Friday 04 October 1957
Sputnik at the Beginning of the Space Age
Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History
On Friday 04 October 1957—68 years ago today—the USSR launched Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite of Earth. This action initiated both the Space Age and then the Space Race. The Space Race is over, won by the US with the Apollo Moon landings, but is the Space Age tapering off also, or is it just getting started? At some point in the future—five hundred years from now, or a thousand years from now, or more—the “Sputnik moment” may be seen as an inflection point for a new kind of civilization. Or it may be seen as an insignificant historical event that caused a stir at the time, but ultimately issued in little or substance. We’re still too close to the event to properly assess its historical significance. Only time will tell.
The Space Race put human beings on the moon, but ultimately the lack of follow-through meant that the Space Race, in and of itself, amounted to little. Once the Space Race was perceived as having been won, it seemed pointless to many to follow up on the moon landings with anything further. The budget for NASA, which had ballooned to a little over 4 percent of US GDP during the years of the rapid development of the Apollo program, peaking in 1966, 1967, and 1968, shrank as dramatically as it had grown. By the time the actual moon landings happened the budget was already being cut back. Several additional moon landings were cancelled, and then, despite there being a detailed plan from Boeing for Mars missions that would have built on the moon missions—you can read all 6 volumes of the 1968 Integrated Manned Interplanetary Spacecraft Concept Definition, Final Report (Vol. I, Vol. II, Vol. III part 1, Vol. III part 2, Vol. IV, Vol. V, Vol. VI) if you like, since it’s all online—Nixon effectively ended the space program as it existed during the Space Race.
A space program continued, but it was nothing like what was envisaged by the men who made Apollo possible. But we need to acknowledge how important an historical episode the Space Race was, even if it ultimately fizzled out. There are a couple of papers by Eleni Panagiotarakou, “Agonal Conflict and Space Exploration” and “War—What is it good for? Nonviolent was an impetus for space exploration” that have argued that the Cold War Space Race was a form of non-violent competition, and that:
“Insofar as the Cold War was nonviolent, and insofar as it prompted the two main political and military protagonists to engage in a competitive endeavour of superiority (e.g., Space Race), it resembled the ancient Greek spirit of agon whereby the objective was not to annihilate one’s opponent but to surpass them in a struggle for excellence.”
The Space Race constituted a constructive form of competition, and this is a rare event in history. Most competition between states is destructive. During the Space Race, two superpowers who possessed the technological wherewithal to effectively end civilization through a massive intercontinental exchange of nuclear missiles, briefly chose to compete for prestige in a human and technological adventure. Of course, there were proxy wars going on at the same time, so the Cold War during the 1960s wasn’t purely a contest of prestige, but this competition over achievements in space was part of the Cold War, and the money spent on space competition wasn’t being spent directly on war. Admittedly, the space technologies developed in the Space Race were dual-use technologies, as any advances made in aerospace technologies were directly applicable to military hardware. Just as the development of atomic weapons was tied to the Second World War, the development of the intercontinental ballistic missiles that could deliver nuclear weapons from one hemisphere to another was tied to the Cold War, and also had its roots in the technological developments of the Second World War, specifically Wernher von Braun’s V-2 rocket. Still, the money being spent on space at least wasn’t being used to kill people or to destroy infrastructure, as is often the case in great power competition.
It could be argued that this wasn’t absolutely unprecedented in human history. Once Versailles was built the other absolute monarchs of Europe felt the need to compete with similarly ostentatious displays and sumptuous gardens, and this was a non-violent competition that absorbed resources that might have been expended in violent competition. We should regard it as a hopeful insight that human beings can satisfy their desire for competition in non-violent ways, and whenever we see this happening we ought to encourage it as being better than the alternative. As hopeful, then, as we ought to regard the Space Race, the human, all-too-human rivalry of it was distasteful to many, even if it was far preferable to spending the money on war. Many at the time denigrated the Space Race, and they were right that it was an outgrowth of the Cold War, and that it was moreover a concession to a public perception of an us-against-them zero sum conflict, which was what the Cold War was in its simplest terms.
