CHAPTER 3Star of Hope

Sputnik Globalism

Urgent as sober policies for space seemed, it was difficult for the new generation of interplanetary advocates to be heard amid the national cacophony after October 4, 1957—the Sputnik “shock.” Eisenhower's enemies in Congress, the press, and everyday Americans inveighed against the president for allowing the Soviets to beat the United States into space and for reacting so nonchalantly. Particularly revealing were the hundreds of letters that poured into the White House over the following weeks pleading for increased spending on defense, science education, and the technological infrastructure necessary to compete with the Soviet Union. Many citizens begged Eisenhower to increase taxes in order to speed up the US space effort. Some simply wrote to scold the President. “Our error in every case,” one citizen scribbled, “is that we have not set out to WIN THE COMPETITION but only to exert a limited effort. In a war or contest, the second best is a loser!” Another promised that if the United States did not soon surpass the Soviets in space, he would never vote Republican again.¹⁰

But panic and scorn were not the only reactions to Sputnik. As opinion polls conducted in the weeks and months after the launch revealed, indifference was another. According to one survey, 54 percent of Americans had never heard of Earth satellites and only 20 percent had any notion about the nature and purpose of satellites. When pollsters asked a sample of Baltimoreans what they thought to have been the most important thing to happen during the previous week, only 59 percent thought the world's first satellite preeminent. Many thought the crisis in Little Rock, the World Series, and “their own affairs” to be more important. Remarkably, although Sputnik had surprised more than half of Americans, fully 44 percent reported not to have been surprised. Gallup found, similarly, that in Washington and Chicago opinion on the threat of Sputnik were evenly mixed. Forty-six percent of respondents said the satellite had not dealt a serious blow to American prestige; only 43 percent said it had. Allen Hynek, associate director of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, told the Associated Press that laypeople he had met reacted casually. “Their attitude,” he reported, “seemed to be that we had lost the ball on the 40-yard line but would surely win the ball game…. It was a shocking mixture of complacency and superiority.” Measuring the pulse of the American people after Sputnik, the political scientist Donald N. Michael concluded that “opinions did not indicate unanimous psychological shock or national loin girding, as the press and many issue makers have insisted.”¹¹

Beyond apathy, many Americans conveyed enthusiasm, even elation, for the Soviet satellite, for they perceived in it an opportunity to deescalate the Cold War. Among the letters addressed to the White House were expressions of hope that the Soviet satellite—and indeed any future US satellite—would foster greater understanding between nations and become a force for peace. Church groups, peace advocates, and women's organizations implored Eisenhower to make the first US satellite “a positive expression of our desire for peace.”¹² The Women's Prayer Crusade for World Order and Peace asked why a US satellite could not mean “something far different to the world, why it cannot be a symbol of World Unity and Peace and why, instead of fear, it can’t bring God's blessing to all as it wings its way around the world.”¹³ Many citizens suggested names for the satellite that would inspire both admiration of the United States and recognition that any launch would not only be a national accomplishment but also a victory for all humanity. “Satellite for Peace,” “Star of Hope,” and “Freedom Sphere” were among the most popular recommendations.¹⁴ “Think,” wrote one, “what a far-reaching impression this would have on the peace-loving populace of the world, plus the immeasurable amount of prestige and dignity that would come our way as a result?”¹⁵ If the first US satellite could be “made to look like a star,” another suggested, perhaps the it would carry “not a sinister ‘beep,’ but a light of hope.”¹⁶

In a matter of weeks, John McConnell's original proposal to orbit a satellite in the name of world peace grew into a nationwide education program—itself named Star of Hope—aimed at promoting space exploration as a “moral equivalent to war.” Based in San Francisco, Star of Hope printed pamphlets, newsletters, and editorials dedicated to advocacy of a robust US space program completely divorced from the Department of Defense. Star of Hope would “serve international understanding” by pressuring the United States to launch a visible satellite symbolizing “world friendship.” “It will be a civilian rather than a military satellite,” the organization's Statement of Purpose declared, “and launched through the participation of the world scientific fraternity.”¹⁷ In a document simply entitled “Purpose,” McConnell wrote a short pledge he planned for the satellite to carry into space and to which all Star of Hope members were to commit themselves: “I, a citizen of this planet, dedicate my friendship and knowledge to work for peace among all men. I will aid the efforts that heal, build, and unite.”¹⁸

Compared to, say, the campaign for nuclear disarmament, as a peace movement Star of Hope was diminutive. Outside of San Francisco and the local towns surrounding Bakersville, McConnell enjoyed limited visible support. But his organization was not insignificant, either, largely because its chair promoted it so tirelessly. He wrote to the editors of more than 5,500 local newspapers urging them to tell their readers about the Star of Hope (figure 11). Many obliged. The Washington Post, New York Herald Tribune, Chicago Herald, Baltimore Sun, and Christian Science Monitor each ran stories about the activist's idea. McConnell appeared on the Today Show, the Arlene Francis Show, and dozens of radio broadcasts to spread the word. He received letters of support from numerous public officials and powerful personalities including Adlai Stevenson, Eleanor Roosevelt, Billy Graham, Wernher von Braun, and Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson (D-WA). Both senators from McConnell's home state of North Carolina, Sam Ervin and W. Kerr Scott, also declared their support for the project. Chester Bowles (D-CT), later a foreign policy adviser to John F. Kennedy, wrote approvingly to Star of Hope's secretary, Peter Hill, that “all of us who are looking for a world of peace and goodwill will sincerely hope that the ‘race to the moon’ can be turned into a more constructive exploration of and use of outer space.”¹⁹

FIGURE 11. Star of Hope pamphlet. “By Laws for the Regulation, Except as Otherwise Provided by Statute or its Articles of Incorporation of Star of Hope, Inc.,” n.d.; Star of Hope Pamphlet, Star of Hope proposals/ideas, box 33, JMP.

For a brief time between late 1957 and mid-1958, the donations that Star of Hope received allowed McConnell to travel widely in support of a goodwill satellite, including the 1958 Atoms for Peace Conference in Geneva, where he showed up with translations of his proposal. McConnell's primary goal at the conference was to acquire as many signatures as possible. Looking to gain the assent of Eisenhower, he was particularly delighted to learn that Glenn T. Seaborg, the US delegate and a frequent adviser to the president on science matters, was willing to support Star of Hope if McConnell could acquire a signature from the Soviet delegation. McConnell had written to Khrushchev the previous October, explaining that his endorsement “would add meaning to the declaration and inspire people throughout the world to do their part in building foundations for world peace.” Though he had not received a reply, McConnell acquired the Soviet signature on the last day of the conference. By then, however, Seaborg had left.²⁰

Although a US satellite launched in the name of “world friendship” gained minimal traction inside the White House, the idea that satellites might ease Cold War tensions permeated popular discourse in the weeks and months after Sputnik. Star of Hope, in fact, had prominent imitators. S. Fred Singer, then director of the Center for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Maryland, penned a “Statement of Conscience” for the New York Herald Tribune urging US leaders to inaugurate programs that would advance space exploration “in a spiritual and moral way.” Nothing could better symbolize the ethical foundation of US-led exploration than “a peace and goodwill satellite” that other countries would juxtapose to the secretive Soviet program. Congressional staff saw fit to include Singer's “Reply to Sputnik” in a special document collection for US representatives a year later. In it, Singer proposed that in addition to launching a goodwill satellite, the United States should collaborate with the Soviet Union and other nations on a manned lunar landing. He asked, ruefully: “Isn’t the prospect of an interplanetary voyage much more appealing than [a] devastated Earth![?]”²¹

