Sputnik and The Space Age
With the launch of Sputnik in October 1957, spaceflight became a fact and a rich canvas for human action and imagination. We are now 50 years into humanity's historic effort to reach beyond Earth and explore, comprehend, and use the vast domain of space. In recounting this effort, spaceflight often is regarded as a story of firsts and triumphs leavened with the occasional failure and missed opportunity. Having lived through five decades of the space age, we might now look to add more texture to this story and ponder the details of well- and little-known acts as well as the larger meanings and effects of our venture into space.
Seen from this vantage, spaceflight, especially in the United States, clearly emerges as a central thread in national life, intertwining with politics, business, foreign affairs, the worlds of science and technology, popular culture, and our very sense of who we are and our place on the Earth and in the universe. In those 50 years, spaceflight in all it guises — from Earth-orbiting satellites of various kinds, from probes to the planets, to human exploration — has traversed from the exceptional to the everyday. Spaceflight and its achievements literally surround us — in how we think, consider the future, and in how we live minute-by-minute in each day.
After Sputnik: 50 Years of the Space Age explores this transformation through the distinctive eye of a national museum and its storehouse of artifacts. The Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum holds in trust nearly 14,000 artifacts relating to rocketry and spaceflight. These objects range from nineteenth-century military rockets, to treasures of the Apollo journey to the Moon, to SpaceShipOne (pictured, right), winner in 2004 of the Ansari X Prize for demonstrating the possibility of privately financed human spaceflight. Through a selection of more than 140 artifacts from the Museum collection this book seeks to convey the broad sweep of the space age. The book presents each artifact as an individual story, seen in detail but connected to larger outlines of American history and spaceflight's role in shaping our world.
Telling the history of spaceflight through artifacts is not a mere convenience. The "real stuff" of history offers a distinctive way to engage the past. In 1881, George Brown Goode, a leader in shaping the Smithsonian, offered that "objects … [are] permanent landmarks of the progress of the world in thought, in culture, or in industrial achievement." Their value is the same today. For scholars and visitors alike the "real stuff" of history pushes us to think and explore how and why an object was created, used, and participated in changing our lives. All have a story, wide-ranging and revealing of a particular historical moment. Each arose from a complex saga of individual creativity and inspiration, politics and ideologies, deep cultural beliefs, and more. Each bears the stamp of specific challenges, successes, and missteps. Each is a slice of the world. In its sturdy, undeniable presence, each artifact asks us, in unique fashion, to reflect on choices seen and made. Individually and in total, the artifacts in this book invite the reader to reflect on the space age as a lived, flesh-and-blood undertaking and a venture that has remapped the human experience.
After Sputnik is a testament to the unique story-telling power of the "real stuff." New, richly detailed photography of each artifact and "behind-the-scenes" essays reveal the many ways in which space became part of the fabric of our lives.
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