Il satellite, il progresso tecnico, la minaccia atomica: Italo Calvino e il lancio dello Sputnik I

The Satellite, Technological Progress, and the Atomic Threat: Italo Calvino and the Launch of Sputnik I – This article reconstructs some aspects of the broad transdisciplinary debate in Italy on the race for the conquest of space, inaugurated in October 1957 by the launch of the first artificial satellite in history, Sputnik I. Reported with great fanfare by the international mass media, and emerging in a new period of crisis marked by the dizzying geopolitical and technological com- petition between the two post-war superpowers – the United States and the Soviet Union – the launch of the satellite marked the birth of astronautics. In the short cosmicomic tale ‘avant la lettre’, Dialogue on the Satellite, published in March 1958, Calvino offered an initial reflection on the complex implications of the race to conquer out- er space. The technological leap achieved by the nascent astronautics appeared to Calvino as a double-edged sword: on the one hand, it suddenly opened the horizon of human thought beyond terrestrial boundaries, renewing the collective astronomical imagination and faith in scientific knowledge; on the other, it also lent itself, here on Earth, to serving as a tool of further forms of alienation and inequality.