Singer partnered with noted French American industrial designer Raymond Loewy—well known in New York for his stylish trains and cars—who declared his company was teaming up with Singer and other satellite engineers to launch a “Star of Goodwill,” what he hoped would be a “spiritual companion” to Explorer 1. Like many Americans, Loewy was disappointed that the United States had not been first into space, but not because being first would have proved the nation's technological superiority. Instead, he felt that the Soviet Union's achievement heralded only national greatness; a US satellite, on the contrary, would represent “this country's desire for world peace, for global fraternity and good will.” As he wrote on December 10, “The Russian attitude allows for no such interpretation of the Sputniks.” Like McConnell's proposal, Loewy's Star of Goodwill would have “absolutely no military connotations” and instead carry microfilms “of the flags of every nation and a symbol of every known religion.”²² Not only did NBC interview Loewy about his idea on television but on January 29, two days before the United States successfully launched its first satellite into orbit, Lyndon Johnson (D-TX), then immersed in national space policy, submitted the Star of Goodwill proposal to the congressional record while on the Senate floor.²³

The quantity and prominence of individuals dedicated to space exploration as a humanistic and unifying adventure pointed to the rise of a new interplanetary figure in the United States, one that can fairly be called the “Sputnik globalist.” These were individuals for whom the Soviet satellite stimulated hopes of peace. Humanity's first thrusts into the cosmos encouraged them to think more cooperatively, more diplomatically, and with greater recognition of the unifying potential of new technologies. As the term “globalist” implies, these actors believed that interdependency was the fundamental condition of modern life. While prizing diversity, they esteemed allegiance to humanity over religion, nationhood, or race. And, crucially, they argued governments should derive policy from considerations of the global. Sputnik globalists believed that the surrender of national sovereignty to international organizations was a necessary precondition for space exploration. The cosmos, a sacred zone to be reserved for the betterment of human civilization, and space technology, the means to reaching that zone, should be governed by all.²⁴

Sputnik globalists were stitched together by competing emotions. The first, what they considered to be the antidote to Cold War politics, was empathy. If only the superpowers could truly appreciate the enemy's desires and insecurities, perhaps each could take a measured step away from conflict. McConnell recommended that US and Soviet leaders trade places for a time. “Why not move President Eisenhower and Congress to Moscow and then have Khrushchev and the Presidium conduct their business from Washington?” he asked Star of Hope members in May 1958. “This should give satisfactory assurances to both sides that there would be no surprise attack, for it is assumed that those who would have to press the button for an Atomic attack, would not do so if they were to be the first casualties.”²⁵ After seeing McConnell on the Arlene Francis show, a woman from Los Angeles wrote to the program about a grand reconciliation in space. God, she surmised, was waiting for NASA to launch its first satellite “so that there may be a conference in the sky of the big three … God, America, and Russia.” She anticipated that God would set aside a small planet on which the United States and the Soviet Union might work out their differences, one God might dub “Amussia Land” (a cross between America and Russia) to reflect mutual respect and cooperation.²⁶

Fear, too, motivated Sputnik globalists, an emotion they marshalled against what they perceived as the endless perpetuation of the Cold War. Figures like McConnell, Loewy, and Singer feared that leveraging space technology for military power would feed the garrison state and increase the likelihood of nuclear war. Echoing the concerns of many commentators, one Star of Hope sympathizer wrote that he hesitated to associate with the goodwill satellite proposal given his “serious doubts as to whether the project could be freed of possible exploitation in militaristic or super-patriotic ways.”²⁷ Peter Hill wrote to another member that fear of a general war with the Soviet Union had “paralyzed our moral capacity as a nation.” Intercontinental missiles had made no room for “intercontinental kindness.”²⁸

Alarm, in turn, morphed into acrimony. Sputnik globalists displayed a clear frustration with—even outright hostility toward—Cold War nationalism, an enmity made particularly intense by their sense that East-West competition had come to define the space age. For them, it was not national achievement and Cold War rivalry that had sparked the first satellites but rather the cooperation of dozens of nations in the IGY, an eighteen-month endeavor (July 1957 to December 1958) to explore the Earth's atmosphere, polar regions, and oceans. When planning for the IGY was just getting underway in mid-1955, a Russian-American citizen implored the government to pool its resources with the Soviets and build a space program that would reflect the accomplishments of “all nations,” not merely those of the United States. Space exploration, in his humble estimation, should be “a United World project.” He exclaimed: “Let us face the outside world as mature citizens of the planet Earth!”²⁹ In another letter to Eisenhower, a Massachusetts resident emphatically resisted all post-Sputnik calls to race the Kremlin in outer space. The best response to the Soviet advantage in technology, he insisted, “is not to strive frantically to beat Russia to the punch—as you and your supporters seem to be doing.” This would only exacerbate tensions. To avert “disaster,” the United States must immediately cease all development of armaments, as well as all nuclear weapons testing. “And the way to stop,” he reminded the president's staff, “is to stop! Not talk! Not try to connive to gain some petty advantage over your adversary! Stop being an adversary! Become a friendly competitor!”³⁰ McConnell summed up his organization's attitudes toward the Cold War in a simple choice: “Grow up or blow up.”³¹

Not confined to the scattered activists of Star of Hope or individual citizens outraged enough to complain directly to the president, one could find Sputnik globalists in the ranks of leading American opinion makers, who helped convey interplanetary ideas to a wider audience. In writing his editorial in the Toe Valley Review, for instance, McConnell had drawn inspiration from an article written two weeks before in the Saturday Review by its larger-than-life editor, Norman Cousins. Sputnik was an ironic event, Cousins mused, for the very inauguration of humankind's greatest and most exciting adventure threatened also to “pulverize” human societies. Regrettably, the significance of the satellite was “measured more in terms of space platforms from which intercontinental wars can be waged than in terms of man's new capacity to extend his citizenship to the universe.” Such was the “unhappy meaning” of Sputnik. There was “no universal release or jubilation,” only hard talk among the American public and in policymaking circles about the weakness of US science and technology and the need for a vigorous national response. Yet improvements in education, science, technology, and defense were not the essential requirements of the moment, Cousins insisted, but rather improvement “in our reasoning, in our judgement, and in our moral imagination.” The United States should surrender its adherence to “unfettered” national sovereignty in favor of allegiance to the idea of the United Nations. Only world government, he argued, could ensure that missiles and satellites would not carry hydrogen bombs. Rather than merely “conjure up more effective ways of destroying the world,” Cousins urged tapping “our intelligence and moral imagination to the fullest in creating a working design for a better tomorrow in which all the world's peoples can share.”³²

Malvina Lindsay, an insightful columnist for the Washington Post, agreed. She questioned whether humankind was yet ready to explore outer space, given its “current national and group squabbling.” To become true “space citizens,” Americans and Soviets would first have to abandon prejudice, hatred, and allegiance to their respective political, ideological, and economic systems. Suppose the Soviets first made acquaintance with foreign beings in the universe, she asked: “Is it possible these might be more highly developed than themselves—yet not Marxists!?” What if it were the Americans who were the Earth's first diplomats to space? “What if we there find beings more advanced than ourselves, who know nothing of people's capitalism, of earth's religions, of our Constitution, and who refuse to accept the American way of life?” Here was a plain critique of the status quo. Lindsay hoped that one day, a “Man from Mars” would appear, for he could tie the superpowers together in peaceful exploration of outer space.³³

It was easy to be pessimistic, though. As it stood, the United States was not a responsible space citizen. In separate article Lindsay captured the anxiety of the times in a fictional conversation between “Mr. Hardpann,” whom readers were to understand as the security-minded US government, and “Mr. Stellar, the indefatigable idealist.” “Why think of a satellite only in terms of weapons?” asks Mr. Stellar. The United States could choose to open a “new frontier of peaceful opportunity” by framing its first satellite launch as a hope for the future, rather than a tool of national prestige. But Hardpann scolds him. “Be realistic, Stellar. Outer space isn’t the proper place to talk of peace.” The only way to achieve peace would be to “beat the Russians to the moon … to bargain from strength.” Stellar replies that world opinion had already turned against the United States because of its militaristic posture. “There's alarm everywhere,” he noted, “because both we and the Russians are treating this new chapter in man's mastery of nature as just another development in the cold war.” Despite Mr. Stellar's appeal to the better angels of human nature, Harpann gets the last word. The Cold War and its politics were an inescapable reality. The United States would be forced to race, Hardpann concluded: “It's no use.”³⁴

“Space for Peace” and the Birth of NASA

Assessments like Lindsay's appeared everywhere. Their ubiquity suggests that Sputnik globalists did not inhabit an intellectual fringe. In many ways, they reflected the national mood. Space for peace was “an unassailable position” in the wake of the Soviet satellite.³⁵ But how might thinkers like John McConnell actually influence space policy in an environment in which the government was likely to subordinate their alarms and aspirations to the more immediate national security requirements of the Cold War? Other than write to members of the administration or voice their concerns in the press, there appeared few options.

