1 

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Steven J. Dick 

Roger D. Launius 

Editors 

CRITICAL ISSUES 

THE INHI STORY^^ 

SPACEFLIGHT 
CRITICAL ISSUES CONFERENCE SPAKERS 

I 

Left to right: James Hansen, John Krige, Asif Siddiqi, David DeVorkin. Howard 

McCurdy, Woody Kay, Andrew Butrica, Margaret Weitekamp, Phil Scranton, Steven 

Dick, Stephen Pyne, Alexander Brown, Slava Gerovitch, Stephen Johnson, and David 

Mindell. Not shown: Roger Launius, Peter Hays, John Logsdon, Todd La Porte, and 

Diane Vaughan. The image was taken in front of the Space Shuttle Enterprise at the 

Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center of the National Air and Space Museum. 
CRITICAL ISSUES 

THE INHI STORY^^ 

SPACEFLIGHT 

Steven J. Dick and Roger D. Launius 

Editors 

National Aeronautics and Space Administration 

Office of External Relations 

History Division 

Washington, DC 

2006 

NASA SP-2006-4702 
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data 

Critical issues in the history of spaceflight / Steven J. Dick and Roger D. Launius, editors. 

Includes index. 

1.Astronautics--History. I. Dick, Steven J. 11. Launius, Roger D. 111. Series. 

TL788.5. C66 2005 

629.409--dc22 

p. cm. -- (The NASA hstory series) 

2005035416 
CONTENTS 

INTRODUCTION ................................................ vii 

SECTION 1 MOTIVATIONS FOR SPACEFLIGHT 

INTRODUCTION 3 

CHAPTER 1:Seeking Newer Worlds: An Historical Context for 

Space Exploration -Stephen J. Pyne. ................................ 7 

CHAPTER 2 : Compelling Rationales for Spaceflight? History and the 

Search for Relevance -Roger D. Launius ............................ 37 

................................................. 

SECTION 11 

INTRODUCTION ................................................ 73 

CHAPTER 3:Observations on the Roboticversus Human Issue 

in Spaceflight -Howard E. McCurdy ........ 

CHAPTER 4: Human-Machine Issues in the Soviet Space Program 

-Slava Gerovitch ........................... ................. 10 

CHAPTER 5: Human and Machine in the History of Spaceflight 

-David A. Mindell ............................................. 141 

HUMAN AND ROBOTIC EXPLORATION 

.................... 

SECTION 111 NASA AND EXTERNAL RELATIONS 

INTRODUCTION ............................................... 165 

CHAPTER 6:NASA and the Aerospace Industry: Critical Issues and 

Research Prospects -Philip Scranton .............................. 169 

CHAPTER 7:NASA and the Department of Defense: Enduring Themes 

in Three Key Areas -Peter Hays. ................................. 199 

CHAPTER 8 : Technology, Foreign Policy, and International Cooperation 

in Space -John Krige .......................................... 239 

SECTION Iv ACCESS TO SPACE 

INTRODUCTION ............................................... 263 

CHAPTER 9:“A Failure of National Leadership”: Why No Replacement 

for the Space Shuttle? -John M. Logsdon. .......................... 269 
vi CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

CHAPTER 10 : Reusable Launchvehicles or Expendable LaunchVehicles? 

A Perennial Debate -Andrew J. Butrica . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 301 

SECTION V NASA CULTURES 

INTRODUCTION ............................................... 345 

CHAPTER 11: Changing NASA:The Challenges of Organizational 

System Failures -DianeVaughan. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 349 

CHAPTER 12 : Accidents, Engineering, and History at NASA, 1967-2003 

-Alexander Brown . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 377 

CHAPTER 13 : Institutional Issues for Continued Space Exploration: 

High-Reliability Systems Across Many Operational GenerationsRequisites for Public Credibility -Todd R. La Porte. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 403 

SECTION VI SPACE HISTORY: STATE OF THE ART 

INTRODUCTION ............................................... 429 

CHAPTER 14: American Space History: Legacies, Questions, and 

Opportunities for Future Research -AsifA. Siddiqi . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 433 

CHAPTER 15 : The History and Historiography of National Security Space 

-Stephen B. Johnson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 481 

CHAPTER 16: Critical Theory as a Toolbox: Suggestions for Space History’s 

Relationship to the History Subdisciplines -MargaretA.Weitekamp . . . . . 549 

CHAPTER 17: Space Artifacts: Are They Historical Evidence? 

-David A. DeVorkin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 573 

SECTION VI1 POSTSCRIPT 

AFTERWORD: Community and Explanation in Space History (?) 

-Martin Collins . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 603 

ABOUT THE AUTHORS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 615 

ACRONYMS AND ABBREVIATIONS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 623 

RIE NASA HISTORY SERIES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 633 

INDEX ....................................................... 643 
INTRODUCTION 

t a May 1981 “Proseminar in Space History” held at the Smithsonian A Institution’s National Air and Space Museum (NASM) in Washington, 

DC, historians came together to consider the state of the discipline of space 

history. It was an historic occasion.’ The community of scholars interested in 

the history of spaceflight was not large; previously, well-meaning but untrained 

aficionados consumed with artifacts had dominated the field, to the exclusion 

of the larger context.’ At a fundamental level, this proseminar represented a 

“declaration of independence” for what might be called the “new aerospace 

history.” In retrospect, it may be interpreted as marking the rise of space 

history as a recognizable subdiscipline within the field of U.S. history. Bringing 

together a diverse collection of scholars to review the state of the art in space 

history, this proseminar helped in a fundamental manner to define the field 

and to chart a course for future research. Its participants set about the task of 

charting a course for collecting, preserving, and disseminating the history of 

space exploration within a larger context of space policy and technology. 

In large measure, the course charted by the participants in this 1981 

proseminar aided in advancing a very successful agenda of historical research, 

writing, and understanding of space history. Not every research project has 

yielded acceptable results, nor can it be expected to do so, but the sum of 

the effort since 1981 has been irnpressivc. The opportunities for both the 

exploration of space and for recording its history have been significant. Both 

endeavors are noble and aimed at the enhancement of humanity. Whither the 

history of spaceflight? Only time will tell. But there has been an emergent “new 

aerospace history” of which space history is a central part that moves beyond 

an overriding concern for the details of the artifact to emphasize the broader 

role of the spacecraft. More importantly, it emphasizes the whole technological 

system, including not just the vehicle but also the other components that 

make up the aerospace climate, as an integral part of the human experience. It 

suggests that many unanswered questions spur the development of flight and 

that inquisitive individuals seek to know that which they do not understand. 

1. Richard E Hirsh, “Proseminar on Space History, 22 May 1981,” his 73, no. 266 (1982): 96-97. 

There had been previous gatherings of hlstorians interested in the subject, but these had mostly been 

oriented toward specific subdisciplines such as space science. See Paul A. Hade and Del Chamberlain, 

e&., Space Science Comes ofAge: Perspectives in the History of Space Sciences (Washington, DC: Smithsonian 

Institution Press, 1981). 

2. At that time, only the several volumes published as part of the NASA History Series, all written by 

credible scholars, and John M. Logsdon’s The Decision to Go to the Moon: Project Apollo and the National 

Interest (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1970) were accepted as works of serious scholarship by the larger 

historian community. 
viii CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

This assumption arises within historians and is based on their understanding 

of humans, for technological systems are constructions of the human mind.3 

This “new aerospace history,” therefore, emphasizes research in aerospace 

topics that are no longer limited to the vehicle-centered, project-focused, 

scientific internalist style of space history. Many of the recommendations that 

historian James R. Hansen suggested in an important historiographical article 

in Technology and Culture are beginning to come to fr~ition.~ Taken altogether, 

these tentative explorations of themes build on what has gone before. At the 

same time, they represent a departure from the simplistic works that preceded 

them, notably the argumentative volumes and essays that either espouse or 

ridicule space exploration. 

Twenty-four years after the 1981 proseminar, the National Aeronautics 

and Space Administration (NASA) Headquarters History Division and NASM’s 

Division of Space History brought together another group of scholarsincluding historians, political scientists, sociologists, public administration 

scholars, and engineers-to reconsider the state of the discipline. This volume 

is a collection ofessays based on this workshop on “Critical Issues in the History 

of Spaceflight,” held at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center of the National Air 

and Space Museum on 15-16 March 2005. The meeting was especially timely 

because it took place at a time of extraordinary transformation for NASA, 

stemming from the new Space Exploration Vision, announced by President 

George W. Bush in January 2004, to go to the Moon, Mars, and beyond. 

This Vision in turn stemmed from a deep reevaluation of NASA’s goals in 

the wake of the Space Shuttle Columbia accident and the recommendations 

of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board. By June 2004, a ninemember Presidential Commission on Implementation of United States Space 

Exploration Policy, led by former Secretary of the Air Force Edward “Pete” 

Aldridge, had produced a report on “A Journey to Inspire, Innovate, and 

Discover.” In February 2005, NASA’s strategic objectives were released in a 

report called “The New Age of Exploration.” All these documents placed the 

new vision in the context of the importance of exploration and discovery to 

the American e~perience.~ 

3. Roger D. Launius dwusses the richness ofwhat has been accomplished thus far in “The Historical 

Dimension of Space Explorahon: Reflections and Possibhties,” Space Policy 16 (2000): 23-38. 

4. James R. Hansen, “Aviation History 111 the Wider Context,” Technology and Culture 30 (fd 1989): 

643-649. 

5. Columbia Accident Investigation Board, Report, (Washington, DC, 2003), 6 volumes. The 

President’s program for NASA as announced on 14 January 2004 was entitled “A Renewed Spirit 

ofDiscovery.” It was followed in February by a more detailed “Vision for Space Exploration.” The 

Aldridge Commission report was A Journey to Inspire, Innovate and Discover. Events leading up to 

the Vision are detailed in Frank Sietzen, Jr., and Keith L. Cowing, New Moon Rising: The Making of 

America’s New Space Vision and the Remaking of NASA (Burlington, Ontario: Apogee Books, 2004), 

as well as in the Aldridge report. 
INTRODUCTION ix 

As the meeting took place, NASA had not flown a Space Shuttle since the 

Columbiu accident on 1 February 2003 and was looking forward to returning 

to flight in mid-2005. At the same time, the space agency was in the midst 

of a reorganization and a change in programs of truly historic proportions. 

The transformation potentially heralded the beginning of a new era, as the 

Agency’s human spaceflight program sought to leave the Space Shuttle behind 

and depart Earth orbit for the Moon and Mars-something that humans had 

not done since the end of the Apollo era more than three decades earlier. 

