Managing space, organising the sublime

Abstract

In 1968, James Edwin Webb, the ex-administrator of NASA, delivered a series of McKinsey Foundation lectures at the Graduate School of Business, Columbia University, which were published under the title Space Age Management the next year, but before the first Moon landing of July 1969. At that time, “space age” was a prefix that was being applied to everything. Effectively, it meant something like “modern”, with connotations of being streamlined, efficient and fashionable. The coupling of “space age” and “management” combines this modernity with a particularly technocratic sense of control. The space age was an age of mass organisation, of new products that saved time, of automated factories and paperless offices and launch pads connected by freeways and telephones. It was a world of harmonious organization, managed by wise and well-qualified elders who would eradicate the problems that beset humanity in its Earth-bound dark ages. The paradox, for Jim Webb,53 was how to retain the advantages of this technocracy without eclipsing democracy. After all, there would be no point in winning the space race against the Soviets if the form of social organisation that enabled it was effectively reproducing what was understood to be the centralised repression of communism.