The West, if not the entire world, is experiencing a renaissance in all matters space. Not too long ago, the New York Times observed that all of a sudden outer space had ‘got sexy all over again’.Footnote 1 Not only is space ‘back’, both in the news and in the public imagination, but so are its glitzy advocates, bragging preachers and glamour boys. Techno-billionaires Jeff Bezos (Amazon/Blue Origin), Richard Branson (Virgin/Virgin Galactic) and, above all, Elon Musk (Tesla/SpaceX) now dominate all news from space. Working relentlessly to make their Apollo-age childhood dreams come true, these ‘astropreneurs’ would have us believe that the revival of space exploration is the only way to save humankind. With a promised imminent conquest of Mars, humans must – so they say – transform themselves into a ‘multi-planetary species’.Footnote 2 Selling private expansion dreams as technoscientific rescue missions for a planet threatened by the impending climate catastrophe and fears of extinction, these individuals stylize themselves as early twenty-first-century harbingers of a long-awaited interplanetary future. When Musk, the wealthiest man on this planet, officially changed his job title as Tesla’s CEO to ‘technoking’, the Times added a smug and less-than-subtle amendment to its tagline: not only has space become sexy again, but it has also emerged as a ‘place for phallic rockets paid for by billionaires’.Footnote 3
Historians of outer space, extraterrestrial life and planetarity instantly recognize long-shelved neocolonial tropes behind the rehashed escape-and-conquer scenarios that these self-made rocket stars unremittingly advertise to their eager audiences around the globe. Those interested in astroculture and bygone futures in the stars will be reminded of early spaceflight forecasts, both pre- and post-Second World War, when small groups of fearless adventurers would pave the way for the rest of humankind to follow.Footnote 4 In some of the most influential early space films, including Holger-Madsen’s Himmelskibet (1918), Fritz Lang’s Frau im Mond (1929) and Irving Pichel’s Destination Moon (1950), the rocketeers-turned-spacefarers aiming for the secularized heavens are private explorers, publicly ridiculed and declared eccentric, rather than anonymous government agencies or profit-oriented mega-corporations.Footnote 5 Studying the emergence, trajectories and afterlives of their ‘real-life’ equivalents – that is, the founding figures, influential technocelebrities and admired ‘stars’ of the early Space Age – as if they were fictive characters promises to unravel the inner workings of the enduring fascination with outer space. Thus the present BJHS special issue, Rocket Stars: Astrocultural Genealogies in the Global Space Age, exposes and challenges a masculinist, West-centric, chauvinist and hypercapitalist view of yet another future in the stars core to the present-day astropreneurs’ propaganda and their exuberant ‘Occupy Mars’ rhetoric.Footnote 6 Technokings of other kinds were adored around the globe long before Musk crowned himself, and it is for that reason that this issue turns to other hemispheres to understand such divergent canonization processes. Rocket stars did indeed prove central to the making of outer space as a public enterprise, yet in quite a different way than they themselves or their numerous admirers chose to portray.
Technokings and space celebrities
A biographical perspective remains one of the most conventional yet irrepressible approaches in the history of science and technology. Specific technical achievements, inventions and innovations are commonly credited to individuals, usually white males. Despite manifold attempts to recover the pivotal and too-often obscured contributions of female scientists, engineers and coders, ‘great men of science’ abound in the historiographical literature.Footnote 7 So-called technocelebrities – that is, individual engineers, technicians and scientists who have attracted such a degree of attention that their name has come to stand for an entire sub-discipline – dominate the public understanding of science and technology. Half a century ago, Rae Goodell coined the term ‘visible scientists’, and it is in that vein that media scholar Declan Fahy has traced the public rise – and, in some cases, fall – of a number of contemporary celebrity scientists, from Stephen Hawking to Neil deGrasse Tyson. Fame, Fahy argues, has become ‘the most powerful way of understanding ideas in a complex world’, with those star scholars morphing into cultural commodities in their own right.Footnote 8
In its epic scale and litany of ‘firsts’, space history has proven particularly prone to hero worship. Sociologists Katarina Damjanov and David Crouch have shown how celebrity status has continually been bestowed upon objects traversing outer space – not only animals such as Laika and humans such as Yuri Gagarin, but also artefacts, including the Mars rovers and Hubble Space Telescope.Footnote 9 Yet venerable space celebrities exist not only beyond the Earth’s atmosphere but also within. Starting in the mid-1920s, a motley crew of male amateurs – mostly engineers, writers and scientists – launched a generational effort to make outer space imaginable and the prospect of spaceflight socially respectable. The work of astroculture propaganda requires and produces stars, distilling complex expansion scenarios down to the ‘doers’ and their wide-ranging expansionist gospel. Consequently, over the course of the twentieth century, an unexpectedly large number of earthbound space advocates have attained a high level of social recognition that extends beyond expert circles and challenges conventional understandings of space history, which remains a relatively undertheorized and often under-complex sub-domain of the history of science and technology.