Because the new Vision was to be achieved with little or no addition to 

NASA’s $16-billion annual budget, attempts to develop an implementation 

plan set off a debate on the relative merits of other areas of NASA’s portfolio. 

Funding for aeronautics was under severe pressure, with serious implications 

for NASA’s aeronautics research centers at Glenn, Langley, and Ames. In the 

wake of renewed emphasis on human spaceflight, the space science community 

was quick to argue that its activities were also exploration, an integral part 

of the “Moon, Mars, and beyond” vision, and therefore should not be 

subject to cuts. Earth science-which had been administratively co 

with space science as part of the recent transformation-could not s 

make that argument, but it had Congress largely on its side becaus 

practical implications of the Earth Observing System. Also in the mix 

extraordinary and sustained controversy over a servicing mission for the 

Space Telescope, in which the public, Congress, and the science co 

had strong opinions, mostly favoring a servicing mission. Finally, 

a time of transition between Administrators: after three years of heading the 

Agency, Sean O’Keefe departed in February, and on 11 March, the President 

nominated a new Administrator, Michael Griffin, who was confirmed by the 

Senate and became the 11th NASA Administrator on 14 April. 

As these issues swirled, March 2005 thus proved a particularly appropriate 

time to assess some of the perennial challenges and concerns of spaceflight, 

with the primary goal of providing perspective on current issues. Six critical 

issues were chosen for analysis. The first session examined motivations-the 

persistent question of why we should go into space at a time when there 

are so many problems on Earth. The second session provided background 

on another often-asked question, why should so much be spent on human 

spaceflight if robotic spacecraft were cheaper and more efficient? The 

controversy then raging over servicing the Hubble Space Telescope with 

the Space Shuttle demonstrated that this dichotomy was not quite so simple; 

without human spaceflight and four servicing missions, the myopic Hubble 

would never have functioned properly and certainly would not have reached 

its 15th anniversary on 25 April 2005. The third session could provide only a 

sampling of case studies of NASA’s relations with external groups, in this case 

with the Department of Defense (DOD), international relations, and a portion 
X CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

of the aerospace industry. The fourth session shed light on another persistent 

issue: why there has been no replacement for the aging Space Shuttle. The 

fifth session, on NASA cultures, reflected the preoccupation with safety and 

risk in the wake of the Columbia accident. A concluding session addressed 

specific questions relating to the historiography of spaceflight and suggested 

possibilities for future research. After the assessment of distinct issues, it 

particularly considered the second goal of the meeting: to assess the state of 

the field of space history. 

Two decades had passed since serious attempts had been made to assess the 

state ofthe field. In addition to the 1981 proseminar, NASA and NASM joined 

forces once again to hold a broader meeting in the spring of 1987, published 

as A Spacefring Nation: Perspectives on American Space History and Policy.6 In its 

treatment of issues, Critical Issues in the History Of Spaceflight is broader in some 

respects but narrower in others. The title and spirit of the current volume 

hearkens back to Marshall Clagett’s book Critical Problems in the History of 

Science, a collection of essays from a meeting at the beginning of the Space Age 

that had a considerable influence on the evolution of the history of science? 

Space history was no part of that volume, but the 50 intervening years have 

given rise to a new kind of history with links to scientific, technological, 

political, cultural, and social history. 

Although the subject of the meeting was “Critical Issues in the History 

of Spaceflight,” this did not imply that history was the only mode of analysis 

that could be applied. Experts with a variety of backgrounds brought a variety 

of approaches to the chosen critical issues, including history, cultural studies, 

political science, and sociology. The reader will therefore find a range of 

approaches reflecting these backgrounds. 

Certainly not all subjects could be covered at this meeting. NASA’s first 

A, aeronautics, was not represented at all-not for a lack of issues, but precisely 

because an entire conference could be devoted to the subject. In addition, 

the focus was naturally on NASA and American space history, despite papers 

on international relations, and comparisons of the U.S. and Soviet space 

programs. The space sciences also received short shrift in this workshop and 

in this resulting volume. Again, there is more than enough in this arena to 

fill an entire volume. The issues encompassed by space history, along with its 

interconnections with the broader world and with other forms of analysis in 

6. Martin J. Collins and Sylvia D. Fries, eds., A Spacefaring Nation: Perspectives on American Space 

History and Policy (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991). A similar conference 

hosted by Yale University in 1981 was published as Alex Roland, ed., A Spacefaring People: Perspectives 

on Early Space Flight (Washington, DC: NASA, 1985). 

7. Marshall Clagett, Critical Problems in the History of Science (Madison: University of Wisconsin 

Press, 1959). 
INTRODUCTION xi 

history and the social sciences, compose a field now grown so large-in scope if 

not in practitioners-that only a fair sampling can be given here. Ifthis volume 

serves to stimulate more research in these areas, which we believe are of vital 

importance to the nation and the world, it will have served its purpose. 

The meeting was a small workshop with 18 presentations and several 

dozen audience members who contributed substantially to the discussions. 

Even a small workshop, however, engendered numerous logistics. We would 

like to thank General John R. Dailey, Director of the National Air and 

Space Museum, for allowing us to use the beautiful Udvar-Hazy Center, just 

opened in December 2003 and adjacent to Dulles International Airport. It 

was a pleasure to contemplate space history in the midst of the Concorde, the 

SR-71 Blackbird, and the Space Shuttle Enterprise, among other aviation and 

space icons, all part of “the cathedral of the artifact,” as it was termed during 

the meeting. For essential logistical help, we thank Nadine Andreassen, Giny 

Cheong, and Annette Lin, all of the NASA History Division. We are grateful 

to Chris Brunner and Tim Smith of SAIC for recording the proceedings 

on videotape. A copy of the video, along with transcripts of the discussions, 

may be accessed in the NASA Historical Reference Collecti 

Headquarters. 

At the NASA Headquarters Printing and Design Office, 

Lisa Jirousek for copyediting and Shelley Kilmer-Gaul for desi 

Finally, we wish to acknowledge the many contributions 

participated in the workshop, both as presenters and from the 

book represents a final report on the activities of the workshop, and we hope 

that it will stimulate additional contemplation, research, and presentation of 

the history of spaceflight. 

Steven J. Dick, NASA Chief Historian 

Roger D. Launius, Chair, NASM Department of Space History 9 
SECTION I 

MOTIVATIONS FOR SPACEFLIGHT 

INTRODUCTION 

he first section of this volume examines what is perhaps the most basic T question that can be asked of the Space Age: Why do nations undertake spaceflight, and why should they? It is a question equally important for 

understanding the history of spaceflight and for divining its future. And it is a 

question that history is in a unique position to illuminate. From its inception 

in 1957 to “The New Age of Exploration” that NASA proclaimed in 2005 in 

the wake of the Vision for Space Exploration, the Space Age has inevitably 

been linked with the idea of exploration as a motivating force. In the opening 

paper of the conference, Stephen Pyne argues that the idea of exploration and 

its links to the past need to be examined in more detail and in the context of 

the cultures in which it is embedded. Many writers, especially journalists, have 

seen space activities as part of an unbroken line of exploration going back at 

least to the Renaissance Age of Discovery and even earlier. Richard S. Lewis’s 

From Vinland to Mars: A Thousand Years ofExploration is a prime example of this 

view. By contrast, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian William H. Goetzmann 

distinguishes a “Second Great Age ofDiscovery,” beginning with 18th-century 

explorers such as Captain James Cook and Alexander von Humboldt-an age 

characterized by further geographic exploration, now driven by the scientific 

revolution and still in progress. Goetzmann sees this fissioning of ages as 

important to understanding the differences between the two.’ 

While examining the characteristics and lessons of the first two ages, Pyne 

now proposes a Third Age of Discovery, which segregates space exploration 

from the motivators of the Second Age and places it with the exploration of the 

Antarctic and the deep oceans.2 This distinction, he argues, is important to 

understanding the unique character of the current age. Just as for the Second 

Age, science replaced God, commerce replaced gold, and national prestige 

trumped individual glory, the motivators for the Space Age have changed in 

part. Most strikingly, at least so far, and perhaps happily, since such encounters 

in the past have left more than one civilization decimated, explorers of the 

Space Age have not had to worry about encounters with indigenous inhabitants 

of the lands they e~plore.~ 

l.W&am H. Goetzmann, New Lands, New Men:America and the Second Great Age OfDiscouery (New 

2. He also made this case in his article,“Space:AThird Great Age of Discovery,”Space Policy 4 (August 

3. For a discussion of this problem, see Jane M.Young, ‘“Pity the Indians of Outer Space:’ Native 

York: Penguin Books, 1987). 

1988): 187-199. 

AmericanViews of the Space Program,” Western Folklore 46 (October 1987) 269-279. 
4 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

Pyne also argues that it is “cultural conditions that prompt and sustain 

discovery” and that exploration is an invention of particular societies. This is 

no academic distinction, but one with real-life consequences: if exploration is 

a cultural invention, then it may pass away as have other cultural inventions 

and, indeed, as exploration itself has withered in some societies throughout 

history. This is no less true in the American context than it is in other 

societies, now or in the past: Carl Sagan, Ray Bradbury, Robert Zubrin, 

and others have argued that exploration is a societal imperative with unique 

valences to American history and the American ~haracter.~ Exploration means 

many things to many people, and historians need to analyze these meanings 

and understand the myriad ways in which culture imbues exploration with 

meaning, or with no meaning at all. 

Pyne’s essay is full of provocative suggestions: that the idea of exploration 

needs to be decoupled from the idea of colonization; that the Second Age 

collapsed not only from closed frontiers, but also from a weariness with the 

Enlightenment enterprise; that geopolitical rivals may divert some of their 

energies from the battlefield to exploration; that Voyager’s Grand Tour may 

be for the Third Age what Humboldt was for the Second and Magellan for 

the First; that the Third Age may already be in decline; that cyberspace may 

be more important in historical terms than outer space; and that although 

encounters with other cultures were essential to creative individuals and 

societies in the first two Ages, that possibility is unlikely for the Third Age, at 

least in the near future, unless by remote radio communication. 

In the second paper, Roger Launius takes a broader view of the motivations for spaceflight and enumerates five, and only five, rationales operating 

over the last 50 years: human destiny and survival of the species; geopolitics, 

national pride, and prestige; national security and military applications; economic competitiveness and satellite applications; and scientific discovery 

and understanding. Launius argues that some of these rationales rest on a 

fundamental desire to become a multiplanetary species and, in particular, to 

found utopian societies beyond Earth. 

In the context of the human destiny argument, Launius finds that the 

“frontier thesis”-the idea that the existence of a frontier has given Americans 

their most distinctive characteristics and that space exploration is important 

for that reason alone-is counterproductive for a postmodern, multiculturalist 

society. Yet “the final frontier” continues to be a rallying cry for space 

enthusiasts. Is this inappropriate, or can the frontier thesis be separated from 

the charges of excessive ethnocentrism? 

