Hitting the Books: How NASA helped JFK build his ‘Nation of Immigrants’

The Apollo 11 moon touchdown was a seminal occasion in American historical past, one etched deeply into our nation’s collective psyche. The occasion ushered in an period of unbridled potentialities — the celebrities have been lastly coming into attain — and its results have been felt throughout the tradition, from artwork and trend to politics and tradition. In After Apollo: Cultural Legacies of the Race to the Moon, a multidisciplinary assortment of historians, researchers and lecturers discover the myriad ways in which placing a person on the moon impacted the American Expertise.

Excerpted from “Scientists With out Borders: Immigrants in NASA and the Apollo Program” by Rosanna Perotti from After Apollo: Cultural Legacies of the Race to the Moon, edited by J Bret Bennington and Rodney F. Hill. Gainesville: College of Florida Press, 2023. Reprinted with permission of the College of Florida Press.

Area Journey and the Immigrant Expertise

From NASA’s very beginnings, immigrant engineers, scientists, and technicians lent their expertise, labor, and technical abilities to the house program. However house journey itself at all times represented greater than a scientific endeavor. Human spaceflight was one of many “nice goals” of the Sixties, as house historian Valerie Neal reminds us, and as a “large thought,” spaceflight relied closely on American cultural narratives. The Apollo program (1963–1972) conjured the picture of pioneering the frontier within the Sixties—exploration and discovery have been indispensable to America’s historical past and persevering with redefinition, and People welcomed the frontier as a metaphor for house exploration (Neal 15). The shuttle program (1972–2011) echoed the narrative of People “going to work.” Because the Apollo missions have been changed by the house shuttle, NASA supporters and commentators depicted the shuttle crews with imagery related to blue-collar labor: “astronaut repairmen made service calls in a automobile usually known as an area truck.”

Each of those narratives — “pioneering the frontier” and “getting the job carried out” — are carefully related to a 3rd narrative that was turning into deeply ingrained in American nationwide identification within the Sixties: the parable of the USA as a nation of immigrants and of the immigrant because the spine of America’s egalitarian democracy. This American immigrant fantasy was not born within the nineteenth and even within the early twentieth century, when immigration was peaking and Congress struggled to impose limitations and quotas. The parable reached vast acceptance solely within the early Sixties. It’s no coincidence that John F. Kennedy offered the immigrant fantasy most succinctly in his pamphlet, A Nation of Immigrants, in 1963, as Kennedy was making ready to ask Congress to overtake the nation’s immigration legal guidelines. On the similar time, his administration was urgent furiously to place a person on the Moon by the top of the last decade, a central objective of the New Frontier. Apparently, Kennedy’s house proposals have been a much more vital coverage precedence for the administration than immigration reform (the latter was not completed till 1965, as we will see later). However his articulation of the “nation of immigrants” narrative supplied highly effective imagery in help of the house program he championed from the beginning of his administration.

Kennedy’s articulation of the complicated immigration fantasy featured not only a welcoming America, however an idealized immigrant, united with others by little aside from a typical love of freedom. Ours was “a nation of individuals with the contemporary reminiscence of outdated traditions who dared to discover new frontiers, individuals keen to construct lives for themselves in a spacious society that didn’t limit their freedom of selection and motion.” Citing Tocqueville, Kennedy famous that immigrants’ very poverty made them extra inclined towards egalitarian democracy. No area of American life was untouched by the affect of immigrants, and immigrants themselves have been paragons of self-reliance, ingenuity, entrepreneurship, and pioneer spirit. “It was the long run and never the previous to which he was compelled to deal with himself,” Kennedy wrote, describing the motivations of the nineteenth-century immigrant.

Aside from the Negro slave, he may go wherever and do something his skills permitted. A sprawling continent lay earlier than him, and he had solely to weld it collectively by canals, by railroads and by roads . . . This has been the inspiration of American inventiveness and ingenuity, of the multiplicity of latest enterprises, and of the success in attaining the best way of life wherever on this planet.

The house program was the following frontier within the pure development towards excellence. It evoked not solely the immigrant’s capability for journey and discovery but in addition his practicality and capability to work arduous and tame his environment. From the time of the English settlers, who “fought a rugged land” within the phrases of Kennedy, immigrants needed to overcome adversity to earn their fortunes and form their atmosphere. That they had labored as artisans, supplied low cost labor for American farms, factories, mills, and mines, and climbed the financial ladder to offer succeeding generations with academic alternatives. That they had moved ahead to get the job carried out. Launched beneath the motto “Going to Work in Area,” the house shuttle was a automobile that might ship satellites and restore them in orbit, carry industrial payloads, and help a analysis laboratory. Astronauts would perform their work all however rolling up their sleeves as builders and restore technicians, wielding robotic arms and energy hand instruments. Companies may use the shuttle as a workhorse to launch satellites or develop manufacturing capabilities. All of this financial productiveness in house could possibly be anticipated to resonate with a nation whose more and more numerous immigrant workforce was transitioning to a brand new financial system. American society was mirrored not solely symbolically however virtually in NASA’s missions. They produced outcomes that appeared virtually impossibly bold. NASA represented excellence: one of the best work on this planet. Area journey additionally mirrored a few of the dangers and hardships of the immigrant expertise. Because the American public started questioning the nation’s funding in house journey by the Eighties, advocates harked again to this a part of the immigrant narrative. Within the aftermath of the 1986 Challenger tragedy, the Report of the Advisory Committee on the Way forward for the US Area Program (1990) reminded People that acceptance and resilience within the face of failure have been part of America’s pioneer and immigrant legacies:

In a really actual sense, the house program is analogous to the exploration and settlement of the brand new world. On this view, threat and sacrifice are seen to be fixed options of the American expertise. There’s a nationwide heritage of risk-taking handed down from early explorers, immigrants, settlers, and adventurers. It’s this ingredient of our nationwide character that’s the wellspring of the U.S. house program.

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