Curating the space race, celebrating cooperation: Exhibiting space technology during 1970s détente

Abstract

During the 1960s, US and Soviet space efforts engaged in a surrogate space race at international expositions, displaying real and replica space hardware as a way of demonstrating their celestial achievements to an earthbound public. The following decade saw an uneasy détente between the Cold War superpowers that prompted a new rhetorical emphasis on space cooperation rather than competition that spilled over into transnational collaborations and exchanges between the curators of American and Soviet space exhibitions. Drawing on documents from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and Smithsonian Institution archives in Washington, DC, this article reveals how competitive displays of space technology were reconfigured to sell US–Soviet space cooperation. Official government-sponsored cooperative exhibits were spectacular and bombastic, but détente also fostered a quieter, transnational process of exchange between Soviet and American curators. American curators at the Smithsonian’s newly opened National Air and Space Museum were eager to build ties with their Soviet counterparts. However, the collaborations that resulted from these ties often ended up reinforcing their museum’s nationalistic narrative rather than subverting it. The 1970s saw the emergence of a transnational community of professional space curators dedicated to memorializing the early space age, but 1970s space exhibitions continued to reflect the previous decade’s nationalistic competition.