It was to their benefit, however, that the Eisenhower administration, ever mindful of the worldwide psychological impact of US policies, recognized the potential of Sputnik globalism for image making. The president observed that the Soviet Union's space program was shrouded in secrecy, tied inextricably to the military, and used by Khrushchev to boast about the superiority of communist organization and technology. In February 1958, Rand Corporation political scientists emphasized to the president's National Security Council (NSC) that acquiring superiority in space meant more than achieving dramatic firsts or developing more powerful ICBMs and sophisticated satellites. Maintaining a level of moral—that is, political—advantage over the Soviet Union was equally if not more important. The American program, therefore, must be kept open, peaceful, and scientific. “From now on,” their report urged, “the US should recognize the need for restoring credibility in US superiority, stress our peaceful intentions and [the Soviet Union's] aggressive ones, and disclose and publicize US outer space activities according, first and foremost, to the effect on the US international position.”³⁶

Top US officials had already taken initial steps to equate American space exploration with peace and cooperation over the course of the previous year. In his State of the Union address that January, Eisenhower had proposed to “mutually control the outer space missile and satellite development.” That same month, Ambassador Lodge submitted a proposal to the General Assembly that space be “devoted to exclusively peaceful and scientific purposes.” And at the Four-Power Disarmament Conference in August, the US delegation called for technical studies for an inspection system to ensure that space vehicles were not intended for military use. In Sputnik's wake, however, efforts of this kind had to be doubled if the United Sates was to fashion a favorable image of its space activities.³⁷

Eisenhower attempted to do just that in a series of high-profile letters to Soviet Premier Nikolai Bulganin in January 1958. In a broader jeremiad on the development of ever-more destructive weapons, the threat of nuclear war, and the absence of support for the United Nations, the president warned his counterpart that there would soon be “powerful new weapons which, availing of outer space, will greatly increase the capacity of the human race to destroy itself.” The two superpowers thus stood at a “decisive moment in history” in which they could realistically curb the arms race. Eisenhower recalled with regret the missed opportunities for international control of atomic energy during the mid- to late 1940s and considered the frontier of space technology an opportunity for rectification. “Let us this time, and in time, make the right choice, the peaceful choice.”³⁸

Following an address at the National Press Club on January 16, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles implored Bulganin to accept the president's outstretched hand. He suggested that “if they are at all sincere in their profession of peace,” the Soviets should “jump at the chance” to control both space technology and the medium itself. In line with Eisenhower's rhetorical theme of lost opportunities, Dulles reiterated that the United States had offered in the spring of 1946 to put nuclear weapons under international control. “Never in history” had such a “great and generous a gesture” been extended by a country in such a hegemonic position. Given the Soviet Union's ostensible lead in satellite technology and missile propulsion, American offers of control may appear to be “sour grapes,” he said; but the elder statesman hoped, “from the depths of my heart,” that “platitudes about peace” could be transcended to ensure that space would be used in the service of “science and humanity and not in the interests of war.”³⁹

How genuine were these overtures? Were there not significant advantages to be gained from achieving superiority in space? Was the United States merely attempting to stall a weapons race in space because it was already behind? In the Kremlin's estimation this was certainly true: Washington was trying to put under international auspices that which it did not possess. Yet many US officials responsible for national space policy already maintained a genuine eagerness to preserve space as a demilitarized zone, both because space weapons were costly and impractical and because the benefits to American prestige would be greater if the United States explored space solely in the interests of science.

The President's Scientific Advisory Committee (PSAC), which Eisenhower endearingly referred to as “my scientists,” embodied the administration's measured approach to space. It consisted of some the United States’ most eminent scientists, including Hans Bethe, I. I. Rabi, and Lee DuBridge, and was chaired by James R. Killian, president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Most of the committee's scientists harbored serious doubts about the capability of space technology to achieve military superiority vis-à-vis the Soviet Union and instead advocated, in Zuoyue Wang's phrase, “technological skepticism,” an awareness of technology's limitations as well as its possibilities. Machines, they insisted, could not be divested from their social, political, and anthropological contexts. They could not solve every problem, but unchecked, could cause them. This cautiousness, like that of so many Sputnik globalists, came from the struggle to control nuclear weapons. Most PSAC scientists were liberals and moderates who had worked on the atomic bomb and radar during the war, had supported J. Robert Oppenheimer in the H-bomb debate, and had worked for Truman's Science Advisory Committee during the Korean War. They hoped after Sputnik that incipient developments in space technology would have a salubrious effect on foreign policy and thereby redeem science from its immoral associations with the bomb.⁴⁰

Similar convictions, rooted in politics and belief more than in science, extended to the president himself. At the beginning of his first administration Eisenhower had positioned nuclear weapons at the center of US national security strategy despite his discomfort with the moral questions surrounding their use and development. Whereas in 1952 the president had been sure that the bomb would be indecisive in a future war with the Soviet Union—America's industrial capacity, its “Detroit deterrent,” would remain the most important factor—by the mid-1950s, after nuclear crises in Berlin, Suez, and the Taiwan Straits, he was no longer so confident in the wisdom of “massive retaliation.” Sputnik began its first orbit amid this reorientation in Eisenhower's thinking. Even this most ardent supporter of the “New Look” paused to reflect on the volatility of a deterrent balance in which each superpower possessed quantities of orbital bombers, antisatellite missiles, lunar bases, and manned space stations.⁴¹

In no area of policy were these considerations as consequential as the embattled government's deliberations regarding a federal agency for aeronautics. Over the spring and summer of 1958, Eisenhower and his science advisers determined that the institutional contours of what eventually became NASA would define the government's space efforts both at home and abroad. The elemental choice between military and civilian control was central to the debate over exploration and American space policy more broadly. An agency housed under the Department of Defense (DoD), many officials believed, would bestow undue influence and power upon the services, induce uncontrollable expenditures, and present an aggressive face to the US space program. Civilian control, on the other hand, would promote international cooperation, attract the best scientists, and mark the United States the leader in peaceful space exploration.

