Some morning thoughts on space politics:

So, whenever I post something about the Moon landings being almost entirely a political move, I get lots of (polite!) people telling me that of course we all know this and it's obvious. Here's where I disagree:

1) I don't think it's obvious to most people. People know the space race was an international competition, but in my experience rarely think of it in terms of either domestic politics or international politics pertaining in particular to nations being decolonized in the 60s.

2) I think most people, including most space geeks, underestimate how nakedly political it was, how Kennedy immediately had second thoughts, how his own science advisor thought human Moon landing was a very bad deal for science, how he clearly didn't give a shit as late as 1958.

3) I think space geeks who know the Apollo history often don't realize that rocketry has been in bed with military and politics everywhere since the very beginning (e.g. both Goddard and Oberth trying to get funding by proposing poison gas rockets post-WWI), and remains so today.

4) Even people who *know* Apollo was political will often still talk as if space exploration has always been largely aspirational/inspirational, and will sometimes repeat lines, e.g. "For all mankind" that were born from late 60s US Information Agency propaganda work.

5) The Soviet and German history seems to be especially little known in the West, and especially the US, but it provides real insight into how current space law developed as well as its likely course in the future.

6) Understanding the actual details here is important if you want to think carefully about the future. A lot of space advocacy comes packaged with either no history, or history in which the focus is on very smart engineers, not politicians, diplomats, generals, etc.

In short, I'm willing to buy that people with some space history knowledge understand the political nature of space travel, but in books and (in my experience) in conversation, they don't talk as if the history is part of the weave of the present.

This sort of thing is especially egregious when people talk about e.g. space communes, space frontiers. Both concepts (commune, frontier) have a rich non-speculative history, not to mention economic theory, which rarely enters into actual discussions about space settlement.

So, for The Space Book, and in my twitter whinging, I'm trying very hard to push for this idea that you have got to understand the past and connect it up. You can't talk about a pop notion of the 60s or 30s or 1850s as if it's what actually happened.

Anyway, I think space settlement is cool, but accuracy is cool too!