The complicated genealogies one observes today are as old as the so-called Space Age itself. ‘The future belongs to the space rocket’, advocates incessantly declared in assemblies, in print, on the radio and in film.Footnote 10 On their way to the stars, these proselytizers not only formed closely knit networks of transnationally connected space advocates, the ‘space international’, but also made themselves known to their audiences in Russia, Europe and the United States. It is here that one must seek the very beginnings of what media scholars have termed ‘celebrification’; that is, the process by which celebrity is fabricated, power is consolidated and social expectations are created and maintained.Footnote 11 This process depended on new media strategies, moving from film to magazines to commerce, and consciously self-reinforced its own messaging. Newly established expert journals, including the short-lived Die Rakete (1927–29), its post-war successor publication Weltraumfahrt (1950–66) and the extant Journal of the British Interplanetary Society (JBIS, 1934–), regularly ran portraits of their most prominent members, usually with headshots and sometimes even announced on issue covers. In its three short years of existence, Die Rakete alone portrayed fourteen ‘pioneers’ and the JBIS fifteen space advocates, while Weltraumfahrt continued a similar feature after the war.Footnote 12 In 1928, Willy Ley (1906–69), later dubbed the ‘self-styled historian of the pioneer phase of the space age’, edited an anthology Die Möglichkeit der Weltraumfahrt (The Possibility of Space Travel). It opened with short biographical sketches of the volume’s eight Austrian and German contributors, each featured in a black-and-white headshot underscoring their personal and professional sincerity (Figure 1).Footnote 13 Similarly, Rudolf Nebel’s (1894–1978) 1932 brochure Raketenflug introduced a set of nine ‘pioneers of rocket flight’ (‘Vorkämpfer des Raketenfluges’), with Russian teacher Konstantin Tsiolkovskii (1857–1935) and Berlin-based ‘inventor’ Hermann Ganswindt (1856–1934) leading the pack (Figure 2).Footnote 14 Both authors included themselves in these genealogies – Ley at the bottom left of the second image plate, Nebel at the bottom right – but not each other. Recently deceased experimentalist Max Valier (1895–1930) and private scholar Hermann Oberth (1894–1989) were the only ones included in both ancestral portrait galleries. Werner Brügel’s Männer der Rakete, a collection of portrayals of ‘rocket men’ published the following year, was more international: the thirteen ‘most distinguished rocket researchers’ came not only from Europe but also from Russia and the United States. Robert Esnault-Pelterie (1881–1957), Robert Goddard (1882–1945), Ley, Oberth, Nikolai Rynin (1887–1942) and Tsiolkovskii contributed biographical essays about – themselves.Footnote 15 If the emerging realm of outer space was an infinite unknown, its cast of characters was established and communicated in meticulous detail.
The eight German-speaking ‘spaceflight folks’ (Raumfahrtsleute) Willy Ley invited to contribute to his 1928 anthology Möglichkeit der Weltraumfahrt. Left, top to bottom: Hermann Oberth, Franz von Hoefft, Walter Hohmann, Karl Debus; right: Guido von Pirquet, Friedrich Wilhelm Sander, Willy Ley and Max Valier. Willy Ley (ed.), Die Möglichkeit der Weltraumfahrt: Allgemeinverständliche Beiträge zum Raumschiffahrtsproblem, Leipzig: Hachmeister & Thal, 1928, pp. ix, xi.
