Introduction

Once upon a time, in a cold and faraway city, one man became lord and protector of the entire universe. The time was January 18, 1949, the city Chicago, Illinois. There, only weeks before, James T. Mangan had been sitting atop his apartment building gazing at the cosmos when he wondered aloud: who owns outer space? Unusual though the question may have been almost a decade before the launch of Sputnik, it came naturally to this local eccentric. When his business partner, sitting beside him, replied that there certainly was “plenty of stuff out there,” Mangan resolved to stake claim to all of space. A bold proclamation to be sure, but that morning the fifty-two-year-old walked to the Recorder of Deeds in Cook County—followed by television crews and photographers from Life magazine—and submitted a charter for a new nation: Celestia, or more formally, the Nation of Celestial Space. After some understandable confusion on the part of the recorder and a brief legal scuffle, the state's attorney granted the peculiar request. With the flutter of a pen and a blotch of wax, Mangan became “First Representative” of the most expansive nation in history (figure 1).¹

Acquiring recognition for Celestia was another matter entirely. Mangan sent letters to the secretaries of state in seventy-four countries, but none replied. A student at the University of Tennessee claimed for himself “the southern half of all outer space” to protest Mangan's Yankee pretention to the universe. And when the Soviet Union finally launched the world's first artificial satellite in October 1957, Mangan could only watch helplessly from the sidelines as the Reds “trespassed” on his sovereign-less domain. Despite creating a national flag, passports, postage stamps, and gold currency for his new nation, Mangan seemed unable to convince outsiders of Celestia's legitimacy.²

FIGURE 1. James Mangan points toward his new nation, Celestia, outside Chicago's Adler Planetarium in December 1948, shortly before he made his claim “official.” Wallace Kirkland/The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The public's tickled reaction to Celestia frustrated Mangan, for he viewed its founding as an eminently serious, even noble undertaking. This was no self-indulgent public relations stunt, he insisted, but rather an effort to create “a bulwark of international peace.” The Nation of Celestial Space was to be a model of political harmony and enlightened thinking, free from war and bitter historic rivalries. The First Representative quickly banned weapons from Celestia, even if they might be necessary to defend space from external threats. In September 1949, he issued diplomatic notes to the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union forbidding nuclear tests in his territory.³ Celestia was “a moral nation dedicated to peace everywhere,” as Mangan wrote in a press release.⁴ By example, he would show that “in space, right is more powerful than might,” and that cosmic politics would operate “more on the principle of moral persuasion than force.”⁵ When Mangan began selling Earth-size parcels of space for one dollar apiece, he urged his potential customers to view the matter philosophically: “If you owned something 8,000 miles in diameter and 25,000 miles in circumference, you might realize that war is something to be laughed at.” The Nation of Celestial Space might just lend citizens “enough bigness of thinking … to make them feel international squabbles are petty.”⁶

One could be forgiven for consigning Celestia to the realm of historical curiosity. That in 1958 Mangan flew the Celestian flag outside United Nations headquarters in Manhattan seems a charming conclusion to a story that, however amusing, nevertheless carried little significance for the postwar world. But in fact, Mangan's ambitions for a space-nation devoid of “the world's pressures and poisons” both drew on a deep well of political thought connecting outer space with peace and reflected its continued relevance.⁷ Convictions that the cosmos somehow transcended human conflict only grew stronger in the 1950s and 1960s as the incipient space age evolved into a full-blown technology race between the United States and the Soviet Union. The utopian ideas driving Mangan's crusade assumed greater salience as contemporaries came increasingly to fear destruction from orbital weapons, pollution of the heavens with earthly hatreds, and the extension of the Cold War to yet another exciting realm of human ingenuity.

Indeed, the story of Celestia is illustrative not because Mangan's ideas were so unique or unusual, but because they were pervasive. The Nation of Celestial Space was only the most playful example of what later writers would call “sanctuary” politics, a collection of ideas that (1) predicted spaceflight would bring about a more harmonious era in international relations and (2) argued that if such an exploration-induced revolution were to truly occur, it was imperative that governments preserve outer space as a haven free from war, imperialism, and other adolescent habits to be shed on humanity's breach into space and, by extension, political adulthood.⁸ It was no coincidence that Earth, for so many dreamers, was but a cradle.

