¹ On the history of imagining earth from space, see Denis E. Cosgrove, Apollo's Eye: A Cartographic Genealogy of the Earth in the Western Imagination (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001); Robert K. Poole, Earthrise: How Man First Saw the Earth (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008); Lazier, Benjamin, ‘Earthrise; or, The Globalization of the World Picture’, American Historical Review 116, 3 (2011), 602–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

² Walter A. McDougall, … the Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age (New York: Basic Books, 1985), 423–9, considers Western European space programmes after the book's main narrative has concluded.

³ The historically fluid and uncertain relationship between Europe and Russia is broached in Martin W. Lewis and Kären Wigen, The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 47–72.

⁴ Kiran Klaus Patel, Project Europe: A History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).

⁵ My thinking follows Johnson, Alison Frank, ‘Europe without Borders: Environmental and Global History in a World after Continents’, Contemporary European History 31, 1 (2022), 129–141CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶ David Armitage, ‘The International Turn in Intellectual History’, in Darrin M. McMahon and Samuel Moyn, eds., Rethinking Modern European Intellectual History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 242, suggests that – in the context of an international turn in historical scholarship that has foregrounded questions of physical space – ‘outer space may be the truly final frontier for intellectual history’.

⁷ Alexander C.T. Geppert, ‘European Astrofuturism, Cosmic Provincialism: Historicizing the Space Age’, in Alexander C.T. Geppert, ed., Imagining Outer Space: European Astroculture in the Twentieth Century (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 8.

⁸ Alexander C.T. Geppert, ‘The Post-Apollo Paradox: Envisioning Limits During the Planetized 1970s’, in Alexander C.T. Geppert, ed., Limiting Outer Space: Astroculture After Apollo (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 12.

⁹ Alexander C.T. Geppert and Tilmann Siebeneichner, ‘Spacewar! The Dark Side of Astroculture’, in Alexander C.T. Geppert, Daniel Brandau and Tilmann Siebeneichner, eds., Militarizing Outer Space: Astroculture, Dystopia and the Cold War (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), 3.

¹⁰ Geppert, ‘European Astrofuturism’, 10.

¹¹ Ibid., 16.

¹² Steven J. Dick, ‘Space, Time and Aliens: The Role of Imagination in Outer Space’, in Geppert, ed., Imagining Outer Space, 34, 46.

¹³ Howard E. McCurdy, Space and the American Imagination (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), 16.

¹⁴ Michael J. Neufeld, The Rocket and the Reich: Peenemünde and the Coming of the Ballistic Missile Era (New York: Free Press, 1995); Michael J. Neufeld, Von Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007); Asif Siddiqi, The Rockets’ Red Glare: Spaceflight and the Soviet Imagination, 1857–1957 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 196–289; Monique Laney, German Rocketeers in the Heart of Dixie: Making Sense of the Nazi Past during the Civil Rights Era (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015). On space science and culture in Cold War Germany, see Daniel Brandau, Raketenträume: Raumfahrt- und Technikenthusiasmus in Deutschland, 1923–1963 (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2019), 131–450; Anderson, Colleen, ‘Youth Space Education and the Future of the GDR’, Central European History 53, 1 (2020), 146–67CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Daniel Brandau, ‘One Nation, Two Astrocultures? Rocketry, Security and Dual Use in Divided Germany, 1949–61’, in Geppert, Brandau and Siebeneichner, eds., Militarizing Outer Space, 171–204.

¹⁵ Michael J. Neufeld, ‘“Smash the Myth of the Fascist Rocket Baron”: East German Attacks on Wernher von Braun in the 1960s’, in Geppert, ed., Imagining Outer Space, 117–40.

¹⁶ Geppert, ‘European Astrofuturism’, 10.

¹⁷ Bernd Mütter, ‘Per Media Ad Astra? Outer Space in West Germany's Media, 1957–87’, in Geppert, ed., Imagining Outer Space, 165–86; Henry Keazor, ‘A Stumble in the Dark: Contextualizing Gerry and Sylvia Anderson's Space: 1999’, in ibid., 209–30.

