NASA's Other Science Diplomacy - Spacemobile Goes Abroad in the 1960s

In early 1961, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the Franklin Institute, a Philadelphia, PA popular science museum, collaborated on a traveling science education program called the Spacemobile. Two Ford Econoline vans splashed with fancy graphics and the NASA meatball logo were loaded with rockets and spacecraft models and a team of science educators each, launching five decades of NASA science education and teacher training across the United States. Quickly going international in 1962, the program crossed the borders of 50 countries in Europe, Latin and Central America, Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia by the end of the decade. NASA's Educational Programs Division, a small division of the Public Affairs Department, collaborated with the U.S. Information Agency (USIA) and the U.S. State Department to facilitate the international circulation of science education diplomacy at the height of the early Cold War. Using primary sources from NASA, the USIA, the Department of State, oral histories, and memoirs, I argue that the Spacemobile program tailored a 'neutral' space science lecture-demonstration to not only teach the basic science behind the space program, but to also influence foreign audiences to accept NASA's global reach, to align with the U.S. over the Soviet Union, and to improve the United States' global reputation. Thus, the Spacemobile program expanded U.S. geopolitical power through science education diplomacy, an overlooked mediator of NASA's international technoscientific collaboration during the Cold War.