Cold War Space Research Articles

Far from Tranquility Base

Abstract The Apple+ television series For All Mankind imagines an alternative history in which the Soviets beat the United States to the moon and the Cold War space race never ends. Gender politics and associated dynamics are central to the action. This article explores plotlines involving two fictional cosmonauts: the first woman on the moon and a male crew member stationed at the Soviet's lunar base. It finds that FAM reinforces Cold War tropes, anxieties, and “us vs them” formulations. FAM's writers miss the opportunity to probe the complexities of gender and personhood in the late Soviet era. Instead of encouraging more nuanced thinking about “the Russians,” FAM's universe perpetuates Cold War sensibilities that promote competition and conflict on Earth and in space.

David L. Pike, Cold War Space and Culture in the 1960s and 1980s: The Bunkered Decades

David L. Pike, <i>Cold War Space and Culture in the 1960s and 1980s: The Bunkered Decades</i>

Reaching for the Stars: The Zambian Space Programme and Alternative Imaginaries of Space Travel

Discourses of space travel have long been acknowledged as imbricated in the logic and language of colonial expansionism. Despite the dangerous uses to which romantic framings of these have historically been put, there is nonetheless a lingeringly aspirational quality to imaginaries of space travel whose emancipatory potential exists in strange tension with its discursive complicity in coloniality. A related tension reverberates in newer revisionings of postcolonial science or speculative fiction that point to the utopian possibilities of imagining otherwise, in the face of traditional science fiction’s embeddedness in colonial discourses of science and progress. In this essay, I explore this tension by way of an engagement with some lesser-known perspectives on and interventions in the Cold War space race. This entails an analysis of the Zambian space programme as refracted in a number of texts: A. K. Chesterton’s The New Unhappy Lords, Edward Nkoloso’s article, “We’re Going to Mars! With a Spacegirl, Two Cats and a Missionary”, Frances Bodomo’s short film Afronauts, and Namwali Serpell’s novel The Old Drift. I propose that irony, satire, and the theatricality of space travel have provided entry points for the critiques of inequality and oppression manifested here, and argue that this has been used to undercut coloniality and white supremacy, albeit in very different, and often disjunctive and profoundly ambivalent ways. Though at times confounding, this ambivalence warrants nuanced exploration as it reveals both overlapping and incongruent strategies for resistance, and serves to contextualize appropriations, aspirations, and imaginaries of space travel today.

Beyond Sputnik and the Space Race: The Origins of Global Satellite Communications by Hugh R. Slotten

