Conclusion
Among the millions who witnessed the first moon landing on television, there sat one especially interested observer. In July 1969 James Mangan still reigned as ruler of Celestia. He was elated. Initially wary of trespassers, he had issued a twenty-year lease to the US government for space exploration and accorded special privileges to the lunar mission. Two decades after he claimed the cosmos in the name of peace, Mangan issued passports to the crew of Apollo 8 and, with Earthrise beamed back home, felt that “my job is done.” The transcendent symbolism of Tranquility Base seven months later seemed to prove his judgment correct.1
Mangan was lucky to behold the moment. He died less than a year later in Oak Lawn, Illinois, where he had lived his entire life.2 Celestia passed to his family. His son and daughter became prince and princess of the nation. His grandchildren inherited galaxies. One of them, Dean Stump (Duke of the Milky Way), later wrote that Celestia's birth after World War II had not been a coincidence. The totalitarian movements of the 1930s had “left much of the world in [a] state of exhaustion, despair, and exploitation.” To overcome these afflictions of the spirit, Mangan had founded Celestia on one philosophical principle: “Magnanimity.” He believed, Stump remembered, “that the promotion of peace is essential,” and that perhaps the world needed a “State” of magnanimity to serve as a model.3 “By achieving bigness of mind,” Mangan had insisted, “the people of the world can find lasting peace.”4 Reaching out into space was merely the clearest path to achieving those new mental horizons.
James Mangan's life spans precisely the years covered in this book. His birth in 1896 preceded by mere months the popularization of interplanetary fiction that The War of the Worlds and Auf Zwei Planeten brought about. His Chicagoan adolescence paralleled the maturation of rocketry and, with it, interplanetary thought in Europe, Russia, and the United States. The Western Hemisphere's first planetarium, Adler, opened in 1930 just miles from Mangan's home. Celestia's founding in 1949 occurred just as the cosmic philosophies of Arthur Clarke and Olaf Stapledon found purchase in postwar Britain. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, as he scurried about protesting the incursions of Soviet cosmonauts and satellites, US officials set about creating the legal and political architecture that made up what James Clay Moltz calls “strategic restraint”: an emphasis on diplomacy and international law; pursuit of arms control; self-discipline in the development of military space technology; civilian control of the space program; and a public commitment to use space “exclusively for peaceful purposes.”5 In other words, a space sanctuary.
For all the successes that posture brought about, Mangan's dream of a “bulwark of international peace” in space, one that might transcend the Cold War, died with him. As policy, strategic restraint lasted just a dozen years. Ambivalence toward Apollo 11 was but one of many omens signaling that the idea of a space sanctuary—and its power to transform international relations back on Earth—had peaked too soon. Indeed, if the moon landing was a climax for the space-for-peace consensus, it was also, as the term “climax” implies, the beginning of a swift and inexorable decline.