Nine ‘pioneers of rocket flight’. From left to right, top: Konstantin Tsiolkovskii, Hermann Ganswindt; middle: Reinhold Tiling, Fritz von Opel with Max Valier, Johannes Winkler; bottom: Klaus Riedel, Hermann Oberth, Rudolf Nebel. Valier and Oberth are the only ones listed on both plates. Rudolf Nebel, Raketenflug, Berlin: Raketenflugverlag Berlin-Reinickendorf, 1932, p. 11.
The global rupture and ensuing dislocation caused by the Second World War had little impact on this ‘epistemic community’ in the making.Footnote 16 Although known as prickly and belligerent, Oberth above all was lauded by his peers on both sides of the Atlantic (see Figure 3). Soon, he became a primus inter pares among the ‘small circle of men whom we call today pioneers of spaceflight’, as another chronicler of the space international put it.Footnote 17 When exactly Oberth was awarded the title ‘father of rocketry’, and by whom, remains unclear. However, by the early 1950s, his patriarchy was well established. ‘Perhaps more than any other man, Professor Oberth could fairly be described as the father of astronautics’, the JBIS confirmed in September 1951. When Oberth and Wernher von Braun (1911–77) received honorary doctorates from Technische Universität Berlin, von Braun was referred to as Oberth’s ‘son’.Footnote 18 Similarly, a 1965 best-of anthology, Coming of the Space Age, edited by Arthur C. Clarke (1917–2008), influential British futurist, science fiction writer and one of the most prolific and media-savvy players in this field, contained thirty-six exemplary ‘famous accounts of man’s probing of the universe’, including short ego-documents by Tsiolkovskii, Goddard and Oberth.Footnote 19
Ralph Andrew Smith (1905–59), the British Interplanetary Society’s ‘chief graphic artist’, explains his space station concept to Irene Sänger-Bredt (1911–83) and Hermann Oberth (1894–1989) during the Second International Astronautical Congress in London, 2 September 1951. Photograph by Reg Burkett, Hulton Archive, Getty Images.
Effectively, those ‘rocketeers’ – to use a more neutral and descriptive term that emphasizes the means of transport rather than the desired destination – acted as their own amateur historiographers through self-conscious documentation and strategic media exposure. Collectively and across borders, they created a glorious past, an upward trajectory ‘from imagination to reality’, upon which their successors could build.Footnote 20 Many professional historians would follow Ley’s path, not infrequently crossing the slippery threshold to undue glorification. Since the 1950s, books celebrating overlapping sets of ‘rocket men’, ‘fathers of space travel’, ‘space pioneers’ and ‘heroes of the Space Age’ have abounded, some more critical than others, most not critical at all.Footnote 21
Well into the 1960s, women were not included in the ever-growing ranks of public figures who became synonymous with the future of spaceflight. True to its title, Men of Space: Profiles of the Leaders in Space Research, Development, and Exploration, the most comprehensive space-historical biographical reference work published at that time, did not feature a single woman of space among the eighty-four portraits spread across eight volumes.Footnote 22 Consequently, no space ‘mothers’ or female ‘rocket stars’ can be claimed, either on Earth or in space, despite the concrete and consistent contributions of pivotal female figures. As the first female spacefarer, ‘cosmonette’ Valentina Tereshkova (1937–, spaceflight in 1963) is conventionally referenced in this context. Tereshkova was to be celebrated for being a ‘space first’ in her own right, and a planned exception after eleven male spacefarers, to demonstrate the Soviet Union’s progressiveness. However, once she had fulfilled her patriotic duty, Tereshkova was never permitted to fly again. Afterwards, it would take two decades for the first ‘astronette’, Sally Ride (1951–2012, spaceflight in 1983), to be launched. To this day, neither she nor any of her successors, including Christa McAuliffe (1948–86, spaceflight in 1986) and Mae Jemison (1956–, spaceflight in 1992), have attained technocelebrity status.Footnote 23
The sole woman among the early spaceflight advocates and practitioners was Irene Sänger-Bredt (1911–83) (Figure 3, centre), the only female key player by far. Having earned a doctorate in physics in Bonn in 1937, she joined the Raketenflugtechnisches Institut of the German Air Force, a rocket testing site disguised as an aviation research centre in Trauen, in the Lüneburg Heath, as an assistant to its director, Eugen Sänger (1905–64).Footnote 24 They became a couple, moved to France in 1945, married in 1951 and returned to Germany in 1954. In the autumn of 1959, Sänger-Bredt was the only female founding member of the International Academy of Astronautics.Footnote 25 As the original ‘plurality of founding heroes’ was increasingly reduced and Eugen Sänger’s place in the emerging canon seemed not so assured, his wife’s was even less so. Rather than advocating for herself, after Sänger’s sudden death his widow convened a 1971 symposium entitled ‘Pioniere der Raumfahrt’ in Stuttgart as a countermeasure, with the hardly concealed agenda of securing her husband’s place in the Olympus of those spaceflight pioneers. ‘Legacy custodian’, one journal titled a biographical sketch of Irene Sänger-Bredt.Footnote 26