Reviewed by: Beyond Sputnik and the Space Race: The Origins of Global Satellite Communications by Hugh R. Slotten Roger D. Launius (bio) Beyond Sputnik and the Space Race: The Origins of Global Satellite Communications By Hugh R. Slotten. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022. Pp. 245. NASA Administrator James E. Webb asked a pointed question in 1964: "How did we get so much communication satellite technology for so little money?" Webb's question could not be satisfactorily answered at the time; this important new book offers the best explanation yet. Beyond Sputnik and the Space Race explores how government and industry shaped policy, expanded capabilities, [End Page 630] and used this envisioned space-based telecommunications capability to propound the American way to the peoples of other nations, as well as to enhance American commercial profitmaking at the same time that it facilitated American geopolitical ends in the American-Soviet Cold War. Sometimes these objectives clashed, most of the time they coexisted, and, as Hugh Slotten demonstrates, more often than not the various actors agreed on a solution beneficial to all. Slotten's focus on the nexus between government and industry in the building of an entirely new space-based communications system in the 1960s revectors the time-worn story of Cold War space rivalries between the United States and the Soviet Union. Instead of NASA and the race to the moon, Slotten uses the creation of a system of global communications with space-based components as a study of something equally critical to America's Cold War objectives: the soft power of technological verisimilitude that could help sway nonaligned—and especially emerging—nations to the American side of the global conflict. Like so many other "hearts and minds" efforts by the superpowers in the Cold War, the establishment of a worldwide satellite communications network represented war by another means, but one in which no one died—at least not intentionally. Appropriately, Slotten makes clear that satellite communications was the first truly commercial space technology developed in the first fifty years of the space age, generating billions of dollars annually in sales. His first chapter relates the efforts of John R. Pierce at AT&T's Bell Labs, who argued before Sputnik that a space communications system could be worth billions and could ensure AT&T's primacy as a communications company. At Pierce's insistence, AT&T filed in 1960 for permission to launch an experimental communications satellite. Although embraced by the Eisenhower administration, when Kennedy became president in January 1961, this decision made some senior officials wince. They opposed AT&T's seeking to extend its telephone monopoly into the "new high ground" of space. They also saw the opportunity to use this as a powerful nonmilitary means of persuading other nations to ally with the United States against the Soviet Union. The Kennedy administration sponsored the Communications Satellite Act of 1962, authorizing the public-private COMSAT Corporation to oversee the development and operation of an international communications satellite system. Slotten offers an in-depth account of how the COMSAT Corp. became the primary actor in the establishment of the International Telecommunication Satellite Consortium (INTELSAT), which brokered international agreements and oversaw the development of Intelsat 1 in 1965, the first satellite pioneering a global space-based communications network. With this satellite system in orbit, the world became a far different place. There is no question, and Slotten emphasizes this in his final chapters, that communications satellites helped to shape the course of the Cold War. Many nations wanted to be part of the system, and the building of Earth stations to [End Page 631] communicate through the satellites to other stations was cause for celebration in many regions of the world. Within a few years, telephone circuits increased from five hundred to thousands, and live television coverage of events anywhere in the world became commonplace. With this, one could make the case that the most notable change to the life of the ordinary Earthling coming from our ability to fly in space was global instantaneous telecommunications. Slotten ably examines how this first constellation of communications satellites came to be and offers a compelling argument for their importance as a...

Contract of Nationalism between Space Mission from Cold War to Trump Administration

The American government has made it known that future space initiatives are necessary and that unilateral space missions may be possible during Donald Trump's administration. This change is a significant break from previous practices because, particularly since the Cold War, American political discourse on space during the ISS (International Space Station) era has tended to encourage international cooperation. This research explores the relationship between American nationalism and space, offering an explanation for why the relevance of space exploration has changed over time from the 1960s to 2019. One of the key components of American national identity, space technology is employed to highlight and strengthen national might. This article will contrast how nationalism was practiced during these three eras of American history: the Cold War space race, the international space station era and Trump’s administration. In the face of an equal "challenger," a fantastic nation is depicted using a spectacular set of technology.

전후 타이완 냉전주체의 형성과 공간 - 영예국민과 영예국민지가를 중심으로

This study focuses on the honorary citizens and the honorary citizens home in order to identify the formation and space of Cold War subjects in Taiwan’s Cold War studies. In previous studies, honorary citizens, anti-communists, and honored compatriots from the mainland China, who were captured as ‘honored citizens’ by the National Government of the Republic of China in Taiwan, were mainly recognized as ‘old and sick foreign soldiers’. erefore, the government had to take responsibility for the employment and recuperation of honorary citizens, and the honorary citizens home was regarded as a ‘care space’ for such employment and recuperation. However, in the Cold War in East Asia that unfolded after the end of the Korean War, the National Government of the Republic of China, which was establishing Taiwan as an East Asia ‘anti-communist base’ along with Korea, tried to convert the honorary citizens and the honorary citizens home to ‘cold war subjcet’ and ‘cold war space’ against backdrop of ‘Retaking the Mainland’ policy. ‘Military dependents house construction’ and economic construction transformed the honorary citizens into the subject of the ‘Retaking the Mainland’ and the ‘hero of Taiwan’s modernization’.

Collaboration in Space and the Search for Peace on Earth by Andrew L. Jenks (review).