Consider the strange circumstances by which notions of a space sanctuary entered the vernacular. In the decade after Sputnik very few people had actually used the word “sanctuary” to describe their hopes for space. Instead, they used synonyms. Lyndon Johnson saw space as an “ocean of peace.” Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. called it a “zone of peace.” The Times of India alluded to a “Warless World.” And so on. Though commentators chose disparate terms and phrases, the idea pulsed with vitality. There was the feeling, as late as 1969, that “the cold war has been left behind as man reaches toward the moon and, eventually, the planets.” Without using the magic word, Johnson had captured the essential element of a sanctuary when he signed the Outer Space Treaty: the goal was “to enlarge the perimeters of peace by shrinking the arenas of potential conflict.”6
Ironically, the term “space sanctuary” came into popular use only during the 1970s, when Americans began to call its very existence into doubt. As satellites became part of the warp and woof of military operations on both sides of the Iron Curtain, journalists, pundits, and military leaders confidently announced the death of the sanctuary era. In 1976 a special panel commissioned by Gerald Ford concluded that “treating space as a sanctuary [was] neither enforceable nor verifiable.” In his administration's final defense authorization, Ford's Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld argued that space could not remain a “relative sanctuary” because space technology had become powerful enough to decide the outcome of future wars. In fact, wrote an engineer at Lockheed, to treat space as a sanctuary was a “genocidal hoax.”7
Why did the space-for-peace regime self-destruct in the 1970s, and why so abruptly? The answers lay in the nooks of conservatism's revival in US politics; the collapse of détente; structural shifts in national security policy during the late Cold War; and, of course, the changing nature of space technology itself. To relay all the sordid details would require another book entirely, but the reader has slogged this far and deserves at least an orientation to the variables at play.8
Perhaps most consequential was the decline of manned spaceflight itself, to which notions of human rebirth in the cosmos were so obviously and intimately attached. From the very beginning, human space travel had been linked to the transference of civilization from war, overpopulation, and ignorance to peace, material abundance, and moral clarity. For nearly one hundred years the narrative power of exploration to effect change dictated that the realm be sheltered from violence and political competition. But beginning in the 1970s, space travel did not seem the urgent national, philosophical, or metaphysical project it did only a decade before.9 The Soviets had been beaten in the prestige race to the moon—NASA struggled to answer what would come next. The agency forwarded the Space Shuttle as a reusable transportation system to boost heavy loads into orbit at low cost, but operational expenses far outstripped initial expectations, undermining public trust and casting the overall US space mission into doubt.10
Suddenly, the human future no longer seemed to be taking place in space. The growing environmental movement argued throughout the post-Apollo period that “there is no Planet B”; all that remained was stewardship of Spaceship Earth. The overwrought national budget, the war in Vietnam, and racial unrest at home forced Nixon to slash NASA funding. A 1969 Harris poll showed that most Americans thought the Apollo program had been too costly to begin with.11 In any case, the development of robotics had outstripped crewed spaceflight in the 1960s and appeared after Apollo to make human missions both unnecessary and irrationally expensive by comparison. Over the course of the 1970s, despite severe budget shortfalls, NASA's Mariner, Viking, and Voyager spacecraft succeeded in flying by, imaging, mapping, and in some cases landing on nearby planets. Humans, by contrast, made their final voyage to the moon in December 1972—and have yet to return.12
Drifting further and further into the human future, space increasingly came to be understood in a narrower and more immediate sense—that is, as a platform from which to gain advantage on Earth. Because interplanetary theorists had predicted that human beings would evolve morally, socially, and politically as they moved through and built new civilizations in space, it was a logical corollary that because space travel was slowing down, the promised revolution in human psychology and spirit would have to be postponed as well. All that was left to do was hunker down and begin reconciling the new technologies with old political forms.
Arming for the Space Age
In the wake of the OST, it appeared for a time that military competition in space was winding down. In June 1969 the DoD cancelled its massive MOL intended to ascertain what military role humans would play in space. In all, the Pentagon scaled back its military space operations by more than 35 percent between 1969 and 1975, from $6 billion to $3.8 billion. In 1971 the Soviet Union, too, suspended its testing of the FOBS weapons that had so terrified US defense planners in the previous decade. Richard Nixon and Leonid Brezhnev achieved further momentum the following year with SALT I, in which both sides agreed to prohibit interference with satellites that helped to monitor arms control accords. The future seemed bright.13