¹⁸ William R. Macauley, ‘Inscribing Scientific Knowledge: Interstellar Communication, NASA's Pioneer Plaque and Contact with Cultures of the Imagination, 1971–72’, in ibid., 313–34; Tristan Weddigen, ‘Alien Spotting: Damien Hirst's Beagle 2 Mars Lander Calibration Target and the Exploration of Outer Space’, in ibid., 335–52; Philip Pocock, ‘Look Up! Art in the Age of Orbitization’, in ibid., 252–381.

¹⁹ Guillaume de Syon, ‘Balloons on the Moon: Visions of Space Travel in Francophone Comic Strips’, in ibid., 187–208.

²⁰ John Krige, Arturo Russo, Michelangelo de Maria and Lorenza Sebesta, A History of the European Space Agency: The Story of ESRO and ELDO, 1958–1973 (Noordwijk: European Space Agency, 2000); John Krige, Arturo Russo and Lorenza Sebesta, A History of the European Space Agency: The Story of ESA, 1973 to 1987 (Noordwijk: European Space Agency, 2000). For an abridged but updated account, see John Krige, Fifty Years of European Cooperation in Space: Building on its Past, ESA Shapes the Future (Paris: Beauchesne, 2014).

²¹ On Western European space cooperation with NASA, see also Brian Harvey, Europe's Space Programme: To Ariane and Beyond (London: Springer, 2003); John Krige, Angelina Long Callahan and Ashok Maharaj, NASA in the World: Fifty Years of International Collaboration in Space (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). On space cooperation between non-Soviet Europeans with the Soviet Union and, more recently, Russia, see Colin Burgess and Burt Vis, Interkosmos: The Eastern Bloc's Early Space Program (London: Springer, 2016); Brian Harvey, European-Russian Space Cooperation: From de Gaulle to ExoMars (London: Springer, 2021).

²² Roger D. Launius, ‘Responding to Apollo: America's Divergent Reactions to the Moon Landings’, in Geppert, ed., Limiting Outer Space, 51. By contrast, British space culture and policy missed much of the Apollo-era upswing evident in the United States, making the 1970s less of a comparative low in the United Kingdom. Doug Millard, ‘A Grounding in Space: Were the 1970s a Period of Transition in Britain's Exploration of Outer Space?’, in ibid., 79–102.

²³ Florian Kläger, ‘The Earthward Gaze and Self-Reflexivity in Anglophone Novels of the 1970s’, in ibid., 131–54.

²⁴ Thore Bjørnvig, ‘Building Outer Space: LEGO and the Conquest of the Beyond in the 1970s’, in ibid., 155–82.

²⁵ Tilmann Siebeneichner, ‘Spacelab: Peace, Progress, and European Politics in Outer Space, 1973–85’, in ibid., 259–82.

²⁶ Martin Collins, ‘The 1970s: Spaceflight and Historically Interpreting the In-Between Decade’, in ibid., 31, 39. Collins and other contributors to Limiting Outer Space position space history alongside broader interpretive accounts of the 1970s including Thomas Borstelmann, The 1970s: A New Global History from Civil Rights to Economic Inequality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011); Göran Therborn, Geoff Eley, Hartmut Kaelble, Philippe Chassaigne and Andreas Wirsching, ‘The 1970s and 1980s as a Turning Point in European History?’, Journal of Modern European History 9, 1 (2011), 8–26; Niall Ferguson, Charles S. Maier, Erez Manela and Daniel J. Sargent, eds., The Shock of the Global: The 1970s in Perspective (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).

²⁷ On satellites and globalisation, see also Slotten, Hugh, ‘Satellite Communications, Globalization, and the Cold War’, Technology and Culture 43, 2 (2002), 315–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lisa Parks and James Schwoch, eds., Down to Earth: Satellite Technologies, Industries, and Cultures (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012); Martin J. Collins, A Telephone for the World: Iridium, Motorola, and the Making of a Global Age (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018).

²⁸ Christopher Gainor, ‘The Nuclear Roots of the Space Race’, in Geppert, Brandau and Siebeneichner, eds., Militarizing Outer Space, 69–92.

²⁹ Michael J. Neufeld, ‘Cold War – But No War – in Space’, in ibid., 47.

