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.
The race to the moon was much like
the voyage of Columbus in that, in the end, Americans felt that they
had discovered a new land and conquered a new frontier. Although it
remains diplomatic to state that the moon belongs to all humans, in
fact, it is perceived by the military as an American outpost. Ronald
Reagan took the concept of space-based weapons to new imaginative
heights with his 1983 "Star
Wars" speech.
On March 23, 1983 in his "Star
Wars" speech President Reagan announced, "I call upon the
scientific community who gave us nuclear weapons to turn their great
talents to the cause of mankind and world peace: to give us the means
of rendering these nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete." His
proposed Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) forwarded
the concept of using space-based lasers to shoot down
incoming Soviet intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) armed with
nuclear warheads.
This speech, following upon Reagan's earlier Evil
Empire speech on March 8, 1983, ushered in the last phase of the
Cold War, bringing the nuclear standoff with the Soviet Union to its
most critical point before the collapse of the Soviet Union later in
1991.
See "Strategic Defense Initiative" in Wikipedia.