The three-heroes scheme
From a pool of approximately a hundred men, eventually a holy trinity emerged: Tsiolkovskii in Russia, Goddard in the United States and Oberth in Germany. Each of these men was gradually bestowed the honorary title of ‘founding father’. All born in the nineteenth century, these three academic outsiders are conventionally credited with being the first to make the idea of spaceflight both scientifically and technologically feasible. Naming this three-heroes scheme the ‘TGO interpretation’ – for Tsiolkovskii–Goddard–Oberth – historian and museum curator Michael Neufeld has traced the trope’s emergence over the course of the twentieth century. He locates its widespread acceptance sometime between 1957 and 1967, when the rapid acceleration of the Space Race after the launch of Sputnik required the creation of nationally distinct spaceflight genealogies. Each would only be complete once a nationally distinct founding father had been transformed into a socially acknowledged authority figure, the alleged starting point of things to come (Figure 4).Footnote 27
This 1975 sketch, ‘Friendship across all borders’, was drawn on the occasion of the American–Soviet Apollo–Soyuz Test project, the first docking of a US and a Soviet spacecraft in Earth orbit and often said to mark the end of the Space Race. It portrays Robert Goddard, Hermann Oberth and Konstantin Tsiolkovskii as the originators of spaceflight, a key technology promising not only human but also planetary unity. Hermann Fritz, ‘Freundschaft über alle Grenzen: Apollo-Sojus-Unternehmen 15. Juli 1975’, DMA, LR, PERS00132 Hermann Oberth.
Upon further examination, however, it becomes evident that the pool of potential contenders was more extensive and less clear-cut than Neufeld asserts, both chronologically and geographically. Precursors and variants of the TGO scheme can be found as early as 1931 and in languages other than Russian, English and German, with different authors propagating different, if overlapping, constellations of heroes.Footnote 28 Since its canonization, the TGO interpretation has served as the foundation for numerous present-day histories of spaceflight, in addition to virtually all of the few quasi-textbooks that exist, including Neufeld’s own.Footnote 29 With Oberth himself the notable exception, all major paternity candidates have been subject to comprehensive biographical treatment:Footnote 30 There are at least three Tsiolkovskii biographies.Footnote 31 Six monographs have been dedicated to Goddard.Footnote 32 Ley has been treated a single time.Footnote 33 At least three Clarke biographies have been written.Footnote 34 Sergei Korolev (1907–66) is the subject of at least three monographs.Footnote 35 And von Braun alone boasts almost ten, with the first published when he was forty-eight years old.Footnote 36 Of the surveyed twenty-nine biographies, seven bear in their title the metaphor of the ‘father of spaceflight’, albeit referring to different progenitors.Footnote 37
Some reject the tri-national pedigree altogether. Paternal honours – one counterargument goes – should remain reserved for the space movement’s ‘second generation’, von Braun and Korolev, as the masterminds behind the Soviet and American spaceflight programmes. A second objection is that actual space travel should be a conditio sine qua non for space celebrity status, and that the honour should go to Soviet space dog Laika (1954–7), who, in November 1957, became the first mammal to orbit Earth. Voluntarily or not, Laika and her successors Belka and Strelka – the first ‘space pop stars’ – laid the ground for all subsequent spacefarers’ celebrification.Footnote 38
The contributions to this special issue broach a third objection. The very moment at which space historians’ gaze turns to other hemispheres, quite a different set of rocket stars comes into view, calling existing canonizations into question (Figure 5). Equivalent founding-father figures, space pioneers and technocelebrities also exist within national traditions other than the former superpowers and beyond the global North. Rocket scientist Qian Xuesen (1911–2009) and physicist Vikram Sarabhai (1919–71) are generally accorded foundational roles for having launched spaceflight programmes in China and India respectively.Footnote 39 In 1956, Clarke relocated his one-man operation to Sri Lanka, whence he would coordinate his global activities for over half a century.Footnote 40 In addition, spacefarers Sigmund Jähn (1937–2019), Ulf Merbold (1941–) and Arnaldo Tamayo Méndez (1942–) have constantly been fashioned as poster boys of the East or West German and Cuban space efforts since their first spaceflights in 1978, 1983 and 1980 respectively.Footnote 41 Whether they are memorialized and celebrated as ‘father of spaceflight’, ‘space pioneer’, ‘prophet of the Space Age’ or some more specific moniker – ‘first German in space’, first Black, Latin American or Spanish-speaking spacefarer – each of their names continues to occupy a central position within the respective national narratives. Their making and public careers warrant thorough deconstruction, just as the TGO interpretation needs to be reconsidered and, if necessary, modified at the moment space history goes global and, eventually, transforms into planetary history.Footnote 42
