The United States has been a space power since its founding, Gordon
Fraser writes. The white stars on its flag reveal the dream of
continental elites that the former colonies might constitute a "new
constellation" in the firmament of nations. The streets and avenues
of its capital city were mapped in reference to celestial
observations. And as the nineteenth century unfolded, all efforts
to colonize the North American continent depended upon the science
of surveying, or mapping with reference to celestial movement.
Through its built environment, cultural mythology, and exercise of
military power, the United States has always treated the cosmos as
a territory available for exploitation. In Star Territory Fraser
explores how from its beginning, agents of the state, including
President John Adams, Admiral Charles Henry Davis, and astronomer
Maria Mitchell, participated in large-scale efforts to map the
nation onto cosmic space. Through almanacs, maps, and star charts,
practical information and exceptionalist mythologies were
transmitted to the nation's soldiers, scientists, and citizens.
This is, however, only one part of the story Fraser tells. From the
country's first Black surveyors, seamen, and publishers to the
elected officials of the Cherokee Nation and Hawaiian resistance
leaders, other actors established alternative cosmic communities.
These Black and indigenous astronomers, prophets, and printers
offered ways of understanding the heavens that broke from the work
of the U.S. officials for whom the universe was merely measurable
and exploitable. Today, NASA administrators advocate public-private
partnerships for the development of space commerce while the
military seeks to control strategic regions above the atmosphere.
If observers imagine that these developments are the direct
offshoots of a mid-twentieth-century space race, Fraser brilliantly
demonstrates otherwise. The United States' efforts to exploit the
cosmos, as well as the resistance to these efforts, have a history
that starts nearly two centuries before the Gemini and Apollo
missions of the 1960s.
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