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