Notions of a “sanctuary” in space tapped into the term's deep etymology. The word derives from fourteenth-century Europe where, in Late Latin, a sanctuarium was a sacred place set aside for worship. Initially connected to purely ecclesiastical ideas, by the middle of the sixteenth century the definition had broadened to include a place of refuge, since by that time the use of churches as asylums for fugitives and debtors had endured since the time of Constantine. A third and final definition arrived in 1879, when the American bison, then nearly extinct, needed “land set aside for wild plants and animals to breed and live.”⁹

Seventy years later, in the throes of a totalizing cold war, support for a space sanctuary absorbed elements of all three translations. When the Apollo 8 astronauts read the Book of Genesis to a worldwide audience from lunar orbit in 1968, they proved that space was a place to “touch the face of God” and thereby inch closer to His image.¹⁰ At the same time, religious and secular rhetoric alike referred to the cosmos as a site where human beings might find safety from the social and political diseases of their primitive, earthbound existence: the nuclear arms race, chronic inequality, ecological degradation, racism, and war. The logical corollary, and the one with which these pages are most interested, was that far from engaging in a hostile technology race, the spacefaring juggernauts should “set aside” the cosmos as a pristine frontier, an environment where the human animal could strive for a future divorced from the violence of history.

Sanctuary politics held that peace in space would reap benefits for earthly statecraft. Communications satellites would increase contact and thus understanding between nations. Reconnaissance satellites would monitor arms control agreements and help build trust. Disarmament in outer space could open doors for earthly demilitarization, perhaps even the abolition of nuclear weapons. “Space may well be the sea in which the human race will someday find an island of peace,” Senator Lyndon Johnson (D-TX) told CBS affiliates in Sputnik's wake. By 1973, merely fifteen years later, the international lawyer Edward R. Finch anticipated that space exploration might usher in “the true internationalization of nations into a conglomerate of States of the World governed by law.”¹¹

Such convictions enjoyed special resonance in the United States, where the economic and technical prospects for exploration were substantial, to say nothing of the demand to answer the Soviet gauntlet. From the 1920s through the post-Sputnik years, Americans drew on budding “astrocultures” in Europe to articulate a vision of the human future in space in which national animosities and tribal hatreds melted in the heat of discovery.¹² Breaching Earth's atmosphere would foster in man “an interplanetary mind” elevated above parochial concerns and dedicated instead to egalitarian care of the entire human family.¹³ Consumers of the era's copious science-fiction stories and popular science magazines came to understand space as either a site of destruction and civilizational collapse, or alternatively, of cosmic wisdom and restraint.

Thus, when the services began advanced research on rocket boosters, satellites, and other spacefaring vehicles in the 1940s and 1950s, many Americans demonstrated a preference for restraint by condemning what they considered to be the perversion of space exploration—of science itself—by the Cold War. Why, they asked, should this new vista in humankind's mastery of nature fall under the purview of militarists? Why should space exploration be yet another avenue of national competition rather than an adventure that all nations could undertake together?

A generation of US officials wrestled with these questions. In the fifteen years after Sputnik, policymakers in the Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson administrations fretted over the introduction of space-based weaponry, the bankrupting of the nation by lavish expenditures on military space programs, and the probability that technological developments would outpace the capacity of international law to regulate new hardware. To avert these problems, they built a diplomatic menu that subsumed many of the utopian ideas offered by stargazers like James Mangan: joint missions with the Soviets; technology transfers to Europe and the Global South; United Nations jurisdiction of space activities; and pursuit of a binding treaty to govern the peaceful use of space for all.

Beliefs about the pacifying effect of exploration inevitably touched domestic space policy as well. Debates over whether the fledgling National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) should be a civilian- or military-controlled institution, for instance, hinged on ideas about the purity of space and the necessity of stopping exploration from becoming a surrogate—or a spark—for war. Later, amid the Apollo 11 mission, public officials were keen to portray the first moon landing as the accomplishment of all humanity rather than heroic American astronauts. In this way, early US space policy strove not only to prevent the extension of the arms race to space but also to pitch spaceflight as the catalyst for a harmonious new era in international life. Here was sanctuary politics grown full flower.

