President Nixon’s close confidant and counsel John Ehrlichman similarly suggested that it was a concern over a loss of reputation, rather than the potential for a gain, that shaped Nixon’s view of the space shuttle: “We had to be at the leading edge of this kind of applied technological development. And if we weren’t, then a great deal of national virtue was lost, and our standing in the world and all that.”105 When the space shuttle program was ultimately put to Nixon after extensive negotiations between NASA, White House staff, and the OMB, Nixon asked if it was a good investment but quickly added, “even if it was not a good investment, the nation would have to do it anyways, because space flight was here to stay. Men are flying in space now and will continue to fly in space, and we’d best be part of it.”106 Whether or not it was wasteful, space exploration had become an element of the conspicuous investment of a superpower and a cost that the U.S. government had accepted as now being a necessity of political life.
Further evidence for the signaling value of spaceflight can be seen in the origins of the American Space Station Freedom program under Reagan and its evolution into the International Space Station program under the Clinton administration.107 Reagan’s announcement of his space station initiative was unique in that it had an explicitly electoral context. He first announced his decision in his 1984 State of the Union address, where the space station was the only major new initiative proposed. With 1984 an election year, the incumbent president was in a difficult position. As a conservative facing a large government deficit, he had to appear to be restraining government spending. At the same time, he needed to back up his claim that, under his leadership, the nation had a fresh new start and that it was “morning in America” again. His speech addressed these themes and identified what he believed the initiative would signal:
Our second great goal is to build on America’s pioneer spirit. . . . A sparkling economy spurs initiatives, sunrise industries, and makes older ones more competitive.
Nowhere is this more important than our next frontier: space. Nowhere do we so effectively demonstrate our technological leadership and ability to make life better on Earth. . . . Opportunities and jobs will multiply as we cross new thresholds of knowledge and reach deeper into the unknown.
Our progress in space—taking giant steps for all mankind—is a tribute to American teamwork and excellence. Our finest minds in government, industry, and academia have all pulled together. And we can be proud to say: We are first; we are the best; and we are so because we’re free.
America has always been greatest when we dared to be great. We can reach for greatness again. We can follow our dreams to distant stars, living and working in space for peaceful, economic, and scientific gain. Tonight, I am directing NASA to develop a permanently manned space station and to do it within a decade.108
This high rhetoric made for a bold statement of national renewal, and Reagan’s investment in the new space station could be seen as a credible commitment of his dedication to those ideals. It was also about the only new commitment that he could afford with a budget deficit of roughly $185 billion for the 1985 fiscal year.109 For Reagan, the space station, projected initially at a cost of only $8 billion, was thus a high-visibility program, replete with future promises at a relatively marginal cost. It was this ability to seemingly signal a bright future for the nation at a comparatively low cost that made it such an attractive element for Reagan’s 1984 election campaign.
The space station initiative is the only NASA program to have been integrated into a presidential campaign platform at such a high level. In the Reagan-Bush 1984 official campaign brochure, the space station featured prominently. The brochure noted that “Americans were ready to make a new beginning. So we elected President Ronald Reagan and Vice President George Bush to lead us into a more promising future” and that the “President has challenged us to move forward again, to unite behind four great goals to keep America free, secure and at peace for the ’80s.”110 The first goal was to “Ensure steady non-inflationary economic growth,” the third to “Strengthen our traditional values,” but the second was to “Develop space, America’s next frontier.”111 The brochure further declared that in order to achieve this goal, “President Reagan has proposed the construction of a permanent manned space station.”112 President Reagan also made a giant model of the space station a centerpiece of the May 1984 London G-7 Economic Summit, where he invited leaders of Europe, Canada, and Japan to join in the project. Reagan maintained his emphasis on the station throughout his campaign, including at a major rally in Fairfield, Connecticut, less than two weeks from election day, where he waxed lyrical on the wonders of the space shuttle and stated that “we’ve committed America to meet a great challenge—to build a permanently manned space station before this decade is out.”113 He finished his speech with an appeal to a farsighted vision: “America is never going to give up its special mission on this Earth—never. There are new worlds on the horizon, and we’re not going to stop until we all get there together.”114 The space station, with its significant but not overwhelming cost, could be portrayed as a credible indication that Reagan intended to fulfill this view, and as a result it became an important part of his successful election platform. The signaling value of spaceflight had again contributed to a major new initiative. It would also, however, lead to that program being scaled back when a new president wished to signal fiscal responsibility and international cooperation rather than the dawning of a new day for the nation.