³⁰ Chapters treating space war in fiction include Natalija Majsova, ‘In Space, Violence Rules: Clashes and Conquests in Science-Fiction Cinema’, in ibid., 119–46; Oliver Dunnett, ‘C.S. Lewis and the Moral Threat of Space Exploration, 1938–64’, in ibid., 147–70; Philipp Theisohn, ‘Starship Troopers: The Shaping of the Space Warrior in Cold War Astroculture, 1950–80’, in ibid., 233–56.

³¹ Paul E. Ceruzzi, ‘Satellite Navigation and the Military-Civilian Dilemma: The Geopolitics of GPS and Its Rivals’, in ibid., 343–70. Cold War-era military technologies and their legacies are further considered in Patrick Kilian, ‘Participant Evolution: Cold War Space Medicine and the Militarization of the Cyborg Self’, in ibid., 205–32; Anthony Enns, ‘Satellites and Psychics: The Militarization of Outer and Inner Space, 1960–95’, in ibid., 257–84; Regina Peldszus, ‘Architectures of Command: The Dual-Use Legacy of Mission Control Centers’, in ibid., 285–312. See also Regina Peldszus, ‘Architectural Experiments in Space: Orbital Stations, Simulators and Speculative Design, 1968–82’, in Geppert, ed., Limiting Outer Space, 237–58.

³² John Lewis Gaddis, The Long Peace: Inquiries into the History of the Cold War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 195–214; Neufeld, ‘Cold War – But No War – in Space’, 45–6.

³³ Geppert, ‘European Astrofuturism’, 21.

³⁴ Michael J. Neufeld, Spaceflight: A Concise History (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018), 137–68.

³⁵ Alexander C.T. Geppert, ‘What Is, and to What End Do We Study, European Astroculture?’ in Geppert, Brandau and Siebeneichner, eds., Militarizing Outer Space, 373, 376. Recent histories of space science and astroculture in the Global South have included important treatments of India and southern Africa, e.g.: Siddiqi, Asif, ‘Science, Geography, and Nation: The Global Creation of Thumba’, History and Technology 31, 4 (2015), 420–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Siddiqi, Asif, ‘Another Global History of Science: Making Space for India and China’, BJHS: Themes 1 (2016), 115–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Waetjen, Thembisa, ‘Sputnik from Below: Space Age Science and Public Culture in Cold War Southern Africa’, Interventions 18, 5 (2016), 687–708CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Keith Snedegar, ‘The Congressional Black Caucus and the Closure of NASA's Satellite Tracking Station at Hartebeesthoek, South Africa’, in Brian C. Odom and Stephen P. Waring, eds., NASA and the Long Civil Rights Movement (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2019), 167–79; Siddiqi, Asif, ‘Whose India? SITE and the Origins of Satellite Television in India’, History and Technology 36, 3–4 (2020), 452–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Siddiqi, Asif, ‘Competing Technologies, National(ist) Narratives, and Universal Claims: Toward a Global History of Space Exploration’, Technology and Culture 51, 2 (2010), 425–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³⁶ Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1963), 102.

³⁷ Paul Betts, Ruin and Renewal: Civilising Europe after the Second World War (London: Profile Books, 2020), 225–6. Literature on Europe after empire includes Todd Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006); Jordanna Bailkin, The Afterlife of Empire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012); Elizabeth Buettner, Europe after Empire: Decolonization, Society, and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). On European integration and space, see ‘West European Integration and the Militarization of Outer Space, 1945–70’, in Geppert, Brandau and Siebeneichner, eds., Militarizing Outer Space, 93–118.

³⁸ Sue Davenport, Peter Johnson and Yuwali, Cleared Out: Contact in the Western Desert (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2005).

³⁹ Asif Siddiqi, ‘Dispersed Sites: San Marco and the Launch from Kenya’, in John Krige, ed., How Knowledge Moves: Writing the Transnational History of Science and Technology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2019), 175–200.

⁴⁰ Peter Redfield, Space in the Tropics: From Convicts to Rockets in French Guiana (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), xiv.

