"The Most Hazardous and Dangerous and Greatest Adventure on Which Man Has Ever Embarked": The Frontier in Presidential Pro-Space Discourse, 1957-1963

Abstract

Since the inception of the US Space Program, space exploration has been linked in public discourse to the cluster of ideas and images constituting "the frontier." In the seven years between 1957 and 1963, Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy moved the nation from Sputnik-stunned to burgeoning space pioneers, linking the language of scientific and technological advancement to American exceptionalism and the romance and adventure of the frontier. Thus, the nation's conception of the space program, as a significant feature in the US-Soviet agon, was initially encouraged by early Presidential space discourse. The image endured well beyond the early years of the space program, to the turn of the century and the completion of the nation's shuttle program. I argue that the ideas and images that constitute the frontier proved to be such a potent symbolic framework in American society that it functioned as a terministic screen for presidential pro-space discourse from the Eisenhower administration on. As the space age dawned, Dwight D. Eisenhower co-opted the dominant metaphor to justify his pragmatic and measured response to the Soviet Union's dramatic space achievements. One term later, John F. Kennedy's symbolic trajectory evolved pro-space discourse, building from an early continuation of Eisenhower's pragmatism to a transcendent justification for his vision of the nation's accelerated space efforts couched in a soaring mythic language, strains of which are still evident today. This nearly ubiquitous and certainly enduring nature of the space-frontier association in both popular and technical discourse signals its potential importance to rhetorical scholars and historians alike.