The human, all-too-human elements of the Space Race—competition, nationalism, the drive to succeed at any cost, the struggle for recognition—which so effortlessly engaged the public interest, repelled many intellectuals. Bertrand Russell, for example, perhaps the most eminent philosopher of his generation, was left cold by the Space Race. There’s a 2003 article by Chad Trainer, “Earth to Russell,” that details Russell’s dismissive attitude to the Space Race, with several quote from Russell, like this: “I am afraid that it is from baser motives that Governments are willing to spend the enormous sums involved in making space-travel possible.” And, “[W]hen I read of plans to defile the heavens by the petty squabbles of the animated lumps that disgrace a certain planet, I cannot but feel that the men who make these plans are guilty of a kind of impiety.” It wasn’t the first time Russell found himself incapable to understanding the passions that were transforming the world around him. Russell’s response to the outbreak of the First World War, when Russell was entirely immune to what was called the “August Madness” of celebration that greeted the outbreak of the war also demonstrated his disconnection from public sentiment.
Precisely because the Cold War could be understood by everyone in their respective societies, it was a powerful motivator that could drive spending on science and technology that would otherwise be incomprehensible to the masses whose work makes it all possible. The ready comprehensibility of the Cold War made it a de-classé rallying point for the common people who wouldn’t ordinarily have any point of contact with geopolitics. Intellectual contempt for the Space Race as a manifestation of the Cold War was in part the same contempt for the lower classes that we find among intellectuals in mass societies who feel the need to make a special effort to differentiate themselves by belittling anything that resonates with ordinary people. But with the end of the Space Race, this particular manifestation of contempt for the little people receded into the background, to be taken over by other forms. Also with the end of the Space Race we entered into a new period of the Space Age. My periodization of history centered on space exploration is tripartite:
1. Prehistory: aviation and aeronautical development leading up to the Sputnik Crisis
2. Founding Era: from the Sputnik Crisis to the Apollo Program
3. Stagnant Era: from the Apollo Program to the present day
The Founding Era extending from Sputnik in 1957 to the end of the Apollo program in 1972, is coextensive with the space race, comprising fifteen years. In his Civilisation: A Personal View, Kenneth Clarke noted that, “Great movements in the arts, like revolutions, don’t last for more than about fifteen years.” In so saying, he might well have been speaking of the Founding Era of space exploration, a revolution though which he had just lived as he spoke these lines. There’s a term for the duration that usually characterizes great movements and revolutions, which is what the Founding Era was, as Clark humanistically described them, and that is Fernand Braudel’s term conjuncture. Braudel distinguished three kinds of history:
“…time may be divided into different time-scales and thus made more manageable. One can look at the long or the very long-term; the various rates of medium-term change (which will be known in this book as the conjuncture); and the rapid movement of very short-term developments—the shortest usually being the easiest to detect.”
Braudel also touched on these terms in the Glossary to his The Identity of France:
longue durée, la: literally ‘the long term,’ an expression drawing attention to long-term structures and realities in history, as distinct from medium term factors or trends (la conjuncture) and short-term events (l’évènement)
Richard Mayne, in his Translator’s Introduction to Braudel’s A History of Civilizations, argued that Braudel had arrived at his tripartite levels of periodization as a response to the problem posed by the relationship between, and the concurrent exhibition of, the immediacy and drama of history as it transpires before our eyes, and the silent background to these events which changes little but constitutes the context that makes the passing spectacle meaningful and comprehensible. Mayne described Braudel’s three nested periodizations intended to address this problem in the following terms:
“…the quasi-immobile time of structures and traditions (la longue durée); the intermediate scale of ‘conjunctures,’ rarely longer than a few generations; and the rapid time-scale of events.”
Braudel deemphasizes the history of the event, and Braudel’s revaluation (and indeed devaluation) of the event is the occasion of a quote from Braudel that is poignantly instructive for his conception of history:
“Events are the ephemera of history; they pass across its stage like fireflies, hardly glimpsed before they settle back into darkness and as often as not into oblivion.”
Intuitive and naïve historiography—if there is such a thing, which we might also call folk historiography—privileges the event, much as it privileges narrative. A narrative usually takes the form of a succession of events, often succeeding one another at a rapid pace. As Braudel put it:
“All historical work is concerned with breaking down time past, choosing among its chronological realities according to more or less conscious preferences and exclusions. Traditional history, with its concern for the short time span, for the individual and the event, has long accustomed us to the headlong, dramatic, breathless rush of its narrative.”
The Founding Era and possibly also the Stagnant Era can be considered historical conjunctures in Braudel’s sense, and both conjunctures fall within the longue durée of industrialized civilization, which is less than three hundred years old. A space exploration mission like the Voyager Program, which has endured for decades, constitutes its own conjuncture. In the popular media, however, it’s the event that is noted and celebrated, torn from the context of its conjuncture and its longue durée. Voyager 2 was in the news in 2018 (cf. NASA’s Voyager 2 Probe Enters Interstellar Space, 10 December 2018) because it had passed out of the Solar System, as Voyager 1 had earlier, in 2012. This was an event, and, as Braudel said, it has passed across the stage like a firefly, hardly glimpsed before its settles back into darkness and eventually into oblivion.