4. See in particular Robert Zubrin,“Epilogue:The Significance of the Martian Frontier,”in The Case 

for Mars (NewYork Free Press, 1996). 
INTRODUCTION - SECTION I 5 

In the area ofnational security and military applications, Launius emphasizes 

a fact little known outside the space community: that since 1982, military 

spending on space has outpaced civilian spending. By 2003, the Department of 

Defense was spending $19 billion on space, compared to NASA’s $14 billion. 

Obviously, the military is motivated to use space as “high ground.” Launius 

finds that the economic competitiveness argument, though emphasized by the 

conservative agenda since the 1980s, remains mixed: although communications 

satellites have proven a commercial success since COMSAT and Intelsat in the 

early 1960s, other efforts such as Landsat and the Global Positioning System 

(GPS), while great technical successes, have not yet proven commercially 

viable. Space tourism and private investment for access to space are barely at 

the beginning of their potential. Whether these activities become economically 

viable, thereby causing the commercial motivator to become increasingly 

important, is one of the great open questions of the Space Age. 

Launius discusses science as a motivator at some length; however, in 

the context of Pyne’s paper, it is notable that he does not explicitly include 

exploration as one of his five motivations, instead viewing it as a means to an 

end rather than an end in itself. He briefly discusses it in the context of the 

human destiny argument and the frontier thesis, and he later uses it again in 

the context ofthe science motivator, noting that a National Research Council 

(NRC) study in 2005 proclaimed that “exploration done properly is a form of 

~cience.”~ It should be noted that the NRC did so in the context of threatened 

cuts to space science-money that would go to the new human exploration 

program-and therefore had a vested interest in relating science to exploration. 

This raises the interesting question of the differences between science and 

exploration in principle and in practice. While it is clear that, as Launius 

argues, there are synergies between science and exploration, one could clearly 

argue that they are not one and the same. After all, Magellan was an explorer, 

not a scientist; conversely, many scientists undertake routine science that 

can hardly be called exploration. One might argue a relationship as follows: 

when exploration is undertaken, it may lead to discoveries, which then are 

explained by science and in turn add to the body of scientific knowledge. 

Alternatively, one might also argue that when exploration is undertaken, it 

is usually done with an economic, military, or nationalistic purpose in mind, 

but that exploration, viewed as benign while the true objective may be less 

so, serves as the rationale. As Pyne puts it in his article, historically “society 

needed science, science needed exploration, exploration to far countries [or 

outer space] needed support,” at the national level. 

5. National Research Council, Science in NASA’s Vision for Space Exploration (mC: Washington, 

DC, 2005). 
6 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

These distinctions are more than semantic in nature-they become an 

issue of public policy when decisions must be made about the balance between 

human and robotic exploration (see section 11). Although Apollo clearly 

produced important science, as Launius points out, it was criticized for not 

generating enough science relative to its high cost. Yet one could argue that 

the explorations of Apollo represented something beyond science that will 

be remembered as one of humanity’s greatest triumphs. At least some space 

scientists have come to this realization, despite the high costs and the risks 

involved in human spaceflight. At a NASA meeting on risk and exploration, 

Steve Squyres, the science principal investigator for the Mars Exploration 

Rovers, allowed that he loved his machines, which are still active after 16 

months. But, he added, “when I hear people point to Spirit and Opportunity 

and say that these are examples of why we don’t need to send humans to 

Mars, I get very upset. Because that’s not even the right discussion to be 

having. We must send humans to Mars. We can’t do it soon enough for me.”6 

Squyres’s words reflect a deep truth: even though science may be a motivation 

for exploration and a product of it, human exploration is more than the sum 

of all science gained from it. If exploration is a primordial human urge, and 

in a larger sense the mark of a creative society, to what extent should a society 

support it in the midst of many other priorities? In a democratic society, that is 

a question with which the public, and public policy-makers, must grapple. 

6. Steven J. Dick and Keith Cowing, e&., Risk and Exploration: Earth, Sea and the Stars (Washington, 

DC: NASA SP-2005-4701,2005), p. 179. 
CHAPTER 1 

SEEKING NEWER WORLDS: 

AN HISTORICAL CONTEXT FOR SPACE EXPLORATION 

Stephen J. Pyne 

Come, rnyfYiends, 

Tis not too late to seek a newer world 

-Tennyson, “Ulysses,” 1842 

early 40 years ago, William Goetzmann, in his Pulitzer-winning N Exploration and Empire, argued that explorers were “programmed” by 

their sponsoring societies. They saw what they were conditioned to see, and 

even novelty fell within a range of expected “curiosities” and “marvels.” 

What is true for explorers has been no less true for exploration’s philosophers, 

historians, and enthusiasts. Pundit and public, commentator and scholar, all 

have become accustomed, if not programmed outright, to see exploration 

and space as inseparable. Space has become the new frontier; exploration, if 

it is to thrive, must push to the stars; the solar system is where, in our time, 

exploration is happening.l 

Since Sputnik, no survey of exploration has not looked heavenward, and 

no advocate for space adventuring has failed to trace its pedigree through the 

lengthening genealogy of the Earth’s explorers. But in the particulars they 

differ; this field, too, has its “lumpers” and “splitters.” The lumpers consider 

the long saga of geographic exploration by Western civilization as continuous 

and thematically indivisible. The Viking landers on Mars are but an iteration 

of the long ships that colonized Greenland. The Eagle, the Command Module 

orbiter, and Saturn V rocket that propelled the Apollo XI mission to the Moon 

are avatars of Columbus’s Niiia, Pinta, and Santa Maria. The “new ocean” of 

planetary space is simply extending the bounds of the old. The ur-lumpers 

would go further. The historic eruption of European exploration was but 

the most recent device to carry humanity’s expansive hopes and ambitions; 

1. William H. Goetzmann, Exploration and Empire (NewYork: Knopf, 1966). 
8 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

its origins reside in the genetic code of humanity’s inextinguishable curiosity. Even more, space exploration shares an evolutionary impulse. Through 

humanity, life will clamber out of its home planet much as pioneering species 

crawled out of the salty seas onto land. The impulse to explore is providential; 

the chain of discovery, unbroken; the drivers behind it, as full of evolutionary 

inevitability as the linkage between DNA and proteins. 

The most prominent have generally boosted space exploration as necessary, 

desirable, and inevitable. The argument assumes the form of a syllogism: The 

urge to explore is a fundamental human trait. Space travel is exploration. 

Therefore, sending people into space is a fundamental characteristic of our 

species-what more is there to say? The only impediment to the past serving 

as prologue to the future is imagination, as translated into political will, 

expressed as money. From Carl Sagan to Ray Bradbury, such advocates have 

self-admittedly been fantasists, whether they argued that the motivating vision 

is embedded in our genes or our souls. But the urge, the motivating imperative, 

they place within the broad pale of Homo sapiens sapiens.2 

Yet humanity doesn’t launch rockets; nations do. So there exist also 

among the spacefaring folk special themes that place interplanetary exploration 

within the peculiar frame of a national experience. In particular, there exist 

groups for whom extra-Earthly exploration is a means to perpetuate or recreate 

what they regard as the fundamental drivers of American civilization. Space 

exploration offers the chance to discover another New World and to erect a 

New America, a technological New Jerusalem, beyond the tug of the Earth’s 

gravitational field and the burdens of its past. Only a New Earth can save the 

Old. Space colonization would remake William Bradford’s vision of Plymouth 

Plantation into a very high-tech city and transplant it to a very distant hill.3 

Still, a countercase exists. What expands can also collapse. Ming China 

launched seven dazzling voyages of discovery and then shut down all foreign 

travel and prohibited multirnasted boats. Medieval Islam sponsored great 

travelers before shrinking into the ritual pilgrimage of the hajj. The Norse 

spanned the Atlantic, then withered on the fjords of a new world. Moreover, 

plenty ofpeoples stayed where they were: they lacked the technological means, 

the fiery incentives and desperate insecurities, or the compelling circumstances 

to push them to explore beyond their homeland. Like Australia’s Aborigines, 

they were content to cycle through their ancestral Dreamtime and felt little 

2. Examples among the celebrity celebrants might include Carl Sagan, Cosmos (NewYork Random 

House, 1980); Ray Bradbury et al., Mars and the Mind ofA4ind (NewYork Harper and Row, 1973); and 

Arthur C. Clarke, The Exploration of Space (NewYork Harper, 1959). 

3. See, as an extreme example, Robert Zubrin, The Case for Mars (NewYork:Touchstone, 1996). 
SEEKING NEWER WORLDS: AN HISTORICAL CONTEXT. . . 9 

urgency to search beyond the daunting seas or looming peaks. A walkabout 

was world en~ugh.~ 

In this perspective, what matters are the particulars-the cultural conditions that prompt and sustain discovery. What is commonly called “geographic 

exploration” has been, in truth, a highly ethnocentric enterprise. It will thrive 

or shrivel as particular peoples choose. There is nothing predestined about 

geographic discovery, any more than there is about a Renaissance, a tradition 

of Gothic cathedrals, or the invention of the electric lightbulb. Exploration 

as a cultural expression is something peculiar to times, places, and peoples. 

General historians might site exploration within dramas of human mobility, 

of empires, of Europe’s astonishing millennial-long expansion, and its equally 

astounding almost-instantaneous implosion. They would grant exploration 

little intrinsic motivation; explorers would derive their inspiration, no less 

than their characteristics, from a sustaining society. They view contemporary arguments for space trekking as not grounded in historic reality but 

inspirational rhetoric. 

From such a perspective, the exuberant era of exploration that has 

dominated the past five centuries, bonded to European expansion, is simply 

another in a constellation of cultural inventions that have shaped how peoples 

have encountered a world beyond themselves. It will, in time, pass away 

as readily as the others; European-based exploration may yet expire, even 

after 500 years, perhaps exhausted like the cod fisheries of the Grand Banks. 

The history of exploration bears littlc similarity to the simplistic narrative of 

triumphalists. Historians, litterateurs, humanists, and a significant fraction of 

ordinary citizens may wonder why a chronicle of past contacts, particularly 

when burdened by imperialism and inflated by tired clichts, should argue for 

doing more. The record suggests that future worlds will be corrupted as old 

ones were. The much-abused Earth is world enough. Space exploration may 

prove to be a defiant last hurrah rather than a daring new departure. 