Without claiming to be exhaustive, this chart lists selected key protagonists of the global Space Age in chronological order, suggesting a heuristic distinction between ‘founding figures’, ‘advocates’, ‘engineers’ and ‘spacefarers’ (with the date of the first spaceflight indicated by a dot). Regions and countries of origin are grouped by continent: Russia (purple), the Americas (blue), Europe (green) and Asia (red). The six rocket stars covered by individual contributions to this special issue are marked with an asterisk. Graph by Raven M. Davis, Georgia Institute of Technology.
The appeal of the persona
This special issue zooms in on these six rocket stars from a meta-biographical rather than a conventional biographical perspective. The concept it puts forward is that of ‘persona’. Originally developed by social theorists as diverse as C.G. Jung and Marcel Mauss in the 1930s, persona has seen a remarkable, yet at times equally confusing, rise in the past two decades.Footnote 43 While the concept has broader and older intellectual roots, it was in the early 2000s that a group of historians of science around Lorraine Daston and H. Otto Sibum claimed origin. They were interested in the creation of a particular type of scientific person, and used the concept to coin the notion of a ‘scientific persona’.Footnote 44 A decade later, in the early 2010s, Australian media and communication scholar P. David Marshall and others began to propagate the persona concept as well. Apparently unaware of its earlier rediscovery, they suggested employing ‘persona’ to study how individuals produce, perform and publicize a version of themselves. Coming from celebrity studies, Marshall et al. aimed to reconceptualize, restructure and systematize their field by focusing on the making of online identities and the public proliferation of self-made selves in contemporary media culture. In 2015, they founded an open-access journal called Persona Studies; four years later, they published an introductory textbook.Footnote 45 In the interim, a third group, largely composed of Dutch historians, developed and explored the term ‘scholarly’ – as opposed to ‘scientific’ – personae with a view to studying historians’ professional selfhoods, predominantly in nineteenth-century Europe.Footnote 46
The term’s own meteoric rise to fame has not furthered consensus among proponents about its analytical clarity. A cacophony of conceptual ideas is now subsumed under the ‘persona’ buzzword. Variants include the aforementioned scientific persona, media persona and scholarly persona, but also political persona, journalistic persona and persona performance. To make matters worse, in 2008, prior to the recent upswing of ‘persona’, the present author proposed its application to space history in an article entitled ‘Space personae: cosmopolitan networks of peripheral knowledge, 1927–1957’. Cited about three dozen times, but never with explicit reference to the persona concept, the article seems to have fallen short of enticing other space historians to explore persona’s analytical usefulness.Footnote 47
Apparently equally dissatisfied with such conceptual confusion, Gadi Algazi and Herman Paul, two protagonists of the persona boom, have suggested distinguishing between a micro, meso and macro approach when studying ‘models of scholarly selfhood’. Whereas scholars interested in the micro level would be looking at the orchestration of an individual’s public appearances, those engaging in the macro approach would instead be seeking group templates, collective ideal types of selfhood making. While Marshall et al. stand for the former, Daston et al. exemplify the latter. As its name implies, the meso approach mediates between both perspectives, combining the individual with the archetypal.Footnote 48
What, fundamentally, all these approaches share – regardless of whether they target mediatized, scientific, scholarly or any other personas – is that they distinguish between the person and the persona. A persona is not a person, even if a persona presupposes an individual. Marshall, Moore and Barbour define persona as
a strategic public identity that is neither the true individual nor a false individual. It is an identity that is used to navigate the social world and only exists to manage collective connections. It is a performance of the self for strategies to be used in some public setting.
