Space Travel & Culture: from Apollo to space tourism

“Space Travel & Culture: From Apollo to Space Tourism,” edited by Martin Parker and David Bell, is an interdisciplinary academic collection of essays that examines how space travel—beginning with the Apollo moon landings and extending into contemporary commercial space tourism—has intersected with culture, society and the humanities rather than just technology and politics, exploring the symbolic, social and cultural meanings attached to spaceflight and its representations in media, law, economics and imagination. The volume includes contributions on themes such as the cultural impact of iconic space images, the political history of NASA programmes, legal and economic dimensions of geostationary orbit and commercialization of space, as well as gender, myth and environmental perspectives, offering a critical and wide-ranging look at the space age beyond traditional engineering narratives. Published in 2009 by Wiley-Blackwell, this book situates space exploration and the emerging phenomenon of space tourism within broader cultural, historical and sociological contexts.