⁴¹ Geppert, ‘European Astrofuturism’, 4, 17–18. See further Redfield, Peter, ‘The Half-Life of Empire in Outer Space’, Social Studies of Science 32, 5–6 (2002), 791–825CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On aliens and ideas of otherness, see also Steven J. Dick, The Biological Universe: The Twentieth-Century Extraterrestrial Life Debate and the Limits of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Stefan Helmreich, Alien Ocean: Anthropological Voyages in Microbial Seas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009); Thomas Brandstetter, ‘Imagining Inorganic Life: Crystalline Aliens in Science and Fiction’, in Geppert, ed., Imagining Outer Space, 73–96; Gonzalo Munévar, ‘Self-Reproducing Automata and the Impossibility of SETI’, in ibid., 293–312; Debbora Battaglia, ‘Life as We Don't Yet Know It: An Anthropologist's First Contact with the Science of “Weird Life”’, in ibid., 231–44.

⁴² Pierre Lagrange, ‘A Ghost in the Machine: How Sociology Tried to Explain (Away) American Flying Saucers and European Ghost Rockets, 1946–47’, in ibid., 245–58; James I. Miller, ‘Seeing the Future of Civilization in the Skies of Quarouble: UFO Encounters and the Problem of Empire in Postwar France’, in ibid., 269–92.

⁴³ Luca Follis, ‘The Province and Heritage of Humankind: Space Law's Imaginary of Outer Space, 1967–79’, in Geppert, ed., Limiting Outer Space, 183–208.

⁴⁴ Peter J. Westwick, ‘From the Club of Rome to Star Wars: The Era of Limits, Space Colonization, and the Origins of SDI’, in ibid., 283–304.

⁴⁵ John Krige, American Hegemony and Postwar Reconstruction of Science in Europe (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 6. The cultural dimensions of US hegemony in Europe are considered in Victoria De Grazia, Irresistible Empire: America's Advance through Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005).

⁴⁶ Odd Arne Westad, The Cold War: A World History (New York: Basic Books, 2017), 4. See further Kate Brown, Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Bathsheba Demuth, Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait (New York: W.W. Norton, 2019).

⁴⁷ Several chapters in the astroculture trilogy consider Russian and Soviet space thought, notably Claudia Schmolders, ‘Heaven on Earth: Tunguska, 30 June 1908’, in Geppert, ed., Imagining Outer Space, 51–72; Andrew Jenks, ‘Transnational Utopias, Space Exploration and the Association of Space Explorers, 1972–85’, in Geppert, ed., Limiting Outer Space, 209–236; Cathleen Lewis, ‘Space Spies in the Open: Military Space Stations and Heroic Cosmonauts in the Post-Apollo Period, 1971–77’, in Geppert, Brandau and Siebeneichner, eds., Militarizing Outer Space, 313–42. This topic has previously generated interest in Russian and Soviet studies, e.g.: James T. Andrews and Asif A. Siddiqi, eds., Into the Cosmos: Space Exploration and Soviet Culture (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011); Eva Maurer, Julia Richers, Monica Rüthers and Carmen Scheide, eds., Soviet Space Culture: Cosmic Enthusiasm in Socialist Societies (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).

⁴⁸ On the language of space as a frontier, see McCurdy, Space in the American Imagination, 154–80; Rainer Eisfeld, ‘Projecting Landscapes of the Human Mind onto Another World: Changing Faces of an Imaginary Mars’, in Geppert, ed., Imagining Outer Space, 97–116.

⁴⁹ Geppert, ‘European Astrofuturism’, 19.

⁵⁰ De Witt Douglas Kilgore, Astrofuturism: Science, Race, and Visions of Utopia in Space (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 10, 222.

⁵¹ Robert Poole, ‘The Myth of Progress: 2001 – A Space Odyssey’, in Geppert, ed., Limiting Outer Space, 119. 2001 co-creator Arthur C. Clarke is also considered in Thore Bjørnvig, ‘Transcendence of Gravity: Arthur C. Clarke and the Apocalypse of Weightlessness’, in Geppert, ed., Imagining Outer Space, 141–64.

⁵² Pritchard, Sara B., ‘The Trouble with Darkness: NASA's Suomi Satellite Images of Earth at Night’, Environmental History 22, 2 (2017), 312–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵³ The development of ‘Afrofuturism’ as a literary tradition and site of cutting-edge scholarly analysis deserves significant engagement within future studies of European astroculture. For an introduction, see Reynaldo Anderson and Charles E. Jones, eds., Afrofuturism 2.0: The Rise of Astro-Blackness (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016), viii–xviii.