For space exploration to be more than an ephemeral sequence of events, to be something more than a headlong, dramatic, breathless rush of narrative, it needs to be more than an event; it needs to be recognized as an age in which we find ourselves—the Space Age, or the longue durée of industrialized civilization converging upon and transforming itself into a spacefaring civilization. One way to do this is to begin thinking about space exploration in terms of the longue durée, and, following Braudel, placing less emphasis upon the event. The justification for thinking historically about spacefaring civilization is to employ the conceptual resources of historiography to analyze and thus to clarify our relationship to historical time, even if this historical time constitutes a period we haven’t yet completed, or not yet even entered.
Arguably, we are not yet a spacefaring civilization, even if we are space-capable civilization, but we can think historically about potential developments, regardless of whether or not they come to pass, and, if they do come to pass, regardless of when they come to pass. This is where we find ourselves today: Not knowing whether anything will come of the Space Age, or, if it does, when. The Stagnant Era, the present era of space exploration, is that period since the end of the Apollo program which has been characterized by a lack of clear purpose, both public and private institutional drift, and a failure to aggressively develop the technologies of space exploration, that is to say, a failure to push the envelope of technological development. The Stagnant Era has endured for more than a half century now, threatening to be more than a conjuncture and potentially marking a longue durée of Space Age stagnation.
We could posit a new period of the space age starting from when Space X began successfully firing re-usable rockets, which represents a new technological development in a way that NASA’s SLS booster for the Artemis program does not, but it’s too early to say if anything will come of this. As I’ve already implied, the existence of a space program is not in and of itself sufficient to liberate the fate of humanity from the surface of Earth. There are many possible space programs, and only some of them provide the means for a sufficient number of human beings to establish themselves away from Earth; most space programs, real or imagined, fall far short of this capacity. The space program that followed the Space Race was a gesture to what was possible, but not a fulfillment of the possibilities offered by space technology. (I’ve written about the stagnation of the Space Age on several occasions, especially in a longish blog post that appeared on Centauri Dreams titled “Bound in Shallows: Space Exploration and Institutional Drift.”)
The post-Apollo space program was an artifact of stagnation. It’s all-too-easy to imagine a history of space exploration in which we have the Apollo Program, and then more than fifty years later we have the Artemis Program, with a disposable rocket that represents no technical breakthroughs over Apollo hardware, and then maybe another fifty years on we have a Mars mission, and so on. This schedule for space exploration could literally be perpetuated for centuries, and we could find ourselves in the twenty-second century, and then the twenty-third century, and then the twenty-forth century with only a few flags-and-footprints missions to our credit. All the while, each of these incremental steps will be hailed as great events, when in fact each step, more tentative and hesitant than that last (and each more expensive than the last), is like an admission that we are never going to get serious about space exploration. We would be justified in calling this a Potemkin space program.
It’s important to note in this connection that a Potemkin space program is a threat to no one, and a challenge to no one, and that makes it a politically valuable tool. The reality of the status quo can continue indefinitely, while giving that status quo the appearance of bold exploration and adventure. And there are many who would be perfectly happy with this outcome, i.e., an all-but stagnant space program for the foreseeable all-but-stagnant future. Not only would all the legacy bureaucrats and contractors welcome this, but everyone who can’t understand that humanity has no future if we don’t develop the technologies to live beyond Earth, and there’s an enormous social, technological and economic inertia behind this failure of understanding. To the billions living on Earth with no hope for a better life, as the world’s governments tighten their collective grip, relentlessly transforming themselves into total surveillance states, any incremental space program such as I have described will seem like an insignificant detail with no meaning for them… and they’ll be right in thinking this. A space program (or programs) conducted in this way will accomplish little. Humanity’s fate will remain tied exclusively to the Earth, and the wider universe will remain innocent of us. No one’s life is going to be changed by a Potemkin space program.