But as with détente generally, these developments proved illusory. The superpowers’ increased dependence on satellites for military operations dictated that they become legitimate objects of conflict. The first sign of trouble came late in 1975, when the Soviets resumed ASAT testing. Over the next six years the Soviet Union would go on to conduct thirteen total ASAT tests. Accordingly, US spending on satellite survivability ballooned from $19 million in 1978 to more than $33 million three years later.14
The reinitiation of Soviet ASAT tests was jarring enough to wake the dormant US effort. At the end of the Ford administration, ASAT capabilities, satellite surveillance, and satellite survivability were grouped together under one umbrella: the Space Defense program, for which US spending increased from a measly $100,000 in 1974 to more than $41 million four years later.15 In 1977, the Air Force awarded a $58.7 million contract to Vought to begin development of the Pentagon's most robust new ASAT system, the miniature homing vehicle (MHV). Added to this program were development projects using modified ABM weapons and ICBMs, particle beams and lasers, and electronic jamming.16
In conjunction with his authorization of ASAT weapons, Jimmy Carter, as part of a two-track foreign policy, initiated bilateral talks with the Soviets to reign in the new arms race. Three rounds of ASAT talks began in June 1978, but they were doomed from the start. Negotiators faced all the old disagreements about verification, as well as continued fears about technical asymmetry. US officials could not countenance negotiating in an area of weapons technology in which they were already behind. The thorniest issue was that arms controls for ASATs implied massive oversight of dozens of military systems with only ancillary relevance to satellites, for seemingly every weapon was deemed capable of adaptation to the ASAT role. So-called residual satellite-killers lurked in the ABM programs of both countries; in their SLBMs, IRBMs, and ICBMs; in air-launched capabilities, directed-energy research, radio transmission, and rapidly accelerating satellite technology itself. On the surface, it appeared that no combination of measures possessed the capacity to curb all the relevant projects, at least none that either side was remotely willing to accept.17
Failure to reach agreement on ASAT weapons was, perhaps, attributable less to any specific issue than the general deterioration of diplomatic relations between the United States and the Soviet Union in the late 1970s. The relative stability that had earlier prevailed in bilateral space politics succumbed to the collapse of détente late in 1979. In December the Soviet Union began its ill-fated invasion of Afghanistan, an act that prompted an exhausted Carter not only to boycott the Moscow Olympics in 1980 but request the Senate to postpone ratification of the SALT II agreement, which contained articles bearing on ASAT ordnance. Ronald Reagan's triumph in that year's presidential election signaled the dawn of a more hardline approach to the Soviet Union. It could only follow that space policy trace this reorientation.
To the High Ground
Indeed, the Reagan administration thought of outer space differently from its predecessors. Space, not merely a frontier from which to display US competence in technology, organization, and science, was a platform to project power. It was now incumbent on the nation's leaders to maintain capabilities that would ensure free access to space, deny the enemy use of space during wartime, and “apply military force from space if that becomes necessary,” as one defense planning document phrased it.18
Not content to pursue agreements for image-making, the United States would now take a hard-headed, realist approach toward arms control in space. If it determined that limits to existing or future systems were not in the interests of national security, the new administration would simply avoid talks aimed at those limits. Eugene Rostow, whom Reagan plucked from Yale Law School to head the ACDA, explained the matter in Congress: though it was a “noble aspiration” to preserve outer space as a “sanctuary from the conflicts that beset us here on earth,” it did not reflect facts on the ground. “Outer space,” Rostow testified, “is not a distant place way out there.” Missiles passed through it, and the orbits of satellites enabled them to pass over nearly any point on the globe. “We cannot regard space as a place totally apart—it is an inextricable element of our national security concerns.”19
These determinations quickly manifested themselves in policy. In October 1981, Reagan announced the start of what would be massive support for the air-launched ASAT system begun under Carter, dealing Vought and Boeing contracts worth nearly $419 million for R&D. A year later the Air Force formed a distinct Space Command to consolidate all space launch and missile warning operations under one roof and leverage space for military operations on Earth. Reagan's National Security Decision Directive 42 (NSDD-42), issued that July, established a senior interagency group on space to be chaired by the national security adviser. At an Independence Day address celebrating the return of the fourth Space Shuttle launch, Reagan expressed confidence that aside from establishing “a more permanent presence in space,” his administration would begin “strengthening our own security by exploring new methods of using space as a means of maintaining the peace.”20
