The founding figures, advocates and engineers of the early Space Age are frequently hailed as ‘fathers’, ‘forebears’, ‘prophets’, ‘pioneers’, ‘visionaries’ and ‘heroes’, employing hagiographic, gendered and indiscriminate tropes that lack analytical value. Inspired by persona and celebrity studies, this introduction proposes an alternative approach to comprehend the historical significance and historiographical prominence attributed to global ‘rocket stars’ Qian Xuesen (1911–2009) in China, Arthur C. Clarke (1917–2008) in Sri Lanka, Vikram Sarabhai (1919–71) in India, Sigmund Jähn (1937–2019) in East Germany, Ulf Merbold (1941–) in West Germany and Arnaldo Tamayo Méndez (1942–) in Cuba covered in this special issue. Replacing ‘great-men’ hagiography with a theoretically grounded focus on celebrification processes and the making of national patriarchs from without – from person to persona – enhances nuance and reduces cliché in understanding the role technocelebrities played in the production of outer space as a key phantasmagoria of the twentieth century. As these six space personas operated and starred in geographical contexts distinct and distant from the spaceflight superpowers, the special issue advances the notion of a global Space Age as an alternative to the conventional bipolar Cold War variant and offers a foundation for its budding historicization.

Commonly referred to as the ‘father of spaceflight’ and ‘king of rocketry’, Qian Xuesen (1911–2009) is for many Chinese citizens the pre-eminent scientist of the twentieth century. Trained at the California Institute of Technology, he co-founded the Jet Propulsion Laboratory before returning to China in 1955, where he became instrumental in the space programme and the missile industry. This article investigates Qian’s ascent from aeronautical engineer known only within expert circles to China’s face of space. It charts his celebrification, particularly after the Tiananmen Square crackdown, and distinguishes five facets of a rocket star in the making. Transforming Qian into China’s quintessential technocelebrity and transfiguring his persona into the cornerstone of astrocultural production helped propagate spaceflight activities, rendering outer space an imaginable arena for both the state and the public. Yet, as the analysis of a comprehensive body of visual materials, media reports, biographies and obituaries shows, ultimately Qian’s carefully crafted persona is what Ernesto Laclau has termed an ‘empty signifier’. Qian is space, and space Qian, but little else. If historians are to understand the allure and inner workings of the global Space Age, then historicizing the orchestrated rise of non-Western space personas such as Qian Xuesen proves key.

Hundreds of thousands of conferences have taken place since their first appearance in the late eighteenth century, yet the history of science has often treated them as stages for scientific practice, not as the play itself. Drawing on recent work in the history of science and of international relations, the introduction to this special issue suggests avenues for exploring the phenomenon of the international scientific conference, broadly construed, by highlighting the connected dimensions of communication, sociability and international relations. It lays out a typology of scientific conferences as a way of gaining an overview of their diversity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It argues that the international scientific conference is a central locus for understanding science as a social, cultural and political practice.

Historical accounts of the Indian space programme inevitably invoke the figure of Vikram Sarabhai (1919–71), credited as the father of its early development in the 1960s. A physicist by training, Sarabhai was best known for his ‘leapfrogging’ vision, into which social applications of space technology would catapult developing countries out of poverty. By interrogating official and unofficial records, speeches, cinematic productions and obituaries, this article examines how Indian leadership utilized Sarabhai’s persona to substantiate the role of space flight in the nation’s domestic modernization and geopolitical leverage. Especially after his death in 1971, the making of Sarabhai into the pioneer of Indian space flight allowed India to fashion a geocentric appeal specific to its space programme, which construed the benefits of low-earth-orbit satellite communication to tackle unequal development. In the 1990s, Sarabhai’s image was further appropriated by international powers and actors to propagate the commercialization of satellite systems. Despite its elitist outlook and subscription to received notions of nationhood and modernity, a closer look into the public resonance of Sarabhai’s persona reveals how the geocentric promise of space flight in the Indian context contributed to the formation of post-1960s astroculture globally.