To date, the lumpers have commanded the high ground of historical 

interpretation and historiography. Dissenters are few, and even they accept space 

travel’s exploring pedigree. Scholarship has hardly begun to parse exploration’s 

long chronicle to understand what features might apply or not apply to the Space 

4. For a good discussion of the Norse traverse across the Atlantic, see Carl Sauer, Northern Mists 

(Berkeley: University of Cahforma Press, 1968). Studies of the Chinese voyages have become a rmnor 

cottage industry; see, for example, Gavin Menzies, 2422: TheEar China Discovered the World (NewYork: 

Bantam, 2002). On the Islamic eucumene, see %chard Hall, Empires .f the Monsoon: A History .f the 

Indian Ocean and Its Invaders (London: HarperCollins, 19961.The Polynesian voyages are the subject of 

endless retellings; an early, defining work is Peter Buck, Vikings of the PM@ (Chicago: University of 

Chicago Press, 1959). 
10 CRITICAL kJJES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

Age. Does the Apollo program resemble Columbus landing in the Bahamas, 

or the abortive Greenlanders at Vinland? Does Voyager mimic Captain James 

Cook’s circumnavigating sallies, or Roald Amundsen’s small-craft threading of 

the Northwest Passage? Is Mariner a robotic version of Lewis and Clark, leading 

America to its new westward destiny, or a Zebulon Pike, whose expeditions 

south led him to a Mexican jail and whose forays north left him dead outside 

a Canadian fort? The history of exploration is so complex that one can find 

whatever anecdote and analogy one wants. 

How one identifies the exploratory character of space depends on how one 

interprets the enterprise-whether space travel is primarily about technology, 

science, adventure, geopolitics, or inspiration. Each theme can lead to its own 

history. For space as exploration, however, two clans dominate the discourse: 

space enthusiasts eager to trace the genealogy of exploration from ancient 

times to contemporary launch sites, and historians anxious to push their 

erstwhile narratives into today’s news. The two display a kind of symmetry, 

a yin and yang of emphasis. Space enthusiasts tend to condense exploration 

prior to the mid-20th century into a lengthy prelude, while historians of 

exploration-there aren’t that many-update their chronicles to include 

space endeavors into a kind of coda. The common assumption is that space 

is of course exploration, so there is little need to explain how and why. One 

only needs enough of the past to boost the narrative into orbit, or enough 

contemporary events to predict the narrative splashdown. Instead of analysis, 

the ur-lumper rhetoric tends to conflate a cascade of themes: intellection with 

exploration, exploration with contact, contact with colonization, colonization 

with human settlement. 

Of course there are exceptions; the best scholarship usually is. A good 

example of exploration considered from the perspective of space is Richard S. 

Lewis’s From Vinland to Mars: A Thousand Years of Exploration. The Space Age, 

he concludes, “can be defined reasonably as the modern extension of a process 

of exploration that began a thousand years ago with the Norse voyages to 

Greenland and North America.” The common motivator was “intraspecific 

competition,” the deadly contest “among men and families for land, among 

nations for power and wealth.” This persistent trait could yet “carry future 

generations to the stars.” Lewis devotes 100 pages to exploration prior to 

1957 and 300 from the International Geophysical Year (IGY) to the Viking 

landings on Mars. Like most lumper historians, he came to space themes by 

way ofjournali~m.~ 

5. Richard S. Lewis, From Vinland to Mars: A Thousand Years .f Exploration (New York Quadrandle, 

1976), pp. xi, xii. 
SEEKING NEWER WORLDS: AN HISTORICAL CONTEXT. . . 11 

Scholar historians, by contrast, are likely to carve up the long chronicle 

into more manageable units. Unquestionably, the outstanding practitioner is 

William H. Goetzmann. Building on J. C. Beaglehole’s scholarship on Captain 

Cook and the exploration of the Pacific generally, in which Beaglehole argued 

that the voyages constituted something new, a renewal of global exploration, 

Goetzmann has elaborated the concept of a Second Great Age of Discovery, 

which he believes has not yet ended, which extends unbrokenly into space, and 

which has fundamental valences with America. “Just as in the Renaissance,” 

he writes, “a New Age of Discovery began-born of competition between 

men and nations, dependent alike on abstract theory, applied science, now 

called ‘engineering,’ visionary imagination and the faith of whole cultures 

who invested billions of dollars or rubles in the great adventure out into the 

frontier that President John F. Kennedy called ‘this new ocean.”’ The undertaking has special resonance for the United States, for “America is the product 

of an Age of Discovery that never really ended. From the Viking voyages 

in the 10th century to the lunar voyages of the twentieth, much that is held 

to be American derives from a sense of the ongoing and complex process of 

exploration that has made up so much of its history.” The explorer, Goetzmann 

concludes, “stands as a kind of archetypal American.”6 

Even so, Goetzmann, ever the scholar, concluded that the ultimate payoff 

lay in the realm of knowledge, particularly the peculiar moral understanding 

that helps us understand who we are and how we should behave. In explicating 

that understanding, Goetzmann, always the historian, chronicles exploration 

against the “constant imaginative redefinition of America.” In that sense, 

“America has been almost anything its explorers or their ‘programmers’ 

wanted it to be at the time. And yet constant discoveries and rediscoveries 

have continually changed the meaning of the country for its citizens.” 

Thus, “to many,” by implication himself included, the analogy of Apollo 

to Columbus “seems false.” Rather, “what Armstrong and Aldrin and all 

their heroic space predecessors have revealed is not a series of new worlds for 

escape and habitation, but a profounder knowledge of the earth’s true place 

in the universe. They have changed once again the entire perspective of the 

globe and man’s place on it.” Yet Goetzmann, author of a trilogy of books on 

American exploration, never included space exploration in those volumes, 

save allusively in a preface? 

6. J. C. Beaglehole, The Exploration ofthe Pacii, 2nd ed. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1966); 

William H. Goetzmann, “Exploration’s Nation. The Role of Discovery in American History,” in 

American Civilization: A PortraitJmm the Twentieth Century, ed. Daniel J. Boorstin (New York: McGrawW Book Co., 1972), pp. 36,25. 

7. Goetzmann, “Exploration’s Nation,” pp. 33,36. 
12 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

And then there are those for whom space is continuous not merely with 

exploration but with evolution, for whom the Space Age represents a quantum 

leap in human existence. The nuances of geographic discovery’s changing technologies, beliefs, lore, institutions, and personalities become mere 

background noise, the junk genes of story. Most practitioners come from 

literature or natural science, an odd couple joined by conviction and pulp 

fiction rather than formal scholarship. History is a loose jumble of anecdotes, 

like oft-told family stories or the sagas of the clan. For them, the future is what 

matters. What preceded contact is only preamble. What follows will be, in 

Arthur C. Clarke’s words, childhood’s end. 

Regardless, no one questions the linkage ofspace with exploration. Their 

analysis ofwhat that bond is, and what benefits the country might derive, vary. 

Exploration remains a means to other ends. The recent report of the President’s 

Commission on Implementation of United States Space Exploration Policy 

described the goal of the “vision” as “to advance U.S. scientific, security, and 

economic interests . . . ,” and not least national prestige. More realistically, 

at the time Mariner orbited Mars, Bruce Murray observed simply that “we 

are exploring,” that the “very act of exploration is one of the more positive 

achievements open to a modern industrial society,” that space exploration is 

“as important as music, art, as literature,” that it is “one of the most important 

long-term endeavors of this generation, one upon which our grandchildren 

and great-grandchildren will look back and say, ‘That was good.”’ But if space 

exploration is a cultural enterprise, then it should be examined as such, subject 

to the same tangible criteria.’ 

All this suggests ample opportunity for future research. There is, first, a 

place for dedicated analysis beyond the selective anecdote, heroic narrative, 

and flimsy analogizing. There is little empirical heft, even less quantitative 

data, and sparse scrutiny of what, exactly, exploration has meant in terms of 

economics, politics, ethics, knowledge, fiction, and the like. Serious scholarship 

has not tracked exploration to the extent it has related fields such as the history 

of physics, military history, government institutions, or even the literature of 

the western hero. The founding saga of the Great Age of Discovery, Luis de 

Cambes’s Lusiadas, is, after all, a tragedy, brooded over by the Old Man of 

Belem, who declaims its debased origins: the enterprise to the Indies will turn 

out badly, though it cannot be stopped. By the time we arrive at the Space Age, 

“literature” has come to mean Edgar Rice Burroughs and the imagination of 

nine-year-old boys. A similar declension seems to affect the scholarship. 

8. Report of the President’s Commission on Implementation of Umted States Space Exploraaon 

Policy, AJourney to Inspire, Innovate, and Discover (Washngton, DC: Government Printing Office [GPO], 

June 2004), p. 11; Bruce Murray, quoted in Ray Bradbury et al., Mars and the Mind ofMan, pp. 24-25. 
SEEKING NEWER WORLDS: AN HISTORICAL CONTEXT.. . 13 

A part of this general task is comparative study. We know things in the 

context of other things. We will understand contemporary exploration better 

if we arrange suites of comparisons with past efforts, understanding their 

common elements, isolating what features make them similar or different. But 

this exercise should not be restricted to exploration, comparing itself in various 

eras. If expeditions are a cultural creation, then they should be compared as 

well with other undertakings, perhaps with opera, baseball, publishing, art 

museums, extreme sports. Exploration is not the only way by which a society 

can express its restlessness or exercise its curiosity. A society must choose to 

explore. What is the basis for that choice and how does the outcome compare 

with other choices? 

Of particular value to Americans is the need to segregate exploration from 

colonization. American accounts of the Space Age almost invariably begin with 

the drscovery of North America, preferably by the Norse. This is teleologd 

history: the point, the conclusion, of exploration was to find a New World and, 

subsequently, to found the United States. The epic of America is its expansion 

westward. When exploration completed its survey ofAmerica, it had to continue 

elsewhere, to the Poles, for example, and then to planetary space, or else that 

epic would end. It makes a wonderful national creation story. It works less well 

as scholarship. The exploration of America was part of a global project, rising 

and falling with those same geopolitical tides. So it is proving to be with space. 

I confess to being a splitter. This is a minority viewpoint without much 

of a clientele; it may be a singularity. My premises are these: that exploration 

as an institution is an invention of particular societies; that it derives much of 

its power because it bonds geographic travel to cultural movements, because 

it taps into deep rivalries, and because its narrative conveys a moral message; 

that, while unbroken, the trajectory of a half millennium of exploration by 

Western civdization can be understood best by parsing its long sweep into smaller 

increments; and that the future of exploration may become a reversed mirror 

image of its past. In particular, my splitter history would partition the past half 

millennium of European exploration from humanity’s various migrations, and 

it would then fraction that grand chronicle into three great ages of discovery, 

fissioning William Goeztmann’s Second Great Age of Discovery into two, addmg 

a Third Age as dstinctive from the Second as the Second was from the First. 

