Cosmos is a thing of formal order and beauty.
- Denis Cosgrove, describing the work of Alexander von Humboldt
This is a book about outer space, its relation to British culture and politics since the start of the twentieth century, and to geographical enquiry. It originated from a long-standing fascination with spaces of the imagination, science and technology, provoked by many of the iconic images of space exploration that proliferated Western culture throughout the twentieth century. This is a fascination that has by no means been restricted to any one time or place, as dreams of outer space are likely to be as old as humanity itself. Yet such imaginations, no matter how expansive, are inflected by a sense of place and associated cultures and politics, and this book aims to understand how outer space has been understood in the specific context of the United Kingdom, from the start of the twentieth century to the present day, using contemporary geographical approaches.
As the writer Arthur C Clarke pointed out in his 90th birthday reflections, uploaded to the internet in the early years of online video-sharing, the twentieth century was a period that witnessed rapid technological change, and in no area was this more apparent than in space exploration.1 Clarke had a significant influence on British understandings of outer space, perhaps more than any other individual, and his life-long role as someone who engaged with both the realm of the imagination and the world of science and technology reflects the outlook of this book, which is to say that, in order to fully understand the meanings of space exploration, it is essential to seek out the cultural and political roots of its scientific and technological discourses. As such, Clarke's involvement with the British Interplanetary Society (BIS), his early science-fiction novels, as well as some of his technical concepts of space exploration, are featured in a number of the forthcoming chapters, as prime examples of the cross-fertilisation of science and culture in understandings of outer space in Britain. In terms of organisations, the BIS was the most influential group in conceptualising outer space in Britain, whose significance stemmed from its straddling of technological and imaginative themes, and its continued longevity as the oldest space advocacy group in the world. While this book by no means offers a comprehensive account of this organisation, various episodes in its history are examined in several chapters, including its establishment in 1930sâ Liverpool, its post-war plans for configuring space exploration, and its expansive designs for interstellar flight. As such, the BIS encapsulates the dual nature of space exploration, as being part imagination, part techno-science, and in focussing on the cultural and political roots of space exploration in Britain, this book aims to broaden the scope of historical studies of outer space to take account of this hybrid quality. Indeed, when considering states such as the United Kingdom, in contrast to the principal space powers of the USA and Russia, acknowledgement of the imaginative as well as the technical becomes all the more important in appreciating the fundamental meanings of human spaceflight, space exploration and space science, and our complex relation to outer space here on Earth.
In such ways, this book argues that Britain became a home to rich discourses of outer space, both feeding from and contributing to iconic achievements in space exploration, while also embracing the cosmos in imaginative and philosophical ways.2 Cognisant of this spatial context, a central aim is to demonstrate how contemporary geographical enquiry can provide specific and valuable perspectives from which to understand outer space. This is an argument that was initiated by Denis Cosgrove, and his critique of Alexander von Humboldt's seminal work Cosmos helped to demonstrate geography's special relevance to thinking about outer space.3 The key thematic areas which provide the interface for this book's research, therefore, are the cultural, political and scientific understandings of outer space; the context of the United Kingdom since the start of the last century; and the geographical underpinnings of their relationship.