This posture found its purest expression in the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), Reagan's proposal for a space-based ballistic missile defense (BMD) system. Reagan's goal for SDI was to replace mutually assured destruction (what the president referred to as “a suicide pact”) with “assured survival,” to eliminate US vulnerability to nuclear weapons once and for all. By constructing a vast network of sensors, guidance systems, and high-energy lasers, the United States could retake the initiative in the Cold War and perhaps render nuclear weapons “impotent and obsolete.” Drawing from his career in acting, Reagan pitched Star Wars as if in a television commercial. “What if free people could live secure in the knowledge that their security did not rest upon the threat of instant U.S. retaliation to deter a Soviet attack, that we could intercept and destroy strategic ballistic missiles before they reached our own soil or that of our allies?” he asked in a now-(in)famous March 1983 speech on national defense. After consulting with technologists and military leaders in his administration, he reported, “I believe there is a way.”21
SDI turned the logic of a space sanctuary on its head. Whereas Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson had placed their faith in mutual restraint in space weapons, Reagan placed his own confidence in space weapons themselves. Whereas as SDI's opponents considered outer space a pristine new realm in which to transcend the Cold War, its supporters viewed it as a battlefield upon which the United States could finally win it. Cooperation in space technology, a hallmark of the sanctuary vision, was incompatible with Reagan's notion of pitching “our great industrial base” head on against communism. In 1958, at NASA's founding, the partition of civilian space exploration from military programs had been designed to put the Soviets at ease. Now, almost thirty years later, US officials intended for Star Wars to frighten the Kremlin toward the negotiating table or else propel it into an arms race that it could neither afford nor engineer.
The cost, of course, was to bring an escalatory research program into an environment that US and Soviet leaders had at least feigned to be a weapons-free zone for the past three decades. The numerous proposals submitted to and by the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization (SDIO), the DoD office responsible for development of Star Wars projects, conceived of space in the same way that space-power theorists had done at the dawn of the space age: as “the high ground” from which to enforce deterrence and dominate the twentieth-century battlefield.22 Project Excalibur, a brainchild of Edward Teller at Livermore, envisioned packing large numbers of X-ray lasers around a nuclear device, which, once detonated, would propel the lasers toward targeted missiles. Such a weapon could conceivably take down several missiles in a single shot. Brilliant Pebbles, another Livermore project, entailed orbiting a space-based “architecture” of thousands of interceptors that would detect the rocket motors of enemy ICBMs during the boost phase and destroy them. Hundreds of such interceptors would be orbiting over the Soviet Union at any given time.23 Under George H. W. Bush, the SDIO would approve deployment of a program designed to defend against missile attacks from the developing world—the Global Protection Against Limited Strikes, or GPALS. The system would utilize more low-orbit satellites (called Brilliant Eyes) as well as a series of ground-based systems to destroy missiles that did not reach the altitudes necessary for Pebbles interceptors to detect.
Advocates of these weapons argued that the scope and cost of SDI would force the Soviets to negotiate; if space-based BMD could make nuclear weapons ineffective, perhaps Mikhail Gorbachev would agree to substantial, if not complete, nuclear disarmament. It was an optimism that ignored completely the history of Soviet behavior since the beginning of the Cold War, for although the Kremlin was indeed interested in limiting Star Wars to the laboratory and showed interest in political trades for arms control, Soviet leaders were not content, as they never had been, to let the imperialists set the terms of the strategic debate.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Soviet Union funded two massive R&D studies to explore countermeasures for the United States’ imagined BMD programs: an orbital platform that would shoot down SDI satellites with a carbon-dioxide laser, the Polyus or Skif spacecraft; and Kaskad, which would destroy satellites with missiles from a craft stationed in orbit.24 When Ronald Reagan walked away from the Reykjavik disarmament summit in October 1986, it became an unappreciated wrinkle of the late Cold War that at the moment of his decision to preserve SDI at the expense of arms control, the Soviet Union was closer to orbiting space weapons than was the United States. Just months after the summit, the Soviet Union launched a demonstration model of its Skif weapon. The cumbersome platform suffered a software malfunction upon separating from the rocket and disintegrated in the atmosphere as it fell toward the Pacific. Though the launch failed, the project's ambition—and the power of the Energia rocket that had propelled the weapon—foreboded a costly arms race in space.