This is not a commonly held analysis, not least because it compels us 

to examine differences. It demands that we identify what segregates space 

exploration from its progenitors beyond exalted claims that, in leaving the 

Earth’s gravitational pull, humanity is, at last, leaving its nest. It places space 

exploration with the exploration of Antarctica and the deep oceans. It suggests 

a future that will less resemble the near past than the deep past. The Space Age 

is different; the Space Age is the same. A splitter history asks, how? and what 

does it mean? My version of a sample such history follows. 
14 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

ISLANDS IN THE MIST: THE CASE FOR AGES OF DISCOVERY 

Why three eras? Why not four, or eight? Why any at all? History is messy, 

and exploration history, with its perpetual disputes over prediscoveries and 

rediscoveries, messier still. So consider, as an index of exploration, the case of 

Pacific islands. None were known empirically to Europe prior to the Great 

Voyages. While some discoveries, particularly by the Portuguese, were no 

doubt hoarded as state secrets, the dates of discovery for most are reliably 

known. Plotting those discoveries by 50-year increments yields three fairly 

distinct periods (see figure below). 

The first coincides with the classic voyages of discovery, led by Portugal 

from the west and Spain from the east. Every island is new: discovery is rapid 

and relatively easy (if anything done by ship in those days can be considered 

easy). Between 1500 and 1550, mariners discovered some 32 islands. They 

found fewer in the next 50 years, and half as many again in the next 50. By 

the mid-17th century, the long wave has exhausted itself. Some 75 percent of 

the discoveries occurred over roughly 75 years. 

Discovery of Pacific Islandsg 

9. Data horn Henry Menard, Islands (NewYork Scientific American, 1986). 
SEEKING NEWER WORLDS: AN HISTORICAL CONTEXT.. . 15 

An explanation for the odd curve, a peak followed by a rapid decay, is 

simple. Mariners were not searching for islands, but for routes to the great 

entrepbts of the East. They found islands along the way, and once they plotted 

out the best paths, they had scant incentive to keep at sea. The latter discoveries 

happened from miscalculations or accidents-storms, for example, that blew 

ships off course-or, as the Dutch became more expansive in their plans to 

outflank the Portuguese, a scattering of islands that they chanced upon. There 

was no reason to randomly rove the seas. Explorers had completed their task, 

had hewed routes to the riches, and the discovered islands had been, as it were, 

the chips that scattered to the side. 

Then, in the mid-18th century, after nearly 150 moribund years, the 

process rekindled Europeans begin encountering new islands. But these are 

new Europeans-British and French, mostly-entangled in hesh rivalries, and 

they have novel purposes. They come as emissaries of the Enlightenment; they 

are keen to explore nature’s economy for its exotic wealth and commercial 

wonders; they carry naturalists eager to catalog the Great Chain of Being, trace 

the contours of the world ocean, and draft a new muppu mundue; and they haul 

artists and litterateurs avid for lush tropical utopias. They search out the blank 

spots of the Pacific. They seek unknown islands as ends in themselves. A great 

age of circumnavigators commences, of which the three voyages of Captain 

James Cook are a prime exhibit. 

The number of known islands explodes. More islands are discovered in 

70 years than in the previous three centuries. But this, too, quickly expires. 

They reach the last island, Midway, in 1859. Then nothing, and it is a nothing 

all the more profound because the voyagers have revealed all that exist. 

By the onset of the 20th century, not only have explorers exhausted the 

dominion of Pacific islands, the Enlightenment itself has begun to crumble 

before the intellectual tremors and metaphysical termites of Modernism. For 

the Pacific Ocean, a second age of exploration ends with traffic in guano 

and copra; excursions by tourists, adventurers, and anthropologists; and color 

prints by Gauguin. 

How, then, might there be another era? Because mariners went below 

the deep swells; they traveled by submarine and surveyed the hard-rock 

topography of the deep ocean by remote sensing devices. They discovered 

a vast realm of volcanic islands-guyots-that had eroded and subsided 

beneath the surface. In a few brief decades, an exploring science mapped 596 

new Pacific isles. These were more Pacific islands than Western civilization 

had discovered since Vasco da Gama first landed Portugal at the gates of the 

Indies. More powerfully, the context of discovery revived with another global 

rivalry, this one begun in World War I1 and accelerated during the Cold War; 

with another intellectual syndrome, the curious culture of Modernism; with 

another revolution in technology. 
16 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

The Cold War competition beneath the waves complemented almost 

perfectly the better-known competition for the high ground beyond the Earth's 

atmosphere. Space exploration was part and parcel of this sameThird Great Age of 

Discovery. If islands are a reliable index, three eras might equally characterize the 

vast sweep of Western exploration since the natal times of Henry the Navigator. 

If space, however, becomes a powerful enough presence, then the Eurocentric 

frame itself might need resetting and another index might in time be necessary. 

Perhaps discovered moons might replace encountered isles, although it's hard 

to imagine a future artist rendering Titan or Europa with the lavish cultural 

colorations that William Hodge, traveling with Cook, brought to Tahiti.'O 

GREAT VOYAGES: THE FIRST AGE 

The Great Age of Discovery opened with centuries of false dawns. 

Part of the difficulty is disentangling exploration from other forms of travel: 

from migration, walkabout, exile, wars of conquest, trading expeditions, 

reconnaissance, long hunts, great treks, missionizing, pilgrimage, tourism, 

and just plan wanderlust. Roman merchants had contact with the Canaries 

and Cathay. European pilgrims trekked from Hibernia to the Holy Land. 

Franciscan scholars trudged to the court of the Great Khan. Each age of 

expansion, every expansionist people, experienced a burst of discovery about 

a wider world. What made events of the 15th century special was that these 

exploring contacts did not end in a rapid contraction. They became welded 

to a revived expansion of Europe that would stretch over half a millennium; 

they bonded with revolutionary epochs of learning and political reform. They 

became institutionalized. Exploration became the outward projection of 

internal unrest that would not let the momentum long languish." 

The Great Voyages began cautiously enough. That Portugal pioneered 

the practice should alert us to the process's uncertain origins and its often 

desperate character.There was little in Portuguese history from which someone 

might predict, in 1450, that it would leap across whole seas and over unknown 

continents, establish the world's first global empire, and create the raw template 

1O.To match the discovery of Pacific islands with the general swarm of exploration, consult standard 

references. A sprawl of atlases exist that trace the general contours of geographic exploration, for 

example, and there is the flawed but indispensable A History of Geographical Discovery and Exploration, by 

J. N. L. Baker (NewYork Cooper Square Publishers, 1967). 

11. The doyen of the founding Age of Discovery is J. H. Parry. Among his many works, three are 

especially informative as syntheses: The Establishment .f the European Hegemony, 1425-2 725, 3rd ed., 

rev. (NewYork: Harper and Row, 1966); The Discovery offhe Sea (Berkeley: University of Califorma 

Press, 1981); and The Age of Reconnaissance: Discovery, Exploration, and Settlement, 2450-2 650 (NewYork 

Praeger, 1969). 
SEEKING NEWER WORLDS: AN HISTORICAL CONTEXT. . . 17 

for European expansion.Yet that is precisely what happened. For several hundred 

years, exploring nations sought to emulate the Portuguese paradigm, whose 

outposts survived until the 21st century.Within a generation, it came to be said 

that it was the fate of a Portuguese to be born in a small land but to have the 

whole world to die in. 

What happened was that exploration became-directly, or indirectly through 

charters-an organ of the state, and because no single state dominated Europe, 

many joined the rush. Geographical exploration became a means of knowing; of 

creating commercial empires; of outmaneuvering political, economic, religious, 

and military competitors-it was war, diplomacy, proselytizing, scholarship, and 

trade by other means. For this reason, it could not cease. For every champion, 

there existed a handfii of challengers. This competitive dynamic-embedded 

in a squabbling Europe's very fabric-helps explain why European exploration 

did not crumble as quickly as it congealed. On the contrary, many Europeans 

absorbed discovery into their culture, even, in some cases, writing explorers into a 

founding mythology, a cultural creation story. In short, where exploring became a 

force, something beyond buccaneering, it interbred with the rest of its sustaining 

society. The broader those cultural kinship ties, the deeper the commitment. 

Societies dispatched explorers; explorers reshaped society, Exploration became 

an institution.The explorer became a role. 

NNN 

The fabled Greatvoyages announced a First Age of Discovery. Its particular 

domain was the exploration of the world ocean, the discovery that all the world's 

seas were one, that it was possible to sail fiom any shore and reach any other. 

Of course, there were some grand entrudas in the Americas, and missionaries, 

Jesuits especially, penetrated into the vast interiors of the Americas, Africa, and 

Asia. But as J. H. Parry observes, it was the world sea that defined the scope 

and achievements of the First Age.The mapping its littoral was the era's finest 

cartographic triumph." 

The map reminds us that the First Age coincided with a Renaissance. 

The era unveiled two new worlds: one of geography, another of learning. 

Francis Bacon conveyed this sense perfectly when he used as a frontispiece to 

his Great Instaurution the image of a sailing ship pushing beyond the Pillars of 

Hercules. The voyage of discovery became a metaphor for an age of inquiry 

that would venture far beyond the dominion of the Mediterranean and the 

inherited wisdom of the ancients. The discoveries overwhelmed a text-based 

12. Parry, Discovery ofthe Sea. 
18 CRITICAL ISSUES INTHE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

scholarship: scholasticism, that arid discourse that resulted from too many 

scholars and not enough texts, collapsed as new information poured into 

Europe like New World bullion into Spain and, like it, inspired an inflationary 

spiral of kn0w1edge.l~ 

An age of discovery, however, demands more than curiosity and craft. 

It has to speak to deeper longings and fears and folk identities. The ships 

must voyage into a moral universe that explains who a people are and how 

they should behave, that criticizes and justifies both the sustaining society and 

those it encounters. The Great Voyages provided that moral shock: they forced 

Europe to confront beliefs and mores far beyond the common understanding 

of Western civilization. The Renaissance expansion of Europe profoundly 

altered Europe’s understanding of itself and its place in the world. There was 

plenty of hollow triumphalism, of course, but those contacts also inspired 

Montaigne’s celebrated preference for the cannibalism of Brazil’s noble savages 

to that of Versailles’s courtiers, and Las Casas’s excoriating denunciation of 

the conquistadoves. They compelled a reexamination of the political and ethical 

principles underlying Christendom and its secular principalities. Exploration 

could upset the discovering society as well as the discovered. It often found 

things it didn’t like, not least things about itself. The dark regions held horrors 

as well as marvels. 