⁵⁴ This term is promisingly if idiosyncratically used in the astroculture trilogy, e.g.: Geppert, ‘The Post-Apollo Paradox’, 19; Geppert, ‘Spacewar!’, 31. Historians, anthropologists and others have expressed substantial interest in theorising conceptions of earth, although the nomenclature and theoretical ground remain in flux. See Joyce E. Chaplin, Round About the Earth: Circumnavigation from Magellan to Orbit (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2012); Todd, Zoe, ‘An Indigenous Feminist's Take on the Ontological Turn: “Ontology” Is Just Another Word for Colonialism’, Journal of Historical Sociology 29, 1 (2016), 4–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bruno Latour, Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime (Cambridge: Polity, 2017); Dipesh Chakrabarty, The Climate of History in a Planetary Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021).

⁵⁵ Spencer R. Weart, Nuclear Fear: A History of Images (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988); Matthew Grant and Benjamin Ziemann, eds., Understanding the Imaginary War: Culture, Thought, and Nuclear Conflict, 1945–90 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016).

⁵⁶ Jacob Darwin Hamblin, The Wretched Atom: America's Global Gamble with Peaceful Nuclear Technology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021).

⁵⁷ Toshihiro Higuchi, Political Fallout: Nuclear Weapons Testing and the Making of a Global Environmental Crisis (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2020). On the material consequences of the nuclear age, see also Joseph Masco, The Nuclear Borderlands: The Manhattan Project in Post-Cold War New Mexico (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006); Gabrielle Hecht, Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Uranium Trade (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012); Kate Brown, Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future (New York: W.W. Norton, 2019).

⁵⁸ Serhii Plokhy, Nuclear Folly: A History of the Cuban Missile Crisis (New York: W.W. Norton, 2021), xvi, 362.

⁵⁹ Teasel Muir-Harmony, Operation Moonglow: A Political History of Project Apollo (New York: Basic Books, 2020), xii–xiii, 275. On planetary consciousness, see also Goossen, Benjamin W., ‘A Benchmark for the Environment: Big Science and “Artificial” Geophysics in the Global 1950s’, Journal of Global History 15, 1 (2020), 149–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶⁰ Muir-Harmony, Operation Moonglow, 122, 276.

⁶¹ Relevant works include Janet Abbate, Recoding Gender: Women's Changing Participation in Computing (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012); Mar Hicks, Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost its Edge in Computing (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017); Safiya Umoja Noble, Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (New York: New York University Press, 2018); Margaret O'Mara, The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America (New York: Penguin, 2019); Thomas S. Mullaney, Benjamin Peters, Mar Hicks and Kavita Philip, eds., Your Computer Is On Fire (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2021).

⁶² Margot Lee Shetterly, Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race (New York: William Morrow, 2016). See also Margaret A. Weitekamp, Right Stuff, Wrong Sex: America's First Women in Space Program (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004); Nathalia Holt, Rise of the Rocket Girls: The Women Who Propelled Us, From Missiles to the Moon to Mars (New York: Little, Brown and Co., 2016).

⁶³ Plokhy, Nuclear Folly, 162, 186.

⁶⁴ Muir-Harmony, Operation Moonglow, 280.

⁶⁵ Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Paul Thomas Chamberlin, The Cold War's Killing Fields: Rethinking the Long Peace (New York: Harper, 2018).

⁶⁶ J.R. McNeill and Peter Engelke, The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of the Anthropocene since 1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014). The environment has yet to become a major category of analysis in histories of Europe and space. Future work in this area might engage Launius, Roger, ‘Writing the History of Space's Extreme Environment’, Environmental History 15, 3 (2010), 526–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Helmreich, Stefan, ‘From Spaceship Earth to Google Ocean: Planetary Icons, Indexes, and Infrastructures’, Social Research 78, 4 (2011), 1211–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rand, Lisa Ruth, ‘Falling Cosmos: Nuclear Reentry and the Environmental History of Earth Orbit’, Environmental History 24, 1 (2019), 78–103CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Black, Megan, ‘Prospecting the World: Landsat and the Search for Minerals in Space Age Globalization’, Journal of American History 106, 1 (2019), 97–120CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶⁷ Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights, ‘Climate Change and Poverty’, 17 July 2019, UN Human Rights Council, <https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/3810720?ln=en#record-files-collapse-header>.