The first generation of Soviet rocket engineers were deeply influenced by both the technical and the cultural fantasy of space travel (Siddiqi, 2004). At the end of the Second World War, these visionaries were developing long-range missiles in the post-war competition between the USSR and the USA. However, it was the drive to see a scientific application of rocket technology that persevered even the threat of nuclear war. While working in the IBMP, the Chief Designer of the Soviet rocket programme, Sergei Korolev began testing suborbital flights with street dogs inside of the heads of the rockets, taking the place of the nuclear warhead. During one of the early rocket experiments in which an untrained puppy successfully returned from a stratospheric flight, Korolev exclaimed, ‘Space travellers will soon be flying in our spaceships with state visas – on a holiday!’ (Romanov, 1990). It was this fantasy of widespread civilian exploration of space that ultimately ushered the nuclear programme towards a race to the Moon.
The decade long ‘Space Race’ seemed to turn science fiction into reality, culminating in some of the most iconic moments of the twentieth century. And yet, in the fading spectacle of the NASA moon landing, space programmes underwent extreme national criticism as the public began to blame the lack of social welfare, inequality, and other social depravations on excessive government spending (Makemson, 2009). At the height of the race, NASA’s budget equalled four per cent of the total federal expenditure, more than was designated to education or health care (Handberg, 2003). Space exploration, which in many ways became symbolic of Cold War competition, cost as much as any other modern war, nearly bankrupting the Soviet Union in the process and causing severe public disapproval in the US.In order to sustain the future of space exploration past the lunar missions of the 1960s, both the Soviets and the Americans had to think beyond the short-term political value of extraordinary missions, towards long-term institutional reform. The space programmes had proven to have strategic value for foreign policy objectives, as well as producing a highly skilled workforce that could not simply be dismantled due to unpopular cost over-runs. The structural reforms of the 1970s changed the space programmes forever, even prompting US President Jimmy Carter (quoted in NASA, 1979) to state that ‘The first great era of space is over. The second is about to begin.’ It was in the time of wider political, economic, and societal transformation that the culture of the space agencies was forced to change as well (Woods, 2009). Beginning in the 1970s both NASA and the Soviet space programme shifted their focus from one-of-a-kind technological feats towards the stability of long-term scientific research and routine access to space. Over the following decade, the Soviet Union transitioned to successfully maintaining a permanent presence in orbit aboard a series of space stations called Salyut. In the meantime, NASA began the design and production of the reusable Space Shuttle programme. As historian Brian Woods (2009) has noted, NASA’s Space Shuttle ‘promised technology that would precipitate a revolution akin to those thought to have been engendered by the ship, the train, and the aeroplane’. This new infrastructure would open the door for investors, entrepreneurs, and potentially the general public, deeming it ‘the next logical step in space’ (Congressional Record, 1973). In order to balance the expenditure of the Space Shuttle design and operation, NASA calculated the potential subsidy in the form of payload costs – or space cargo that would be shipped by private parties. Payloads mainly included scientific and medical research experiments as well as satellites and their parts. But more significantly, this cargo was accompanied by Payload Specialists – partially trained crew who joined the Shuttle missions, and over the years of the programme saw politicians, scientists, engineers, business representatives and even a Saudi prince in orbit. The Soviets also opened the doors of their space station through a programme, called Intercosmos [5]. This programme created joint space ventures with the allied Eastern European and Communist countries: Bulgaria, Cuba, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Mongolia, Poland, Romania, and Vietnam. Intercosmonauts were ‘guest cosmonauts’ who would join the Soviet crews in the mid-1970s and 1980s on missions to the Salyut and later on the Mir space stations. Just like the payload specialist, the guest cosmonauts did not receive the full extent of cosmonaut training. Their week-long missions were designed by their respective countries and focused on scientific research, international cooperation, and Earth observation. Unexpectedly, the multicultural crews of the Intercosmos programme not only paved the way for building further international space relations between the East and the West (Draguns, 2011), they also reflected Buckminster Fuller’s (1968) utopian notion, that ‘we are all astronauts’. Towards the end of the Intercosmos programme, and with only ‘slight modification’, the Soviet space agency was able to offer the guest seat to the Mir space station to paying customers (Johnson, 2007, p 181). In 1989, Tokyo Broadcast Systems paid $12 million dollars to fly a Japanese reporter, Toyohiro Akiyama. In 1991, a British business consortium negotiated a flight for the British chemist Helen Sharman, the first woman to visit the Mir space station (Zimmerman, 2003, pp 292–301). These two international, civilian space travellers completed cosmonaut training in Star City, had specific missions developed by their nation states, and had their tickets financed by their governments. Although the space program was in a sense officially opened to the market by these events, the notion of commercially viable tourism was still a distant consideration.
