ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how the seductive, but quixotic form of inscribing exceptional America's place in the world, precipitated a particular way of seeing, thinking and eventually experiencing, outer space. The American press was at pains to report how the launch of Sputnik challenged perceptions across the world of American claims to be leading humanity's moral and temporal, as well as spatial, vanguard. To be strong and bold in space technology will enhance the prestige of the United States among people of the world and create added confidence in 'scientific, technological, industrial and military strength'. After Kennedy's speech an imaginative cosmography became practically, as well as culturally, central to conceptions of American identity. The Moon speech appears to embody the moment through which a mythology of writing American into the world as the exceptional universal destiny of humanity, a mythology that had circulated in New World popular geopolitics since the sixteenth century, had come to the fore of American policy decision-making.
