The rise and fall of the space age

Edwin Diamond, an irreverent veteran reporter who became the science editor of Newsweek in 1957 and then took over as the magazine’s general editor, covered the space program virtually from its beginning. The result was a book that came out in 1964 that lambasted the notion of racing the U.S.S.R. to the Moon. In the process, Diamond ridiculed the very idea of a race and asserted, correctly, as it would turn out, that there was less to the Soviet space program than appearances indicated. He acerbically likened the race to the potlatch ceremony conducted by the Kwakiutl Indians of North America, in which the chiefs of clans tried to glorify themselves and humiliate their opponents by tossing their most valuable possessions into a fire. Diamond used potlatch as a metaphor for what he considered to be the senseless and ultimately destructive pouring of billions of dollars and rubles into the space race. “The cumulative effect of the space race psychology,” he added sourly, “was to elevate the Kwakiutl potlatch rite into contemporary national policy.”

The race, he went on, also had a number of unfortunate consequences. One was creating the “unwarranted impression that rockets and ‘hardware’ … can be made the pre-eminent standard to judge national achievement.… The most exciting and, perhaps, important science being done today, for example, is in the field of molecular biology and biochemistry; but to date space activities provide little measure of these achievements.” Furthermore, he wrote, the race did not reflect where both societies stood on such immeasurable qualities as civil rights and human freedom in general.

Diamond, a dedicated liberal and First Amendment fundamentalist, declared that turning the competition into a full-blown race against both time and the Communists tended to shut off discussion about the space program’s goals and the techniques for attaining them. “The normal governmental procedures for funding and programming tend to give way to wartime-style ‘crash programs’ and a doctrine of ‘concurrency,’ in which design may be only half a step ahead of construction, and construction only half a step ahead of procurement. At the same time,” he added, “an increased degree of secrecy also becomes necessary ‘to prevent the opposition from knowing too much.’ Thus momentous decisions may be made under pressure or behind closed doors, and to question them too closely becomes somehow un-American.” [William E. Burrows, in This New Ocean, 1998]