The key idea – emphasized elsewhere – is the ‘production of a public self’.Footnote 49 Oscillating between private and public, a persona is never given but always made. Its production follows strategic and political rationales. Even if it retains elements of subjectivity, eventually the persona becomes a collectively shared quasi-object that rests with the public rather than the individual. At the same time, persona is not synonymous with celebrity either. Every celebrity is a persona, but not every persona is necessarily a celebrity. It is by taking a persona approach that one exposes the process of celebrification itself.Footnote 50
For historians, the intricate person–persona relationship constitutes a challenge and an opportunity alike. While Marshall, Moore and Barbour blithely concede that historicity is not their concept’s forte, the problem lies considerably deeper.Footnote 51 Despite a long-standing debate about the historical power of individuals versus that of structures, in day-to-day operations historians usually strive to combine both standard explanatory models – an individualized and a structural one. For the persona concept to be useful for historians, that duality must remain in place. Unless producing a conventional biography is the aim, a strict and exclusive focus on how a particular individual created their own public self would not be worthwhile. Simultaneously, it is hard to imagine a public self whose respective ‘person’ has played no part in its creation. As a public version of an individual, the persona is processual, never completed, and subject to both collective expectations and historical change, including posthumously. It cannot exist without both an individual and an audience; the exact proportions vary historically and culturally. The key challenge for historians working with persona is, then, to balance both perspectives – a persona’s making ‘from within’ and that ‘from without’. As the contributions demonstrate, the concept of persona allows for critical meta-biographical work without relapsing into individual or collective hagiography.
Pedigree, production and patrimonies in the global Space Age
This special issue employs this persona concept to interrogate the making, appeal and legacy of six space patriarchs in five national contexts across four continents. Contributions dissect the interweaving dialectics between the genesis of technoscientific celebrities and the creation of distinct, yet interdependent, spaceflight genealogies in and for emerging space powers from the 1950s to the early twenty-first century, exploring cultural patterns and political contours of a global Cold War Space Age and beyond. To do so, they draw on a wide array of written and visual sources, including artwork, caricature, film and, as a special feature, philately. The issuing of postage stamps, at times that of entire series, is usually considered an expression of the far-reaching ‘official’ significance assigned to a person or object and what the respective state wishes to celebrate and commemorate. Historically, postage stamps ‘carry the aura of that political authority with them’, as one scholar has pointed out. Since its beginnings, spaceflight has offered particular appeal.Footnote 52 All six rocket stars discussed here were not only subject to their own stamp portraits, often even more than once, but frequently also featured in national contexts other than their homelands – for instance, Jähn and Tamayo in Vietnam and Mongolia, and Clarke and Merbold in Guinea.
