Pariah state ambassadors
Minardi
River Cafe quiz

Flavio Briatore
Eddie Irvine
George Galloway
Boris Johnson
Mordechai Vanunu
Helena Christensen
Mark Wallinger
Saif Gaddafi
George MacDonald Fraser
Michael Sheen

Cash & Haggard
AC/DC: An Appreciation
Richard Thompson interview
Why Country Music Rules
Steve Earle interview
Drive-By Truckers' Brighter Than Creation's Dark
R.E.M.'s Murmur
The Go-Betweens' Liberty Belle
The Go-Betweens' Spring Hill Fair
Go-Betweens interview
The Fatima Mansions' Viva Dead Ponies
Microdisney's Daunt Square To Elsewhere
Paul Westerberg interview
Prefab Sprout interview
Bruce Springsteen's Human Touch
Bruce Springsteen's politics
Why Bruce Springsteen rules
American Music Club interview
Accents in rock
Dolores O'Riordan's lyrics
Def Leppard's covers album
The politics of Eurovision
Ryan Adams interview
The Triffids' Born Sandy Devotional
George Jones' The Grand Tour
Luke Haines interview

The Te Kuiti sheep run
The space race
Comedy And Disability
Psychology of space travel
World leaders on drugs
Freedom of speech
Bashar Assad profile
Diana, five years on
Why Formula 1 Doesn't Suck
Walk The Line
Almost Famous
Remembrance Day
Ned Kelly
Political interviews
Exiles
Backpackers
Con artists
Sport and politics
The evil of umbrellas
Dictator decor
Cricket and civilisation
Music as punishment
Music in public
Travel guides

Native America
The Confederate Air Force
The Cresta Run
South Africa

Chris Mills live
Glen Campbell live
Guy Clark live
John Prine live
Josh Ritter live
Laura Cantrell live
Randy Newman live
Richard Thompson live 1
Richard Thompson live 2
Teddy Thompson live
The Blue Aeroplanes live
U2's "Pop"
Willie Nelson live

Addis Ababa
Cape Verde
Chernobyl
Tehran

The space race
The Guardian, September 2005

OF the many extraordinary aspects of “Space Race”, an excellent docu-drama about the Cold War scramble for the stars, the most extraordinary is the collaboration that produced it. “Space Race” is a joint production of the USA’s National Geographic Channel, Russia’s Channel One, Germany’s NDR, and the BBC. The symmetry is – almost – perfect. The space race, like “Space Race” was also a joint effort by those four countries, but in the non-fictional one they were hardly co-operating partners. The more squalid reality of mankind’s giant leap was that the USSR and the USA provided the money and competing ideological motivations, Nazi Germany’s engineers provided much of the know-how, and
Britain. . . Britain provided the target practice. The first rocket capable of flying faster than sound, and of leaving our atmosphere, the progenitor of the vehicles which would carry humans to their most inspirational scientific accomplishment, was the Vergeltungswaffe-2 (literally, “Vengeance Weapon”), or V-2, designed by Dr Wernher Von Braun to deliver death to London.

