In this chapter, I will consider a sequence of alternate history science fictions by the contemporary British sf author Ian Sales. These novellas, titled the ‘Apollo Quartet’, re-imagine the NASA space programme of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s to critique the ideological and gender codings of what Dale Carter called the ‘American Rocket State’ of the decades following the Second World War. Carter, in his book The Final Frontier, suggested that not only did the NASA space programme and its male astronauts articulate a peculiarly ‘American pioneering tradition’ and masculine heroism, they ‘embodied a nation, a social system, a whole way of life. Their mission would make manifest America's destiny; their achievements would universalize the American Century’ (159).

In the second decade of the twenty-first century, Sales returns to this historical moment to interrogate its particular mode of spectacular geopolitical strategy, where the Space Race was part of the Cold War, a technical and ideological supplement to the Arms Race: ‘“To insure Peace and freedom”, Kennedy told the voters a month before the [1960] election, “we must be first”’, Carter notes (154). Sales’ fictions reveal the belligerent, violent practicalities of space ‘exploration’, inextricably bound up with the Cold War, and also the systemic exclusions and blinkered thinking of NASA's technocratic project. For us, in the twenty-first century, the heroic images of the Saturn V rocket launch or of Aldrin (and reflected in his visor, Armstrong) standing on the Moon tend to mask the rather less heroic realities: thus I will begin with NASA’s implication in both utopian dreaming and nostalgia. Sales is sophisticated enough, however, to allow those tensions, between a longing for the heroic spectacularism of Apollo and a critique of its foundational principles and operation, to form the very fabric of his fictions.

In his book on Apollo, Moondust: In Search of the Men Who Fell to Earth (2005), Andrew Smith characterizes the programme in terms of spectacle and theatre: