Die Tragödie des neuen Weltraumrennens | Die Weltraumforschung ist eine schnell wachsende Branche. Aber ihr Ziel ist Dominanz, nicht Entdeckung.

>Two versions of history began when, one fall night in 1957, a two-stage rocket lifted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome and deposited a Soviet satellite called Sputnik into orbit around Earth. The first version is the one that is well-known: the grand romance of a terrestrial species bounding out of its cradle, the sharpening of America’s own hunger for this scientific adventure, the astonishing realms of knowledge bequeathed to us by the Space Age. The alternate history casts the space race, first and foremost, as a surly, selfish contest for military and ideological supremacy.

>The prospect of being snooped upon from space by the Soviets got the Americans worked up enough to accelerate the development not only of Explorer 1—the first U.S. scientific satellite, launched in January 1958—but also of the Corona program of spy satellites. Just as worrying for the Eisenhower administration was the rocket on which Sputnik rode: an R-7 Semyorka, the world’s first intercontinental ballistic missile. (Edward Teller, who helped build the hydrogen bomb for the United States, described the news of Sputnik as “a technological Pearl Harbor.”) If you could put a satellite on the R-7 and send it into orbit, you could also put a nuke on it and send it to Chicago. The Russians had set a precedent, Eisenhower’s advisers insisted in a closed-door conference; the United States, too, could and should lob missiles into outer space. Moscow was surreptitious and scheming in its own way. To dupe the Americans, the spaceport referred to as the Baikonur Cosmodrome was, in fact, nearly 200 miles southwest of the mining town of Baikonur. These cold warriors had not so much thoughts as afterthoughts of science.

>All narrators of the Space Age as a sordid geopolitical competition will invite several accusations. That they’re narrow- and mean-minded, so intent on sweating the politics that they’re unable to cherish the scientific advances—not to mention the glorious vistas of our universe—that our spacefaring has brought to us. That they’re Luddites. That they’re too idealistic, too eager to believe that we would have reached the moon when we did even without the pants-on-fire urgency of Cold War militarism. Or that they’re not idealistic enough, because they aren’t able to imagine the egalitarian space bound future that will rescue us from our ramshackle present.

>These charges hold varying levels of merit. You’d certainly have to be staggeringly cussed, for instance, to dismiss the images of Saturn’s rings captured by the Voyager and Cassini probes, or the truths that space telescopes, picking up cosmic microwave background radiation, revealed about the age and shape of our universe, or just the daily conveniences of GPS, memory foam mattresses, and runners’ Mylar blankets that have spun out of space missions. The clear-eyed will see, on the other hand, the utter hokum that is the space utopia now hawked to us by a handful of libertarian billionaires. They will also spot the bright, continuous line that connects the space race of the twentieth century to that of the twenty-first.

>Just as scientific universalism was once used, at least in part, as a cover for the power struggles of the Cold War, today’s techno-libertarian drive outward into space cloaks a steroidal American urge to impose its will upon the world. The signs can be read through the history of space exploration, right up into Artemis—the recent lunar mission hastened along by Donald Trump’s vanity, his desire to “never be second,” and the plot to “establish U.S. dominance on the moon.” It’s futile to deny that we got the Space Age we got because one country grew drunk on capitalism and is still zealous about defending its mythic exceptionalism beyond the literal ends of the earth.

I wanted a Uranus orbiter in my lifetime, but instead I’ll get US v China moon posturing.

All discovery is? Name a time in human history exploration wasnt for domination?

good. it’s the only way space based infrastructure will realistically be built.

Private enterprises are in it for the money, only way they get money from science and discovery is for someone else to pay for it.

„Always has been“ – Let’s be honest, space exploration was never about discovery, it was about competing against ther countries for dominance.

Has the space race ever been about discovery? Much of space history is directly tied to military strategic goals, hence the space race between the USSR and the US. Those goals still haven’t changed, just the players.

Wow, this thread of comments is depressing. People have had their brains fully cooked by capitalism. Humanity is doomed long-term.