President Clinton’s conversion of Reagan’s Space Station Freedom project into a reduced-budget cooperative venture with Russia is an example of the negative effect that spaceflight’s signaling value can also have on spaceflight expenditures. In the years between Reagan’s announcement and when the Clinton administration took office in January 1993, NASA had spent $11.2 billion on the project with few pieces of hardware completed and none of them yet launched into space.115 Whereas Reagan had used the space station to signal his commitment to a bright future for the nation, Clinton had other signals that he wanted to send: fiscal responsibility in the face of difficult economic conditions, and a willingness to cooperate with Russia following the collapse of the Soviet Union. In Clinton’s 1993 State of the Union address, he emphasized core issues of domestic politics, bemoaning “two decades of low productivity and stagnant wages; persistent unemployment and underemployment; years of huge government deficits.”116 His only reference to space was to use its distance to emphasize the scale of the debt problem: “I well remember, twelve years ago Ronald Reagan stood at this podium and told the American people that if our debt were stacked in dollar bills, the stack would reach sixty-seven miles into space. Today, that stack would reach two hundred and sixty-seven miles.”117 With his focus on the debt, he stated his intention to reduce government spending by $246 billion over five years. Exactly four months after his 1993 State of the Union speech, Clinton would make it clear that the space station would be an important part of those cuts.
In his “Statement on the Space Station Program” of June 17, 1993, Clinton began on an ominous note for NASA: “At a time when our long-term economic strength depends on our technological leadership and our ability to reduce the deficit, we must invest in technology but invest wisely, making the best possible use of every dollar.”118 Although there remained the usual references to space as being vital to “technological leadership,” the overriding note was one of retrenchment rather than advance: “I am calling for the U.S. to work with our international partners to develop a reduced-cost, scaled-down version of the original Space Station Freedom. At the same time, I will also seek to enhance and expand the opportunities for international participation in the space station project so that the space station can serve as a model of nations coming together in peaceful cooperation.”119 Although the move signaled a credible commitment to cooperate with Russia—as Kennedy’s overtures to Khrushchev might have—it just as pointedly signaled a commitment to tackling the debt while at t
he same time continuing to invest in American leadership in technology. Clinton claimed that with “deep cuts in future development and operations costs,” the redesigned program would save more than $4 billion over five years, and more than $18 billion over the two-decade life of the program.120 These space station “savings” represented almost 2 percent of the total Clinton cuts. Although NASA’s budget represented only 1 percent of total federal expenditures at the time, spaceflight’s visibility had made it a target for deeper cuts to signal the seriousness of the Clinton administration’s attack on the debt. As in the other major American space program decisions—Apollo, the space shuttle, Space Station Freedom—the decision to pursue the International Space Station had signaling as a major political motivation. The International Space Station, however, is a unique reminder that, although spaceflight has largely been used as a signal for American leadership, there is also a reverse side to the coin. Reductions in spaceflight funding can also be used to signal a commitment to austerity and the intent to refocus on a more “down-to-earth” agenda.
While an identification of the overall signaling function of spaceflight clarifies its exchange value in a political context, it also raises a number of questions and problems. The most fundamental of these is the effectiveness of the signals. If there have been political desires and decisions to pursue space exploration for its signaling value, to what extent have these signals been effective? This is an inherently difficult question to answer, and to address it comprehensively would require opinion surveys of the world population before and after individual space exploration achievements. We only have a few of these types of surveys—such as those by the USIA and Almond, referenced earlier—and the results are ambiguous.121 The effect of the Sputnik signal was strong but heterogeneous: those geographically closer to, and presumably with more detailed knowledge of, the Soviet Union were less influenced by the signal than those farther away. Similarly, although a significant portion of the world population was impressed by the success of the Apollo program, it seems equally clear that a number of important actors were not. General Võ Nguyên Giáp and the North Vietnamese, for example, were hardly overwhelmed by American spaceflight achievements and continued to press their attacks while their enemy walked on the Moon: their understanding of the real power of the United States, at least in a military sense, was at most only marginally influenced by space signals, and they ultimately prevailed on the battlefield. Although the political desire for signaling may have been a driving force, the effectiveness of the space signal was ambiguous even at the height of the Space Age, and it became even more so in the subsequent decades.
There is also a case to be made that space signals can be as deceptive as they are informative. The cost of a spaceflight achievement means it can be an informative signal relative to other sources of information—but at the same time, because spaceflight is not a perfect representation of the characteristics it signals, it can also mislead and create false impressions. By its nature, a signal is only a proxy for an underlying set of characteristics that remain largely unknown to observers. Savvy actors can thus intentionally manipulate perceptions using space signals, and there is evidence to suggest that this has been the case—such as with Khrushchev’s desire to leverage the Soviet space program to project an international image of a powerful and robust Soviet economy, which was at odds with domestic reality. An American example of this intentionally deceptive use of space signaling can be seen in President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). According to some SDI scholars and participants, the program was conceived of, at least in part, as an expensive signal that would severely strain the Soviet Union’s industrial base if it tried to match it, and which would sow dissension and undermine Soviet confidence if it didn’t.122 From 1983, the DoD and the Reagan administration avidly promoted SDI to the public, even though many experts argued that the system had major technical obstacles that precluded realistic implementation. Even with some $26 billion spent on the program in the 1980s and early 1990s, an operational space-based intercept system was never fielded.123 Despite never having been implemented, however, there is evidence to suggest that the program had an effect: at least some high-ranking decision-makers in the Soviet Union seem to have believed SDI to be a genuine signal of American technical and economic superiority. According to some accounts, this had a demoralizing effect on Soviet leadership and played a role in the Soviet collapse. It is also worth noting that the conceptual and advocacy origins of SDI have been traced to members of the space colonization advocacy group the L5 Society, making it another example of a program promoted by private individuals who offered a powerful space signal to politicians in exchange for resources that they hoped to use to satisfy their own intrinsic preferences for spaceflight.124
The potential use of spaceflight signaling for intentional deception also raises the question of whether some of these signaling investments were also unintentional instruments of self-deception. To what extent did space achievements lead to overconfidence among American and Soviet leadership in the Cold War? To what extent did these achievements encourage damaging overextensions, such as with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the extended American campaign in Vietnam? To what extent have historic space achievements been given undue weight as relevant signals of national strength in the subsequent decades, long after the underlying conditions that produced the initial signals have changed? To what extent did the success of the Apollo program help to foster an overly optimistic perception of the organizational capabilities of NASA in the decades after its achievement?125 These are complex questions deserving further analysis and research; they cannot be answered here, but they are important to consider when thinking about the overall public utility of the signaling value of space exploration activities.
