HISTORY 40C Lecture Notes - Lecture 17: Space Age, Sun Belt, Consumerism
8 Jun 2016
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Document Summary
Debates over role of government; what to do about race, gender, sexual discrimination, and over the consequences of growth and consumerism. Space age: extending us power into space affects american life. Estimates of space spending were 1% of gdp or about billion today. Spending for research and development of space is huge. Space and the meaning of life: technocracy and spaceship earth. Wernher von braun was the top rocket scientist in germany and. Rockets were scary: chesley bonestell illustrations of the 1950s said anyone who had power of space had power over the earth. Space was big in pop culture space was identified with the future and it was an assumption that man would go there. 1957 soviet union launched first space satellite, sputnik. Signaled to most americans that we were losing the war. Eisenhower had developed the u2 airplane and took detailed pictures of the soviet union and their military.
