing military interest in rockets and a core of talented engineers, in 1942 Malina, now a professor at Caltech, founded a new company with colleagues from the original Rocket Group to build JATOs: the Aerojet Engineering Corporation.⁸²

Malina enjoyed the work but, as he explained to his parents, discovered that “my enthusiasm vanishes when I am forced to develop better munitions.” When, as a graduate student, he worked part time for the Department of Agriculture studying soil movement in Dust Bowl-wrecked farmland, Malina found that he preferred “to keep on with SCS [Soil Conservation Service] as it is further from warmongering.” His colleague Hsue-Shen Tsien, a brilliant engineer who would one day lead the Chinese missile program, had tried consoling him: better weapons were needed in the fight against fascism. But Malina felt “one cannot be certain that such a path will not boomerang.”⁸³ Unlike Goddard, who accepted military patronage to support his rocket research without moral scruples, Malina struggled with the bargain he had struck with GALCIT to pursue the dream of spaceflight.⁸⁴

Despite his enthusiasm for the rocket as a tool for science and a vehicle for cooperation, by the end of the war Malina found himself waist-deep in the military-industrial complex. In 1944 and again in 1946, he traveled abroad on behalf of the War Department for European Missions, collecting data on rocket developments in Britain and France and examining captured German weapons. At the same time, he traveled frequently to Washington as a consultant for the US National Defense Research Committee to obtain funding for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), the semi-independent Caltech research facility that had absorbed GALCIT's various rocket programs.⁸⁵ Malina's travels were not only exhausting but deeply discomfiting. “I found that I was getting caught up more and more in trips to Washington in meetings with the army, navy, and air force, planning the next war,” Malina recalled years later. “I found in these meetings that I was getting more and more disturbed[,] and I would break into cold sweats. I just hated the idea of, say, planning to use all this for bombarding people.”⁸⁶

On the eve of his first excursion—September 6, 1944, two days before the first V-2 attack struck Staveley Road in London, killing three—he was gripped by fears of witnessing the rocket's human toll. “As you know,” he confessed to his wife, Liljan, “I have fought against … an unmanageable fear of physical pain[,] not so much for myself, but when it happens to others.”⁸⁷ And indeed, while in England Malina was privy to numerous reports about the physical damage wrought by the new weapon. On one occasion, a conference Malina attended at the British Projectile Development Establishment in Kent was “shook-up” by an incoming rocket. The incident left him “rather disturbed, but my colleagues continued … as though nothing had happened.”⁸⁸

Back home, Malina tried to punctuate his military work with scientific endeavors. In the wake of British intelligence reports about the Germans’ strides at Peenemünde, US Army Ordnance pressed the JPL to develop long-range missiles of its own. Von Kármán's team proposed a series of rockets that would represent a progression—captured in their names, which would correspond to ascending army ranks—of power and accuracy. First, there would come the Private, a small, unguided, solid-fuel rocket with a limited flight range; then, a larger, guided, liquid-fuel Corporal with a range of one hundred miles, up through Sargent and the officer ranks. Within this progression, Malina recommended the development of an intermediary rocket, between Private and Corporal, that would allow JPL engineers to test complex launch systems, fix guidance defects, and provide more experience before the expected leaps in size, fuel, and range. This transitional rocket would be a miniature WAC (without altitude control) Corporal that would carry twenty-five pounds of scientific instrumentation to an altitude of more than 1,000 feet, the world's first sounding rocket.⁸⁹

Using the RFNA and aniline fuel that the Suicide Squad had developed earlier for JATOs, Malina achieved stunning success. On October 11, 1945, the WAC Corporal breached the stratosphere above the white sands of the Chihuahuan Desert in New Mexico at speeds approaching Mach 3. When it finally stopped ascending, it was nearly forty-five miles above the Earth, in the frigid and hostile mesosphere. It had flown more than twice the altitude expected. Four years later, when JPL launched a Bumper-WAC Corporal atop a German-made V-2, it reached an altitude of 244 miles, the first human-made object to reach outer space as it is understood today. In what was a cruel irony for Malina, the missile's final product, the MGM-Corporal, was the first guided missile authorized to carry a nuclear warhead.⁹⁰

