ABSTRACT

This chapter presents the traumatization of the messianic mythologizing and technocratic organizing of American spaceflight, by the losses of Apollo 1 in 1967 and the Space Shuttle Challenger in 1986. The analysis of causes was vital to re-establish a progressive history of spaceflight, technocratic confidence in NASA, messianic hope in America. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari's philosophy, the chapter explores how the shock, trauma and anxiety associated with the losses of the crews and hardware of Apollo 1 and the space shuttle Challenger, disrupted and augmented hope in America as a transcendental space and time. The visceral trauma of the event threatened to diminish the rising messianic hope and technocratic confidence within and around NASA. The trauma of Apollo 1 threatened to spread with speed beyond NASA, disorganizing, and de-territorializing, assumptions of confidence in the agency to render the future, the cosmos, as knowable, as progressive, as hopeful, as American.