From the time the United States first began satellite research early in the 1940s, the struggle for space was intense. Because there was no agreement about where “air” ended and “space” began, the Army Air Force (AAF) argued that outer space was naturally its area of expertise. The “X-series” of jet aircraft were representative of this claim. The Bell X-1 broke the sound barrier over California in 1947, and the Air Force designed the X-15 to fly at fifty miles above the Earth, at the edge of the atmosphere. Conversely, the Army emphasized its control over ballistic rocketry in the immediate postwar years and, under Eisenhower, anti-satellite ordnance. The fight over institutional claim to space peaked in 1958 as Congress debated the contours of the space bill. The would-be agency seemed at home in any number of bureaucracies: the Army, Air Force, Navy, Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), and National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) each vied for a space agency under its exclusive control. Other recommendations included joint ventures between the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), the universities, and a cabinet-level Department of Science, as well as a new independent agency. In the interests of expediency, too, some officials advocated giving responsibility for space to the DoD's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), which Defense Secretary Neil McElroy had just created under the leadership of General Electric executive Roy Johnson and physicist Herbert York to consolidate military space missions. Its care of several ongoing space projects, including satellite reconnaissance, made it as good a nest as any.⁴²

Considerations of domestic and world opinion conditioned internal debates about the establishment of a space agency. Concerns that space technology would tread the same path that atomic energy had a decade prior ensured that the most important feature of the bureaucratic struggle was the proper balance between civilian and military authority. In a memo to Eisenhower three months after Sputnik, Killian expressed that although it was “entirely feasible” for the Pentagon to sponsor R&D for space, there were “deeply-felt convictions that the more purely scientific and non-military aspects of space research should not be under the control of the military.” Such an arrangement would limit the new agency “to narrowly military objectives” and, crucially, put the United States “in the unfortunate position before the world of apparently tailoring all space research to military ends.”⁴³

Initially Eisenhower disagreed. He favored military control given the services’ jurisdiction over most of the relevant technology and facilities, the “paramountcy of defense aspects,” and most pertinently his desire to avoid undue duplication of space research. While it was a foregone conclusion that any new space agency would occupy itself with peaceful research, it was incumbent on the administration to capitalize on DoD's substantial experience and resources in space, the Army Ballistic Missile Agency (ABMA), Naval Research Laboratory (NRL), USAF's Ballistic Missile Division, and Cal Tech's JPL chief among them. “Defense could be the operational agent, taking orders from some non-military scientific group,” he thought in a February 4 meeting with GOP leaders.⁴⁴ Later in the day, when he met with PSAC members Herbert York and George Kistiakowsky, Eisenhower remarked that DoD objectives in space should receive “the highest priority” and that he “did not think that large operating activities should be put in another organization.” It was unwise, he thought, to concentrate talent outside the Pentagon.⁴⁵

Others were not so sure. In the same meeting Killian and Vice President Richard Nixon, appreciating the impression a space agency would have on “our posture before the world,” thought it wiser if nonmilitary research in space were carried out by an agency “entirely separate from the military.”⁴⁶ S. Paul Johnson, director of the Institute for Aeronautical Sciences, similarly argued that the exploitation of space fell “more nearly into civilian-scientific areas rather than into military areas.” Probing outer space, he wrote in a memo to Killian, would be of greater interest “to the scientist than to the strategist.” Referring to the ideas for military applications of space technology then circulating in the services’ competition for the agency, Johnson remarked in jest that “we can discount at this time most of the ‘Buck Rogers’ type of thinking.” Instead, the principal military interest in space remained improving surveillance, communications, and long-range weather forecasting.⁴⁷

On March 5 Eisenhower received an important memorandum from Killian, Bureau of Budget (BoB) director Percival Brundage, and Nelson Rockefeller, chair of the president's advisory committee on government organization. The document recommended that the civilian space effort be housed under a revitalized and redesigned NACA. Despite budget cuts and mission rollbacks dating from World War II, the organization possessed an experienced technical staff and robust research facilities, had moved aggressively into space research, and notwithstanding its civilian posterior had a history of collaboration with the DoD. If not permitted to wade deeper into the space pool, what reason was there for NACA in the first place?⁴⁸ The Defense Department, by contrast, was “a military agency in law and in the eyes of the world.” Giving the space program to the Pentagon, the memo stressed, “would be interpreted as emphasizing military goals.” Nonmilitary aspects of the space program could fall into neglect, cooperation with other nations in space science could be made more difficult, and civil-military relations could suffer under stringent secrecy requirements. The law should be amended to allow NACA to tap DoD resources, provide for a single director reporting directly to the president, free it from civil service payrolls, and permit contracts with private industry.⁴⁹

This advice seemed to have made an impression on Ike, who in a meeting with the memo's authors reversed his earlier enthusiasm for a space agency centered on DoD competency. Eisenhower agreed with Killian's assessments about the “limited scope” of military space activities over the near term. Although military use was “acceptable” in terms of “application of knowledge,” the president remained “certain … that discovery and research should be scientific, rather than military.” Except for ballistic missiles, Eisenhower “felt that there is no problem of space activity that is not basically civilian.” He immediately ordered BoB to draft a space bill based on NACA before Congress adjourned for Easter.⁵⁰ Budget moved quickly, so that by April 2 Eisenhower was pitching the new legislation in person before a joint session on the Hill, where he emphasized that “a civilian setting for the administration of space function[s] will emphasize the concern of our Nation that outer space be devoted to peaceful and scientific purposes.” That same afternoon the president issued a memo to DoD and NACA officials ordering an expeditious transfer of all nonmilitary projects to the latter, civilian agency. While the Pentagon would retain all programs relating to “military weapons systems or military operations,” NACA would take over the remaining work.⁵¹

The fledging space act received a substantial boost from the PSAC, which authored a best-selling pamphlet in line with the administration's growing consensus on civilian control. Admittedly the entire enterprise of space exploration had been inaugurated by the “military quest” for long-range weapons, the report began, and indeed there were substantial benefits of space technology for national defense. But the impetus for exploration, the scientists argued, derived at a more foundational level from humanity's “compelling urge” for discovery. The military exploitation of space was unavoidable given the circumstances but was necessary only “to be sure that space is not used to endanger our security.” In its concluding paragraphs on military applications, the PSAC derided the copious speculation about satellite bombers, moon bases, and advanced space weapons then circulating in popular science magazines. “For the most part,” it wrote, “even the more sober proposals do not hold up well on close examination or appear to be achievable at an early date.”⁵²

That the PSAC chose to address the more fantastical possibilities of military spaceflight revealed a crucial reality: the general public, to which the pamphlet had been addressed, associated the “military” use of space with the futuristic and encompassed the elemental questions of war and peace in space with which Sputnik globalists like John McConnell, Norman Cousins, and Malvina Lindsay concerned themselves in the aftermath of the Soviet satellite.

Nowhere was this association clearer than in the frenzied congressional debate over the BoB's draft bill, which took the military-civilian divide to near-theatrical lengths. On May 20, the Subcommittee on National Security and Scientific Developments testified before the House of Representatives. John McCormack (D-MA), chair of the subcommittee, considered militarized space to be a “very grim prospect.” McCormack warned of “manned orbital bombers traveling at satellite speeds” and space-based military bases capable of destroying Earth-sites with ease. His colleague Kenneth Keating (D-NY) imagined “death rays from whirling mechanisms” and “missiles launched from outer planets.” These possibilities should not be dismissed as “fiction,” they argued. Those responsible for policy could not “afford to let such tragic works of human ingenuity take place,” lest they risk “global suicide.”⁵³ During the hearings, there was widespread agreement that the US space program should avoid such dark potentialities, and instead be devoted to improving life on Earth. The prospect of interplanetary travel or colonies on the moon made anything possible. Space technology, if devoted to peaceful pursuits, would unleash knowledge that the United States could use to “eliminate poverty everywhere,” “bloom the desert,” and even “change the climate of various regions of the world.”⁵⁴

Indeed it would be the United States, in particular, bestowing the fruits of new human adventure to the world. The reasons for a space program devoted to peace, McCormack reasoned, “lie in the direction of the American tradition of friendly world leadership.” Adopting NACA as the operative agency was necessary to show “that we not only believe in peace, but … are willing to take concrete steps with all nations and peoples of the world to achieve peace.” Dalip Singh Saund (D-CA) argued that the passage of the bill should be expedited “in order that America may once again take the lead in this splendid approach” to space. Keating urged fast-tracking the legislation because it would demonstrate that the United States was aiming for “a future of vision[,] not vexation.” “It will show the world,” he continued, “that we have no desire to engage in swashbuckling among the stars … that we choose the path of greatness, not oblivion.” McCormack even suggested that if any other nation “got a decided advantage … they would dominate the world and impose their will,” but that the United States would “never do that.” He explained, “Whatever advance the United States would make would not be for the purposes of imposing its will on others but for peaceful purposes.”⁵⁵

