In 2006, historian Asif Siddiqi, a professor at New York's Fordham University and a specialist of Russian-Soviet space exploration, proposed a historiographical review of US space history.1 This history was American in more ways than one: first, because it was largely written by historians or commentators based in the United States; second, because this history benefitted greatly from support from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), responsible for space activities and safeguarding its heritage in the United States; and finally, because the object of study was the US space programme.2
Six years later, Alexander Geppert noted, in a brief historiographical review in the introduction to Imagining Outer Space,3 that the perspective A. Siddiqi had adopted, centred on the United States, was not only due to a biased and partial choice. It was also, to a certain extent, representative of a historiography primarily dominated by the work of American historians and political scientists who gave considerable space to American missions, actors and laboratories. While in the interval that elapsed between these two publications, research emerged on the Soviet Russian "case"4 and new countries in space,5 little treatment was given to Europe (and in Europe, France). Thus, the very purpose of the collective volume Imagining Outer Space was to include Europe in historical inquiry and it proposed an encompassing concept – that of "astroculture" – to study what ‘Europe in space’ had been.6 Before detailing this concept and discussing the decidedly cultural turn it seeks to bring to the fore, this article offers a brief historiographical review of the history of space and outer space activities, especially in the European context.
1. The Role of Space Agencies in the History of Space
Whether in the US or Europe, space activities have been and continue to be widely written about by the actors involved in developing space technology and science, "major witnesses" such as astronauts or scientists involved in national space programmes, or by experts with a largely normative discourse7. Among these actors, NASA has played an important role in developing a history that was long institutional and marked by concepts and ideas of "exploration", "competition", "technical progress" and "human spaceflight." This history has now moved closer to broader historical fields, be they political history, the history of technology, social history or cultural history.8
In comparison, the historical programme at the European Space Agency (ESA) since the 1990s has been much less ambitious. The European programme favours institutional history,9 centred on ESA and prior organizations, and history based on reports commissioned to document specific moments of European space policy or specific achievements.10 Later, the writing of national histories was added to this programme, addressed mainly from a political angle that should eventually cover all the Member States of the Agency.11
In France, the National Centre for Space Studies (CNES) has also not taken responsibility for a historical programme. Although it supports research in the humanities and social sciences through some research programmes and post-doctoral fellowships, and has made available tools and lists of heritage items to researchers, its action remains limited and fragmented.12 As for commemorative events, such as 30th and 50th anniversaries, they have not led to the writing of historical narratives attempting to inscribe the institution's developments into a broader social, political and cultural context nor to explore the relationships among them. The book published on the occasion of CNES’ 30th anniversary is akin to an institutional chronology documenting the achievements of the French Space Agency.13 Another published on the 50-year anniversary of the agency, although it is rooted in a cultural approach, deliberately dodges the problem of grand narrative by emphasizing the juxtaposition of viewpoints on aspects that are different, multiple and not limited to history.14
These works can be used as a foundation for research by future historians on how and why certain techniques emerged and why some politico-socio-technical compromises were made. Yet I would also add the small number of institutional histories documenting the achievements of certain laboratories that have played an important and permanent role in space technology and science in France,15 as well as publications of conference proceedings organized in the first half of the 2000s by the French Institute for Space history [IFHE].16 While all these studies share the characteristic features of a literature centred on the role of institutions and certain "pioneers," which are intentionally progressivist and disconnected from the sort of social, political, and cultural questioning that has marked the field of professional history in the last decades, they do constitute a written memory of the subject. As such, they provide essential documentation to then enable historians to work on this subject, which seems fragmented and undeveloped due to the lack of regular and ambitious investment by space agencies. Moreover, they are sources in themselves for analyzing the construction of the memory of the space sector.
2. Space through the Lens of Historical and Sociological Inquiry
In addition to the studies funded by space agencies seeking to establish or protect a memory and a heritage, although not quite a proper history, the space industry has also interested professional historians (and sociologists) who have found it to be a fertile ground for analysing broader dynamics. Although excluding here studies that focus on the contemporary geopolitical issues of space programmes,17 without doubt the most numerous, I would mention, in a relatively chronological order, studies that document the beginnings of French space policy, that take a political history approach marked by the history of international relations.18 Development in the space sector, which, at least until recently, favoured prototypes and technological sophistication, has drawn the attention of specialists in the economic history of contemporary France, because the space sector’s specific characteristics have enabled a series of high-tech companies to emerge.19
Then, historians of science and technology have been particularly interested in this subject. In this field, which in recent decades has undergone many changes in its questions and methods and seen the growth of political, social and cultural studies,20 approaches vary. Within a first subset related to the history of technology, research has focused on the emergence of technical innovations and their effects on a field or a science that is not necessarily space per se, such as satellites in the history of telecommunications21 or managing spatial data from instruments onboard satellites in earth sciences.22 Other studies have included the space sector in the history of earth sciences or environmental history, sometimes superficially, sometimes more thoroughly.23 In this regard, however, historical studies of space technology (regardless of the angle from which they are done and the meaning we attribute to this term) occupy a rather small place while they may be of interest to historians of numerous fields: meteorology, geology, oceanography, and atmospheric sciences (all components of what has contributed to the emergence of "Earth System Science"),24 as well as historians of astronomy (with subjects ranging from planetary science to astrophysics).25
The study of space activities is not limited to analysing them in relation to contemporary scientific developments and the political, social and cultural conditions of their emergence (with an approach particularly marked by constructivism).26 The study of space is also explicitly grounded in sociological analyses, attentive to the ways in which a scientific-technical field is organized and changes over time, depending on political, managerial or institutional transformations.27 In addition, research on space activities is also connected to the study of social and cultural resonances that reach beyond the scientific and technical community.