For all this, the Portuguese were the originators. If exploration became, 

as Goetzmann argues, programmed, then the Portuguese paradigm was the 

template, the default setting for exploration’s software. The degree of interpenetration between exploration and society was astonishing, of which the 

suite of exploring ships was only a down payment. Consider the founding 

explorers: Henry the Navigator, late-medieval prince, blurry-eyed speculator, 

and wastrel, who began the fusion of discovery with state policy; Vasco da 

Gama, merchant and administrator, representing the bonding of commerce 

with the state; Afonso de Albuquerque, soldier and strategist, seizing at gunpoint the critical nodes of traffic throughout the Indian and South China seas; 

St. Francis Xavier, tempering the sword with the cross, missionizing in India, 

the East Indies, and especially Japan, with plans to proselytize in China; and 

Luis de CamBes, adventurer turned litterateur, author of the epic Os Lusiadas 

(1572), which cast contemporary explorers into the mode of classical heroes. 

Together they embodied, literally, the swirl of Renaissance ambitions-God, 

gold, glory-while wrapping it in an enduring saga. “Had there been more 

13.This has long been a common theme.A somewhat eccentric but insightful (and lively) recreation 

ofwhat it meant can be found in William Manchester’s A World Lit Only by Fire:The Medieval Mind and 

the Renaissance: Portrait ofan Age (Boston: Little, Brown, 1992), which tracks the imaginative impact of 

Magellan’s voyage. 
SEEKING NEWER WORLDS: AN HISTORICAL CONTEXT.. . 19 

of the world,” Cam6es wrote, his bold mariners “would have discovered it.” 

Revealingly, all the founders died oversea^.'^ 

When this tidal bore of discovery passed, it left an institutional berm 

throughout the strands on every continent save Australia and Antarctica. 

Portuguese explorers and fishermen plied the Grand Banks and probed the 

shorelines of North America and the North Atlantic isles. They established 

colonies in Brazil. They held trading fortresses along the coast of Africa and 

India, in the Spice Isles, Cape Verde, St. Helena, Tristan da Cunha, and at 

such major trading entrephts as Malacca, Macau, and Nagasaki. Probably they 

had reached Australia, though they found nothing to hold them. Those who 

followed were interlopers, seeking to poach parts of an empire too vast for tiny 

Portugal to hold. Or they sought to outflank the Portuguese. That was surely 

the intention of Christopher Columbus, who after all had learned his mariner’s 

craft sailing on the Portuguese Atlantic circuit. And that was the prospect held 

by Magellan, who had already been to the East Indies in service to Portugal 

before, on Columbus’s example, he offered fealty to Spain.15 

The Portuguese paradigm pointed as well to the enormous liabilities inherent in geographic discovery. The overseas posts, never illy staffed, nevertheless 

siphoned off perhaps a tenth of the Portuguese population. They drained the 

homeland without demographically overwhelming the colonies. The rapid 

infusion of knowledge failed to spark a Portuguese renaissance; much of the 

data was hoarded as a state secret, and the rest demanded an infi-astructure of 

scholarship that did not exist. Worse, the sudden inundation of wealth proved 

destabilizing. It tempted rulers to indulge personal and geopolitical fantasies, 

typically expressed as foreign wars. The unwisely sainted Henry was here the 

prototype-What wealth he gleaned, he sank in fide fighting on Moroccan sands. 

Exploration could led to profitable colonization where the discovered place was 

uninhabited, as at Madeira. Where lands were already occupied, colonization 

led to extravagant wars and bottomless expenses. The paradigm thus had its 

paradox: exploration required money as well as will, but beyond sacked towns 

and coastal trade, there was little wealth to get from it. Once permanent, the 

colonies became not sources of sustainable wealth, but economic placers, quickly 

14. Even in English, the Portuguese experience looms large. In addition to €’arv, see C. R. Boxer, The 

Portuguese Seaborne, 1415-1825 (London, Hutchinson, 1969), and Four Centuries OfPortuguese Expansion, 

1415-1825:A SuCnnct Survey (Johannesburg:Wicwatersrand University Press, 1965), as well as BaileyW. 

DSie and George D. Winius, Foundations of the Portuguese Empire, 1415-1580 (Minneapolis: University 

of Minnesota Press, 1977). Luis de Camdes’s epic, The Lusiads, is translated by Leonard Bacon with an 

introduction and notes (NewYork, Hispanic Society ofAmerica, 1950). 

15. On the Dutch strategy, see C. R. Boxer, The Dutch Seaborne Empire, 1600-1800 (New York, 

Knopf, 1965). 
20 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

plundered, before plummeting into fiscal sinks. An exploring imperium proved 

easier to grab than to hold.16 

The Portuguese paradigm should remind us how much geographic exploration has morphed over the centuries. By the late 18th century, as motivating 

forces, science had replaced God; commerce, gold; and national prestige, individual 

glory. The issues are even more serious for space exploration, although America’s 

spacefaring traverse through the solar system may be the closest geographic romp 

comparable in scale to Portugal’s. But there the simdarities cease. Pioneer did 

not have to force access to the outer planets by the sword, Mariner did not have 

to proselytize, andvoyager did not have to wrestle with restless indigenes and 

obstreperous crews. Instead of CamGes, American letters had Norman Mailer 

and Ray Bradbury, neither of whom had been in space, and instead of classic 

heroes, Renaissance versions of Odysseus, we had Tom Wolfe’s test pilots, forever 

fretting about drinking and screwing and their ranking on the ziggurat. No one 

wrote about the vessels themselves, any more than the 16th century &d about the 

Victoria. Mostly, Portugal’s voyages were a prelude to imperium, an extension of 

ancient empire-building by new means. America’s probes were valenced to the 

limited conflict of the Cold War. If Portugal faltered, someone else would move 

in. IfAmerica stalled, the void might widen. 

CORPS OF DISCOVERY THE COMING OF THE SECOND AGE 

The inflection to what William Goetzmann has termed a Second Great 

Age of Discovery was messier than the paradigm of Pacific islands suggests. 

Yet the same basics apply. By the early 18th century, exploration had become 

moribund; mariners did more poaching and piracy than original probing, like 

William Daumpier more buccaneer than naturalist; the explorer blurred into 

the fantasist and fraud, the promoters of the Mississippi and South Seas bubbles, 

the Lemuel Gulliver of Jonathan Swift’s savage satire, or with the forlorn 

adventures of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, who curses a woeful addiction 

to adventuring that repeatedly brings him to grief. Exploring expeditions 

persisted largely because interlopers tried to outflank established competitors, 

but little new was added. Exploration seemed destined to be left marooned on 

the shore of a fast-ebbing historical tide.17 

Then the cultural dynamics changed. The long rivalry between Britain 

and France, the penetration of high culture by the Enlightenment, a hunger for 

16. Peter Russell, Prince Henry “the Navigator”: A L$e (New HavexYale University Press, 2000). In 

fact, all the standard accounts of the Portuguese eruption, even the most celebratory, relate the same 

sad dechne. 

17. See William H. Goetzmann, New Lands, New Men: The United States and the Second Great Age .f 

Discovery (NewYork:Vi!sing, 1986). 
SEEKING NEWER WORLDS: AN HISTORICAL CONTEXT. . . 21 

new markets, all combined to move Europe again out of dry dock and onto the 

high seas of exploration and empire. Naturalists lengthened their excursions; 

artists painted natural scenes; philosophes looked to pure nature for guidance. 

The Grand Tour became a global excursion around the Earth. Perhaps most 

extraordinarily, the missionary emerged out of a secularizing chrysalis into the 

naturalist. Increasingly, scientists replaced priests as the chroniclers and observers 

of expeditions, and scientific inquiry substituted for the proselytizing that had 

helped justify an often violent and tragic collision of cultures." 

From Linnaeus's apostles gathering the fruits of nature from the Americas 

to Antarctica, to expeditions measuring the arc of the meridian and the transit 

of Venus, explorers swarmed across the Earth and often sailed around it. Over 

the next century, every aspiring great power dispatched fleets to seek out new 

wealth and knowledge, to loudly go where others had not yet staked claims. 

Cook,Vancouver, Bougainvdle, LePerouse, Wilkes, Bellingshausen, Malaspinathese became the Magellans of the Enlightenment.They placed the competition 

intrinsic to science into the service of geopolitical strife. Once again, the rivalries 

among the Europeans were as great as anything between Europeans and other 

peoples. A civilization's internal conflicts drove its outward expressions. 

In the process, the old motivations became secularized and updated. In 

petitioning the Lords Commissioners of the Treasury to support the 1761 

transit, the Royal Society of London laid out the new rationales for systematic 

discovery : 

The Memorial itself plainly shews, that the Motives on 

which it is founded are the Improvement ofAstronomy and the 

Honour of this Nation [an Englishman, Edmund Halley, had 

proposed the transit as a means of measuring the astronomical 

unit] . . . .And it might afford too just ground to Foreigners for 

reproaching this Nation in general (not inferior to any other in 

every branch of Learning and more especially in Astronome); 

if, while the French King is sendmg observers . . . not only 

to Pondicherie and the Cape of Good Hope, but also to the 

Northern Parts of Siberia; and the Court of Russia are doing 

the same to the most Eastern Confines of the Greater Tartary; 

not to mention the several Observers who are going to various 

18. The classic figure, of course, is James Cook, so see J. C.Beaglehole's classic (if exhaustive) biography, 

The Ltfe ofcaptainJames Cook (Stanford, CA Stanford University Press, 1974). But see also the impact of 

Linnaeus in The Compleat Naturalist; a Liji ofLinnaeus (NewYork:Vikig Press, 1971), by Wdfrid Blunt, 

with the assistance of WiUiamT. Stearn, and see the impact of Banks, a critical catalyst for whom Patrick 

O'Brian offers a popular biography,Joseph BankA Liji Fondon: Collins Hard, 1987).The hterature 

on all these men and their apostles and imitators is almost oceanic in its extent. 
22 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

Places, on the same errand from different parts of Europe; 

England should neglect to send Observers to such places . . . 

subject to the Crown of Great Britain. 

This is by foreign Countries in general expected from us; 

Because the use that may be derived from this Phaenomenon, 

will be proportionate to the numbers of distant places where 

. . . observations . . . shall be made of it; And the Royal Society, 

being desirous of satisfying the universal Expectations of 

the World in this respect have thought it incumbent upon 

them . . . to request your effectual intercession with His 

Majesty . . . to enable them . . . to accomplish this their desire 

. . .which . . . would be attended with expense disproportionate 

to the narrow Circumstances of the Society. 