In addition to strengthening America's leadership in the promotion of peace, a civilian agency had the potential to foster greater trust among the nations of the world and protect outer space from long-standing hatreds. “We want to keep space as an area where mankind can put aside quarrels and there work for the betterment of all men through our understanding of the universe,” McCormack preached. Keating seconded this utopian vision in his own statement. It was now possible for mankind, “freed from the ties of his earth-bound existence,” to shake off “some of the jealousness and differences which beset human affairs.” Those gathered at the hearing all agreed that these ideals were a real possibility, and that the United States should pursue them for moral reasons. Several representatives commented on the “unpolitical” and “nonpartisan” atmosphere surrounding these discussions. “There has not been one dissenting voice,” McCormack remarked.⁵⁶

Though there were in fact many dissenting voices, particularly in the Air Force, the bill had moved quickly through Congress in the spring. Johnson and Senator Styles Bridges (R-NH) introduced the Senate version of the space bill (S.3609) on April 14. McCormack introduced the House's draft (HR.11881) the following day. Both versions had passed by mid-June, and a bipartisan blue-ribbon panel chaired by Johnson met to iron out major differences between them. The final snag proved to be the agency's proper authority. Whereas the House bill had proposed a relatively weak seventeen-member advisory committee, the final bill retained the Senate's proposal for a much stronger seven-member policy board, which Eisenhower opposed on grounds that it would undermine presidential power and encourage bureaucratic logrolling.⁵⁷

Johnson and Eisenhower met on July 7 to break the impasse. To assuage the president's concerns regarding the possibly diminished role of the executive in space matters, the Texas senator suggested that Ike serve as chair of the policy board. Eisenhower assented, and on July 29 signed into law the final, compromise bill. That autumn, the federal government would abolish the NACA, and subsume its infrastructure under a new agency, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. A civilian agency, NASA's chief philosophy was for activities in space to “be devoted to peaceful purposes for the benefit of all mankind.” Yet the Pentagon would still get its piece of the pie. Projects “peculiar to or primarily associated with the development of weapons systems, military operations, or the defense of the United States,” the act's declaration of purpose read, “shall be the responsibility of, and shall be directed by, the Department of Defense.” NASA was also to furnish for the Pentagon and its subsidiaries any “discoveries that have military value or significance.” Henceforth, the president would decide whether a given program met this description; hence, the amorphous barriers between military and civilian space activities would permit the chief executive to justify transferring a given project to the services or the wizards at ARPA. The Space Act established a Civilian-Military Committee with seats reserved for DoD and at least one representative from each branch of the military.⁵⁸

NASA was both a cornerstone in the Eisenhower administration's plan to equate the United States with the peaceful uses of outer space and evidence of how firmly entrenched the cultural connections between space exploration and international renewal had become in popular consciousness. The new agency reflected Eisenhower's vision for space as well as his desire to build contrasting images of Soviet and American science. He could now boast of an open, liberal-democratic space program controlled by civilians. The Soviet program, though it had “captured the imagination” of the world with its accomplishments in space, remained secret, autocratic, and controlled by the military. While the federal government could not ignore the space race—indeed it created NASA to address this—US officials emphasized the agency's civilian character to suggest that a nation's intentions in space were equally relevant to technological outcomes.

March to the United Nations

As the conflicted language of the Space Act indicated, it remained an open question whether an irenic American space program was sufficient to prevent the arms race and US-Soviet tensions generally from extending into space. As the law stipulated, DoD would continue to control all projects deemed relevant to national security, and as we shall see, this included a veritable mountain of programs ranging from obvious military applications like missiles and satellite reconnaissance to those that overlapped neatly with civilian goals like navigation and weather forecasting. At the same time, Soviet leaders marked NASA a manifestation of the space program's duplicity. They proclaimed—accurately—that programs for war-making and scientific research were inextricable, the USSR's classified military program dispersed among varied (and competing) Experimental Design Bureaus and the Strategic Rocket Forces. Would the newborn civilian program be strong enough to withstand the established interests of the Pentagon, aerospace defense industry, and cold warriors in Congress? Would the Soviet Union and, for that matter, the ambitious space programs of Britain and France, follow the American example? The military utility of space and the impetus for competition having already been established, the answers were far from certain.

As Eisenhower's exchanges with Nikolai Bulganin suggest, the lesson of the atomic revolution hung heavy over early deliberations about space exploration: it taught that once technology crossed a certain threshold of development under national auspices, for national purposes, control would prove impossible. In speech after press release, article after newscast, contemporaries expressed their fears that policymakers would “make the same mistake” with space technology as they had done in 1945. Cousins captured the original sin of the atomic bomb in the “Sense and Satellites” article that sparked John McConnell's Star of Hope campaign. “We never paused long enough to think through the meaning of the nuclear explosives we so ingeniously created,” he had intoned. Regarding the bomb as “just another weapon,” US leaders failed to appreciate the “vast intelligence and imagination … required to keep the new force under control.”⁵⁹

Now, when the same generation of cold warriors again held the reigns of technological revolution, it was imperative that new paths be charted, new initiatives explored, new prudence and patience called forth. Given ten years of discouraging disarmament talks between the superpowers, Norma Herzfeld, vice president of the Catholic Association for International Peace, and her husband Charles, a University of Maryland physicist, urged UN control of outer space. “Very soon,” the couple warned, “it will be too late to do anything and the world will be exposed to cosmic terror and blackmail.” Of course, international control of space would not stop nuclear weapons development or the ability of nations to use space research to build better ICBMs. Yet control would establish an important precedent for peaceful cooperation, and “divert the fascination of mankind from the power struggle of today toward a thorough conquest of the universe carried out in common.”⁶⁰ Even before Sputnik, Henry Cabot Lodge urged the General Assembly to “take the problem [of space technology] in hand now before future developments complicate the problem of control in this field.”⁶¹

Even among those analysts of the situation who advocated military vigilance in the face of Soviet space technology, UN control seemed a sensible possibility. In his best-selling book War and Peace in the Space Age, Lieutenant General James M. Gavin suggested that all military operations be conducted under UN auspices. Despite the organization's troubles in easing Cold War tensions, the United Nations, if given support by its member nations, could prove “a fully effective instrument of peace” in the space age. Colonel Martin B. Schofield of the Air War College warned that the “presence of a variety of devastating military forces, of many sovereign states, constantly deployed throughout international space may not be conducive to peaceful living…. It may be sounder for the United States, while it is an early contender in the exploration of space, to use its position of influence to the best advantage by strongly advocating a form of international control over the use of space.”⁶²

Donald Cox and Michael Stoiko, authors of Spacepower: What It Means to You, outlined four reasons to surrender control of space exploration to the United Nations that others often repeated. First, there were significant political advantages. A UN ban on weapons in space might prove “a crack in the door” to more comprehensive disarmament. If the world organization could successfully broker an agreement on space law, perhaps participating countries could then transfer their nuclear weapons, missiles, and satellites to a “UN Air and Space Force” that would police the use of outer space in the same way the United Nations was then overseeing the Suez region. Second, the United States and the Soviet Union could benefit economically, for if the United Nations alone could create missiles, then the cost to national economies would be reduced and wasteful redundancy eliminated. Third, if governments were to surrender space technology to UN control, then national missile programs would have to be centralized and streamlined, thus solving the interservice rivalry then plaguing the Pentagon. Last, the authors emphasized the “psychosocial” aspects of international control: “Man's moral conscience would be freed … he could look up at the heavens and know that he no longer need have any fear that some shooting star he might see in the dark night could actually be the glow of a deadly warhead plunging down to annihilate him and his family.”⁶³