But by then, he was long gone. A week after the bombing of Hiroshima, Malina had filed for a leave of absence from JPL, and he never returned. Having glimpsed the Trinity site from the air, he felt increasingly anxious about the role he would be asked to play in engineering missiles powerful enough to ferry the atomic bomb to its victims. “I have never been convinced that what I was doing the past 10 years was right,” he wrote his parents. “Technical developments are now so far ahead of other human arrangements that it appears nonsensical for one who sees the gap to make it even wider.”⁹¹ When on his second trip to Europe Malina sat in on a preparatory meeting of a UN committee to be called UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization), he found a promising alternative to his military work. This new body offered a vision that Malina, ever the idealist, could embrace with confidence. “Since wars begin in the minds of men,” read UNESCO'S constitution, “it is in the minds of men that the defenses of peace must be constructed.”⁹²

By early 1947, Malina was in Paris working as a counselor for UNESCO's Natural Sciences Department, where his first project was to study methods of decreasing national barriers to the free movement of scientists and equipment, a natural fit. Following on his research for the SCS, Malina also worked on the Arid Zone Program, which aimed to boost agricultural productivity in the parched regions still covering significant parts of the globe. “I think anyone that works in astronautics can’t help but be somewhat world-minded,” Malina later said of his motivations to work for the United Nations. “To us the world is one planet relative to the Moon or Mars and so forth.” From his earliest days as an engineer, Malina had been a true believer in Albert Einstein's call for “some kind of world cooperation.” He felt that the traditional notions of state sovereignty that had developed during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were “now reaching [their] limits.”⁹³

Malina's escape from weapons development was both a conscious choice and an abrupt change thrust on him by his own government. In September 1945 agents of the US Army's Counterintelligence Corps (CIC) had ransacked Malina's home looking for evidence of espionage (“blueprints” for the WAC Corporal had been found with an intercepted Russian courier in Paris). Malina had as a graduate student joined a local chapter of the Communist Party, and he expressed his belief in the importance of international scientific exchange to his parents and colleagues, but scant evidence supported the accusation that the engineer was engaging in any subversion. The Los Angeles Police Department began surveilling Malina in 1938; the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) opened a file on him in 1942 and continued to compile reports for another thirty-one years, a span that covered the lion's share of his adult life. Though it lacked any link between Malina and the captured Paris documents, the government acted on its suspicion. In 1952, the Bureau pressured the Justice Department to issue a sealed indictment against Malina for making false statements to the government (allegedly, he had not listed his membership in the Communist Party USA and had said “no” when asked if he had ever belonged to any groups that wanted to overthrow the government). A secret warrant for his arrest, should he step foot in the United States, followed swiftly behind. After initially pressuring UNESCO to transfer Malina to American soil, the State Department did not renew his passport, stranding him in France.⁹⁴

Emotionally and physically exhausted, and now independently wealthy from the sale of his valuable Aerojet stock, Malina quit UNESCO in 1953 to pursue a lifelong passion for art. As W. Patrick McCray has illuminated, Malina became one of a set of Cold War “thingkers” who combined traditional artistic practices with competence in science and engineering. From the mid-1950s, he experimented with painted string and wire to create depth and stimulating optical effects. He further leveraged his engineering background when he created a series of works, known as “electro-kinetic” art, that integrated painting with moving electrical components to create dynamic pieces. Indeed, having made seminal theoretical and technical contributions to American rocketry, Malina became, in his new creative profession, an international pioneer of so-called kinetic art. Many of his works (e.g., Rocket Motor, Shock Waves, and Jet Plane) suggest he never abandoned his original love for engineering. In 1965 he would finish Cosmos, a commission by Peramagon Press to represent the union of the arts and sciences. Eight feet wide, ten feet tall, and more than eight hundred pounds, the piece is a dazzling assemblage of lights, electric motors, and plastic parts painted in muted, translucent colors. Viewed altogether, it is a moving collage of astronautical images, a colorful swath of what he imagined astronauts and cosmonauts had gazed on in their first voyages into space. It was a culmination of Malina's strange arc from military rocketry to a quieter cosmos.⁹⁵

Frank Malina personified, as Wernher von Braun did, the abiding tension that existed between the humanist, utopian impulses driving interplanetary thought on the one hand, and the real-world influence space technology promised to render upon war-making and politics on the other. Even as he looked on in pure elation as the WAC Corporal disappeared into the skies above White Sands, he knew to what ends rocket science was now inexorably moving. Ever the engineer, he was passionate about his work, but unlike von Braun his conscience (and, no doubt, the FBI) drove him away from the bargaining table between rocketry and state power.

