One of the most iconic outcomes of human spaceflight was the influential metaphor of ‘spaceship Earth’. The metaphor figures amongst the most influential Cold War interpretations of the global environment and it effectively translates a ‘new’ vision of the world as a finite planet. It was adopted not only by military planners at the Pentagon but also proponents of new forms of environmentalism. Its success from the late 1950s onwards, in politics and economics, was driven by the fact that the metaphor incorporated both, the idea of global environmental crisis, yet also a strong belief in progress and the capacity to control and manage Earth as a whole. Thus, as a technological metaphor, spaceship Earth also illustrates Banham’s famous paradigm of the ‘First Machine Age’, where the machine appears as the ultimate metaphor for architecture. It thus comes as no surprise that Cold War architects, such as Buckminster Fuller and Frei Otto, developed utopian and concrete manifestations that actively fed into the idea of the Earth as a controllable spaceship. The declared goal was to resolve at a global scale all earthly problems in one sweeping gesture of urban planning, architectural design and infrastructural construction. More recent projects of geoengineering are ultimately the dark descendants of this highly problematic Cold War conceptualization of Earth as a controllable machine.

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