In addition to commentators in the press, scientific community, and defense establishment, popular opinion also reflected a measure of enthusiasm for UN control. In his analysis of post-Sputnik opinion in Western Europe and the United States, Princeton political scientist Gabriel Almond showed that there was increasing support for “a more active role” for the United Nations. The notion that nuclear weapons could be hitched to satellites provoked “a widespread sense of personal and national vulnerability” to modern weaponry. Consequently, there existed “popular pressure to ‘meet,’ ‘negotiate,’ ‘disarm,’ ‘disengage,’ and ‘try to settle,’” in dealing with thorny political problems. The success of Sputnik, Almond concluded, increased the appeal of the global body as a venue for disagreements as well as the expansion of cultural and economic exchange programs. UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold confirmed such thinking in his annual report to the General Assembly. “Rapid strides in scientific discovery,” particularly atomic weapons and space technology, had strengthened “the tendency to link the United Nations with all aspects of international life.” In many circles, he noted, the novel problems posed by space-age technology “cannot be handled without the help of world institutions. Accordingly, it is felt widely that since international machinery exists in the United Nations and its agencies, that machinery should be used in efforts to handle these pressing questions.”⁶⁴

As the atomic bomb had done in 1945, Sputnik triggered greater interest in and support for multilateralism and even world government. Political science journals, international law reviews, and other academic trade publications confirmed the reemergence of world federalism as a plausible political project. “The thinking of policymakers as well as of the general public in the West remain wedded to the ideology of global regulation,” wrote Hungarian-born sociologist Paul Kecskemeti. Though regulatory regimes might fail, existing international organizations prove ineffective, and geopolitical realities enforce a Cold War balance of powers, “this neither diminishes the suggestive power of the ideology of regulation nor renders the principle of the balance of power more acceptable.”⁶⁵

Among academics, few were more interested in the international political implications of space exploration than MIT political scientist Lincoln P. Bloomfield. After graduating from Harvard in 1941, Bloomfield served in various posts in the Navy and OSS during World War II. After the war, he worked for the State Department for eleven years, before arriving at MIT's Center for International Studies in 1957. There, Bloomfield built a reputation for strong political analysis as well as a keen interest in the prospects for world order. A self-described realist, Bloomfield nevertheless thought that considerations of power had to be “tempered with moral authority and political imagination,” an approach he brought to his scholarship on space. Bloomfield believed that although romantic ideas about cooperative space exploration were easy targets for political pragmatists, the cosmos, in truth, presented “both [a] need and [an] opportunity for the development of institutional forms of international cooperation.” “All rhetoric aside,” he suggested, “the fundamental long-range task facing the United States in its international strategy is to substitute processes of cooperation, order, and eventually world law for the anarchy and narrow nationalism that continue to endanger world peace and stability.” If but thirty nations could transcend Cold War bipolarity, a “limited but meaningful community” would emerge. Like John McConnell, Raymond Loewy, and S. Fred Singer, Bloomfield advocated offering the first “moon-shot” to the international community: “A ‘UN shot’ of this nature,” he wrote in International Organization, “could serve as a telling countermove against the spirit of nationalism which frustrates the quest for more genuine international collaboration.”⁶⁶

In his edited volume Outer Space: Prospects for Man and Society, Bloomfield warned that space exploration would introduce several vexing problems for bureaucrats and lawyers to sort out: traffic control, radio-frequency allocation, liability for damage caused by spacecraft, and security from space-based weaponry. Humankind, he argued, would inherit as many puzzles from space as they would solutions. But none could be resolved in space. They had to be “dealt with on earth, through statesmanship, in carefully thought-through military policies, in diplomatic negotiations, and in creative and imaginative planning in the fields of international law and international organizations.” It would be up to flexible thinkers to develop a novel apparatus upon which the foundations of a “space-for-peace” regime could be laid.⁶⁷

It is worth pondering what common assumptions undergirded both academic rationalizations for UN control, such as Bloomfield's, and the social ones that activists like McConnell forwarded in his Star of Hope campaign. One “space-shocked political scientist” at the Rand Corporation, Joseph M. Goldsen, offered three possibilities. First, enthusiasm for global governance of space derived from understandings of the “separateness” of space, not only as a tranquil, virgin area to protect from weaponization but also as an area particularly ripe for political and technological cooperation. In many political and professional circles, moreover, thinkers held up the universality of science as a modus operandi for the peaceful development of space exploration. Scientists and engineers could create a universally beneficial program for probing the cosmos “if the politicians would only let them alone.” The scientific community especially feared that parochial national interests would, as they had in World War II, coopt the purportedly immutable values of science. Last, Goldsen observed the confluence of nineteenth-century rationalism, cosmopolitanism, and anxieties about nuclear holocaust in the development of ideas about outer space. The result was an antagonism toward traditional notions of sovereignty that had prevailed after 1914 and again after 1945 in the UN Charter.⁶⁸

Proponents of UN participation in space governance were emboldened on March 15, 1958, the eve of the space act's submission to Congress, when the Soviet Union submitted to the UNGA a proposal to control outer space. It called for a ban on the use of “cosmic space” for military purposes, the liquidation of all foreign military bases, the establishment of a UN “framework” for international control of space, and a special UN agency to facilitate international cooperation in space exploration. Eisenhower, Soviet leaders argued, thought too narrowly about the demilitarization of outer space. Disarmament measures pertaining to space could not be separated from broader political disagreements between the superpowers. Should not banning ICBMs open the door for disarmament measures back on Earth? Should not foreign bases also be eliminated as forwarding zones for atomic destruction? After all, it was not ballistic missiles that threatened mankind, but rather the nuclear weapons that they could potentially deliver to enemy targets.⁶⁹

Dulles rebuffed the proposal. The Soviets were “mixing up two things that are quite unrelated.” For starters, the global system of US overseas garrisons depended on the “voluntary co-operation” of the host nations, which in many cases welcomed the presence of US troops out of fear of Soviet “imperialism.” The Kremlin, he argued, was trying to kill the American plan by attaching an impossible measure to it.

Only five days later, however, a visit to the State Department by the UNGA president, Sir Leslie Munro of New Zealand, forced US diplomats to take the Soviet proposal more seriously. Munro referred both to Eisenhower's January 12 letter to Bulganin and Dulles's speech at the National Press Club, noting that his own public statements were consistent with their enthusiasm and optimism about using space for strictly peaceful purposes. Yet if Munro were to say anything more in his role as president of the Twelfth Assembly, he would need to confirm the official US position. Undersecretary of State Christian Herter reassured him that “the subject of outer space control was in the forefront of our thinking at the moment.” The legal novelties of space exploration presented formidable obstacles, yes, but Herter had “reviewed the past US proposals for [the] peaceful uses of outer space, and affirmed that this was [a] continuing objective.” Munro referred to the Soviets’ new proposal and noted that although it was unlikely to pass a vote, it had nevertheless “captured the initiative.” The world was “groping for ideas and answers,” Munro implored. It was incumbent on the United States to “move soon with new and specific ideas.”⁷⁰

This advice came at a crucial juncture. Over the spring and summer of 1958, not only was Congress debating the National Space Act, but Eisenhower's NSC was busy drafting what would become the United States’ basic space policy, NSC 5814/1. In this seminal policy study, the NSC contemplated the consequences of space exploration for science and technology in the twentieth century as well as its implications for international relations, particularly political competition with the Soviet Union. The report outlined the United States’ most important goals in space, objectives that would guide US space policy into the late 1960s: developing and exploiting space capabilities to help achieve the nation's other scientific, military, and political aims; acquiring recognition as a leader in space; pursuing international cooperation in scientific space research and with allies in military research; building a system to develop and regulate space programs; and utilizing space technology and scientific cooperation to “open up” the Soviet bloc.⁷¹

