Spacemobile Goes Abroad—NASA's Cold War Science Education Diplomacy, 1962–1969

Abstract

In 1961, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the Franklin Institute, a popular science museum in Philadelphia, PA, launched a mobile science education program in the U.S. called the Spacemobile. The program went international a year later, touring 53 countries by 1969. NASA's Educational Programs Division, part of the Public Affairs Department, collaborated with the U.S. Information Agency (USIA) and the U.S. State Department to facilitate the international circulation of science education diplomacy at the height of the early Cold War. Using primary sources from NASA, the USIA, the State Department, oral histories, and memoirs, it is argued that the Spacemobile program mediated the circulation of NASA's technoscientific knowledge and materials around the world by teaching the basic science behind the space program to students and other public audiences. Mediation Occurred when the Spacemobile program accompanied NASA's technoscientific collaboration and exchange agreements, confirms geopolitical alliances, eased sociopolitical tensions over tracking station expansion, and when it appealed to student audiences receptive to Western ideological perspectives about space science.