Limiting outer space: astroculture after Apollo

'Limiting Outer Space' propels the historicisation of outer space by focusing on the post-Apollo period.

After the Apollo moon landings, disillusionment set in.

With the return of the last astronaut in 1972, the skies - rather than the distant stars - once again became the limit.

No longer considered the inevitable destination of human expansion, outer space lost much of the popular appeal, cultural significance and political urgency that it had gained since the end of the Second World War.

With the rapid waning of the worldwide Apollo frenzy, the optimism of the Space Age gave way to an era of planetised limits.

Bringing together the history of European astroculture and American-Soviet spaceflight with recent scholarship on the 1970s, the 13 chapters in this cutting-edge volume examine the reconfiguration of space imaginaries from a multiplicity of disciplinary perspectives.