Signaling theory provides a useful analytical tool for understanding the context of resource allocation decisions made during the space race and the political value of spaceflight. It enables the consolidation of a number of the commonly identified motivations for spaceflight programs into a simple framework with explanatory power that applies over a broad range of space history. The demands for prestige, pride, peace, competition, and cooperation, which have been identified as among the most basic drivers of space exploration expenditure, can all be reasonably approximated by a demand for signaling. This simplified model is not meant to account for all of the complex demands and motivations behind space-related resource allocation. It does, however, provide a new interpretive framework within which to place key political decisions.
Signaling considerations have played a role in a wide range of endeavors throughout the historical continuum of American space exploration. As we have seen earlier with the construction of early American observatories, signaling can be a powerful motive at multiple levels—individuals, institutions, civic communities, and national governments. Amid the competitive antagonism of the Cold War, the importance of the space exploration signal reached new heights. The efforts of the early pioneers of liquid-fuel rocketry, spurred on by wartime support from the military, had reached a point of technological breakthrough that opened up the potential for spectacular new space exploration milestones to be achieved. The milestones were within the grasp of two world powers that were locked in a political struggle for global influence and dominance. Moreover, that struggle was one of conflicting economic and political systems, where the signaling characteristic of space exploration gave it high value as a means of projecting system superiority.
Space exploration could be used to signal many things, but above all, it credibly signaled an ability to muster resources, organize capacity, harness technology, and surmount challenge—in short, the ability to possess and project power. The more dramatic the accomplishments and the more resources and technological sophistication required to achieve them, the more effective the signal became: a nation that could send a man to the Moon was seen as one that could accomplish the seemingly impossible. The strength of the signal w
as further amplified by the transition in communication technologies. The mid-twentieth century’s information asymmetries, particularly across the Cold War divide, meant that space exploration achievements were effectively a type of globally verifiable information that came to be seen as a proxy measure for overall economic development, technological capacity, and military strength. At the same time, the beginning of the rapid proliferation of television provided a means of amplifying the signal by its rapid distribution to both domestic and worldwide audiences. As hundreds of millions of people across the planet watched Neil Armstrong plant an American flag into the lunar soil—though the television picture may have been fuzzy—the signal of American power was clear.
The principal improvement of the signaling framework is that its emphasis of a characteristic of space exploration—rather than a rationale for space exploration, as is more common in the literature—allows for the production of space exploration to be understood as part of an economic exchange. Although at a geopolitical level it was the American government that “produced” the achievements of the space race, at the project level of actual spacecraft and missions, it was the spaceflight engineers, scientists, and advocates who were the producers of items of political value that were, in effect, traded to the American government in exchange for financial support for themselves and their projects. A signaling perspective thus takes account of both the intrinsic interests driving the technical pioneers and dedicated promoters on the supply side of the exchange, as well as the demand-side requirement for a quid pro quo on the part of those allocating the resources. When Korolev’s team succeeded in convincing Khrushchev to allow Sputnik to be launched, it was not an attempt by the politicians to create a compelling symbol of the new Soviet society. The Sputnik project itself was largely the result of the personal efforts of Sergei Korolev, Mikhail Tikhonravov, and other Soviet designers, leveraging military demands and the infrastructure and technology that those demands allowed them to build.126 The act of launching Sputnik nonetheless had the characteristic of signaling the abilities of the Soviet Union to the world—as well as establishing the powerful signaling characteristic of spaceflight. With the political value of space exploration thus established, the producers of spaceflight signals—in America and the Soviet Union—now had a basis for large-scale exchange with government patrons. A view of spaceflight as having a fundamental political value in its signaling ability thus does not mean that signaling is the motivation of spaceflight per se. Rather, the signaling characteristic of spaceflight is simply the exchange value of a product that, for its actual producers (the engineers, scientists, and managers of spaceflight), is often intrinsically motivated. This provides a view of space history that allows the intrinsic motivations of the individual virtuoso engineers and scientists to be recognized as paramount in the development of spaceflight while at the same time identifying the signaling value of their products as being their principal exchange good in the context of political funding.
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