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Article ID: CBB001211874

Cultivating the Cosmos: Spaceflight Thought in Imperial Germany (2012)

History and Technology
Volume: 28, no. 3
Issue: 3
Pages: 225-254

Publication Date: 2012
Edition Details: Part of a special issue, “Rethinking the Space Age: Astroculture and Technoscience”
Language: English

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Space historians have predominantly identified Weimar Germany (1919-1933) as the starting period of German debates over the possibility of spaceflight. However, spaceflight and the utopian potential of outer space were already topics of popular discussion in the late nineteenth century, when calls by German astronomers for speculative restraint were challenged in popular science accounts and fantasy literature. Mass-produced fiction in the first decade of the twentieth century increasingly depicted spaceflight as a technological vision, imagining the spaceship as the successor to the airship. While exploring the historical processes behind this ascent of plausibility of futuristic design, the article shows how popular science media gave public voice to both established and new professional elites and fostered interprofessional exchange. In the 1900s spaceflight developed into a popular theme and boundaries between fiction and popular science blurred.[ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]Space historians have predominantly identified Weimar Germany (1919-1933) as the starting period of German debates over the possibility of spaceflight. However, spaceflight and the utopian potential of outer space were already topics of popular discussion in the late nineteenth century, when calls by German astronomers for speculative restraint were challenged in popular science accounts and fantasy literature. Mass-produced fiction in the first decade of the twentieth century increasingly depicted spaceflight as a technological vision, imagining the spaceship as the successor to the airship. While exploring the historical processes behind this ascent of plausibility of futuristic design, the article shows how popular science media gave public voice to both established and new professional elites and fostered interprofessional exchange. In the 1900s spaceflight developed into a popular theme and boundaries between fiction and popular science blurred.[ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Article Geppert, Alexander C. T. (2012) Introduction Rethinking the Space Age: Astroculture and Technoscience. History and Technology (pp. 219-223). unapi

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https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB001211874/

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