These tensions characterized the interplanetary vision in toto. Increasingly through the early twentieth century, the utopian motifs and moralism of cosmic fiction competed with a rising tide of alien invasion literature that, removed from the socialism of Wells or the scientific internationalism of Ley, did more to entertain than educate. The new, more popular generation of science fiction tilted toward the externalization of contemporary fears rather than the fabrication of imaginative social and moral orders. The narrative result was violence without rebirth, conflict without change. In the 1930s, Lasser's optimism about the cultivation of an “interplanetary mind” sat uncomfortably alongside his warnings about the imminent temptation to bombard civilian populations with rockets.⁹⁶ Stapledon's hopes for “a commonwealth of worlds” based on cooperation and spiritual understanding competed in his lectures with predictions about the extension of “the coming struggle between America and Asia” to other planets.⁹⁷

The uneasy duality between the transcendence promised by human spaceflight and the harsh political realities of the technology needed to achieve it grew out from the conviction, so widely held among the interplanetarians, that humanity's existence on Earth was but a wretched puberty to be left behind for a more ripened life in the cosmos. That Stapledon felt Americans were puerile “adolescents” in need of spiritual and ethical growth echoed a decades-long certainty that the Earthling represented an unfinished, and hence imperfect, project.⁹⁸ The notion that Homo sapiens persisted in a predeveloped state on its home planet traversed the entire span of interplanetary discourse. For Tsiolkovsky, humans were “infantile” compared with other beings in the universe that had enjoyed access to other planetary cultures or had simply inhabited longer-lived celestial bodies.⁹⁹ Writing amid an eager European literature regarding extraterrestrial intelligence, he observed that most of his fellow Russians could not conceive of aliens visiting Earth because they clung to the idea that humankind was “tied down” to the planet. Clarke and other writers often wrote of Earth as the “nursery” or “cradle” of human life. The species’ precosmic experience represented merely its “childhood” or “infancy.”¹⁰⁰

Of course, the childhood thesis's natural corollary was that in space humanity would grow up. There human beings would build civilizations capable of outlawing war, abiding by the rule of law, abolishing material want and disease, and achieving universal respect and dignity for their diverse populations. As individuals, humans would undergo profound psychological transformations in space, which, as the characters in In the Days of the Comet had experienced, would expel the forces of racism, bigotry, selfishness, nationalism, and aggression. In their place, altruism, liberalism, worldliness, and pacifism would flourish. In time, humans would cease to be humans at all; they’d become something “over and above” humanity. ¹⁰¹

What was new about interplanetary thought in the early postwar years—after the omen of the first V-2 attacks and the rocket's looming merger with the atomic bomb—was a shift in emphasis: from constructing the dreamworlds of the space future to notions of ethical responsibility in the present. Early advocates of spaceflight had conjured utopian dreams in part to stimulate enthusiasm and public expenditure for the rocket power needed to reach the heavens; but after 1944, when that power had been achieved and then distorted, voices suddenly called out to pump the breaks. “Morals and ethics must not lag behind science, otherwise (as our own recent history has shown) the social system will breed poisons which will cause its certain destruction,” Clarke wrote in 1951. “With superhuman knowledge there must go equally great compassion and tolerance. When we meet our peers among the stars, we need have nothing to fear save our own shortcomings.”¹⁰² Philosophy, not technics, was the order of the day. Like so many others of his time, Stapledon thought atomic energy and space technology the djinns of Aladdin's lamp: its power for good or ill was equal. He hoped, therefore, that “science will be used wisely, instead of being abandoned to that blend of short-sighted stupidity and downright power-lust that has played so tragic a part in the application of science thus far.”¹⁰³

Whereas early interplanetarians had shaped popular understandings about outer space as a transformative place, the arrival of “vengeance weapons” demanded a crucial caveat: to profit from the mind-broadening benefits of cosmic conquest, human beings and their governments must sufficiently transform before the quest into space could begin. Much as he would have liked to have seen human beings touch the cosmos (he died of a heart attack in 1950), Stapledon held out hope that space colonization could wait “till mankind has attained a rather higher level of wisdom, and has a clear knowledge of the kind of world that would really favour human development.”¹⁰⁴

And the greater the rockets grew, the greater the plea. By 1956 the leader of Christendom felt it necessary to weigh in on the profundity of the coming age of space. “The common effort of all mankind toward a peaceful conquest of the universe should assist in impressing more deeply upon the consciences of men a sense of community and solidarity,” intoned Pius XII at the Seventh International Congress of Astronautics in Rome. “The boldest explorations of space will serve only to introduce among men a new area of dissension if they are not undertaken with deep moral reflection and conscientious devotion to the higher interests of humanity.”¹⁰⁵

A year later, Sputnik screeched skyward atop the Soviet R-7 missile, the world's first ICBM.