Thus, a first approach is to study how space activities are mentioned, perceived or narrated in other settings, particularly through the intermediary of the media. The most promising studies in this field are not content to analyse media discourse as a direct reflection of space activities, but rather to consider how the media helps to forge collective representations of space and space activities, through its very professional standards (that differ from those in scientific and technical fields) and its particular requirements in terms of writing, funding, etc.28 To this end, various approaches can be used and enrich each other: the history of space seen through the lens of science and technology intersects with issues in information science and communication, the history of the press, publishing, or television in building a cultural history of space.
Within this perspective, then, the field of investigation widens and the questions multiply, as do the chronological boundaries. Indeed, trying to make sense of space and attempts to reach space do not concern only scientists and engineers, and do not begin with the start of the "space age" (considered to start with the first Sputnik in 1957). Not only has there been both experimental and theoretical research for technical solutions to the problem of getting to space (choices made regarding propulsion and rocket navigation, etc.), along with efforts to legitimize such research to make sure that "space flight seems real" before it was possible; 29 but there have also been ways of imagining space that differed, more or less clearly, from legitimate scientific and technical approaches. Beyond the poetic, literary and artistic approaches that may be of interest more specifically to historians, the relationships that existed (or not) among space amateurs and space lovers, as well as ufologists and those who claimed to have witnessed paranormal events, are also part of a historical and sociological study of space that seeks to reconstruct and analyze the diversity of space history’s cultural components.30
In all these studies, the interest in space may initially arise from questions concerning the organization of the scientific and technical community, and its relationship with what is commonly considered, in the context of science and technology research, as "society." Yet, a body of work is emerging that gradually but progressively chooses explicitly to examine the collective representations of space or space activities, as well as the appropriations and uses of concepts, data and images produced by the sector. In doing so, space has become an object for research that can resolutely claim to be cultural, even though these cultural dimensions remains fairly distant from cultural history which has, up until recently in France, rather neglected the fields of science and technology.31 Studies have recently been published in Europe in this direction that should promote further research in this area.
3. Space as an Organizing Principle for Cultural Studies: a new Direction for Historical Research?
In recent years, a programme entitled "The Future in the Stars: European Astroculture and Extraterrestrial Life in the 20th Century" was set up at the Freie Universität in Berlin to promote the history of space in Europe. It adopted a decidedly cultural perspective concerned with documenting and analyzing the ways in which space is and has been understood in Western Europe. In other words, this initiative seeks to understand not only space programmes’ dynamics and changes over time by linking them with political and cultural developments and taking into account the role of "imagination,"32 but also the "cultural significance and societal repercussions of outer space and space exploration," by analyzing the diversity of human responses when trying to "render the infinite vastness of outer space conceivable." 33 To this end, members of the research programme, headed until recently by Alexander C. Geppert, voluntarily embraced the broad concept of "astroculture."34
Seeking to avoid potential misunderstandings arising from the use of the polysemic phrase "Space culture(s)," this programme seeks to study a "heterogeneous array of images and artifacts, media and practices that all aim to ascribe meaning to outer space" and to replace it within individual and collective imagination.35 Thus, the concept of "astrofuturism," forged by De Witt Douglas Kilgore in his study of the speculative scientific and fictional narratives produced by scientists, engineers and writers of science fiction and popular science promoting space travel, is a subset of the broader concept "astroculture."36 Research on "astroculture" means taking into account the diversity of human activities and concepts that have been created about space without granting predominance to institutional scientific and technical frameworks or elements that have contributed to the promotion of these latter fields. Therefore, the public’s enthusiasm for space activities, amateur practices, as well as the development of science-fiction and stories about extraterrestrial life, and the debates on all these subjects, have just as much right to be included as objects for study.
Although extending the field will be a challenge to overcome, it is also, in the current state of research on space, an interesting proposition because it can bring people together or at the very least, create a dialogue between very different approaches that have hitherto been fragmented – as the brief presentation of the French historical and sociological works given above has undoubtedly shown. In so doing, space itself comes to the fore of scholars’ inquiry, who can each contribute different readings with the potential to enrich each other. Moreover, this research programme on Europe certainly constitutes an important focal point, not only because it examines a previously neglected region in the literature, but also because it raises questions at a time when history, on space in particular but also history in general, is thought of in terms of "global history" or "connected history."37 On the whole, then, and despite the difficulty to forge a unified field of historiography at the national or the European level, particularly interesting avenues for future research are opening up for scholars interested in the study of space.