The Ghosts of Space Supremacy
Such a race would surely have been in the offing had the Soviet Union not precipitously collapsed over the following three years. On their face the astonishing political developments of 1989–1991 appeared to augur a return to the ideas that had defined outer space as a special realm to be exempted from earthly conflict. With the Cold War ended, what need was there for a robust US program to militarize the cosmos? The Japanese and European space programs were years behind and, in any case, unthreatening. China and India had made enormous strides in space technology during the 1970s and 1980s, but were still years away from an ASAT capability. Yet the end of the Cold War, rather than precipitating the decline of the space supremacy paradigm, hastened its absorption into American political culture. The notion that space technology provided an avenue for international reconciliation, though it never expired, gradually gave way to the competing idea that these tools were levers the United States could pull to maintain military, economic, and political hegemony. Space itself, viewed less as an oasis of peace after 1991, came increasingly to be portrayed as a high ground from which to enforce a Pax Americana.
This shift, already well underway because of the Reagan-era policies, accelerated during the First Gulf War, a conflict that many would later dub “the first space war.”25 The moniker was not without justification: DoD's Global Positioning System (GPS)—known as NAVSTAR, or Navigation System Using Timing and Ranging—though it only featured sixteen satellites at the beginning of 1991, was critical to the Coalition's victory against Iraq. Operation Desert Storm required that Coalition forces fight and navigate in inhospitable, featureless deserts. It required nimble artillery fire, effective communications, and reactive troop movement based on weather and the enemy's location. Satellites helped secure all these needs.26 Over the one-hundred hours that the lopsided ground war transpired, NAVSTAR provided three-dimensional coverage of the battlefield for nineteen hours at a time. Whereas earlier, land-based GPS provided coordinates with an expected error margin of up to eight miles, the system employed in Desert Storm plotted points to within sixty feet. GPS receivers allowed infantry divisions to link phase lines and thus maintain effective command and control. Artillery divisions successfully leveraged satellite positioning to direct fire on dense concentrations of Iraqi armor. Before long, commanders on the ground replaced the artillery surveyor's compass, aiming circle, slide rule, and other trade tools with GPS.27
The swiftness of victory and the outsize role that space technology had played in achieving it convinced observers that the world stood on the threshold of a Long Peace backed by American techno-military supremacy. William J. Perry, who had served Carter and Reagan as undersecretary of defense for research and engineering, thought GPS had proven itself a revolutionary force multiplier. To engage an enemy without such technology, he wrote in Foreign Affairs, would resemble a cavalry equipped with tanks meeting one of horses.28
Desert Storm's success exhumed the corpse of “space war” from its shallow grave. The 1990s witnessed an avalanche of military analysis regarding the role space technologies would play in future wars and the necessity of controlling the space environment to deny opponents an opportunity to “shape” the battlefield, both on Earth and in space.29 The new wave of literature, offering little in the way of updated interpretation, regurgitated the predictions of the 1960s analysts. Generously quoting Bernard Schriever, Thomas White, and Homer Boushey (see chapter 4), military officers and defense analysts once again crowned outer space the new high ground of modern warfare. Few writers neglected to apply old Mahanian ideas about critical choke points to space; defense scholar Colin Gray's publication of “The Influence of Space Power upon History” in 1996 drove the point home.30
By 1998 Lieutenant Colonel David Lupton, dean of the new spacepower theorists, declared sanctuary policy “a fallen star.” Dreams of a space sanctuary, he wrote, had been conjured by “reasonable, peace-loving men” who appreciated the potential for space technology to strengthen nuclear deterrence through treaty verification, test detection, and photoreconnaissance. It was a viable approach for the early Cold War, when trust was in short supply and crises abounded. But continued technological revolution had made the idea obsolete by the middle of the 1970s. The military value of space for observation; the increasing sophistication of satellites for mapping, communications, and weather prediction; and the superpowers’ budding ASAT programs had belied “rose-colored” space rhetoric. Although some dreamed of a return to the politics of peace, Lupton concluded, “like lost virginity, the ideal sanctuary is irretrievable.”31