The five contributions to this special issue centre on three overarching questions, which can be subsumed under the keywords pedigrees, production and patrimonies:
1. Pedigrees. Articles investigate the origins of these founding-father myths, generally during different phases of the global Cold War and concomitant decolonization processes. When and where did these personas initially emerge? By whom and to what end were rocket stars acclaimed as national heroes? Why did they receive patriarchal-figure status? And what political roles and cultural virtues were they attributed by their respective audiences?
2. Production. Contributions ask how respective figures were successively made and remade, consumed and perceived. What media techniques were used, what rhetorical and visual strategies were employed, and how did audiences respond? Furthermore, what, if any, role did the respective person themselves have in the fashioning of ‘their’ personas? Of the six cases examined, Clarke was more actively engaged in the fabrication of his own persona than any other.Footnote 53 While contributions strive to move away from the individual – again, the articles do not constitute mini-biographies – the question of subjectivity in general and personal agency in particular is inevitable. It is for this reason that autobiographical writings and ego-documents, when available, form part and parcel of the respective analyses, even if they are not specifically the focus.Footnote 54 Productively used, these categories expose cultural and political dynamics in the constant (re)ordering of society and the self.
3. Patrimonies. The third set of questions transcends individual cases. As – again – the persona rather than the person is central to scholarly interest, all contributions go beyond the lifetimes of their respective protagonists, sometimes by decades, to explore the afterlives, legacies and personality cults of these rocket stars. For instance, between 1932 and 1935 the Soviet state built up a designated hero cult around Tsiolkovskii that would eventually cement his position as one of the holy spaceflight trinity.Footnote 55 Both Jähn and Qian have had museums erected in their honour.Footnote 56
In addition to these three sets of overarching questions, contributions share a set of three subcutaneous strands that can be subsumed under the keywords conceptual cohesion, pervasive masculinity and indirect comparability:
1. Conceptual cohesion. Contributions to this special issue work with the specific version of the persona concept outlined above and explore both its empirical benefits and its drawbacks. Less of a concerted effort, however, has been made to harmonize other analytical categories, including ‘expert’, ‘technocrat’, ‘public intellectual’ and other comparable attributions – themselves all subject to considerable historiographies and substantial debates. Thus usage was decided from the bottom up, dependent on the respective case, its analytical requirements, the specific approach chosen and the overall historical argument proposed. Some space personas under scrutiny did indeed become veritable celebrities, but the degrees of public attention they attracted differed significantly.
2. Pervasive masculinity. As emphasized above, all these technokings, space fathers and rocket men were indeed – men. Although the 2016 release of Hidden Figures, an Oscar-nominated film based on Margot Lee Shetterly’s homonymous non-fiction book, brought to the public’s attention the diverse, often pivotal, and hitherto overlooked contributions of women – specifically African American female ‘computers’ – to the development of spaceflight technology, there was not a single individual who was celebrated in a manner comparable to their male counterparts as a ‘mother of spaceflight’ or ‘rocket queen’.Footnote 57 Even though the space patriarchs’ pervasive masculinity is explicitly not our primary analytical focus, gender is obviously so central to their persona fabrication that it cannot be ignored, as it arguably sheds light on their continuing presence in the rhetoric of space exploration today. Whether such pervasive masculinity directly corresponds with the phallism of the rocket is left for others to explore.Footnote 58
3. Indirect comparability. As the six rocket stars and their respective makings are examined both from the bottom up and from the inside out, it is not easy to juxtapose and draw direct comparisons between the cases. However, posing identical sets of questions ensures a certain degree of indirect comparability. Thus these self-contained articles can be seen as constituting building blocks of a much larger prosopographical enterprise, in the tradition of collective biography writing, yet turned reflexive through the persona focus.Footnote 59