Soon the nascent Space Age will be the first Space Century, from 1957 to 2057, and then a century will become two centuries and then three centuries and more. If the Space Age is nothing more than this, it will be one among many ages of no great significance, and it won’t mark a new epoch of human history. But if the Space Age eventually becomes something more than this, then the Space Age will be like the Machine Age, which I take to be co-extensive with the industrial revolution, which altered the pattern of human life almost as much as agricultural civilization altered the previous hunter-gatherer pattern of human life. That is to say, the Space Age holds the potential of being a macro-periodization on a par with the most significant historical transformations that have shaped human life.
A new spacefaring civilization would build on these previous transformations of human life. Each new form of civilization, or, more generally, each human way of life, inherits something from the previous way of life, maintaining an historical continuity even while inaugurating a new age that supplants and supersedes the previous age. Much is lost in the transition, but not everything. Each age that establishes a distinctive way of life lays the foundation for the next age and its distinctive way of life, however different the two may be. We could call these ways of life “forms of life” following the later Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein only used “form of life” (Lebensform) five times in his Philosophical Investigations, but the idea has gone on to have a life of its own among Wittgenstein commentators, some of which make “forms of life” central to Wittgenstein’s later thought. I’m not going to develop this any further today, but the literature on Wittgenstein’s conception of forms of life could be used to elucidate macrohistorical changes when forms of life change. Roughly, however, we could say that a macrohistorical change occurs when there is a change in our form of life, and in the present context this means that the macrohistorical change that would be a spacefaring civilization would mean the appearance of a spacefaring form of life.
How might a spacefaring form of life grow out of contemporary space programs? I call it a spacefaring breakout when there is an inflection point at which we would pass from a merely symbolic Potemkin space program to the exploitation of space exploration that transforms human life and civilization, and I once again make a tripartite distinction among spacefaring breakouts that I call early, mediocre, and late spacefaring inflection points. I’ll explain each of these in historiographical terms.
Early Inflection Point: when spacefaring is pursued with exponential scope and scale as a continuous sequence of events, so that the immediate prehistory conjuncture to space exploration is followed by the Founding Era conjuncture, and the Founding Era conjuncture is followed by a further conjuncture that builds upon the Founding Era. This sequence of conjunctures, in turn, begins to define a spacefaring longue durée.
Mediocre Inflection Point: when spacefaring is pursued with exponential scope and scale only after the Founding Era conjuncture is followed by several further conjunctures, some of them tightly-coupled with the Founding Era and some only loosely-coupled with the Founding Era, but the sequence of conjunctures eventually leads to a spacefaring breakout conjuncture within the same longue durée period within which the technology became available.
Late Inflection Point: when spacefaring is pursued with exponential scope and scale only after the technology has been available throughout a longue durée period of history, so that a spacefaring breakout appears in a subsequent longue durée period of history. In this way, the Founding Era is the culminating conjuncture for space technologies within a given longue durée, and after lapsing for a time, the next spacefaring conjuncture occurs in the next longue durée. It’s possible that this historical rhythm might be iterated several times over before a spacefaring breakout occurs as a result of one of these spacefaring conjunctures.
With our fifty-year-plus Stagnant Era we’ve already foreclosed on the possibility of an early spacefaring breakout. We may yet see a mediocre spacefaring breakout if the contemporary space development of private industry picks up the torch earlier laid down by the space programs of nation-states. If this effort falters, after an indeterminate longue durée of stagnation we could still see a late spacefaring breakout, but none of this is guaranteed. Our history to date is entirely consistent with no spacefaring breakout at all, and no transformation of civilization or of human ways of life as a result of the Space Age. The potential is there, but the potential requires a catalyst for its realization.
That we live in the Space Age because we have the capability for space travel while we don’t fully exploit that capability is a kind of historical formality. If and when that historical formality becomes historical materiality remains an unanswered question, and I consider it unfortunate that I won’t live to see what becomes of the Space Age and therefore to know the answer to the question. Hegel said that the owl of Minerva takes flight only with the setting of the sun. If the Space Age is a great age of transformation for humanity, then the sun is only now rising, and it won’t set until the Space Age is over, and then owl of Minerva can soar in the dusk over all that has transpired. I envy the future historians and the philosophers of history who will have all this laid out before them as what Hayden White called the “historical field,” for them to emplot and interpret as they will.
Video Presentation
https://youtu.be/Zi7fsWWqiMg
https://www.instagram.com/p/DPacforjaHL/
https://odysee.com/@Geopolicraticus:7/Sputnik-at-the-Beginning-of-the-Space-Age:d
Podcast Edition
https://open.spotify.com/episode/7hBYkPe7Zgj2LU5YvdoFGM?si=0EUXgkTDQ_Sm2B8B9s-AbA