Reviewed by: Collaboration in Space and the Search for Peace on Earth by Andrew L. Jenks Darina Volf (bio) Collaboration in Space and the Search for Peace on Earth By Andrew L. Jenks. London: Anthem Press, 2021. Pp. 180. The birth and advancement of space technology at the height of the Cold War might explain why the history of the first four decades of physical exploration of outer space is usually told as a story driven by competition and national interest, in which there was hardly any place for transnational and collaborative efforts. Andrew Jenks's Collaboration in Space and the Search for Peace on Earth challenges the dominance of the competitive paradigm in the history of early spaceflight and turns our attention to international collaboration in space. This alone makes the book a long overdue and important contribution to Cold War space history. What is more, Jenks's analysis does not end in the deeps of outer space but returns to Earth in order to shed light on political and societal implications resulting from the internationalization of efforts in space. The introduction focuses on the tension between the ideal of science and technology that is by its very nature transnational and collaborative, and the reality of political limitations to knowledge flows and technology transfers motivated by national interest. As becomes clear, this tension was particularly manifest in the realm of space technology and space exploration, which were perceived as both an instrument of national power and a universal task transcending national boundaries. The latter idea gained importance in the 1970s, which Jenks argues led to a new era of space collaboration introduced by the Soviet-American joint flight and docking experiment known as the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project. The initial two chapters explain the general shift toward space collaboration in the 1970s. Jenks identifies ideas that inspired a more collaborative approach to space exploration, as well as political and societal developments that were central in facilitating rapprochement, negotiations, and the subsequent agreement on the ASTP between the two space powers. Moreover, the ASTP is embedded into a broader context of transnational utopias and visions of global peace associated with exploration of outer space, and Jenks discusses its role in creating an alternative to the images of mutual destruction and in working against Cold War anxieties. But the following reflections also demonstrate the limits of collaborative efforts in space, which often fell victim to bureaucratic and political hurdles. The third chapter of the book shifts the perspective from the origins and legacies of the ASTP to the actual work on the compatible rendezvous and docking mechanism developed in preparation for the joint mission. Here, Jenks presents a fascinating story linking the technological innovation process with its political and symbolic functions. Based on the belief [End Page 885] that technological fixes can also address political and societal problems, the androgynous docking mechanism was loaded with meanings beyond the realm of technology. It became a symbol of cooperation, hybridity, and peaceful coexistence of different systems. The fourth chapter looks closely at the two partners cooperating in the ASTP and suggests the rather surprising conclusion that, over the course of the changes that occurred in the 1960s and 1970s, the United States and the Soviet Union reversed their roles regarding openness and secrecy. From the 1960s on, the Soviet Union started to gradually open its initially secretive space program toward partners from abroad, while in the U.S. space program—which was for a long time perceived as open and transparent—fears of technology transfer reinforced the regime of secrecy and hindered international cooperation, especially during the Reagan administration. The conclusion elaborates on the legacy of the ASTP and persuasively argues that the ASTP was more than an expensive handshake in space. Overall, the book is well written and thoroughly researched. Occasionally Jenks seems to overemphasize the extent of Soviet openness and cooperativeness, which might appear enormous given the previous degree of secrecy in the Soviet space program, but which still had considerable limits. The internal Soviet opposition against every step toward greater openness and the refusal to provide the United States with any information going beyond the scope of the ASTP are...

“Project Man in Space”: Applied Anthropology’s Cold War Space Oddity

During the 1950s, partially in response to the Soviet Union’s launching of Sputnik, social psychologist Donald Michael launched Project Man in Space, a group of American social scientists organized...

Working with the ‘Enemy’: Free Space in Facilitating Cold War Space Collaboration

Although collaboration between competing organizations is one of the most challenging tasks in management, our knowledge about social-cognitive mechanisms that facilitate the collaborative interact...

The antiseptic Miramistin: a review of its comparative in vitro and clinical activity.