Finally, the analytical model developed here could be applied both to those rocket stars not covered by this special issue and to the aforementioned science celebrities. While it is impossible to compile an exhaustive list, in Europe the likes of French aircraft designer Robert Esnault-Pelterie, French publicist Alexandre Ananoff (1910–92) and British astronomer and popular television presenter Sir Patrick Moore (1923–2012) come to mind.Footnote 60 In the United States, potential candidates include Californian rocketeer turned Parisian artist Frank Malina (1912–81); German American rocket engineer and space colonization advocate Krafft Arnold Ehricke (1917–84); and astronomer, ‘showman of science’ and ‘cosmic explainer’ Carl Sagan (1934–96).Footnote 61 And in Asia, the Japanese ‘Dr Rocket’ Hideo Itokawa (1912–99) parallels Qian’s and Sarabhai’s national canonization.Footnote 62
Whether nowadays less known, but once popular and partially controversial, father-figure contenders such as German manufacturer Hermann Ganswindt, Peruvian diplomat Pedro Paulet Mostajo (1874–1945), Italian engineer Luigi Gussalli (1885–1950), Austrian spaceflight propagandist Max Valier and other so-called ‘forgotten pioneers’ could also be subjected to similar deconstructions depends on the precise research interest.Footnote 63 Their historical significance and public resonance were secondary compared to those of their comrades-in-arms, and none of them morphed into a genuine rocket star or became part of a national canon. Moreover, as similar father-figure tropes and overarching technocelebrity types can easily be identified in virtually every other subfield within the history of science and technology, the persona-centred (meta-)biographical approach demonstrated here in practice could be transposed accordingly, especially when following global flows of knowledge. In addition to superhero science stars like Albert Einstein, Marie Curie and Robert Oppenheimer, for instance, French marine explorer Jacques-Yves Cousteau (1910–97), Norwegian ethnographer Thor Heyerdahl (1914–2002), Chinese agronomist Yuan Longping (1929–2021) and English primatologist Jane Goodall (1934–) would undoubtedly warrant close readings of their respective celebrification careers.Footnote 64
Ultimately, this special issue Rocket Stars unpacks some of the sociopolitical and cultural forces driving the world-encompassing allure of outer space, analysing divergent cases of celebrification globally and their geopolitical specificities in order to historicize persistent fantasies of exploration, exploitation and conquest. In space history, as in many other historical fields and sub-disciplines, in recent years much innovation has resulted less from new methodological or conceptual developments than from concerted efforts to decentre, decolonialize and increase inclusivity. In the present context, such geographical and cultural enlargement shifts the underlying questions. Did these celebrated father figures reinforce distinct national features or contribute to one nascent global astroculture, yet with different local, regional and national varieties? Do their respective rises to fame suggest the existence of a worldwide demand for making localized sense of spaceflight as an irresistible, yet hypercomplex, technology usually celebrated as the pinnacle of technological modernity? Moreover, how can the coexistence of national spaceflight genealogies historiographically be integrated into one emerging global history of outer space, space thought and astroculture?
Rocket Stars does not stop at complementing or correcting the original ‘three-heroes’ scheme with a more diverse set of actors. As the conventional bipolar Cold War–Space Race explanatory model reaches its limits when transposed to other regions, historians must ponder replacing the idea of one monolithic Space Age with multiple variants or – even better – develop the notion of a polycentric, interconnected and multitemporal global Space Age. Contributions to this special issue do not leave any doubt as to the political use, cultural appeal and popular resonance of spaceflight in China, Cuba, East and West Germany, India and Sri Lanka personified by the six rocket stars in the limelight. Together, they remind us of the power of space as a key fantasy, project and product of the twentieth century, circulating around the planet.
Acknowledgements
Special thanks are extended to all members of the Global Astroculture Research Group, especially Haitian Ma and Tilmann Siebeneichner, but also David Baneke, Maritza Gómez Revuelta, Lu Liu, Asif Siddiqi and David Skogerboe. Raven Davis patiently created multiple versions of the graph. I am equally indebted to Maximilian Arrouas, Daniel Brandau, Ralf Bülow, Ingrid He, Michèle Matetschk-Delhaes, Michael Neufeld, Ruth Oldenziel, Florian Preiß, Amanda Rees, Sarah Thompson and, as always, Anna Kathryn Kendrick. While I was putting the final touches to the manuscript, the wonderful space historian, long-time museum curator and cherished friend Martin J. Collins passed away. Martin joined some of us at the Qian Xuesen Museum in Shanghai long before this issue was in development, supporting its – and my own – intellectual development in his gentle yet incisive way over the years. This special issue is dedicated to his memory.
Open access