NASA’s New Horizons probe is taking a long nap as it prepares to meet up with a distant icy space
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As Manber (2009) points out, the transformation of the Soviet rocket programme into a commercial space service was something few had imagined in the heat of the space race thirty years prior: ‘Just how has it come about that we owe it to the Russians for showing that capitalism and tourists can thrive, like dogs, monkeys, yeast cells, and fighter jocks in the zero-gravity of the space station?’ In parallel with the reforms of the Kremlin, then head of Russia’s space programme in Energia, Yuri Semenov, began to oversee his rocket engineering company much like a CEO, taking advantage of the market reforms sweeping over the new Russian Federation and accelerating their results. In order to create the funding to maintain the Mir space station, Semenov and Manber leased the space station for use by other countries. ‘In so doing,’ writes Manber (2009) in his memoir, ‘Semenov’s Energia broke with the tradition born with the space age, that space services were an extension of foreign diplomacy, not a commercial venture.’The mutually beneficial transformation provided financial support for the Russian space industry and allowed other nations to pursue research and develop their own space technology, leaving NASA’s model of state funding ‘a relic of the Cold War’ (Manber, 2009). Eventually, even NASA was forced into collaboration with Energia in order to put their astronauts into space. As the money made from a Pepsi commercial shoot on the Mir space station generated the necessary funding to begin to manage NASA-Russian relations, the partnership became symbolic of a new era of collaborative space exploration.[10] This partnership led to the planning, financing and construction of the ISS. The first dollar earned from the newly formed partnership between Energia and NASA is now hanging in a frame at the Energia museum alongside the Sputnik and the Vostok spacecraft.
This narrative of Dennis Tito and his journey to space was presented to the world by MirCorp as a kind of political milestone in the history of space travel, but it was also an important moment in the history of tourism. The emergence of the space tourist signals the opening of a new territory for tourism, one that sees the Earth itself as the ultimate destination. If we think of a 'tour' as an orbital journey, a tourist performs a round trip returning to the point where they started (Theobald, 1998, pp 6–7). Beginning with Tito, seven international tourists have circled the Earth and returned to their point of origin. However, it is not only the idea of a circular or orbital journey that translates so well to space travel, it is also the underlying idea of free movement around the globe. As Ueli Gyr (2015) observes, ‘Tourism crosses borders: spatial, temporal, social and cultural’. Tourist traffic flows globally, moving people to different time zones and climates, even seeing post-communist Russians vacationing in the West. Transport innovation has been essential in enabling modern tourism and the new global forms of holiday experience have been shaped by the successive technological advances of the ship, the train, the aeroplane, and now also the Soyuz rocket. Our modern forms of tourism date back to at least the eighteenth century, when travel for the sake of experience emerged as a rite of passage for young male aristocrats, educated elites, as well as artists and writers.[13] Alongside the requisite ‘grand tour’ of continental European cities, the more adventurous travellers seeking self-discovery found themselves in increasingly exotic, sublime and disorienting locations. Most important in this pursuit was an idea of the privileged view or vantage point. In Germany in the late eighteenth century, alpine climbing and other nature expeditions were sought out as aesthetic experiences, and as tourism developed as an art form, it also generated new genres of fine art production to illustrate the experience (Brilli, 1997). The industrialising societies of Western Europe found a new appreciation for the cascading views of natural grandeur, captured in the landscape paintings of the German Romantics. These works, which emphasised confrontations with sublime nature, brought together the emotion and descriptive power of the travellers’ diaries and sketches with the monumentality of history painting. By the early nineteenth century it was common to see the world through the representation of these travellers, such as the figures in Caspar David Friedrich’s paintings, viewing the dramatic landscape from over their shoulder. Here, there is a paradoxical tension between the emotional anxiety of the sublime and the always distant and elevated position of the viewer. As social historian Tony Bennett observes, ‘Even where Europeans were keen also to experience “reality” as directly as possible, as in their ventures into unknown places or, in a rather different way through the development of highly accurate replicas, the idea of detached representation remained important’ (Macdonald, 1998). The cosmopolitan traveller of the nineteenth century was a detached beholder of the world who simultaneously sought out more and more direct and authentic forms of engagement with that world. Astronauts and cosmonauts have retained this simultaneously intellectual and emotional regard for the sublime view, and often convey such sentiments in their accounts of space walks, moonwalks, and orbital flights. Stepping out into the Hadley Rille lunar mountains in 1971, Apollo 15 Commander David Scott reflected, ‘As I stand out here in the wonders of the unknown at Hadley, I sort of realize that there's a fundamental truth to our nature. Man must explore. And this is exploration at its greatest’ (Casey, 2013, p 191). 2ff7e9595c
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