Framing Space: A Popular Geopolitics of American Manifest Destiny in Outer Space

Abstract This paper examines how 'ways of seeing' landscape, as practised within the little-known American astronomical art community, can be used to examine the popular geopolitical scripting of an American manifest destiny in outer space. A significant body of work in critical geopolitics has sought to recognise the way in which culturally manifest representations of space and place, together with embedded visual practices, can reproduce and elucidate the construction of geographical imaginations. Despite this, cultural representations of outer space have frequently been overlooked in readings of American popular, geopolitical discourse and associated geographical understandings. As a response to this lacuna, this paper interrogates how visual motifs of an American manifest destiny, developed in nineteenth-century American romanticism, have been mobilised through American astronomical art to explain and popularise conceptions of outer space that invite American human space exploration. By way of conclusion, the paper stresses how the inscription of outer space under the rubric of an American manifest destiny continues to frame the way in which the American space programme, and by extension American geopolitical and geographical imaginations, can be understood today. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank Deborah Dixon and Michael Woods for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper. I am also grateful to the staff of the NASA History Office at NASA HQ, Washington DC, and the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum for their assistance with the research for this project. All artistic works reproduced under US copyright fair-use terms. Notes 1. The artist Ron Miller distinguishes between astronomical and hardware space art: "The former is an extension of landscape painting. … Hardware art concerns itself with the means by which space will be explored, and its practitioners are more interested in how we are going to get somewhere than in what we are going to find when we get there", p. 17 in Ron Miller, 'State of Art', Spaceworld (Aug. 1988). As this paper demonstrates, this distinction is often blurred in practice, as space artists frequently depict both hardware and extra-terrestrial scenes. Hence, the division is perhaps best considered more a decision over the emphasis given to a particular subject (hardware or astronomical subjects). 2. Andrew Chaikin, 'Death Valley Meeting of Space Artists', Spaceflight (June 1984). 3. Ibid. , p. 16. 4. Ron Miller, 'Space Art', Spaceflight 30 (Aug. 1988) p. 319. 5. For more detail on the sublime see Peter Shaw, The Sublime (London: Routledge 2006) and on the American sublime see Tony Barringer and Andrew Wilton, American Sublime: Landscape Painting in the United States, 1820–1880 (London: Tate 2002) ; also Joni Kinsey, Thomas Moran: and the Surveying of the American West (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Press 1992) and Albert Boime, The Magisterial Gaze: Manifest Destiny and American Landscape Painting c. 1830–1865 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Press 1991). 6. Gearoid O Tuathail, Critical Geopolitics (Minneapolis, MN: UMP 1996) p. 17. 7. O Tuathail (note 6) ; Gearoid O Tuathail and Simon Dalby, Rethinking Geopolitics (London: Routledge 1998). 8. Fraser Macdonald, 'Geopolitics and the Vision Thing: Regarding Britain and America's First Nuclear Missile', Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 31 (2006) pp. 53–71; Jo Sharp, Condensing the Cold War: The Reader's Digest and American Identity, 1922–1994 (Minneapolis, MN: UMP 2000) ; Gazhi-Walid Falah, Colin Flint, and Virginie Mamadouh, 'Just War and Extraterritoriality: The Popular Geopolitics of the United States' War on Iraq as Reflected in Newspapers of the Arab World', Annals of the Association of American Geographers 96/1 (2006) pp. 142–64. Sean Carter and Derek McCormack, 'Film, Geopolitics and the Affective Logics of Intervention', Political Geography 25 (2006) pp. 228–245. 9. Sharp (note 8). 10. See for example: Sharp (note 8) ; Falah et al. (note 8) ; Gearoid O Tuathail, , 'The Frustrations of Geopolitics and the Pleasures of War: Behind Enemy Lines and American Geopolitical Culture', Geopolitics 10 (2005) pp. 356–77; David Campbell, 'Cultural Governance and Pictorial Resistance: Reflections on the Imaging of War', Review of International Studies 29 (supplement S1) (2003) pp. 57–73. 11. Carter and McCormack (note 8) ; Macdonald (note 8) ; Falah et al. (note 8) ; Gearoid O Tuathail, '"Just Out Looking for a Fight": American Affect and the Invasion of Iraq' Antipode 35 (2003) pp. 857–70. 12. Miller (note 1). 13. On the American sublime tradition see T. J. Barringer and A. Wilton (note 5), and also A. Boime (note 5) as well as Kinsey (note 5). 14. Kinsey (note 5). 15. Ibid. , p. 13. 16. Ibid. , p. 13. 17. Ibid. , p. 15. 18. Boime (note 5) p. 35. 19. Edward Casey, Representing Place: Landscape Painting and Maps (Minneapolis, MN: UMP 2002) pp. 68–72. 20. Barbara Novak, Nature and Culture: American Landscape Painting 1825–1875 (Oxford: OUP 1995) pp. 41–42. 21. Ibid. , p. 154. 22. Ibid. , p. 7. 23. Kinsey (note 5) p. 153. 