Space Forces: A Critical History of Life in Outer Space by Fred Scharmen

Abstract

Reviewed by: Space Forces: A Critical History of Life in Outer Space by Fred Scharmen Rick Cousins Space for All? Fred Scharmen. Space Forces: A Critical History of Life in Outer Space. Verso, 2021. 266 pp. $26.95 hc, $9.99 ebk. I know I'm in for an interesting read when an author sneaks a quote from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy under the radar on the first page. Douglas Adams's quip "space is big" appears in the third sentence in Fred Scharmen's Space Forces: A Critical History of Life in Outer Space, separated by a mere nine words from a much less jocular opening salvo: "Why should we want to go live in space?" (1). The ability to juxtapose the serious and the comedic is one of the highlights of Scharmen's style: it also helps point up the fine distinction between the urgency of the question he poses and the degree to which it remains unanswered, as if waiting for a punch line. We don't live in space yet—and the "going" part has got us no farther than a few quick jaunts to the moon that ended before much of Scharmen's readership was even born. The idea of space travel is, in this sense, the same as the idea of travel anywhere on Earth: an overture of hopeful dreams followed (if the trip begins at all) by a series of sobering and frequently disappointing realities. Scharmen sets these dreams and realities in relief against each other by offering a series of possible answers to his opening question, laid out through case studies of figures who sometimes made surprisingly significant contributions to the theory and practice of space flight. One of the challenges a writer faces when structuring a work in an episodic fashion concerns the role of connecting themes. How much should ideas, questions, and problems shared by individual cases dominate the discussion, forming a clearly visible narrative thread? To what extent should each individual case stand alone as an independent story in its own right? Scharmen pulls off the delicate balancing act between the specific and the general with a skill that never lets the reader see the effort that goes into it. Make no mistake: it requires effort to keep some of the themes common to the stories Scherman tells from elbowing everything else out of the way and turning a well-tempered, harmonious account into a clangorous one-note polemic. The most forceful central idea in Space Forces requires particularly deft handling to allow it to hold the floor without becoming a filibuster. Every one of the cases that Scharmen investigates deals in some way with questions of inclusion: Who gets to go into space first? What do they do once they get there? Who joins them later? Who has to stay home and why? It's all too easy for us to read this from the perspective of a world where Amazon and SpaceX are drowning out the rest of the conversation and boiling all debates about space travel down to discussions about capitalism and commercial interests. [End Page 588] To be sure, money talks, but as Scharmen notes throughout his study, that talk often serves as background noise to other ultimately more influential voices. A number of the figures profiled by Scharmen never had the economic (or political) power to realize any part of their plans for life in space, but the social doctrines embedded in their writings served to influence later wellcapitalized and state-sanctioned plans. Scharmen orchestrates two of these voices from the infancy of rocket science—Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1857-1935) and his friend and mentor Nikolai Fedorov (1829-1903)—into an antiphonal duet for his first full case study. Tsiolkovsky, whose calculations defined the first parameters for escape velocity, was more than just a pioneer in rocketry. He was also a visionary with a far-reaching program for outerplanetary exploitation which "drew on a core of unique mystical materialism" (14). Tsiolkovsky's mysticism and materialism expressed themselves equally in works of fiction and nonfiction: his novel Beyond the Planet Earth (1920) and his pamphlet The Future of Earth and Mankind (1928) combine...