European Journal of American Culture - Project Apollo and After, Sept 2020

During the 1960s, US and Soviet space efforts engaged in a surrogate space race at international expositions, displaying real and replica space hardware as a way of demonstrating their celestial achievements to an earthbound public. The following decade saw an uneasy détente between the Cold War superpowers that prompted a new rhetorical emphasis on space cooperation rather than competition that spilled over into transnational collaborations and exchanges between the curators of American and Soviet space exhibitions. Drawing on documents from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and Smithsonian Institution archives in Washington, DC, this article reveals how competitive displays of space technology were reconfigured to sell US–Soviet space cooperation. Official government-sponsored cooperative exhibits were spectacular and bombastic, but détente also fostered a quieter, transnational process of exchange between Soviet and American curators. American curators at the Smithsonian’s newly opened National Air and Space Museum were eager to build ties with their Soviet counterparts. However, the collaborations that resulted from these ties often ended up reinforcing their museum’s nationalistic narrative rather than subverting it. The 1970s saw the emergence of a transnational community of professional space curators dedicated to memorializing the early space age, but 1970s space exhibitions continued to reflect the previous decade’s nationalistic competition.

In the wake of the Apollo 8 mission on 21–27 December 1968, infamous atheist activist Madalyn Murray O’Hair threatened a lawsuit against the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). O’Hair, who had successfully fought against mandatory Bible reading and prayer in the public schools earlier in the decade, argued that NASA’s administrators knowingly violated the separation of church and state by allowing astronauts Frank Borman, William Anders and James Lovell to read from Genesis during their Christmas Eve broadcast from the moon’s orbit. The threat instantly garnered public attention due to O’Hair’s notoriety, particularly among evangelical Christians. Although the lawsuit was quietly dismissed a year later, letter-writing campaigns defending religious expression in outer space continued unabated, even after the last Apollo astronaut set foot on the moon’s surface in 1972. This article examines defences of prayer and Bible reading in outer space during the later Apollo missions from 1968 to 1976. It argues that these efforts reveal a favourable shift in evangelical attitudes towards the space programme – attitudes that were divided sharply prior to Apollo 8 were subsequently more unified as evangelicals combined the fight for prayer in outer space with other major battles over religious freedom. O’Hair’s lawsuit linked Apollo with evangelicals’ earthly concerns, prompting them to interpret American outer space exploration as an endeavour inextricably endowed with religious purpose. The emotional letters-of-thanks they penned and the strongly worded petitions protesting O’Hair they signed in the years following the Apollo 8 mission make a compelling case for incorporating the space programme more prominently into the broader historical discussion of evangelicalism in twentieth-century America.

Cape Canaveral, the site of the American space programme launch complex located on the coast of Central Florida, has both a deep history in technological innovation and has been the place for architecturally imagining the new frontier of civilization. The range and trajectory of this new extraterrestrial frontier today resides within this once remote wilderness at the ends of architecture – both at the ends of a disciplinary formation and the physical site that enables the departure from Earth. Cultural imaginaries, collective forms created by culture, such as images relating to the assumed efficiencies of space exploration, construct a political desire for departing the Earth, yet rely heavily on architectural and infrastructural devices that are soon left abandoned on our terrestrial surface. This article moves from the geographic space of the late nineteenth century to the celebrated technological objects of NASA’s Apollo 11 programme for reaching the moon. By tracking the range, escape and return of the Apollo programmes’ constructed environment, the American spaceport reveals an invisible wilderness as an architectural aesthetic formed out of the cultural imagination in the early twenty-first century.