Abstract
Catherine Newell’s new book, Destined for the Stars: Faith, the Future, and America’s Final Frontier, starts with a deceptively simple question. Why, exactly, did American astronauts travel to the Moon in 1969? If you consider the long arc of human history, it is unusual that representatives of an individual nation-state would work so hard to reach a distant land without the immediate prospect of territorial expansion. Why not send manned missions to the bottom of the ocean? If the reason really was curiosity, why the fixation on sending humans to a distant and barren celestial neighbour?
The question is a big one and the historiography of the early space age has grappled with it in different ways. For some, the answer is rooted explicitly in politics; America went to the Moon because of a shifting geopolitical landscape spurred by the outbreak of the Cold War. For others, the historical drivers of human spaceflight are situated more tangibly in the realm of the cultural. People have imagined travelling to the Moon for centuries, thus ensuring its status as an activity loaded with meaning.
Destined for the Stars falls squarely in the second camp. Newell argues that the early successes of the American space programme were indebted to the visual tropes of nineteenth-century Manifest Destiny; expansion into space was easy to fathom because Americans already had a conceptual vocabulary for such an activity. According to Newell, space boosters consciously cast outer space as a type of frontier in the post-War period, retooling religious faith into a belief in the power of scientific endeavours. Like Howard McCurdy in his classic Space and the American Imagination, Newell contends that a broadly legible vision of spaceflight was critical to successfully undertaking it as a real project. However, while McCurdy focused on the proliferation of science fiction in American media, Destined for the Stars focuses on the treatment of outer space as a type of conquerable landscape.
The story is set in the 1950s and anchored around collaborations between Chesley Bonestell, Willy Ley, and Wernher von Braun in the years before NASA’s creation. The book contains stories that are likely familiar to space history’s usual readership – the widespread print circulation of The Conquest of Space, Collier’s “Man Will Conquer Space Soon” series, and the creation of Walt Disney’s Tomorrowland – but is coupled with analysis borrowed from religious studies. Newell’s book is one of very few in print to weigh the significance of Chesley Bonestell’s career equally alongside those of Ley and von Braun. Although Willy Ley’s knack for science writing and von Braun’s fame as a rocket scientist are critical to the narrative, Bonestell’s paintings sit squarely at centre of Newell’s argument. His illustrations are the book’s most compelling pieces of evidence. Newell goes to great lengths to establish similarities between Bonestell’s work and that of nineteenth-century American landscape painters. Just as members of the Hudson River School made remote views of the West legible to remote Eastern audiences, so too did Bonestell’s work frame outer space as an immediately conquerable realm.
The focus on Bonestell as a significant player in the history of the early space age makes Destined for the Stars a useful historiographical contribution, but the book also leaves room open for additional scholarship. There is a tension in the way Bonestell’s illustrations are described as “scientifically accurate” and simultaneously beholden to the romanticism of an imagined frontier. That Bonestell was committed to understanding astronomical principles might not be a question, but the extent to which those principles manifested themselves in his work might be an area for further investigation.
The other question readers might be left pondering is how a professedly secular nation like the USSR managed to establish a space programme at roughly the same scale as its American counterpart. If the Apollo Programme was successful because the United States was able to convincingly nest manned spaceflight under the conceptual rubric of Manifest Destiny, then how do we explain the achievements of the Soviet space programme in the first half of the 1960s? For this, maybe a return to political economy is necessary.
Regardless, Catherine Newell’s book is full of lively writing and refreshing analysis. Destined for the Stars will likely delight fans of popular culture in the early space age.