The Eagle Never Lands: Weltraum und Weltraumfahrt in der US-Amerikanischen Kultur

The essay discusses the significance and representation of outer space in US-American cul-tural and intellectual history. It argues that the inaccessibility, emptiness, and vastness ofouter space provoke human attempts to vicariously ‘experience’ and ‘fill’ it, and thus to makeit meaningful, via cultural products and fictional as well as nonfictional narratives. How-ever, the essay further argues, these attempts at naturalization are limited by the very samecharacteristics that provoke them; there remains an unbridgeable distance and meaning-lessness. Using a number of examples from American history, literature, and film, the essayexamines how this double structure specifically and variously manifests itself and what thismay tell us about the respective cultural contexts and their ideological investments.