Heroes in a Vacuum: The Apollo Astronaut as Cultural Icon

Launius, Roger D.

doi:10.2514/6.2005-702

Cited by 9 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 6 publications

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“…NASA has presented itself as the organization responsible for pursuing knowledge of outer space for the benefit of all, and indeed much of the taxpayer-funded data is made available to the layman citizen. Launius (2008) and Hersch (2011) have examined how the constructed everyman image of the early astronauts involved in Project Mercury were vital to building broad public support for a space program, marking a sharp contrast to the less relatable physicists, mathematicians, engineers, and others behind most of NASA's activities. In a similar vein, Sage (2014) explores the use of transcendental imagery and cultural imaginaries in building the U.S. Space Program.…”

Section: Space For Everyonementioning

confidence: 99%

Spaceport America: Contested Offworld Access and the Everyman Astronaut

Sammler

Lynch

2019

Geopolitics

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Spaceport America, a spectacle to see with curvilinear geometry that itself looks like a spacecraft rising out of the desert near Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, conveys a hope of the everyman astronaut. Yet this private-public project, spending over $200 million in state taxpayer money to build and with a $2.85 million operating budget for 2017, does not provide the vertical transport analog of an airport. As Virgin Galactic stalls in launching its astronomically-priced zero-gravity music festival and commercial passenger flights, the facilities have been dusted off for educational rocketry club launches and Hollywood film backdrops while most public access to the grounds is restricted to expensive guided tours. As with the Spaceport, access to outer space itself raises questions of public versus private ownership and exclusivity. With the shifting role of nation states in offplanet activity, there are openings for outer space to become another site of capital accumulation or to manifest as envisioned by social movements and "community space programs." This paper traces the ongoing realignment of public and private interests in offworld activity, of which Spaceport America is representative, considering how notions of offworld access have evolved since the aspirational vision of space as a commons laid out in the 1967 UN Outer Space Treaty. The paper juxtaposes the emerging public-private hegemony with the actions of three autonomous space organizations that actively construct alternative political economic models, technological systems, and cultural imaginaries of offworld access.

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Section: Space For Everyonementioning

confidence: 99%

Spaceport America: Contested Offworld Access and the Everyman Astronaut

Sammler

Lynch

2019

Geopolitics

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“…3 At the edge of a televised era of mass media, their ‘giant leap’ on behalf of ‘mankind’ (despite planting the US flag) made them celebrity citizens of the world. The early astronauts became high-profile figures, and while Gagarin and Armstrong were both celebrated as national heroes and made part of the creation of patriotic narratives, they also became famous internationally (Launius, 2008; Rosenberg, 2008), over time reaching global stardom. Their publicity was in part a result of media wars that accompanied the space race and the assertion of ‘soft power’ deployed to build competing images of progress and domination, but the forms of influence they came to represent extended beyond geopolitics.…”

Section: Assembling Space Celebritymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Achieving their celebrities by assuming the role of our envoys in outer space, astronauts framed its exploration as an arena of collective human progress. They, as Roger Launius sums up, ‘put a very human face’ on space endeavours while themselves attaining the status of cultural icons (2008: 191), becoming globally conspicuous as the representatives and promotional agents of the species’ first extra-planetary forays. The mass distribution of their celebrity not only indicated tendencies to package their achievements into a ready-made product for the consumption of global audiences.…”

Section: Assembling Space Celebritymentioning

confidence: 99%

Global media cultures among the stars: Formations of celebrity in outer space

Damjanov

Crouch

2017

International Journal of Cultural Studies

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The space age launched its own breed of celebrity onto the world stage. From Sputnik onwards, exploration of outer space has endowed media cultures with many spectacular events and prominent heroes, extending the currencies of fame beyond the planet. Under the rubric of ‘space celebrity’, this article gathers those famous people, animals and technologies that have been sent as our envoys into the unknowns of space, framing their exploits as a distinctive register of our mediated public culture and its global provisions. It traces the historical emergence and unfolding of space celebrity and explores the ways in which its human and non-human protagonists shape the extra-planetary horizon of our common world.

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“…The astronauts served as "surrogates for the society that they represented." 126 Soviet space engineers and cosmonauts often regarded the U.S. space program as the paragon of a human-centered approach to spacecraft design. One of Korolev's deputies, for example, remarked: "Americans rely on the human being, while we are installing heavy trunks of triple-redundancy automatics."…”

Section: Conclusion: New Soviet Man Meets American Heromentioning

confidence: 99%

“New Soviet Man” Inside Machine: Human Engineering, Spacecraft Design, and the Construction of Communism

Gerovitch¹

2007

Osiris

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JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. The University of Chicago Press andThe History of Science Society are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Osiris. ABSTRACTSoviet propaganda often used the Soviet space program as a symbol of a much larger and more ambitious political/engineering project-the construction of communism. Both projects involved the construction of a new self, and the cosmonaut was often regarded as a model for the "new Soviet man." The Soviet cosmonauts publicly represented a communist ideal, an active human agency of sociopolitical and economic change. At the same time, space engineers and psychologists viewed human operators as integral parts of a complex technological system and assigned the cosmonauts a very limited role in spacecraft control. This article examines how the cosmonaut self became the subject of "human engineering," explores the tension between the public image of the cosmonauts and their professional identity, and draws parallels between the iconic roles of the cosmonaut and the astronaut in the cold war context.

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Heroes in a Vacuum: The Apollo Astronaut as Cultural Icon

Cited by 9 publications

References 6 publications

Spaceport America: Contested Offworld Access and the Everyman Astronaut

Spaceport America: Contested Offworld Access and the Everyman Astronaut

Global media cultures among the stars: Formations of celebrity in outer space

“New Soviet Man” Inside Machine: Human Engineering, Spacecraft Design, and the Construction of Communism

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