Machinist on the Moon: The Hopes and Anxieties of the Space Age Worker

My paper explores the relationship between the planned, long-term future of technology and industry and the short-term material realities of workers and work, looking at the decade of serious labor struggle in the American space industry during the Apollo program. Feeling that the Space Age required a permanent end to such industrial strife, NASA allied with conservative union leaders to transform space labor relations, end class struggle, and meld the long-term technological future of the state with the short-term material horizons of workers and unions. At first highly successful, strikes disappeared as the Machinists flourished through their relationship with NASA and embraced political support for space technological development as the new official ideology of the union. But this bargain disintegrated when conflict broke out both between union leadership and rank-and-file and between NASA and political leaders over the future of the Space Age, with strikes returning to the space industry in force. After the decline of NASA, a new generation of IAM leadership pivoted towards an aggressive, anti-Cold War democratic socialism, denouncing the United States “addiction” to such forms of Cold War technological development and calling for a new, green industrial revolution on Earth and in space. Understanding this history of labor struggle over the historical future of space technology is essential for making sense of new space capitalists’ calls today for a “Second Space Age” and the revitalization of interplanetary space colonization.