Note: It is significant that the Warrior
Quest's primal image of the Blue Marble, Spaceship Earth or what is
also called Starship Earth was recorded on a military expedition. While
the notion that space travel is driven by scientific curiosity and research
is popular, in fact President John F. Kennedy was responding
to the perceived humiliation suffered by the United States
when the then enemy, Russia, made the first launch of a space vehicle,
that is, Sputnik.
President Kennedy
stated that "We are in a strategic space race with
the Russians and we have been losing .... Control of space will be decided
in the next decade. If the Soviets control space, they can control Earth,
as in the past centuries the nations that controlled the seas dominated
the continents."
More than a scientific humiliation, Sputnik stirred
the deepest fears in the Cold War mentality, that is,
that the Russians would soon control outer space and fire space
based weapons that would defeat America. This heightened the
fear of total human annihilation from global nuclear
war. What is often forgotten is that the early space expeditions and
quest to land on the moon were part of an escape plan
which took seriously the imminent perils of the Nuclear Age. The astronauts
were to determine and discern the feasibility of transporting a selected
group of humans to another planet to re-seed humanity if global nuclear
war came to threaten the annihilation of the human species. In this
light, the militarized Starship Earth is also a prime expression of
the Warrior Quest’s dreadful fearfulness.
Continue—Spacerace
