Margaret A. Weitekamp - Space Craze: America’s Enduring Fascination with Real and Imagined Spaceflight

As I stood on the taped floor mark smiling into the blinding glare of television lights, the doors opened behind me, and people began streaming into the new Boeing Milestones of Flight Hall. Our exhibit team had done its job. After almost three years of intense work, the central exhibit space of the Smithsonians National Air and Space Museum had been reconceived. Its grand opening on July 1, 2016, coincided with the fortieth anniversary of the Museums National Mall building. As I spoke to the viewing audience online, introducing myself as one of the Museums curators and giving a verbal tour of the newly renovated space, crowds of people flooded into an all-night open house. The Halland indeed, the entire Museum buildingremained crowded until the wee hours of the morning. Almost 54,000 people visited the Museum that night alone. When I left at 3:20 a.m., a line of visitors still waiting to enter snaked out the door.

The National Air and Space Museum has consistently been one of the most visited museums in the world. Before the restrictions of COVID-19 upended travel and public gatherings worldwide, the statistics for the Museums visitation ranked it just behind the National Museum of China in Beijing and the Louvre in Parisand in a long-term friendly competition with the Smithsonians own National Museum of Natural History across the Mall. Before 2020, the Museums downtown building alone has received around 7 million visits a year for some time, plus more than 1.5 million visits to its second site, the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center near Dulles Airport.

A large part of the National Air and Space Museums appeal remains its central subject: flight. From the public excitement that greeted the first barnstorming exhibitions and early air races, Americans have had a love affair with flight. So, too, with spaceflight, whether in imaginative visions or real-life missions.

Long before the first Soviet and American spaceflights, however, American science fiction heroes were rocketing off to new locations, leading motley bands of adventurers to explore new frontiers, and encountering new aliens. Conceptions of spaceflight often reflected their national contexts. For instance, the Soviet space program fit well with the distinctively Russian intellectual movement called cosmism, which posited that through technology, humanity would transcend death and earthly depravations by moving away from the planet. Recent studies of astroculture have explored how European spaceflight visions developed in ways that reflected their particular cultural context. Likewise, traditional Confucian culture shaped Korean science fiction. Whether in North Korean science fiction adventures taking place on other worlds or South Korean science fiction set in alternative Koreas, the characters rarely engage other races or aliens as equals. The basic form of American science fiction was just as historically grounded and culturally based.

Beginning in the late 1920s, the dream of spaceflight that coalesced in the United States reflected contemporary concerns, especially gender roles and racial stereotypes. The American science fiction motif, which I am calling the Buck Rogers archetyperocket-propelled vehicles boosting astronauts into space adventures at the point of a gunemerged alongside the earliest successful liquid-fueled rockets. It grew through several decades of science fiction depictions of human space adventures. The phenomenon is not uniquely American, but it took a recognizably American form. It is no accident that many such stories in the United States, beginning with Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon, share a basic narrative structure with Westerns, another distinctively American literary category. Both genres offer outsized tales of rugged individualism, where a quick gun makes everyone equal. Both are set in new frontiers with distant outposts in lawless lands. Both rely on trusty steeds (whether horses or spaceships) that have names and some inherent personality. And both tell stories about Americans cultural aspirations to explore and be independent and inventive. Equally and perhaps most important, both genres also rely on stereotypes that define who should do the exploringalmost always white, male, expansionist pioneers.

Stories of gender and race are deeply intertwined with spaceflight imagination. And in the examination of memorabilia and playthings, those changing depictions can be seen to shift over time. Like Westerns, space science fiction stories reflect the values and fascinations of the culture that created them, not because they act as some kind of cultural mirror, but because the people who created them were products of their eras, weaving their understanding of the world around them into what they created.

From providing an escapist fantasy during the Great Depression to the space craze that greeted the first human flights in the early 1960s and into the twenty-first century, spaceflight has been a persistent and recurring theme in American culture, tapping into foundational ideas about national identity. This is true not only in fictional depictions but also in real programs. As space policy expert Linda Billings has chronicled, American spaceflight advocates often evoke national mythology, drawing upon elements including frontier pioneering, continual progress, manifest destiny, free enterprise, rugged individualism, and a right to life without limit. Such arguments seek to remind people of how spaceflight efforts align with national ideals.

The connections between flight and American identity are not only illustrated in the collections at the National Air and Space Museum, but they are also an inextricable part of the Museums own history. When the building on the National Mall opened in the bicentennial year of 1976 as a birthday present to the nation, its message was clear: being an American meant being a citizen of the country that invented the airplane and landed humans on the Moon. As visitors walked into the founding design of the Milestones Hall, the Wright brothers original 1903 Flyer, the first heavier-than-air aircraft, hung above them. Literally and figuratively, the Museums layout suggested, every subsequent accomplishment in flight radiated out from this American invention. Just inside the door was a real, touchable Moon rock, still owned by NASA as part of the lunar samples returned during six successful lunar landings completed between 1969 and 1972. Across the room was