More than a half-century has passed since the beginning of the space age, yet we are inhabiting a similar political world. When the G-20 Summit convened in Bali, Indonesia, in November 2022, Joe Biden reassured reporters that the United States could avoid “a new Cold War” with China. Despite escalating tensions over trade policy, Taiwan, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the president held out hope that the two countries could responsibly manage competition and avoid conflict. Yet the very utterance of the phrase belied the truth. Growing bipolarity and protracted rivalry between two nuclear-armed superpowers? Yes. Geopolitical flashpoints in Europe, East Asia, and the Middle East? Check. Intense technological competition in areas deemed central to military and economic power? Most assuredly. And because of the Chinese Communist Party's total control over government, even communism is a topic of discussion again. Try as politicians might to deny it, and fret as we might about the onset of another “twilight struggle” between democratic capitalism and communist autocracy, the Second Cold War is already well underway.32
Space technology and “astropolitics” generally will play an even greater role in this redux than they did in the years after Sputnik. As part of its now decades-long drive for military modernization, the People's Republic of China has achieved rapid progress in counterspace weapons, launch capabilities, and the integration of space-based assets with everyday military operations. China proved a direct-ascent ASAT capability when it shot down an aging weather satellite in January 2007, an experiment that generated more than 3,000 individual pieces of trackable debris, a full sixth of the total then orbiting Earth. Recent Chinese research into robotic arms in space—to clean up the mess!—also reflects a latent co-orbital weapon. Long-forgotten fears of orbital bombardment have reawakened, too: twice in 2021 China successfully tested a nuclear-capable hypersonic glide vehicle that, after riding a Long March rocket into orbit, descended to Earth at speeds exceeding Mach 5, confirming USAF fears of China's “potential for global strikes … from space.”33
Not least, the United States has replayed the First Cold War by all but proclaiming a new space race in which the American Artemis Program will compete with China's manned lunar program, Chang’e, to return humans to the moon by the end of the 2020s. Nor does this latest sprint appear a benign display of technological prestige or scientific curiosity. “We better watch out that they don’t get to a place on the moon under the guise of scientific research,” NASA administrator Bill Nelson explained to interviewers in January 2023, for “it is not beyond the realm of possibility that they say, ‘Keep out, we’re here, this is our territory.’”34 His counterpart Ye Peijian, director of China's Lunar Exploration Program, harbors the same fears. “If we don’t go [to the moon] now even though we are capable of doing so, then we will be blamed by our descendants. If others go there, then they will take over, and you won’t be able to go even if you want to. This is reason enough.”35
For its part, Russia—now the junior partner vis-à-vis Beijing—will also play an adversarial role in space. Putin's war in Ukraine is a case in point: Russia has spoofed the locations of US and British warships, jammed GPS-guided weapons supplied by NATO, and threatened to destroy civilian Starlink satellites, which have provided internet services to Ukrainian forces. Moreover, for nearly a decade Russia has conducted numerous tests of its Nudol missile system, a satellite-killer. On November 15, 2021, one of those tests directly intercepted a Soviet-era intelligence satellite, creating at least half as much debris as the earlier Chinese test. Two weeks later Russian state television warned that the military could destroy all thirty-two GPS satellites in geostationary orbit and “blind [NATO's] missiles, planes and ships, not to mention the ground forces.” A sign of the times, Russia has even announced that it will withdraw from the International Space Station.