Like Rand's recommendations for US space policy and Munro's directions to State officials, NSC 5814/1 kept world opinion central to its assessments and recommendations. The report underscored the significance of “psychological exploitation” by recommending that the United States “judiciously select” projects that would achieve “a favorable worldwide psychological impact.” Given the perceived Soviet lead in space technology, the United States would counterpunch by “maintaining [its] position as the leading advocate of the use of outer space for peaceful purposes.” To achieve its objectives, the United States needed to continue the type of international scientific cooperation the government had pursued during the IGY; invite foreign scientists, including those from the Soviet Union, to work in US laboratories; and propose multilateral arrangements for the regulation of satellite launchings and ownership of radio frequencies. NSC 5814/1 recalled the Kremlin's March 15 proposal to the United Nations to ban the use of space for military purposes and correctly surmised that international control would be a key topic for debate when the Thirteenth General Assembly met that September. If the United States were to maintain its status as the leading promoter of peace in space, then it would have to arrive at the United Nations with “an imaginative and positive position” of its own.⁷²

While scarcely imaginative, the US “position”—to the delight of Sputnik globalists—was to recommend the creation, through formal resolution, of a UN ad hoc committee capable of steering nascent space law into maturity and preserving outer space for peace. “It is clear that the potentialities for good or evil that will arise from the exploration of outer space are enormous,” Lodge wrote to Secretary Hammarskjold in a letter attached to the US proposal. As the world's leading multilateral institution, the United Nations should therefore spearhead the development of legal frameworks for space exploration and house the organs necessary to research the novel questions of the space age. The State Department's suggested language for the resolution reflected the government's attention to the emerging idealist consensus on space politics. The purpose of the committee would be to block “the extension of present national rivalries” into space and promote its exploration “solely for the betterment of mankind.” However, it was “essential,” the State Department urged its mission at the United Nations, to maintain a separation between the peaceful uses of outer space and broader disarmament goals involving missiles and nuclear weapons.⁷³

When the General Assembly met in September, the American proposal for a UN space committee immediately hit a roadblock: its future composition. Valerian Zorin, Soviet ambassador to the United Nations, proposed that the new committee consist of two equally represented “sides”: four Soviet-bloc countries, four “Western,” and three “neutral.” After all, the Soviet Union and the United States were the only two nations “practically” exploring outer space. But Lodge scoffed at this suggestion, reminding the General Assembly that “there are no ‘two sides’ to outer space. There are not, and have never been, ‘two sides’ in the United Nations.” Membership on the ad hoc committee, he insisted, should reflect the composition of the General Assembly itself, and consist only of those countries best able to contribute to space exploration. Lodge's delegation thus proposed an expanded membership of eighteen states that restricted the Soviet orbit to a small minority. The US and Soviet delegations met several times to renegotiate the committee's composition, but neither seemed interested in compromise. Zorin emphasized that without the mutual consent of the superpowers, “there would be no cooperation.” Lodge attributed his diplomatic failure to the apparent fact that the two sides simply “work from entirely different premises about the nature of relations between states, the structure of the United Nations, and the nature of the world.” To Undersecretary of State Herter, it was clear that the Soviets wanted to “wrest initiative” from the United States in space-for-peace propaganda. It was an “indication of [the] political importance which [the] Soviets attach to leadership in this field.”⁷⁴

In the face of Soviet intransigence, top US officials trekked to Manhattan in quick succession to urge establishment of the ad hoc committee in the UNGA. Dulles went first. Reminiscing the lost chance for international control of atomic energy, the secretary of state insisted that in space exploration, “we should move as truly ‘united nations.’” Four days later, Eisenhower asked whether outer space would be explored exclusively for peaceful purposes or whether it would become “an area of dangerous and sterile competition.” He pointed to the recently concluded Antarctic Treaty, which forbade military activity on the continent and opened it up for scientific investigation by any nation, as a model for space. The president proposed that UN member nations agree that celestial bodies were not subject to national appropriation; that war be forbidden in outer space; that no nation, under strict verification, place into orbit any weapons of mass destruction; and that the UN develop an international register for all launchings and a permanent program for international cooperation. “The choice is urgent,” he pleaded, “And it is ours to make.” In their subsequent orations, Lodge and Senator Johnson, who chaired the Senate Aeronautical and Space Committee, seconded the president's proposals and noted the bipartisan support for the US resolution. “We can use this new dimension to destroy ourselves through the extension of national rivalries into outer space,” warned Johnson, “or we can use this new development as a vehicle for international collaboration and harmony.”⁷⁵

Johnson, whose political career would be tightly bound to the US space program for the rest of his life, was particularly forceful before the General Assembly. The Senate majority leader was a true believer when it came to space exploration. He saw in space an opportunity for political, economic, social, and spiritual rejuvenation as well as an opening to thaw the Cold War. Perhaps, he suggested, conflict would disappear altogether as humankind ascended in unison: “Barriers between us will fall as our sights rise to space. Secrecy will cease to be. Man will come to understand his fellow man—and himself—as he never he has been able to do. In the infinity of space adventure, man can find growing richness of mind, of spirit, and of liberty.” Johnson's anticipation stemmed in large part from a conviction that outer space was a special oasis untouched by humans and thus devoid of the Earth's “legacies of distrust and fear and ignorance and injury.” Space was “unscarred by conflict,” Johnson reminded the delegates: “No nation holds a concession there. It must remain this way.” Such rhetoric was the culmination of cosmopolitan arguments about the sanctity and inviolability of outer space in the wake of Sputnik, and indeed Johnson's words presaged a generation of space-age idealism that would occupy his own administration and that of John F. Kennedy's as manned spaceflight took off (figure 12).⁷⁶

Despite these appeals to future-mindedness, morality, and cooperation, the Soviets did not participate, convinced as they were that the proposed composition for the committee did not reflect political reality in the wake of repeated Soviet achievements in space. The US delegation pushed forward with its proposal for a committee composed of eighteen states in which Soviet socialist republics would constitute a decisive minority. The General Assembly voted on November 24, 1958, and defeated the Soviet proposal, fifty-four to nine, in favor of the Western composition. The Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space was now an official UN body, but the Soviet Union—as well as Poland, Czechoslovakia, India, and the United Arab Republic—denied the committee's legitimacy and boycotted its future plans.⁷⁷ Three years later, in 1961, the Soviets would join the committee as a means to resist US space reconnaissance; for now, though, the COPUOS's mandate was decidedly limited. The United Nations ordered the committee to report to the General Assembly's Fourteenth session on the resources that the United Nations and other international institutions could muster to facilitate the peaceful uses of outer space; the continuation of IGY-style cooperation in space “on a permanent basis”; the organization of mutual exchange and dissemination of space research; coordination of national space programs; possible organs for facilitating international cooperation in space under UN auspices; and, perhaps most important, the legal complications that could arise from space exploration.⁷⁸

FIGURE 12. Lyndon B. Johnson frequently propounded the bipartisan consensus on the peaceful uses of outer space in the United States. Washington Star, November 19, 1958.