24. Quoted in Kinsey (note 5) p. 149. 25. Boime (note 5). 26. Ibid. , pp. 1–2. 27. Ibid. , pp. 23, 26 28. Dennis Cosgrove, Apollo's Eye: A Cartographic Genealogy of the Earth in the Western Imagination (Baltimore: JHUP 2001) p. 2. 29. O Tuathail, Critical Geopolitics (note 6) p. 43. 30. Anders Stephenson, Manifest Destiny: American Exceptionalism and the Empire of Right (New York: Hill and Wang 1995). 31. Kinsey (note 5) pp. 176, 142. 32. Boime (note 5) ; Kinsey (note 5) pp. 58–67. 33. Kinsey (note 5) p. 62. 34. O Tuathail, Critical Geopolitics (note 6) p. 176. 35. Howard McCurdy, Space and the American Imagination (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Press 1997) pp. 40–47. 36. Ron Miller and Frederick Durant III, The Art of Chesley Bonestell (London: Paper Tiger 2001) p. 73. 37. Ron Miller, 'Biography' p. 4, available at www. bonestell. org, accessed 12 Feb. 2007. 38. William Burrows, This New Ocean: The Story of the First Space Age (New York: Random House 1998). 39. McCurdy (note 35) p. 45. 40. Thomas Hine, 'A Time Machine through Space', The Philadelphia Inquirer (20 Jan. 1992) pp. 22–23; David Hardy, 'Faces of the Moon', Spaceflight 45 (March 2002) pp. 103–105; Mike McIntyre, 'Celestial Visions', Air Miller and Durant (note 36) p. 25. 42. Miller and Durant (note 36) p. 35. 43. Ibid. , pp. 57–93. 44. McCurdy (note 35) p. 37. 45. Miller and Durant (note 36) p. 77. 46. McCurdy (note 35) p. 40. 47. Miller and Durant (note 36) pp. 77–90. 48. McCurdy (note 35) pp. 41–43. 49. Miller and Durant (note 36) p. 9. 50. M. K. Booker, Monsters, Mushroom Clouds and the Cold War (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press 2001) and Cindy Hendershot, Paranoia, The Bomb, and 1950s Science Fiction Films (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Press 1999). 51. Ibid. 52. Miller and Durant (note 36) p. 57. 53. McCurdy (note 35) p. 45. 54. Andrew Chaikin, A Man on the Moon (London: Penguin 1998). 55. Miller and Durant (note 36) pp. 109–10. 56. Cosgrove (note 28). 57. Boime (note 5). 58. Miller and Durant (note 36) p. 28. 59. Ibid. , p. 93. 60. Birgitta Hjalmarson, Artful Players: Artistic Life in Early San Francisco (Glendale, CA: Balcony Press 1999). 61. McCurdy (note 35) p. 40. 62. Miller and Durant (note 36) p. 77. 63. Jonathan Smith, 'American Geographical Ironies: A Conclusion', Chapter 11 in John Agnew and Jonathan Smith (eds. ), American Space / American Place: Geographies of the Contemporary United States (Edinburgh: EUP 2002). 64. Jo Sharp, 'Refiguring Geopolitics: The Reader's Digest and Popular Geopolitics of Danger at the End of the Cold War', in K. Dodds and D. Atkinson (eds. ), Geopolitical Traditions: A Century of Geopolitical Thought (London: Routledge 2000) p. 335. 65. Miller and Durant (note 36). 66. Burrows (note 38) p. 192; McCurdy (note 35). 67. Peter Dickson, Sputnik: The Shock of the Century (New York: Berkeley Books 2001) p. 128. 68. McCurdy (note 35). 69. Miller and Durant (note 36) p. 93. 70. John F. Kennedy, quoted in Burrows (note 38) p. 330. 71. Walter McDougall, The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age (Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 1985) pp. 387–88. 72. Ibid. , pp. 401–02. 73. David Romanowki, Official Guide to the Smithsonian National Airand Space Museum (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press 2002) p. 66. 74. Hardy (note 40) p. 105. 75. William Hartmann, on-line painting gallery, available at www. psi. edu/hartmann/painting. html, accessed 15 Jan. 2007. 76. Ron Miller and William Hartmann, The Grand Tour: A Traveler's Guide to the Solar System (New York: Workman 2005) p. 35. 77. Available from Ron Miller website: www. black-cat-studios. com, accessed 15 Jan. 2007. 78. International Association of Astronomical Artists, History, available at www. iaaa. org/history. html, accessed 18 Jan. 2007. 79. International Association of Astronomical Artists, Manifesto, available at www. iaaa. org/manifesto. html, accessed 18 Jan. 2007. 80. Ren Wick's Mission to Mars, found in R. Launius and B. Ulrich, NASA & The Exploration of Space (New York: Tabori and Chang 1998). 81. NASA art web (2005), Official Website of the NASA Art Program, available at http: //www. hq. nasa. gov/copernica/# accessed 6 Feb. 2007. 82. NASA news release N99-40, 'Art Aboard! – NASA Art Rides the Rails to Tour U. S. ', (15 July, 1999). 83. For example NASA's Art train exhibition was sponsored by the Chrysler Corporation. For more information see 'Artistry of Space' promotional brochure, available from NASA history office: Washington DC. 84. Ron Miller, 'State of the Art', in SpaceWorld (July 1988) p. 17. 85. Peter Bacque, 'Space Art Paintings Bring Out Emotion of What Artists See that We Don't', Richmond Times-Dispatch (24 Dec. 1998) pp. E1–2. 86. George W. Bush, 'New Vision for Space Exploration' (14 Jan. 2004), available at http: //www. nasa. gov, accessed 5 May 2006. 87. Michael Griffin, 'Why Explore Space? ', available at <http: //www. nasa. gov/missionₚages/exploration/main, accessed Jan. 2007. 88. Quoted in McCurdy (note 35) p. 74. 89. Jack Olson, 'A Base on Mars', image for NASA's 'New Vision' for space exploration, available at http: //www. nasa. gov/multimedia/imagegallery/imagefeature₅2. html, accessed 12 Jan. 2007.