During the Space Race between the United States and the Soviet Union, the Americans and the Russians drew upon specific castes for their astronauts and aerospace engineers. The Americans primarily drew upon the segment of the population primed to push their new empire to dominance — the soldiery of the WASPs.
In many ways, the Cold War was America at its most meritocratic, with the Space Race an exemplar of the intense competition. You could either do the mission or you couldn’t, and the consequences of failure were immediate and immense in terms of life, cost, and national prestige. But the race to the Moon still drew from a particular class that had ruled the United States since its inception, and which had honed a caste of highly talented bloodlines within a hypercompetitive culture. The men of NASA were not quite the ensconced blue bloods of the Ivy League, but rather products of the cutthroat officer class of the United States military and the high-IQ proving grounds of the growing outer-Ivy academy. Neil Armstrong was a product of Purdue and USC. Buzz Aldrin went to MIT. Jim Lovell and Alan Shepherd came from the Naval Academy, Michael Collins and Ed White from West Point.
These WASPs were matched so well to the demands of the space program not just because of their more rooted place in the social order, but also because their culture lended itself to the task. The founding British stock of America were notable for their composure, and the way they combined risk-taking with a level-headed reliance on structure and rules systems. These cultural traits enabled the rapid conquest and settlement of America from ocean to ocean, and flexed the capacity to turn wilderness into modern cities within a couple generations. Within the warrior class, the Mercury astronauts were all pilots, a part of the military that served as modern knights — an odd fusion of soldier, engineer, and artist. Most of them were test pilots, perhaps the most dangerous job in the American military at that time, which required an elite mix of technical skill and daring focus — more hallmarks of the frontier WASP class.
The space program was under the umbrella of the United States Air Force, which imbibed this culture and put it toward its goals. The program was anti-neurotic, or had at least relegated the neurotics to the physicists and theoreticians whose work laid the groundwork for the technology. Perhaps the most valuable trait for the Mercury program was calmness - the ability to keep ones composure when things went wrong, since quick and intelligent reaction. This helped them keep casualties in the program to a minimum, especially compared to the Soviets. During one of his pre-Moon landing orbital space flights, Neil Armstrong had to do some quick math using pencil and paper to bring his module out of a tailspin as he hoped to not pass out. More famously, Jim Lovell and the crew of Apollo 13 brought their damaged spacecraft back home after an oxygen tank exploded during their mission to the Moon, with no casualties aboard.
The race to the Moon may have the last great achievement of the WASPs, just as it might have been the last great achievement of America as a civilization — the nation’s true zenith. The U.S. went to the moon a few more times in the 1970s, but its more romantic ambitions became smaller as the empire passed into the era of maintenance rather than creation - of decadence rather than vigor. The great technological advancements extended into the early computer age and then plateaued, leaving us in a modern age where we tinker along the margins, having gained the power of move information in near magical ways, but bereft of a compelling or coherent vision of what to do with it.
When history books are written centuries hence, they may say something to the effect of “As went the WASPs, so went the nation.” Perhaps next to an image of Armstrong planting the flag into the lunar dirt.
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