Spacefarers

Spacefarers: Images of Astronauts and Cosmonauts in the Heroic Era of edited by Michael J. Neufeld. Washington D.C., Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press, 2013. iv, 256 pp. $29.95 US (cloth). 1961/1981: Key Moments in Human Spaceflight, a NASA conference held in April 2011, inspired Dr. Michael J. Neufeld's edited volume. The book contains participants' revised papers, post-conference work, and one solicited work (chapter eight). The book explores how our popular cultural imagination of astronauts/cosmonauts began with narrow WASP-cowboy archetypes and how the culture subsequently struggled to broaden this image to include scientists, people of colour and women. This book holds spacefarers as symbolic of the collective dreams, hopes, fears, insecurities, and tensions of their respective nations and peoples in recent history. These archetypes are a product of the same cultures that continually consume and reinterpret them. The book's nine chapters subdivide into thirds. Part one examines the origins of US-astronaut images in 1940s television. Chapter one identifies how the lone cowboy protagonist thriving in mid-1950s television became a model image for spacefarers. Chapter two deconstructs the romantic mythology of the first astronauts (US military pilots) and the friction between them and subsequent scientist (non-pilot) astronauts. Pilot-astronauts, versus scientist-astronauts, were praised for representing the rugged strength and individualism of the US's post-war identity, an identity that would be challenged, as chapter three notes, by Soviet space successes and by a subsequent diversification of the astronauts' ranks. Part two compares cosmonauts and astronauts. Chapter four explores how museums celebrate the world's first spacefarer Yuri Gagarin first as a proletarian everyman turned national hero and subsequently as a religious icon. Gagarin-mania resembles the somewhat milder US nostalgia for lone cowboy astronauts explored in chapter three and thus bridges sections one and two. Chapter five reflects on how popular French magazine Paris Match stayed politically neutral in the cold war by celebrating astronauts/cosmonauts as peres tranquilles (easy-going dads) (p. 112) that would one day visit une maison dans l'espace (a space house or more specifically, Skylab). Similarly, chapter six's juxtaposition of propaganda images of the US and USSR space programs reveal more similarities than differences. In part three, chapter seven outlines the work required to create the 1985 IMAX film The Dream is Alive. The film, shot by the astronauts themselves shows how far the cowboy-spacefarer image expanded by the 1980s to include the role of auteur-filmmaker. Chapter eight by NASA historian Dr. Jennifer Ross-Nazzal examines the mainstream press's chauvinism in mediating the identities of the first women astronauts and is a standout chapter both for addressing a lack of content in other chapters and for its effective critique of the patriarchal astronaut culture

Aeronautics · Art · Spaceflight · Aerospace Engineering · Engineering · Space exploration and regulation · Space Science and Extraterrestrial Life