THE opening episode of “Space Race” depicts this irony. The USA and USSR both saw their fledgling space programmes as exemplars of their superior ideology, yet both were willing to make the most fundamental compromises with the principles they claimed to uphold. Wernher Von Braun was a Nazi party member and SS officer. His V-2 killed thousands of Londoners, and thousands more of the slave labourers from the Dora-Mittelbau concentration camp who’d been forced to build them. Yet, as Soviet and American troops scoured Germany for Von Braun in 1945, it wasn’t with the aim of dispatching him to Nuremberg with his fellow war criminals, but of employing him. The Americans found him first, and spirited him Stateside. Von Braun became an American citizen, but not everyone regarded his moral flexibility as a virtue. Von Braun’s most enduring cultural legacy is the eponymous Tom Lehrer song of 1965, in which Lehrer gleefully vamps the scientist’s German accent: “Don’t say that he’s hypocritical/Say rather that he’s apolitical/‘Vunce zer rocketz are up, who carez vere zey come down?/Zat’s not my department,’ says Wernher Von Braun.”
  Nor were the Soviets above colluding with enemies, real or imagined. Early Soviet rocketry was overseen by Helmut Grottrup, a Nazi engineer the Red Army had picked up, and Russian engineer Sergei Korolev, who’d been arrested in 1938 on the vague charges of subversion characteristic of Stalin’s lunatic purges, and had spent most of World War II incarcerated in Siberia’s legendarily dreadful Kolyma gulag, or designing weapons in the forced labour camps for Russian intellectuals known as sharashkas.
  Thanks to Korolev, the Soviets made the early running. The first artificial object to orbit Earth, a basketball-sized satellite called Sputnik I, was launched on October 4th, 1957. As America persuaded itself that this would mean the hammer and sickle flying over Macy’s by teatime – it was believed that if Russia could do this, they could do similar with a nuke – the Soviets went one better. On November 3rd, 1957, aboard Sputnik II, a hapless mutt called Laika became the first living creature in space, if one disregards the fruit flies launched, for purposes of study, aboard captured V-2s by American engineers in 1946.
  It would be an exaggeration to describe America’s response to these staggering feats as hearty, ungrudging congratulation. In a speech days after Laika’s one-way voyage, President Dwight Eisenhower told an audience in Oklahoma City “When such competence in things material is at the service of leaders who have so little regard for things human, and who command the power of an empire, there is danger ahead for free men everywhere.” Later in the address, Ike addressed directly the most famous threat from his opposite number in the Kremlin, Nikita Khruschev: “Now, once again, we hear an expansionist regime declaring ‘We will bury you’. In a bit of American vernacular, ‘Oh, yeah?’.” With this unedifying, if undeniably amusing, playground repartee, the space race was launched. A dedicated department of US government – the National Aeronautics and Space Administration – was founded the following year.
  Gains were made by NASA, notably the first photograph of Earth from space, taken from Explorer 6 in August 1959, but in 1961 the Soviets appeared to trump America irretrievably. A thousand years from now, if one name from 20th century history is remembered, it will be Yuri Gagarin. There will be other geniuses, other villains, but there will only ever be one first man in space. On April 12th, 1961, aboard Vostok I, the 27-year-old fighter pilot completed a single 108-minute orbit. America’s new President, unfazed by the losing hand he’d inherited, raised the stakes. Six weeks after Gagarin parachuted into Siberia to find himself the most famous man alive, John F. Kennedy told Congress “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon, and returning him safely to Earth.”
  As even graduates of British high schools know, the Eagle lander from Apollo 11 disgorged Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin onto the lunar surface on July 20th, 1969 – but not before the USSR had chalked up the first woman in space (Valentina Tereshkova, on Vostok 6, June 1963), the first spacewalk (Aleksei Leonov, from Voshkod 2, March 1965) and the first spacecraft to land on another planet (the unmanned Venera 3, which reached Venus in March 1966). The Soviets never hoisted the scarlet standard on the Moon – possibly, their programme was knocked off its stride by the death of Korolev in 1966, or possibly they were just sulking – but struck back with the first space station, Salyut 1, in April 1971. This wasn’t an unqualified success: the first crew sent to it couldn’t board because of a mechanical failure, and the second crew, after 23 days aboard, asphyxiated during re-entry when a valve blew in their capsule.
  The Cold War space race informally ended on July 17th, 1975, when an American Apollo docked with a Soviet Soyuz at the climax of the first joint space mission by the rival superpowers. As the crews exchanged handshakes, they couldn’t have known that the USSR only had 16 years to live. The remaining obvious goal, a re-useable space vehicle, was achieved by America in 1981, with the launch and return of the Columbia shuttle.

THE space race may have been driven by ideology rather than idealism, and certainly involved, at least initially, the expertise of amoral scoundrels. It also moved technology further than any comparable period of history, and united humanity in wonderment at our possibilities like no event before, or since (when the global consciousness boggles in amazement at the television, it’s usually in response to natural or man-made disaster).
  For that reason, there should be excitement that new and old contestants are plotting a re-run. The European Space Agency is planning manned flight to Mars by 2030. Despite the loss of Columbia in 2003, George W. Bush has announced that the USA will return to the Moon by 2020, as a stepping stone to Mars. China, apparently keen to provide America the sort of competition the Soviets once did, launched its first manned spacecraft, Shenzou 5, in October 2003 (with old-school Cold War secrecy, the Chinese didn’t broadcast the launch, in case it turned into an inadvertent, embarassing, fireworks display). Shenzhou 6, which will carry a two-man crew, is scheduled for launch in October.
  What’s even more thrilling about this new space race is that it may be open to the gawping public, or at least its more hilariously rich upper strata. Dennis Tito became the first space tourist in 2001, paying US$20 million for a lift to the International Space Station aboard Soyuz TM-32. Last year, Richard Branson launched Virgin Galactic, the first space tour operator. You can book online, at www.virgingalactic.com, with a deposit of 10% of the US$200,000 fare. Branson hopes to commence sub-orbital flights in 2008. Just imagine that.

PRINT PAGE | BACK TO TOP