![]() ![]() Clarke (1917-2008), this article analzyes the making of a cosmopolitan space international before and after the Second World War. How has European astrofuturism developed into a central element of Western modernity? Focusing on the activities of the early spaceflight movement, in particular key protagonists Willy Ley (1906-1969) and Arthur C. The history of space stations and their development over time, and what it portends for the future of space policy, is the subject of this essay. Suddenly, the space station had become irrelevant to American efforts in space. In that context, he advocated the retirement of the Space Shuttle by 2010 and the ending of U.S. Bush announced a reorientation of NASA’s programs to emphasize a return to the Moon and a human expedition to Mars. On January 14, 2004, moreover, President George W. ![]() But even as ISS became a reality, on February 1, 2003, its role was made tenuous by the loss of the Columbia space shuttle and the grounding of the fleet. This found realization through the building of the International Space Station (ISS) at the end of the century. This involved as its centerpieces the development of an orbital workshop leading to a space station, and a reusable vehicle to transport people and cargo to and from Earth orbit with a modicum of efficiency. They turned to advocating the development of major projects that would create for the United States a permanent infrastructure in space, and eventually the capability to leave Earth permanently. In the latter part of the 1960s many in the leadership of NASA realized that the kind of resources that had been made available for the sprint to the Moon that was Project Apollo would not be repeated. While the first space station in American culture was described in an 1869 work of fiction in the Atlantic Monthly, in the twentieth century the idea proliferated through all cultures as the sine qua non enabling technology for space exploration. Rather than invoking oft-repeated narratives of a bipolar Cold War rivalry and an escalating Space Race, Limiting Outer Space breaks fascinating new ground by exploring a hitherto underrated and understudied decade, the Post-Apollo period. Bringing together the history of European astroculture and American-Soviet spaceflight with recent scholarship on the 'long 1970s,' the thirteen chapters in this cutting-edge volume examine this period of transition and reconfiguration from a multiplicity of disciplinary perspectives. With the rapid waning of the worldwide Apollo frenzy, the optimism of the Space Age gave way to an era of planetized limits and space fatigue. No longer considered the inevitable destination of infinite human expansion, outer space lost much of the popular appeal, cultural significance and political urgency that it had gained since the end of the Second World War. With the return of the last astronaut in 1972, the skies – rather than the distant stars – once again became the limit. After the Apollo moon landings, disillusionment set in. ![]()
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