The Surprising Space Ambitions in Colonial America

Many turned out to watch Venus pass across the face of the sun, a tiny, black dot moving against a white-hot backdrop. Scholars organized watch parties up and down the East Coast, from Rhode Island to Delaware, ready to learn more about their place in the world. The observations were described in published papers, and they were praised by European observers, who were impressed by a “new stage of maturity in the development of America.”

The year was 1769, and American space exploration was beginning to take shape.

The pursuit of space exploration has long been as much about geopolitical power as about scientific discovery. The tug-of-war between the Americans and the Russians on their way to orbit in the 1950s and 1960s is perhaps history’s best example of that, but it’s certainly not the first. Politicians, religious figures, and wealthy individuals have held up the study of the cosmos as a signal of great achievement since the colonial period and America’s early years, according to Alex MacDonald, an economist at NASA and the author of The Long Space Age: The Economic Origins of Space Exploration from Colonial America to the Cold War.

In his first address as president in 1825, John Quincy Adams called for the establishment of a national astronomical observatory. “And while scarcely a year passes over our