Contextualising geographies of outer space in Britain
Outer space has long provoked fascination in the human mind, examples of which can be traced back to Classical antiquity with whimsical stories of transcendence into the heavenly realm, such as Lucian's Icaro-Menippus of the second century, to the early ages of the Enlightenment in Western culture, in the revolutionary observations of Galileo and the imagined cosmic perspectives of Johannes Kepler, and later in the emergence of astrophysics, as the mysteries of the Universe have become deeper and more complex than had ever before been imagined. Yet the twentieth century was a time in which a profound shift in humanity's relation to the cosmos took place â the advent of spaceflight with the satellite Sputnik in 1957 and the human transcendence from Earth's gravity that was represented by the first cosmonauts and astronauts of the early 1960s. These, of course, were far from isolated events, and the cultural and political contexts of the âspace raceâ between the world superpowers of the twentieth century have been well-documented.4 Recently, these contexts have been shown to extend far beyond the immediate events of the Cold War or even the rocketry programmes of the Second World War that accelerated the onset of spaceflight. Indeed, researchers have shown how the roots of spaceflight can be traced to earlier origins, including early-twentieth-century scientific networks in Imperial Russia or the 1930sâ experiments of rocketry pioneers in California.5 The importance of cultures and politics of outer space outside of the bipolar Cold War nexus has also been recognised, with âEuropean astrocultureâ being shown to have had rich and diverse meanings that have often been overlooked in studies of outer space, while the colonial roots of European space exploration have also been acknowledged.6 What sets twentieth-century studies of outer space apart from studies in earlier periods is, therefore, the prospect of spaceflight and the associated cultures and politics of space exploration. While themes of astronomical observation or heavenly transcendence still come into play in this period, what tie together this book's focus on the twentieth century are the enduring possibilities of spaceflight, including its anticipation as well as its ongoing legacy. Studying fully the cultural and political contexts of spaceflight, then, involves considering a wide range of scientific, technological and imaginative sources that reach beyond the immediate environs of contemporary space agencies and individual heroes of the Space Age, to incorporate places whose connections to narratives of space exploration have been left relatively unstudied.
The United Kingdom has been understood as a relatively minor player in space exploration, with a paucity of human spaceflight experience in comparison to European and other international states, partly compensated by an established profile of private-sector space manufacturing and service companies. Yet there is a more complex story to tell about the UK's past and continuing role in outer space that considers the Cold-War-era efforts to produce a British-made satellite, the establishment of a British space-rocket to be launched from an anticipated spaceport in Australia, and the promotion of British private companiesâ involvement in the emerging space sector. There was, indeed, a period following the Second World War, amid an international nuclear arms race, in which the UK was briefly a world leader in outer-space research and rocket technologies.7 Looking back further into the pre-war period, when workable concepts of space exploration started to emerge for the first time, British groups were among the first to realise the technological potential of rocketry for reaching outer space, as evidenced by the recollections of Arthur C Clarke and his associates in the British Interplanetary Society. Furthermore, when considering the science and technology of outer space together with the broader cultures and politics of space exploration, including such registers as science fiction, astronomy and folklore, deeper connections can be identified. In this way, an approach that looks beyond national programmes and frontline geopolitical rivalries has a lot to offer in studies of outer space. Furthermore, such accounts help to understand the changing fortunes of British society from the start of the twentieth century, including the ways in which British geopolitical outlooks altered from a position of global dominance to becoming increasingly reliant on a range of international alliances, as well as the shifting status of British science and technology and the effects these changes had on the lives of people in the UK. Taken together, considerations of British scientific and technological achievement in outer space, couched in their own cultural and political contexts, alongside the legacy of imaginative representations of outer space, makes possible a rich narrative of engagement with outer space in the modern era. Indeed, a key argument of this book is that the UK had an active outer-space culture during and beyond the twentieth century, as much as any other nation of the world.
