Practical Futurism, Part II
The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. September 1959. That message is stamped on a metal pennant deposited on the Moon by the Soviet Union at the dawn of the space race. On September 14, 1959, forty-one hours after the pennant settled in Moon dust, Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev arrived in Washington, D.C., eager to exploit his propaganda coup. His scientists had sent a rocket to the Moon and successfully landed an object on the surface.
Meanwhile, in the States . . . well, since 1957 U.S. rockets had exploded on their launch pads, or shortly after liftoff, with dispiriting regularity. These disasters became staples of American newspapers, magazines, newsreels, and television.
Boom! Crash! American journalists dedicated to the truth, as well as to what they imagined their readers wanted, publicly put two and two together. Their verdict was that Russia could strike New York City with atomic ICBMs, and America probably couldn’t do much to prevent it.
UFO sightings increased.
Meanwhile, in Los Angeles in 1960, architect John Lautner earned fame with his saucerlike Chemosphere House—a structure that looked to be the limit of America’s space technology, because the Soviets one-upped the USA again on April 12, 1961, when cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin completed an orbit of Earth.
Mercury 7 astronaut Alan Shepard became America’s first man in space about three weeks later, on May 5, though he did not orbit. In any case, the space age had arrived, bringing with it a new kind of futurism and, as a cultural aside, increased interest in UFOs. News media gave breathless coverage to these events, and out-and-out space advocacy pushed the editorial agendas of major magazines. Collier’s published a three-part space exploration feature by rehabilitated German rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, with eye-popping painted illustrations by Chesley Bonestell and Fred Freeman. Life became a fervent booster of the American space program and the original Mercury 7 astronauts. Tech-and science-focused periodicals the likes of Popular Science and Mechanix Illustrated also got in on the space action.
Los Angeles became a hub of next-generation American technology. Already heavy with infrastructure created to build warplanes and ships during World War II, L.A. had been active in rocket dynamics and other space-related technology since before Sputnik in 1957. Now it readied itself to refine the technology and build the rockets and propulsion systems that would literally vault the United States into space, and a new world of weather and communications satellites, intelligence gathering, military dominance from space, Moon and Mars landings, and long-term bases on those bodies.
Manufacturing and hard science came together, to make flying saucers and other UFOs plausible.
