Culture and Life

by Rob Gowland

Getting the right stuff right

Space missions don't just require "the right stuff"; they require a 
highly developed industrial economy, with a massive investment in science 
and technology. Undertaking space missions is tangible evidence that a 
nation or group of nations has achieved that status.

When the USSR launched the first space craft, Sputnik, on October 4, 1957, 
it was a scientific and technological achievement that was hailed around 
the world. In the most powerful capitalist country, however, it was viewed 
a little differently.

To the military-industrial complex formed by the Pentagon, the government 
of the USA and the largest corporations, it was axiomatic that whoever 
controlled space would control the world. They set out to regain the 
initiative in space and to ensure that they retained control over it for 
ever more.

But to achieve mastery in space was going to require a huge 
investment of public money. Truly enormous profits were going to be made by 
a bunch of corporations, but the US as a nation would be impoverished.

While the Commie countries sought to develop their space programs while 
striving to maintain universal health care, free education and full 
employment, the unfettered US sought victory in the "space race", that race 
that it was oh so important for the US to "win".

The profits being made in the aero-space and IT industries were pointed to 
as evidence of the health of the US economy, while at the same time the 
absolute priority of achieving supremacy in the space race was used to 
explain why the US could not have universal health care, could not house 
the homeless, provide jobs for the unemployed or even utilise a large part 
the country's industrial capacity.

To keep the US people from tossing their leaders in the Potomac for even 
suggesting such an anti-popular policy, the US corporate state had recourse 
to propaganda and PR, in a campaign of extraordinary magnitude and 
sophistication.

At first they began in Cold War vein, portraying the Soviet scientists' 
achievement as a "threat" to the security and very existence of the USA. 
And of course the Soviet mastery of rockets powerful enough to lift a 
satellite into orbit did have a military function, an unwelcome one 
from the Pentagon's point of view.

By rendering the US vulnerable to retaliatory nuclear attack, the 
development of inter-continental ballistic missiles (ICBM) put an end to 
the US threat of mass nuclear bombing by the long range bombers of the US 
Strategic Air Command which had ringed the USSR.

But the US propagandists sought to produce a hysteria not just of fear of 
Soviet intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), but of Soviet science 
itself. The mastery of maths evident in the launch of Sputnik 1 and its 
successors was implicitly presented as the product of a soulless drilling 
of Soviet children in mathematics.

The US, it was strongly implied, was up against that most deadly of foes: 
evil, fanatical, godless, communist scientists. What could possibly be more 
fearsome?

By 1961, however, the US PR machine had really hit its stride: what the US 
needed (then as now) was a "crusade" and it got it with the attention-
grabbing program for the US to be the first country to put a man on the 
moon.

From the moment US President Kennedy launched the trillion dollar race to 
be first to land on the moon, the US space program has been subject to 
unprecedented, massive spin-doctoring.

The aero-space, IT and armaments industry makes a huge fortune out of the 
US military budget. An unimaginably large amount of money will be spent on 
the National Missile Defence project, the "shield" that is intended to 
allow the US to launch nuclear strikes at Russia and China without fear of 
being hit by any ICBMs they might launch in retaliation.

But the great capitalist corporations want more. They want money out of the 
civilian budget too, and in comparable quantities to the gobs of cash they 
get from the military budget.

To keep this money pouring in from Congress to NASA's coffers (and from 
them into the coffers of the aero-space industry), NASA and its corporate 
lobby sell its "technological marvels", its prestigious assertion of "US 
genius" (even though the scientists come from many countries), and its 
affirmation of US leadership of the world as we "reach out to the stars".

To this end NASA makes or helps in the making of countless TV 
documentaries, like the upcoming two-part series Mars: Pioneering the 
Planet which SBS will screen on successive Fridays in the About 
Us timeslot at 8.30pm commencing on December 14.

The program is predictably described as "the story of the next great 
adventure in space exploration".

NASA similarly produces or supplies the content for innumerable books and 
magazine articles on space, in the process subtly rewriting the history of 
space exploration, like the recent glossy series of space supplements in 
the Sunday Telegraph.

But for me the high point of this continuing PR blitz was the way the 
launch on April 7 this year of NASA's Mars Odyssey spacecraft was 
accompanied by a media launch for which NASA commissioned from the 
composer Vangelis a 60-minute piece entitled Mythodea as 
theme music for the "NASA Mission: 2001 Mars Odyssey".

A special television presentation of Mythodea was held on June 28, 
2001, in the Temple of Zeus, no less, in Athens. The performance featured 
world-renowned sopranos Kathleen Battle and Jessye Norman, with the London 
Metropolitan Orchestra, the National Opera of Greece Choir, 20 timpanists 
and harpists and Vangelis himself performing on electronic keyboards and 
synthesizers.

The Greek Government even made it a "Pre-Olympic Cultural Event" for the 
2004 Olympic Games which will be held in Athens. Now that's PR.