Miramistin is a topical antiseptic with broad antimicrobial action, including activity against biofilms and a clinical profile showing good tolerability. Miramistin was developed within a framework of the Soviet Union Cold War Space Program. It is available for clinical use in several prior Soviet bloc countries, but barely known outside of these countries and there is almost no mention of miramistin in the English literature. However, considering emerging antimicrobial resistance, the significant potential of miramistin justifies its re-evaluation for use in other geographical areas and conditions. The review consists of two parts: (i) a review of the existing literature on miramistin in English, Russian and Ukrainian languages; (ii) a summary of most commonly used antiseptics as comparators of miramistin. The oral LD50 was 1200mg/kg, 1000mg/kg and 100g/L in rats, mice and fish, respectively. Based on the results of the review, we suggest possible applications of miramistin and potential benefits over currently used agents. Miramistin offers a novel, low toxicity antiseptic with many potential clinical uses that need better study which could address some of the negative impact of antimicrobial, antiseptic and disinfectant resistance.

Shooting for the Moon.

![][1] The first Apollo 11 lunar sample to be analyzed in a laboratory, photographed on 27 July 1969 in a vacuum chamber at NASA's Lunar Receiving Laboratory. PHOTO: NASA/NOVAPIX Fifty years ago, on 20 July 1969, the first humans landed on the surface of another world, when the Apollo 11 lunar module touched down on the Moon. A few hours later, astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin took the first steps onto an alien surface while Michael Collins orbited overhead in the command module. The motivation for this milestone of space exploration was geopolitical, not scientific. The Apollo program was intended to demonstrate technological supremacy during the Cold War space race. Yet Apollo 11 and the five additional crewed landings that followed have left a rich scientific legacy. They carried a variety of instruments, including seismometers, magnetometers, and retroreflectors for laser ranging observations. Perhaps their greatest scientific value lies in the 382 kg of rocks and regolith (lunar soil) that were brought back to Earth. Laboratory analysis of these samples revolutionized our understanding of how the Moon, Earth, and other planets formed. Improved technology and advances in planetary science mean that the samples are still actively studied today. Funding for lunar exploration soon ran out. No humans have traveled beyond low Earth orbit since Apollo 17 in 1972, and even robotic missions to the Moon ceased between 1976 and 1990. The 21st century has seen a renewed interest in exploring our nearest neighbor, in part because a growing number of space agencies and private companies now have the capability to reach it. Some have plans to return humans to the lunar surface over the next decade. Even more ambitious are ideas for permanent lunar bases, such as astronomical observatories, which could reap a rich scientific harvest. One day humans will return to the Moon. Until then, the Apollo landings stand alone at the pinnacle of crewed space exploration. [1]: /embed/graphic-1.gif

Nationalism, Ideology, and the Cold War Space Race

One of the most enduring legacies of the Cold War period was the rivalry between the Soviet Union and the United States. This is especially true if one considers the ‘Space Race,’ of the mid 1950s-1960s, where each country tried to out-do the other in all manner of space technology. This paper, while acknowledging the importance held by military and scientific goals, argues that it was matters of nationalism and prestige that provided the biggest motivation for the creation of new space technologies during this time.

Space Technology, an Essential Infrastructure for Rural Area Development

Over the past five decades, space technology has been regarded as either the dream and future of mankind or an endeavor of the Cold War space race. Neither of these views is relevant today. The essential role space serves today is that it is a critical infrastructure for the world. Space is no longer the “big boys club”. Today, about 60 countries own and operate at least one satellite, and almost everyone benefits from the services these satellites provide. Space technology has become an indispensable infrastructure on which everyone relies. Space technology has the capabilities to provide information vital for the environment, education, food security, public health, water resource management, human rights, disaster relief and nuclear security. Services derived from this technology not only improve the efficiency and effectiveness of many terrestrial activities but also provide much of the information and understanding needed to prevent and mitigate a variety of risks. Space-based technologies are embraced in developing countries and some of the applications are rooted in education. This was not so in the past, as the technologies were considered ancillary tools for only wealthy nations. Space technology includes the spacecraft otherwise known as satellite, space stations, other supporting infrastructure, equipment, and procedures. The development of space technology can play significant roles in the development of rural areas in Nigeria. The areas of application include, education, telemedicine, agriculture, and communication. This paper focuses on the use of space technology in the development of rural areas.

Revisiting the U.S.-Soviet space race: Comparing two systems in their competition to land a man on the moon

The Cold War space competition between the U.S. and the USSR, centered on their race to the moon, offers both an important historical case and larger implications for space and technology development and policy. In the late 1950s, under Premier Nikita Khrushchev's direction and Chief Designer Sergei Korolev's determined implementation, Moscow's capabilities appeared to eclipse Washington's. This called the international system's very nature into question and prompted President John F. Kennedy to declare a race to the moon. Despite impressive goals and talented engineers, in the centralized but under-institutionalized, resource-limited Soviet Union feuding chief designers playing bureaucratic politics promoted a cacophony of overambitious, overlapping, often uncompleted projects. The USSR suffered from inadequate standardization and quality control at outlying factories and failed to sustain its lead. In marked contrast, American private corporations, under NASA's well-coordinated guidance and adjudication, helped the United States overtake from behind to meet Kennedy's deadline in 1969. In critical respects, Washington's lunar landing stemmed from an effective systems management program, while Moscow's moonshot succumbed to the Soviet system, which proved unequal to the task. In less than a decade, Soviet space efforts shifted from one-upping, to keeping up, to covering up. This article reconsiders this historic competition and suggests larger conclusions.

The Long Space Age: The Economic Origins of Space Exploration from Colonial America to the Cold War by Alexander MacDonald

Reviewed by: The Long Space Age: The Economic Origins of Space Exploration from Colonial America to the Cold War by Alexander MacDonald Thomas C. Lassman (bio) The Long Space Age: The Economic Origins of Space Exploration from Colonial America to the Cold War. By Alexander MacDonald. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017. Pp. 272. Hardcover $35. After the triumph of the Apollo lunar program in the late 1960s, public enthusiasm and political support for spaceflight ebbed. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) downsized and confined its human spaceflight activities to low earth orbit as budgets shrank and the Cold War drew to a close. Without a replacement for the post-Apollo space shuttle, a successful but costly and accident-prone technology retired in 2011, NASA has relied instead on the Russians to ferry American astronauts into space, and more recently it has seen its role and status diminished even further as a new paradigm takes hold. Billionaire entrepreneurs have seized the initiative and now stand on the cusp of revolutionizing the technology and economics of spaceflight. So the story goes, according to Alexander MacDonald, a historian and space policy expert who sets out to upend what he calls the conventional narrative history of American space exploration. The era of large, government-funded spaceflight programs embodied by NASA's Cold War mission, MacDonald argues, is the exception, not the rule. It did not define the Space Age. A longer historical perspective, dating back to the earliest days of the American republic, reveals that wealthy individuals—the antecedents of today's technology entrepreneurs—eagerly pursued and bankrolled the exploration of space. The recent exploits of Elon Musk and Jeffrey Bezos are not new but rather part and parcel of this broader historical trend. Three pivotal movements in American space exploration structure the book. Chapters 1 and 2 discuss the emergence and evolution of privately funded astronomical observatories from the early nineteenth century through the middle of the twentieth century. Correlating expenditures across time, MacDonald demonstrates the extent to which these early investigative efforts compared in scale and scope to NASA's programmatic initiatives during the Cold War. Chapter 3 carries the same argument forward through the experience of visionary rocket pioneer Robert Goddard. Although he tapped wealthy individuals for funds to pay for his research, Goddard also looked to the military departments for resources, a precursor to the type of public-private partnership that flourished after Sputnik. Chapter 4 explicates the waning of private-sector initiative in the face of overwhelming political will and government expansion that drove the economics of the Cold War space race. The accumulation of national prestige and status through the execution of massive, public financed projects, however, still bore some similarities to the motivations of those wealthy benefactors who had funded the observatory movement years earlier. MacDonald demonstrates the pervasiveness and resilience of institutional [End Page 484] patterns of private-sector behavior in space exploration across two centuries of American history. It is a useful exercise that broadens our understanding of the subject, but it has one significant weakness. There is no discussion or analysis of the twenty-first-century privatization of spaceflight or the leading luminaries of the movement that prompted MacDonald to write the book in the first place. The history of the Cold War space race is "overdetermined" and subject to a "cacophony" of viewpoints that obscure long-term trends, he writes (pp. 160–61), but that recent history, complex and messy as it may be, still reveals much more about current spaceflight activities than MacDonald is willing to concede. Put another way, is it necessary to take a long view of the Space Age to explain how Elon Musk, Jeffrey Bezos, and other technology entrepreneurs are giving NASA and its contractors a run for their money? MacDonald surely could highlight Musk's motivations and their connections to earlier antecedents. He has, for example, publicly proclaimed an ambitious vision for humans to leave the planet and colonize other worlds. MacDonald could also argue that Musk resembles the nineteenth-century capitalist. Like Andrew Carnegie in steel, he founded commercial enterprises that rely on inputs of capital and labor to build rockets and automobiles...