Reactions to COPUOS varied. US officials, for one, were ebullient. In a review of the negotiation process issued the following spring, Clarence Dillon, Herter's replacement as undersecretary of state, was enthusiastic about the committee's chances to “provide an opportunity for effectively continuing [the] leadership of the United States” in promoting “space for peace.” He noted in the report that “while the United States currently suffers from technological disadvantages in the outer space field, it has a clear advantage in its willingness … to take constructive measures respecting international control.” The Eisenhower administration, after all, had placed this prerogative at the center of its space policy. It was true that the United States could not achieve true control without the Soviet Union. Still, the Soviets had seemingly shot themselves in the foot. They, too, had proclaimed their support for international control of outer space. But when a clear opportunity to research the issue arose, the Kremlin instead clung to its “lead” in the space race. In this way, US space policy—premised as it was on images of American benevolence and Soviet deviancy—proved effective: if Soviet cooperation was the ideal outcome, then Soviet obstinacy was next best.⁷⁹

Space Sanctuary: A Matter of Policy

It appeared at the end of 1958 that interplanetary notions about international cooperation in space, the preservation of the cosmos from weapons, and global governance of the medium had not only survived the onset of the “space race” but had actually found expression in germinal US space policy. Scientists and engineers favoring a symbolic reversal of the government's approach to atomic energy had the ear of the president. The Congress and the public enthusiastically supported peaceful space initiatives such as the IGY and shunned extravagant weapons projects. The Pentagon, though it would retain all projects deemed relevant to national defense, lost control over scientific exploration. Creation of the COPUOS heartened proponents of international controls for the revolutionary technology as well as progressive laws to outlaw war and colonialism from space. Even without Soviet participation in the new UN committee, US officials appeared to have preempted the “specter,” as Lodge called it, of a space-based arms race run wild.⁸⁰

As several scholars have pointed out, this effort was attributable in large measure to the Eisenhower administration's drive to legitimate satellite reconnaissance. Measures that guaranteed exploration “exclusively for peaceful purposes” helped distinguish the weaponization of space—which connoted all the “Buck Rogers” notions of space planes, satellite bombers, ASAT weapons, and moon bases—from the militarization of space, a term implying that although the services and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) were engineering spy satellites, these technologies served to monitor compliance with arms control and thus served the interests of peace.⁸¹ Certainly the extent to which incipient space policy was based on uncertainty about Soviet intentions and capabilities is difficult to overlook.

But in explaining why the generation of policymakers responsible for navigating the dawn of the space age pursued the measures they did, it is unwise to dismiss considerations of ideology and culture. As suggested by the enthusiasm with which many Americans greeted Sputnik, interplanetary narrations of the coming superpower reconciliation in space continued to have popular appeal and hence real political influence. While it is unquestionable that the Soviets’ “firsts” in space served to expand and intensify the Cold War, they also became an impetus to temper it. Refining the premises of the interwar period, Sputnik globalism came to encompass more than a resistance to the wastefulness of the space race or the imminent danger that as a technological choice the satellite would follow the path of the atomic bomb. It represented a clamor for fundamental changes in human nature and the ascent of those changes to the practice of international affairs. In many ways, it sought plainly to rewrite the history of the world.

These impulses, which two world wars had impressed deep in human consciousness, were readily apprehended by the crafters of early US space policy, who used the sanctuary paradigm to wage a propaganda battle, a war of national character, with the Soviet Union. They understood that the space race was a contest not only of science and technology but also of prestige and identity. The United States had to surpass its rival in terms of technical achievements as well as portray itself as a peaceful, cooperative, and beneficent space power. Civilian control of NASA and its leadership in the United Nations on governance of international space activities were but two pillars of this image-crafting strategy.

Indeed, the competition over which nation could more vigorously promote “space for peace” became a race-on-top-of-a-race, an adjunct to the technological rivalry between the superpowers already occupying immense political, intellectual, and economic resources. Attempts to garner world prestige by disparaging the enemy's intentions and authenticity in space harmed what might have been more comprehensive agreement and cooperation. The Soviets’ condemnation of Eisenhower's overtures to international control, for one, damaged the spirit of goodwill that space rhetoric was intended to nurture, but so too did Dulles's accusation that imaginative Soviet proposals were purloined from American minds. Khrushchev's insistence that international control of ICBMs be tied to total nuclear disarmament and the elimination of foreign bases, while ambitious, was impracticable and deeply political; yet at the same time, the United States’ refusal to consider any other disarmament measure alongside the banning of weapons in space revealed its obstinance in surrendering any military advantage.

In any case, it is reasonable in light of the evidence to question whether US evangelism regarding “space for peace” was effective. World opinion, for one, remained convinced that US activity in space was intended to produce military superiority. An extensive study conducted by the US Information Agency (USIA) concluded in July 1959 that the “reaction to space development, from all audiences, shows a clear tendency to equate achievements in this field with military power.” Global interest in US initiatives for international control were decidedly “subordinate and unspecified” compared with the military implications of space. In fact, there was a “widespread conviction” that space projects were not truly for the sake of exploration but were “essentially military exercises.” And despite talk of cooperation on both sides of the Iron Curtain, the public still viewed space exploration through the lens of Cold War competition. “The concept of a space race,” the report concluded, “appears to be almost automatically injected” into the worldwide reaction to space-feats.⁸²

Malvina Lindsay, who had conjured Mr. Stellar and Mr. Hardpann one year earlier, was equally incredulous. In another article published on the first anniversary of Sputnik, Lindsay described a report written by an “agent of outer space” named Rik. The alien document appraised the likelihood that the United Nations would “become an agency capable of deterring Earthlings from blowing up their planet and possibly throwing the solar system off base.” While Rik extended hope that the United Nations could “lead Earth toward becoming an orderly and civilized planet,” it faced daunting obstacles, namely, “petty human conflicts,” “ideological bigotry,” and an obsession with cultural difference. Humans, in other words, were in a “retarded” stage of development, too premature to explore space responsibly.⁸³

Even US policymakers remained unsure if they had successfully staked a claim to leadership in the peaceful uses of outer space. Karl G. Harr, the president's special assistant for security operations, thought not. In a November 1958 memo to Eisenhower, Harr cited the administration's initiatives regarding “space for peace.” He concluded that “we have not thus far been able fully to realize the potential of this issue.” Although the “basic blame” for the UN deadlock “must rest with the Soviet Union,” Harr explained, the United States had not done all it could have. Echoing the NSC's recommendations from July, Harr advised that “we must act boldly and soon, if we are to place the United States in the position of world leadership in this dramatic new field.”⁸⁴

Molding an image of the US space program as the peaceful antithesis to its secretive Soviet counterpart was a task made all the more difficult by the American defense establishment, which at times entertained a wholly different interpretation of what it meant “to lose the initiative.” In the view of many defense intellectuals, politicians, and military leaders, arms control in space implied letting down one's guard. It indicated gullibility, naivety, and eventually surrender against a foe that had never let its eyes off the prize of “space supremacy” and, by extension, its quest for world domination. Beating the Soviets in space—or, as alarmists argued, merely keeping pace with them—required prodigious capital and personnel investments in military projects that would ensure US access to and maneuverability in space. Peace, many military leaders argued, relied on it.

McConnell later captured in his memoirs the dawning realization that a space sanctuary would not grow unimpeded within American space diplomacy. Reflecting on his activism, he regretted that the United States had never truly orbited a Star of Hope. The military, he insisted, had blocked his campaign. At the end of 1962, rather than a Christmas light in space, the Pentagon had launched a secret geodetic satellite on Halloween. Far from a Star of Hope, its name was A.N.N.A. While the second “N” stood for NASA, the other three letters stood for Army, Navy, Air Force.⁸⁵

Truly, the battle for the soul of American space policy had just begun. Sputnik globalists began amid their measured successes to confront a countervailing vision of the future. It was a vision in which the historic animosities of states and empires extend into space indefinitely. Rather than serve as a cooling salve for international rivalries, space exploration only accelerates and intensifies them. Competing for new territories or natural resources on planetary bodies, nations ratchet up the destructive capacity of their weapons. Spacefaring planes and massive space stations attempt to control the most strategically valuable orbits, and lunar missile stations menace Earth around the clock. For every dream, it seemed, there was a nightmare.