Images of Place in American Spaceflight, 1958 - 1974

Abstract

This project is a cultural history of images of place in the American space programs of the 1960s, focused on images of Kennedy Space Center (KSC), where the actual launches of rockets took place, and the Manned Spacecraft Center (MSC), where mission planning and astronaut training, and eventually mission control, were located. I consider images of KSC and MSC both in terms of the information they contain about the cultural meaning of a NASA center and of such places, but also as representations of a larger cultural geography of spaceflight places. The idea of a NASA center was not a recognizable entity in the early 1960s. Kennedy Space Center, for example, was in some ways an outgrowth of Air Force and Army launch facilities on Cape Canaveral, from which it borrowed some of its physical facilities and operational practices. The Manned Spacecraft Center was very similar to the suburban corporate campuses that began to be built in the post war period, and the community that grew up around it followed the familiar pattern of middle class suburban developments elsewhere in the country. In the history of spaceflight buildings are prominent loci of activity and meaning –– but so also are tracts of land, wildlife refuges, turning basins, stadiums, freeways, archaeological sites, swamps, lakes, office parks, suburban neighborhoods, and swimming pools. In short, both the places where spaceflight activities take place, and the images that document and constitute those places matter. In the history of space exploration, both placemaking and imagemaking, two processes that are intimately intertwined, contribute to the making of larger cultural meanings about human spaceflight in the 1960s.