Atomic–Antarctic terminal zone

ABSTRACTThis article is concerned with the emergence of proto-cybernetic gadgets and specimen in Antarctica. The essay’s starting point is that the Cold War was literalised at the South Pole, which also operates as a shadowy double of the overtly militarised Arctic. What happens in Antarctica is a secret assimilation of space into the American Cold War perimeter by way of weapons technology, most notably through the gyrocompass (which develops into the black box navigation systems for ballistic missiles) and the man–machine amalgamation. This assimilation and emergence are traced at hand of exploration narratives (Harold Ponting; Douglas Mawson; Richard Byrd) as well as science fiction stories (H. P. Lovecraft; John W. Campbell, Jr.) that precede the Cold War, but whose forging of a superman-specimen anticipate the conceptualisation of Antarctica as a Cold War space. The South Pole operates as zone of rehearsal for superpower merging: the explorers become prototype cyborgs whose expeditions point towards the containment culture, epitomised in the gyrocompass/black box technology, of the Cold War.

Defence and Discovery: Canada’s Military Space Program, 1945–74, by Andrew B. Godefroy

Andrew B. Godefroy, Defence and Discovery: Canada's Military Space Program, 1945-74, Vancouver: UBC Press, 2012. 256 pp., ISBN: 978-0774819602, $32.95 (pbk)Defence and Discovery sets out to provide reader with an analysis of Canada's role in exploration of upper atmosphere and outer space from end of Second World War in 1945 until ratification of country's first space policy in 1974. As author indicates, the book seeks to reveal nature of first three decades of Canada's exploration of space and to place it within wider context of political history of Canadian science and technology (6).Organized chronologically and thematically, Defence and Discovery examines specific periods of space research and technological development and key players who were involved in this important activity. Godefroy begins his analysis by looking at security and aerospace research prior to Soviet Union's launch of Sputnik rocket in October 1957. Next, he turns to Canada's engagement with missiles and rocketry, with particular focus on development of Black Brant rocket and Churchill range. Sequentially, Godefroy then examines Canada's early space policies, nation's development and launching of Alouette satellite followed by agreement with United States on use international satellites for ionospheric studies. The book then looks at Canada's participation in militarization and weaponization of space in 1960s with particular emphasis on anti-ballistic missile defence activities and Royal Canadian Air Force's space defence program. Godefroy concludes his examination by discussing demise of Cold War space program and Canada's new agenda for activity in outer space. The reader will not be surprised to learn that money, resources, and politics played key roles in demise of Canada's ambitions in space in 1960s.Defence and Discovery is a well-written book with significant amounts of primary source research and technical detail about Canada's engagement and scientific and technological developments in upper atmosphere and space. Considered from a scholarly perspective, this book clearly provides a wealth of evidence and technical detail about its subject. It is a significant addition to body of knowledge on Canada's history with space. As author himself observes, there has been very little scholarly work completed in this subject area. However, scholarly strength of this work is also a weakness for general reader. It is a detail-oriented monograph that is not an easy read for someone without an existing understanding of Canada's military and political history. …