But were the Royal Society in a more affluent State; it would 

surely tend more to the honour of his Majesty and of the Nation 

in general, that an Expense of this sort, designed to promote 

Science and to answer the general Expectation of the World, 

should not be born by any particular Set of Private Persons.” 

Here, in a nutshell, were the formal reasons for state sponsorship: society 

needed science; science needed exploration; exploration to far countries needed 

support beyond what individuals could contribute; international scholarship 

and national honor demanded participation. Unsaid, but indispensable, were 

the rising popular enthusiasms for geographic discovery, bonded not to reason 

but to sentiment.The Lacondamine expedition to Ecuador commanded public 

attention not for Lacondamine’s meticulous mapping of the Amazon’s latitude 

and longitude, but for Isabella Godin’s heart-wrenching journey down it to find 

her husband. Public interest widened. By the latter part of the 18th century, 

as select colonies moved from the littoral inland, wider populations found in 

explorers a Moses-like leader of the people to promised lands. Daniel Boone, 

not George Washington, for example, would become America’s folk-epic hero. 

From high culture to pop cult, the explorer claimed cultural standing.20 

Those grand circumnavigations revived geographic exploration, but they 

mostly proved a means to reposition explorers, who promptly moved inland. 

The world’s continents replaced the world sea as an arena for discovery: the 

19. Harry Wolfe, The Transits OfVenus (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959), quoted on p. 83. 

20.The Lacondarmne expedition is not as well known among English speakers as it should be. A good 

introduction, leading to the successors in South America, is avadable inVictor von Hagen, South America 

Called Them. Explorations ojthe Great Naturalistr: La Condomine, Humboldt, Darwin, Spruce (New York: A. 

A. Knopf, 1945). A popular version has recently been pubhshed Robertmtaker, The Mapmaker’s W$e: 

A True Tale of Love, Murder, and Suwival in the Amazon (NewYork: Basic Books, 2004). 
SEEKING NEWER WORLDS: AN HISTORICAL CONTEXT.. . 23 

cross-continental traverse superseded a circumnavigation as the grand exploring 

gesture of the age. 

The pivotal figure was Alexander von Humboldt, whose five years in Latin 

America redefined exploration for the era. Humboldt rewove the loose strands 

into a taut fabric. He projected Linnaeus’s natural-history excursion into a cross 

section of continents. He carried the artist’s GrandTour to the Newworld. He put 

legs under Cook’s tours and let them trek from the shoreline over vast landscapes. 

He gave empirical heft to the misty musings of Nuturphilosophie. He empowered 

geographic science with a global reach. In the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 

he was one of “those Universal men, like Aristotle.” While he was not the first 

European to paddle up the Orinoco or climb in the Andes, Humboldt was the 

first of a new kind of European, such that even when explorers of the Second 

Age revisited sites known to the First, they did so with original eyes and to novel 

ends. Symbolically, upon his return to Europe, he dined with Thomas Jefferson 

the same month that Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery departed St. Louis. In 

the person of Humboldt, the explorer embodied the Romantic hero.” 

The transition matters because, as the 19th century ripened, Europe was 

no longer content to remain as a trader on the beaches of the world sea. Like 

its exploring emissaries, it shoved and swarmed inland.Trading ventures became 

imperial institutions; coastal colonies became continental nations; and the politics 

of commerce gave way to outright conquest.Thus commenced a grand era of 

exploring naturalism. New scholarship, particularly sciences, bubbled up out of 

the slush of specimens shipped home. The returns from the earliest explorers to 

a particular place were often phenomenal-the scholarly equivalent to placer 

mining. A revolution in geographic discovery again accompanied a revolution 

in learning, aptly symbolized by the similltaneous recognition by two exploring 

naturalists, Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace, of evolution by natural selection. 

The moral drama changed accordingly. Secularization and science trans1atedVasco da Gama’s famous declaration that he had come to the Indies for 

“Christians and spices” into a cry for civilization and commerce. The deeper 

drama concerned that fraction of Europe’s imperium colonized by European 

emigrants. Most of what Europe nominally ruled was densely inhabited by 

long-residing peoples, often in numbers far vaster than that of the rulers. But 

in some lands, the indigenes were swept away, and into that demographic 

vacuum European 6migr6s poured in. These settler societies tended to look 

21. Probably the best biography of Humboldt is std Helmut de Terra, Hum6oldt:The Liji and Times of 

Alexander von H~mboldt, 1769-1859 (NewYork: Knopf, 1955). For a fascinating insight into hs cultural 

impact, however, see Hahna Nelken, Alexander von Humboldt: His Portraits and Their Artists: Documentary 

Iconography (Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Verlag, 1980). On his impact in America, see Goetzmann, New 

Lands, New Men. 
24 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

upon discovery as part of a national epic and to honor explorers as vital 

protagonists- Moses, an Aeneas-of those founding events. With Lewis and 

Clark, for example, the frontiersman morphed into a naturalist, the scout into 

a scholar, and the adventurer into an Aeneas on his way to the founding of a 

new civilization. Their subsequent folk expansions proceeded hand in glove 

with formal exploration. These were new worlds, premised on the prospects 

for a new order of society. America truly was, in William Goetzmann’s words, 

“exploration’s nation,” but so were Russia, Australia, Canada, and others.= 

Discovery metastasized. As measured by the number of exploring expeditions, 

a slight increase appears in the latter 18th century and then erupts into a supernova 

of discovery that spans the globe. By the 1870s, explorers had managed continental 

traverses-cross sections of natural history-for every continent save Antarctica. 

With the partition of Africa, expeditions proliferated to assess what the fines 

drawn on maps in a Berlin library actually meant on the ground. Exploration had 

become an index of national prestige and power. The first International Polar 

Year (1882) turned attention to the Arctic. An announcement by the Sixth 

International Geographical Congress in 1896 that Antarctica remained the last 

continent for untrammeled geographic discovery inspired a stampede to its icy 

shores; even Belgium and Japan sponsored expeditions. (America’s attention 

remained fixated on the North Pole and that other stampede to the Klondike.) 

Ernest Shackleton’s celebrated Trans-Antarctic Expedtion was, after all, an 

attempt to complete for that continent the grand gesture that had crowned 

every other.23 

But Antarctica was the last: there were no more unvisited lands to traverse 

other than such backwaters as, for example, the Red Centre of Australia, the 

crenulated valleys and highlands of New Guinea, and the windswept Gobi. 

The number of exploring expeditions began to decline. Plotting them reveals 

the Second Age as a kind of historical monadnock, rising like a chronological 

volcano above a level terrain (see figure on opposite page).The peak crests in 

the last decades of the 19th century, as exploration crossed the summit of the 

Second Age. Then it began a descent down the other side. 

22. Goetzmann, “Exploration’s Nation.” 

23. Accounts &om the Heroic Age of Antarchc Exploration are legion. The entire literature is 

contained-incredbly-wthin the Antarctic Bibliography pubhshed by the Library of Congress. A 

surprismgly good compdatlon, wonderfidly Illustrated, is avadable in Reader’s Digest, Antarctica. 

Great Storiesfrom the Frozen Continent (Surrey HIlls, New South Wales: Reader’s Digest, 1985). For 

an interpretwe summary that places the experience whin the Three Ages of Discovery schema, see 

Stephen J Pyne, The Ire:A Journey to Antarctica (Iowa City, IA: Umversity of Iowa Press, 1986). 
SEEKING NEWER WORLDS: AN HISTORICAL CONTEXT.. . 25 

LOST WORLDS: THE WANING OF THE SECOND AGE 

The reasons for the slow bursting of this exploration bubble are many. 

The simplest is that Europe had completed its swarm over the (to it) unknown 

surfaces of the planet. There was nowhere else for the Humboldtean explorer to 

go. Equally, there were no more lands to meaninmy colonize. Instead, Europe 

turned upon itself in near self-immolation, with two world wars, a depression, 

and the sudden sheddmg of its old imperium. The enthusiasm for boundary 

surveys and natural-history excursions-for imperialism itself-waned with 

the slaughter of the Great War. 

The critical players were exhausted, especially Great Britain. The Second 

Age had kindled with a rivalry between Britain and France, much as the contest 

between Portugal and Spain had powered the First Age. Thereafter, virtually 

every competition featured Britain, which is why its explorers so dominate the 

age. Britain and France clashed in India, the Pacific, and Africa; Britain and the 

U.S., in North America; Britain and Russia, the Great Game, across central Asia; 

Britain and all comers in Antarctica. After the Great War, Britain and France 

Great Ages of Discoveryz4 

24. Data from J. N. L. Baker, A History of Geogriphical Discovery and Exploration, rev. ed. (G. G. Harrap 

and Co., 1937);Alex Roland, ed., A Spacefaring People: Perspectives on Early Spaceflisht (Washington, DC: 

GPO, 1985); and J. H. Parry, The Discovery ofthe Sea (NewYork Dial, 1974). 
26 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

could no longer afford the enterprise; Russia turned inward with revolution; the 

U.S. had few places other than Antarctica in which discovery had geopolitical 

meaning.The Second Great Age of Discovery, like the First before it, deflated. 

By the middle 20th century, Kipling’s “Recessional” had become prophetic: Europe was rapidly disengaging itself from its imperial past and thus 

from the exploring energies that had, like lampreys, attached themselves to the 

institutions of an expansionist era. Decolorization accompanied an implosion 

of exploration; Europe turned inward, quelling the ancient quarrels that had 

restlessly and violently propelled it around the globe, pulling itself together 

rather than projecting itself outward. Antarctica, the deep oceans, interplanetary 

space-these arenas for geographic discovery might be claimed, but they would 

not be colonized. No one was willing to wage war over the asteroid belt or Io. 

Other reasons were cultural.The Second Age had served as the exploring 

instrument of the Enlightenment. Geographic discovery had bonded with 

modern science: no serious expedition could claim public interest without a 

complement of naturalists, while some of the most robust new sciences like 

geology and biology relied on exploration to cart back the data that fueled 

them. Science, particularly natural history, had shown itself as implacably 

aggressive as politics, full of national rivalries and conceptual competitions, and 

through exploration, it appeared to answer, or at least could address, questions 

of keen interest to the culture. It could exhume the age of the Earth, reveal 

the evolution of life, celebrate natural monuments to nationalism and Nature’s 

God. Artists like Thomas Baines and Thomas Moran joined expeditions or, like 

John James Audubon, mounted their own surveys; general intellectuals eagerly 

studied narratives of discovery (even Henry David Thoreau, nestled into his 

Walden Pond cabin, read the entire five volumes of the Wilkes Expedition). 

Exploring accounts and traveler narratives were best sellers; explorers became 

cultural heroes; exploration was part and parcel of national epics; exploration 

was a means to fame and sometimes fortune. The Second Age, in brief, braided 

together many of the dominant cultural strands of its times. 