Considering outer space in the UK context from the start of the twentieth century raises questions about how British cultures and politics of outer space have differed from those elsewhere. Indeed, this becomes one aspect of the âgeographies of outer spaceâ that this book deals with, thinking about the ways in which particular spatial contexts, places and landscapes have influenced understandings of outer space, both official and popular. It is further argued that the diversity of approaches within the broad discipline of geography offers the potential for multiple analytical perspectives from cultural, political, historical and environmental geographies, across a wide range of possible case studies.8 Over and above such approaches, however, there is a more fundamental reason why geographical enquiry offers particular advantages and proclivities to studying outer space, as iterated by Denis Cosgrove and others.9 When Cosgrove wrote about Humboldt's nineteenth-century treatise Cosmos, that incorporated sections on the stars and planets as well as the features of the Earth, he was highlighting a long-standing tradition in geographical scholarship in which the spheres of the Heavens and the Earth were regarded in unison, as part of a divine creation, whereby one could not properly be understood without the other. Often represented in the twin production of terrestrial and celestial globes, this theme can be traced throughout Western culture, from the thinkers of the Classical period through to the Renaissance, including figures such as Aristotle, Ptolemy and Abraham Ortelius, and is a duality that, while diminished, can still be recognised today in some common atlases.10 Yet for Cosgrove, Humboldt's work, in its structure, tone, and modes of representation, signalled a shift in geographical thinking away from this historic tradition of cosmography, towards understanding the Earth as a two-dimensional realm of surfaces and territories, jettisoning the cosmic entirely from the professionalised discipline of geography. This was a move that was caught up in the imperatives of European colonialism, mapping, and the advent of geopolitics, the vestiges of which endured well into the twentieth century in a range of sub-disciplinary traditions. However, human geography's subsequent embracing of post-modernist philosophies, including the cultural turn in geography and a geographical turn in the social sciences, for Cosgrove, offers interesting opportunities for re-connecting with the cosmic spheres of old. The onset of space exploration has further provided an opportunity for this re-appraisal of humanity's connection to the spaces beyond the Earth's surface, supported thematically by new geographies of aerial, subterranean and other three-dimensional spaces.11 In looking above and beyond the Earth's surfaces, while considering the representation and experience of outer space as intimately connected to Earthly spaces, this book aims to re-kindle these deeper traditions of geographical enquiry, fostering a new geography of outer space that holds the cosmic and the terrestrial together in alignment.
Methods and sources
This book takes a selective sample of case studies to illustrate some of the predominant British cultures and politics of outer space since the start of the twentieth century. Examples were selected to cover the book's temporal range, and chapters are arranged accordingly in a chronological manner, starting with the early twentieth century and continuing to the present day. The onset of the last century provides not only a convenient starting-point, but it also was a time when certain understandings in the biological and physical sciences had started to provoke profound reflections on the existence of life on other worlds, or the possibility of interplanetary travel. Such considerations found expression in the works of the âfathers of science fictionâ, H G Wells and, in France, Jules Verne, beginning in earnest the anticipation of space exploration in Western culture. Although this is primarily a historical book, it seemed futile to foreclose any analysis of contemporary events, particularly as the late twentieth and early twenty-first century witnessed the first Britons to go into outer space, amid other developments. Indeed, as British engagement with outer space is likely to continue in interesting ways, looking towards the future is an important part of this book's final chapter, connecting again with the theme of anticipation that runs through this book. Given this timespan, a range of source materials have been interpreted, some archival in the traditional sense of being held materially in an institutional space, others readily available through online searches. Interviews have been an important source of more personal accounts, including one conducted by the author with Patrick Moore, as part of prior scholarly investigations. A multitude of interviews with key actors from secondary sources has also been invaluable in ascertaining individual outlooks and in triangulating certain events and programmes of work. Published sources, including science-fictional texts, specialist journals, and newspaper reports, have formed a substantial part of the source materials. Furthermore, parts of this book have been abridged from two articles published previously by the author, specifically sections of Chapters 3, 4 and 5.12
As a result of this selective sourcing, a number of possible case studies have been overlooked. For example, fictional representations of space exploration, such as C S Lewisâ âcosmic trilogyâ of novels, and the Dan Dare comic series have been left out, partly because they are the subject of existing works by this and many other researchers, but also because the themes they raised are represented by other examples in the chapters that follow.13 The primary focus on cultures of space exploration has also tended to result in the omission of some aspects of astronomy from the analysis, such as the advent of radio astronomy, or the ongoing influence of historic observatories, although certain chapters do testify to some of the enduring influence astronomical observation has had in British culture, while there does exist a substantive literature on these topics.14 In respect to issues of gender, class and ethnicity, the case studies in this book are broadly representative of the cultures and politics of outer space in the UK since the start of the twentieth century. However, this is not to sa...
