Space and the American Imagination

Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997. First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. x,294 pages. Illustrations. Notes. Index. Howard E. McCurdy is professor of public affairs in the public administration and policy department at American University. McCurdy is considered an expert on space policy and NASA. In 1998, he was selected to be the Charles A. Lindbergh Chair in Aerospace History, a one-year fellowship at the National Air and Space Museum. McCurdy received his bachelor's and master's degrees from the University of Washington and his Ph.D. from Cornell University. Elizabeth Hand reviewed McCurdy's history of the U.S. space program: "In Space and the American Imagination, Howard McCurdy doesn't give us the right stuff but the real stuff, the minutiae of policy debate and political razzing that brought the space program into being and seems destined to bury it. It's ... an important one [book]. Examining the popular images that have spurred Americans' enthusiasm in the space program, the author shows how the conquest of space appealed to the nation's deepest cultural ideals and became part of the Cold War effort. Derived from a Publishers Weekly article: In a book guaranteed to disturb technophiles and policy wonks, McCurdy examines the relationships over the past half century among the U.S. space program, the American national character, popular culture and public policy. In a nation where the distinction between perception and reality is becoming increasingly vague, imagination--for good or ill--drives public policy and the programs that implement it, he finds. In his brilliant conclusion, McCurdy writes, "Advocates took fantastic ideas and laid upon them images already rooted in the American culture, such as the myth of the frontier. The resulting vision... had the power to excite or entertain, or as in the case of the Cold War, to frighten. The vision prevailed... not because of its technical superiority but because it aroused the imaginations of people who viewed it." McCurdy compares the evolution of space exploration to the history of other policy arenas, from nuclear power and the war on poverty, revealing a consistent pattern. Policy shifts follow shifts in popular culture, he demonstrates, and cultural shifts follow imaginative new visions. And in late-20th-century America, he makes clear, those visions [are] carried primarily by advertising and the entertainment media.