Selected Legal Challenges Relating to the Military use of Outer Space, with Specific Reference to Article IV of the Outer Space Treaty

Since the end of the Second World War the potential use of outer space for military purposes persisted to be intrinsically linked to the development of space technology and space flight. The launch of the first artificial satellite, Sputnik 1, by the USSR in 1957 made Western states realise that a surprise attack from space was a real possibility, resulting in the so-called "space-race" between the USA and the USSR. During the Cold War space activities were intrinsically linked to the political objectives, priorities and national security concerns of the USA and the Soviet Union. After the Cold War the political relevance and benefits of space continued to be recognised by states. In view of the recent emergence of new major space powers such as China, the focus has again shifted to the military use of outer space and the potential that a state with advanced space technology may use it for military purposes in order to dominate other states. Article IV of the Outer Space Treaty prohibits the installation of nuclear weapons and weapons of mass destruction in outer space and determines that the moon and other celestial bodies shall be used for peaceful purposes only. Due to the dual-use character of many space assets, the distinction between military and non-military uses of outer space is becoming increasingly blurred. This article discusses a number of legal challenges presented by article IV of the Outer Space Treaty, relating specifically to the term peaceful, the distinction between the terms militarisation and weaponisation and the nature of a space weapon. It is concluded that article IV is in many respects outdated and that it cannot address the current legal issues relating to the military use of outer space. The legal vacuum in this area may have grave consequences not only for maintaining peace and security in outer space, but also on earth. Consequently, an international dialogue on the military uses of outer space should be facilitated under the auspices of the UNCOPUOS to address these uncertainties as a matter of urgency. Although it is agreed with the proponents of a hard law approach that a legally binding instrument should be adopted to regulate the military use of outer space, it is submitted that, as an interim measure, soft law guidelines should be developed to provide a framework for the eventual creation of a consolidated and binding legal instrument on all aspects relating to the use of outer space.&#x0D;

The International Telecommunications Union, Space Radio Communications, and U.S. Cold War Diplomacy, 1957-1963

This article examines the role of the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), a specialized agency of the United Nations, in the international effort to manage the radio spectrum. The management of the radio spectrum has been one of the most important activities of the ITU. International agreements for the use of the radio spectrum have been necessary because radio waves do not simply stop at national borders. Governments have viewed the spectrum as an international common resource.Specifically, this article focuses on the development of radio spectrum policy for one of the most significant new radio “services” of the twentieth century: radio transmissions involving outer space. Crucial ITU administrative radio conferences in 1959 and 1963 organized especially by the United States laid the foundation for the Cold War space race. A focus on the efforts by the United States to manage the meetings is particularly important for gaining a deeper understanding of Cold War diplomacy and international relations during this crucial period. In the context of total cold war, diplomacy was closely linked to a broad range of national security concerns, not only military preparedness but also the symbolic and material struggle over hearts and minds. A central concern of the early efforts to arrive at international agreements for space frequencies was satellite communications. The United States was particularly concerned about convincing the international community to set aside large blocks of frequencies for a planned global satellite communications system that would serve multiple national security objectives. The global satellite system would, in turn, play an important role in convincing other countries to agree to set aside frequencies for all forms of space communication.

The Nazi aerospace exodus: towards a global, transnational history

The exodus of Third Reich scientific and engineering personnel after World War II has traditionally been understood through its impact on the Cold War missile and space race. This article assesses the state of scholarship on this topic globally, particularly in aerospace professions, in the process drawing some conclusions on the total numbers, skill composition and Nazi backgrounds of the Germans, the stages of movement, and the technological impact of their movement. Such an assessment not only demonstrates the geographical weaknesses in existing knowledge, notably in the scholarship on Britain, France and much of the Third World, but it also points us towards a global, transnational history of the phenomenon, as cross-border flows of people, information, and technology grew beyond the bounds of the victorious powers’ national programs for exploiting German knowledge.