Introduction

For fifty years, much of our thinking about socio-political, economic and military-related issues were defined, shaped and driven by the Cold War and the centrality of a comfortable paradox – that of a bipolar nuclear confrontation. A decade and a half after the end of that confrontation we are still deemed to be living in a period, the ‘post’-Cold War era, that is defined only in relation to the preceding one. And while there is a strong temptation, if not an expectation, for some scholars to adhere to these well-known and totalizing terms of the debate, for others the past two generations have been animated by a different, and pervasive, intervention – the ‘space age’. The movement of humanity into space and the development of satellite technology in retrospect may well appear as the defining characteristic of this period.