This article traces the visual culture of human genetic engineering over the past decade, focusing on the CRISPR genome editing technology. We argue that the representations surrounding CRISPR exemplify, and to an extent define, this visual culture. We examine the history of CRISPR, particularly its human applications from 2012 to 2022, through a periodization that includes the CRISPR craze, gene therapy initiatives, the He Jiankui controversy and clinical trials. Employing an expanded interpretation of intermediality within science communication, this work addresses the role of figuration across the relationships between specialist science reporting and the mainstream press and between traditional and social media. Using a mixed-methods approach combining visual and social-media analysis, the article presents an empirical analysis of three key figures – the double helix, the scientist and the human subject – and their roles across the discussed phases. The study concludes by articulating the stabilizing, amplifying and affective functions of intermedial figuration within science communication.

This article analyses the development of Arthur C. Clarke’s (1918–2008) persona as the ‘prophet of the Space Age’, focusing on its relation with his adopted homeland, Sri Lanka. Unlike many space personas, Clarke was not an astronaut or a political leader, but a writer and advocate for space technology who developed a global reputation as an authority on the future. In 1956, Clarke relocated from his native England to the former British colony of Sri Lanka (then Ceylon). This article examines how both Clarke himself and a wide range of organizations, nations and individuals, including many from Sri Lanka, contributed to the creation of a global ‘prophet’ persona. This includes Clarke’s public life in Sri Lanka, which came to embody the earthbound, satellite-focused space future he promoted. This persona was in turn used to project commercial and moral justifications for space technologies, especially through Western lenses and for Western audiences, but in numerous ways gave Sri Lanka an active role in the global Space Age.

Finding the right balance between education and entertainment in science communication has always been a challenge. This essay argues that this balance has often been framed in terms of the correct proportion and use of animation and live-action footage in popular-science media. Clarifying the assumptions behind a century of concerns about animation and science, this historical case study examines the advisory board’s complaints about animation in the Bell System Science Series, which aired in the United States between 1956 and 1964. AT&T interrupted the series mid-stream by switching the creative team from Frank Capra and his production company to Owen Crump at Warner Bros. Studio. Capra’s use of animation in the series featured prominently in this decision. The historical record – as well as Capra’s and Crump’s different aesthetic choices about animation – tells us much about the board’s objections and how they were resolved in production. This essay examines the differences between the two parts of the series to uncover a course correction steered primarily by the scientific advisory board, which reveals a sometimes-fraught relationship between live-action footage and animation in science education that persists even today.

This history of a statement attributed to the developmental biologist Lewis Wolpert exemplifies the making and uses of quotations in recent science. Wolpert's dictum, ‘It is not birth, marriage or death, but gastrulation which is truly the most important time in your life’, was produced in a series of international shifts of medium and scale. It originated in his vivid declaration in conversation with a non-specialist at a workshop dinner, gained its canonical form in a colleague's monograph, and was amplified as a quotation on a poster derived from an undergraduate project. Although it drew on Wolpert's authority and he accepted his authorship, it thus represents a collective sifting of earlier claims for the significance of prenatal existence through the values of 1980s developmental biology. Juxtaposing a technical term with major life events has let teachers engage students, and researchers entice journalists, while sharing an in-joke that came to mark community identity. Serious applications include arguing for an extension of the fourteen-day limit on human-embryo research. On this evidence, quotations have been kept busy addressing every audience of specialized knowledge.

The maritime expansion of the early modern period and the discovery of new continents necessitated a profound revision in traditional cosmology, bringing into question the millennia-old practices that were framed around that cosmology. Among these practices was astrology, which in the early modern period reached an unprecedented level of popularity through the development of the printing press. The application of the astrological corpus in tropical and southern latitudes questioned many of the foundational Ptolemaic concepts. At the core of this problem was the reversal of the seasons in the southern hemisphere. Since Ptolemy had firmly grounded the natural explanation of astrological attributes of the zodiac and the planets on the seasonal qualities, their reversal would imply a complete change in the zodiacal and planetary properties. Authors such as Girolamo Cardano, Tommaso Campanella and Athanasius Kircher addressed this matter, but it never became a central point of debate in the astrological literature of the period. However, practitioners in the New World, whose empirical view was very different to that of European authors, reached different conclusions. This problem offers an example of the difficulty in reconciling traditional authority with new knowledge. At the same time, it exposes the sharp contrast between the theoretical perspective of Europe-based authors and the actual experience of astrologers practising in the New World.