The Province of All Mankind is a political, cultural, and intellectual account of this history. The book charts the long maturation of the sanctuary idea and its startling—in retrospect, miraculous—expressions in US policy from Sputnik through the first moon landing. In so doing, it narrates the emergence of the cosmos as a profound new arena of US foreign relations and international law, one many leaders deemed worthy of special protections from Cold War conflict and hence thick with future consequence.

Two observations ensue from such a narration. First, the most important political assumptions about spaceflight surfaced long before rockets, satellites, and lunar probes were matters of fact, that is to say long before the space race, or even the Cold War generally, were features of the international scene. From the late nineteenth century, Americans and their contemporaries in Europe drew a powerful and enduring association between space exploration and the transcendence of international rivalry and war. What follows is in large measure a story about how, in the construction of spaceflight as a political project, imagination was as crucial as space technology itself.

Second, and more surprising, is that the idealism of the spaceflight imagination often jibed with the hard-headed, realist assumptions guiding US national security policy at the height of the Cold War. “Space for peace,” as Mangan called it, appealed to cold warriors because it enhanced the image of the United States as a responsible, moral, and peace-loving power; because, from a space sanctuary, the United States could safely spy on the Soviet Union with satellites; and because, in the final analysis, extending the arms race to space simply did not benefit national safety. For a time, doves and (some) hawks nurtured the same egg.

Chronicling the origins and gestation of the sanctuary idea in American space policy presents a stark historiographical puzzle. Was not space exploration, after all, mainly an avenue of Cold War competition?¹⁴ Was not space technology a crucial arm of propaganda?¹⁵ Did not promoters of peace in space struggle against its militarization by jealous superpowers?¹⁶ There was, to be sure, a very real “space race.”¹⁷ Walter McDougall put it best in his landmark 1985 account, … The Heavens and the Earth. Humanity's ascent into the cosmos was “a time of fear and euphoria both,” and yet: “in the formative years of the Space Age, the euphoria faded, the fear remained.” There was no reorientation of global politics, no political reconciliation between the superpowers, no bludgeoning of poverty and disease by novel engineering derived from NASA. “For the present and foreseeable future,” he wrote, it was instead the victory of technocracy—that is, state-driven research and development—that “defines the character of the Space Age in history.”¹⁸

Forty years and dozens of new works later, the realism of this interpretation, if not the details about technocratic methods, still stands tall in our histories and our collective memory. We remain fixed in McDougall's foreseeable future. And why not? Despite a new burst of creative energy in space, contemporary international relations remains so riven by mistrust, hostility, and great-power competition that pundits have long since declared a Second Cold War, one in which space rivalry will undoubtedly play a central role.¹⁹ In December 2019, as Donald Trump announced the creation of a US Space Force that would protect national interests in the medium, he dubbed space a “warfighting domain,” a designation the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) affirmed when, that same month, it declared space a fifth operational realm alongside land, sea, air, and cyber.²⁰ In 2021 China twice tested a hypersonic, maneuverable glider that descends from orbit to deliver a warhead at speeds exceeding 3,800 miles per hour, an event many observers dubbed another “Sputnik moment.”²¹ Over recent years China, Russia, and India have honed antisatellite (ASAT) weapons capable of torpedoing the space-based architecture upon which the modern economy is entirely—and precariously—dependent. Little wonder, then, why political scientists are so pessimistic about the future of international relations in space. Their book titles betray the basic plot: Dark Skies … Heavenly Ambitions … Crowded Orbits … Scramble for the Skies … Astropolitik, even Original Sin.²²

It is easy enough, too, to read today's foreboding developments back into what historians may soon refer to as the “First” Cold War. Despite high rhetoric about the potential for space exploration to induce US-Soviet cooperation, real collaboration proved a nonstarter. Timid scientific exchanges succumbed in the early 1960s to “the tyranny of realism,” as political scientist Donald Kash wrote in an early account.²³ Instead, US spending on military space projects ballooned from $814 million in 1961 to more than $2 billion by the end of the decade.²⁴ The leap was equally pronounced in the Soviet Union, where the military space budget reached $1.2 billion by 1968.²⁵ From these seedling investments did the ancestors of our contemporary military-space regime burst forth: the US Air Force's (USAF) Dyna-Soar space plane and Manned Orbiting Laboratory (MOL), the Kremlin's Fractional Orbital Bombardment System (FOBS), as well as a host of direct-ascent and co-orbital ASAT weapons. These were years when Nikita Khrushchev brandished space rockets like giant clubs, when Barry Goldwater campaigned for president on American military preponderance in space, and when both Washington and Moscow drew up blueprints for military installations on the lunar surface. The two sides even tested nuclear weapons in space.