Far from a “sanctuary,” space has assumed in the Second Cold War new, more ominous monikers. Official US space strategy defines the medium as fundamentally “congested, contested, and competitive.”36 When Donald Trump announced that he would create a distinct branch of the military, the US Space Force (USSF) in 2019, he dubbed the cosmos “a warfighting domain,” a classification NATO affirmed that same year when it officially declared space a fifth operational medium alongside air, sea, land, and cyber.37 The USSF's inaugural doctrine was clear-eyed in its assessment of the situation. “Military spacepower [is] a crucial manifestation of the high ground in modern warfare,” it began. As a war-fighting branch, the Space Force must “steadfastly prepare to prosecute the appropriate amount of violence against an opponent subject to strategic objectives, legal, and policy restraints.”38 For years now, US politicians, military leaders, and journalists have assumed the inevitability, as CNN put it in a lurid documentary, of “War in Space: The Next Battlefield.”39
Two options are open to the United States and the wider world in the Second Cold War. The first is to accept the certainty of space conflict and reconcile with it. As they have always done, the thinking goes, states will fight to protect their national interests. Toward this end they will build space weapons and counterspace weapons. They will lay claim to orbits and moons. Man, replaying history, will bring his fallen nature to each new domain he inhabits. These harsh realities dictate that we huddle in the command center, acquaint ourselves with space-war doctrine, and welcome the coming dark.
Political scientists have well prepared us for this first option and have fed the fatalism at its core. “The militarization and weaponization of space is not only a historical fact, it is an ongoing process,” wrote Everett Dolman more than two decades ago. Astropolitics, both in the past and future, “is not pretty or uplifting or a joyous sermon for the masses.”40 Nor has the narrative changed. Violence, we’ve been told more recently, is innate to space technology, its “original sin” and therefore an immortal one. Space war—and human expansion into the cosmos generally—is accelerating the closure of Earth by machine civilization and hence propelling us to cataclysm.41 What's left to do but throw up our hands?
This brings us to the second option. What if, instead of resignation, we adopt hope? What if we learn from the example set by the generation of writers, engineers, and politicians who first faced outer space as a profound new arena of international relations? After all, though that besieged cohort faced challenges every bit as daunting as our own, it achieved stunning success. In the span of a single decade, it ushered the United Nations to the center of space politics; suspended nuclear weapons tests in space and subsequently banned nations from stationing warheads there; and stifled, for a time, the futuristic ambitions of the Air Force, a victory that helped cool Soviet military activity in space. Most notably, it succeeded in crafting a binding international treaty to govern the use of space for all nations. That US and Soviet officials were able to stave off an arms race in space at the height of the Cold War should serve as ample instruction for those seeking to curb the weaponization of space in our own time. We needn’t draw up a fresh astropolitical recipe for the Second Cold War, for one is already available, tucked away at the bottom of the cupboard—that is to say, in history.
In the end it may very well be that the idea of a space sanctuary was just a flight of fancy. Few areas of politics, indeed, have been as vulnerable to mythmaking and false prophecy as space. The cosmos served as legend, parable, and origin story for ancient peoples. Medieval civilization affixed its angels, demons, and spirits to the stars. And in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, space fueled fantasy, imagination and, in no small measure, propaganda. “I do not subscribe to some 99% of what is written about this subject—space exploration—as having any validity,” James Van Allen told Congress in 1957.42 This remains sage advice.
But political imagination begets political innovation. We may ground space policy in optimism and nonetheless find ourselves better off. Consider the story just told. It was difficult, no doubt, for cold warriors like Eisenhower or Kennedy to imagine that space could be protected from conflict. Why should it be so? Yet for all their pragmatism, they imbued space with enormous symbolic power. They assigned to the cosmos all the transformative qualities that utopians like H. G. Wells, Arthur C. Clarke, and even Mangan had dreamt up. Their record was not half bad. Placebos can be very effective.
Here is the truth: space is inherently neither a high ground nor a sanctuary. It is what human beings will make of it, the sum product of an innumerable quantity of small decisions, rational and fanciful alike. And careful must we be: like aiming a telescope—if the astronomy analogy is permitted—the slightest change in amplitude or altitude may deliver us a galaxy away from our intended destination. Let us calibrate the lenses. Let us aim straight and true, and through the eyepiece find a world named Peace.