But this is only half the story. Consider what was left when the moondust cleared at the end of the 1960s. By that time, despite the fear induced by Sputnik and the political antagonism of the ensuing space race, the United States had spearheaded the development of a special United Nations committee to govern the peaceful use of the cosmos for all people. Upon NASA's founding in 1958, the federal government resolved that space activities “should be devoted to peaceful purposes for the benefit of all mankind,” language that international lawyers and diplomats enshrined in the first United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) resolutions on space exploration.²⁶ Far from a new theater of conflict, outer space became a tranquil nest for passive satellites that ultimately did more to temper the Cold War than escalate it.²⁷ The USAF's ambition to leverage space as “a new high ground” had collapsed under budgetary, technical, and ethical (read: political) pressures. The Dyna-Soar program collapsed in 1963, the MOL in 1969. The Soviet Union later canceled FOBS having never orbited a single warhead. Instead, negotiators from the two space giants collaborated on an international agreement that banned nuclear weapons from space, forbade military installations and maneuvers on the moon and other celestial bodies, and outlawed claims of national sovereignty in space. This landmark Outer Space Treaty (OST) declared that the exploration and use of outer space was henceforth “the province of all mankind.”²⁸

What are we to make of these events? Two continental superpowers, two vast military-industrial complexes, waged a decades-long cold war having never staged weapons in orbit, on the moon, or anywhere else in space. Neither side triggered a war, or even so much as a Checkpoint Charlie-like military confrontation, outside Earth's atmosphere. Bucking the violent depictions of space that Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica later beamed into American living rooms, the military constellation in space consisted merely of ancillary systems for communications, navigation, reconnaissance, meteorology, and early warning. Compared with the foreign policy misadventures of the 1950s and 1960s—CIA-backed coups in Guatemala, Iran, and the Congo; a bungled invasion of Cuba; and a devastating proxy war in Vietnam, just to name a few—US space policy exhibited remarkable sobriety, even prescience.

The answer is that the irenic vision of space propounded by the likes of James Mangan, dismissed though it was by realist critics, achieved victory in a duel of ideas about the future. It was a contest between the sanctuary worldview and what political scientist Lincoln Bloomfield called “the dark side of space,” wherein human capacities for violence and greed would first extend to and then escalate in the cosmos.²⁹ Did satellite television, for instance, mean education or propaganda? Would our artificial moons keep nuclear war at bay or inaugurate it from on high? Would astronauts “conquer” space as Edmund Hillary or Augustus Caesar? “Colonize” it as Roald Amundsen or Cecil Rhodes?³⁰ It was a conflict, in other words, between dreams and nightmares.

For all the ink devoted to space racing, saber rattling, and panic-inducing “Sputnik moments,” the historical record shows that, at least for a time, the dreams had gained the advantage. In the dozen years it took to complete the Cold War space race (1957–1969), the sanctuary paradigm, forwarded in spite of the Cold War, kept conflict out of space. Despite the rigorous competition that characterized space exploration in these years, sanctuary politics became a vehicle through which to critique great-power rivalry, to express fatigue with its political rules, and to suggest alternatives. It encouraged Americans to think differently about the future of international relations. Some, like Mangan, entertained pure utopianism. Others, like John F. Kennedy, merely opened themselves up to optimism even as they waged the “long twilight struggle” against communism.³¹ In this way, the sanctuary idea did as much to diminish the influence of the Cold War as the space race did to reinforce it. To reverse McDougall's adage, it grounded incipient space politics more in hope than fear.

Half a century later, the dream of a space sanctuary continues to have staying power. But whatever cultural and political battles it may have won during the 1950s and 1960s, recent history shows that the war is still ongoing. Read the epitaph again: Pynchon teaches us that our creations, derived from our nature, are both noble and terrible. Space technology is the sum of an uncountable number of individual choices. Not all will be noble, not all terrible. May the balance be ever in our favor.