By the early 20th century, however, this splendid tapestry was unraveling. 

The Enlightenment found itself challenged by Modernism’s avant-garde: in 

field after field, intellectuals turned to subjects that no longer lent themselves 

to explication by exploration. Modernism spread like an intellectual infection, a 

fever that turned the attention ofhigh culture away from a tangible, commonsense 

world to an interior realm hll of paradoxes.The vital truths no longer lay in the 

domain of geographic discovery. Art looked to art, mathematics to mathematics, 

literature to literature. Natural scientists scrutinized the very large and the very 

small, to red-shifting nebulae and subatomic particles or molecular genes. Artists 

turned inward, probing themselves and the foundations of art, not outward to 

representational landscapes. High culture was more inclined to follow Sigmund 

Freud into the symbol-laden depths of the unconscious or Joseph Conrad into 
SEEKING NEWER WORLDS: AN HISTORICAL CONTEXT 27 

a heart of imperial darkness than to ascend Chimborazo with Humboldt or to 

row with John Wesley Powell through the gorges of the Grand Canyon. The 

Second Age sagged not simply from the exhaustion of closed frontiers, but from 

a more profound weariness with the entire Enlightenment enterprise. 

In the early 19th century, an intellectual could claim international acclaim 

by exploring new lands. By the early 20th, he could not, if he could even find 

suitable lands. There were a few spectacular exceptions: the gold-prospecting 

Leahy brothers trooping into the unknown Highlands of New Guinea; Richard 

Byrd, wistfully erecting Little America on the Ross Ice Shelc Roy Chapman 

Andrews, with carbine and Model T, whisking across the Gobi in search of 

dinosaur eggs, the very model of a Hollywood action hero (and inspiration for 

Indiana Jones). But there was, overall, a rueful, forlorn quality to the striving, 

aptly expressed when the American Museum of Natural History, with Andrews 

at the helm, dispatched an expedition to Shiva Temple, an isolated butte within 

the Grand Canyon, to look for exotic creatures. Sixty years before, the Canyon 

had claimed center stage, not only for geographic discovery, but for what it said 

to fundamental questions about the Earth's age and organic evolution. Now the 

press boosted a minor foray into a search for lost worlds and possibly living relics 

from the age of dinosaurs. Lost world, indeed.25 

BOLDLY GOING WHERE NO ONE IS: THE THIRD AGE 

The fascinating question is why the bubble did not burst more catastrophically. One reason is that Western civilization did discover new lands to explore. 

There were the ice sheets (and sub-ice terrains) of Greenland and especially 

Antarctica; there were the deep oceans; and, of course, a solar system beckoned, 

full of wonders beyond the vision of Earth-bound observatories. As powerful 

instruments and remote sensing technologies emerged, as manned vehicles and 

unmanned probes plummeted to the depths and beyond the atmosphere, the 

prospects for a revival of exploration became possible. 

Yet dazzling technologies and a rekindled curiosity are not enough to 

sustain an era of exploration: cultural engagement also demands a sharp rivalry. 

Those competitive energies flourished with the Cold War. In retrospect, the 

Great Game between the United States and the Soviet Union lasted far less than 

25. Contrast, for example, the classic explorers of the Second Age mth the career of Roy Chapman 

Andrews, as described in Charles Gallenkamp, Dragon Hunter: Roy Chapman Andvews and the Central Asiatu 

Expeditions (NewYork:Vi!&g, 2001). Andrews set out to be an explorer in the classic mode but found that 

the times had changed. For the story of a contemporary who did manage to make the transinon in part, 

see Carol Gould, The Remarkable L@ ofWilliam Beebe: Explorer and Naturalut (Washington, DC: Island Press, 

2004). Beebe famously plunged into the Atlantic in a bathysphere.An attempt to trace the contours of the 

Second Age's rise and fall, using the Grand Canyon as a test site, can be found in Stephen J. Pyne, How the 

Canyon Became Grand:A Short History (New YorkVihng, 1998), which recounts the Shva Temple saga. 
28 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

those between Spain and Portugal, or Britain and France, but the era is young, 

and if it does in fact mark a Third Age, some other competitors, keen to secure 

national advantage or prestige through sponsored discovery, may emerge. China 

has announced its intention to land a tikonaut on the Moon; India and Japan have 

launch capabilities and may choose to compete.Without the Cold War, however, 

there would have been scant incentive to erect bases on the Antarctic ice, scour 

the oceans for seamounts and trenches, or launch spacecraft. The Cold War 

allowed a controlled deceleration of exploring energies, a reversed complement 

to the British-French competition that helped accelerate the Second Age. Two 

geopolitical rivals, both with active exploring traditions, chose to divert some of 

their contest away from battlefields and into untrodden landscapes. 

But perhaps more profoundly, exploration did not wither away because 

the culture, the popular culture, did not wish it to. Exploration had become 

not only institutionalized, but internalized. This was a civilization that could 

hardly imagine itself as other than exploring. Explorers flourished, if only in 

pulp fiction, movies, and adolescent fantasies. Quickly, it forged new institutions, 

of which the International GeophysicalYear is an apt annunciation, and in the 

Voyager missions, it found what is likely to endure as the great gesture of the 

Third Age, a traverse through the solar system.Voyager’s Grand Tour may serve 

for this era as Magellan’s voyage did for the First and Humboldt’s travels &d for 

the Second.Voyager demonstrated both the power and peculiarities of the era.26 

What has not happened is a new knitting together of exploration and high 

culture. Instead, popular culture has filled that void, but in ways that resuscitate 

the images and narrative templates of previous eras. Stur Tuek, for example, is 

the voyage of the Beagle with warp drive. Enthusiasts show Conestoga wagons 

26. The hterature on IGY is large but mostly technical. A good popular survey is J. Tuzo Wdson, 

IGY The Year of the New Moons (New York Knopf, 1961). The Third Age has not been the object 

of a comprehensive survey since space seems to command its own literature and, to put the matter 

bluntly, the concept IS not mdely known. Useful starting points for works about space travel are 

Alex Roland, ed., A Spacefring People. Perspectives on Early Space Flght (Washington, DC: GPO, 1985); 

Wdliam Burrows, Thrs New 0cean:The Story ofthe First Space Age (NewYork Random House, 1998); 

Roger Launius, Frontiers ofspace Exploration, 2nd ed. (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2004); Roger D. 

Launius et al., Reconsidering Sputnik: Forty Ears Since the Soviet Satellite (Amsterdam: Overseas Publishers 

Association, 2000); and, for the political context of the Cold War,Walter A. McDougall, . . . The Heavens 

and the Earth:A Political History ofthe Space Age (NewYork: Basic Books, 1985).The deep-ocean story 

has been much less described, although declassification of dtary documents IS beginmng to change 

the record. See Wilham Broad, The Universe Below: Discovering the Secrets .f the Deep Ocean (New York: 

Simon and Schuster, 1997); Robert D. Ballard mth Wdl Hively, The Eternal Darkness:A Personal History 

of Deep-sea Exploration (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Umversity Press, 2000); Henry Menard, The Ocean 

of Tnth: A Personal History of Global Tectonics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986); and 

Anatomy of an Expedition (New York McGraw-Hill, 1969).To measure the contrast with the supreme 

oceanic expeditlon the Second Age, see &chard Corfield, The Silent Landscape: The Scientific Voyage of 

HMS Challenger (Washmgon, DC: Joseph Henry Press, 2003). 
SEEKING NEWER WORLDS: AN HISTORICAL CONTEXT. . . 29 

trekking to Mars, prairie schooners propelled by solar wind. But popular culture 

can be fickle and selective. The first Stuv Trek movie, for example, imagined a 

Voyager spacecraft returning to Earth, stuffed with a universe of wonders, 

reporting to its “creator.”Ten years later, StuvZek Vopened with a bored Klingon 

commander blasting atroyager probe as space junk. Exploring the galaxies needed 

a story-a deep narrative of moral and imaginative power-as much as dilithium 

crystals. With neither a rambunctious imperialism nor an eager Enlightenment, 

the Third Age must, for now, continue its downward declension. 

There are good reasons, then, for considering the Third Age-our age-as 

continuous with its predecessors.Yet it is also different, and those differences matter. 

Most intrinsically, the Third Age is going where no one is or ever has been. 

The geographic realms of the Third Age are places where people cannot 

live off the land. In Antarctica, they can at least breathe. In the deep oceans, 

beneath the ice sheets, or in space, they can survive only if encased in artificial 

life-support systems. These are environs that offer no sustaining biota. There is 

little reason to believe that much more thrives beyond Earth.These geographies 

remain, for all practical purposes, abiotic worlds.They propel exploration beyond 

the ethnocentric realm of Western discovery, but also beyond the sphere of the 

human and perhaps beyond the provenance of life. 

This is a cultural barrier to exploration, in comparison to which the limiting 

velocity of light may prove a mere technological inconvenience. The reason 

goes to the heart of exploration: that it is not merely an expression of curiosity 

and wanderlust but involves the encounter with a world beyond our ken that 

challenges our sense of who we are. It is a moral act, one often tragic, a strong 

nuclear force that bonds discovery to society. It means that exploration is more 

than adventuring, more than entertainment, more than inquisitiveness. It means 

it asks, if indirectly, core questions about what the exploring people are like. 

This was unavoidable in the past because almost all previous encounters had 

involved people. Exploration meant the meeting of one people with another, 

the transfer of knowledge and experience 6-om one group to another. Most 

of the world Europe did not discover, except to itself. Almost every place that 

could have people did have them, and those indigenes proved indispensable. 

They served as interpreters, translators, native guides, hunters, and collectors. 

Explorers often succeeded to the extent that they borrowed &om or emulated 

the peoples who already resided in these (for Europe) far and foreign realms. 

What Europe did was to stitch these separate someones together into a vast 

cosmological quilt: its voyages of discovery were needles and threads that joined 

geographic patches into new collective patterns. 
30 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

The Third Age has no such option. No one will live off the land on 

Deimos, go native on Titan, absorb the art of Venus, the mythology of Uranus, 

the religious precepts of Mars, or the literature of Ceres.There will be no one 

to talk to except ourselves. Discovery will become a colossal exercise in selfreference. Consider some of the iconic images of the American space program. 

There is the image of Earthrise, which is a view of ourselves from the Moon. 

And there is Buzz Aldrin, encased like a high-tech Michelin Man, staring into 

a camera on the lunar surface. His visor, however, reflects back the image of 

the photographer. In a classic image, WundevevAbove u Seu $Fog, Caspar David 

Friederick could position his painting’s observer peering over the shoulder of 

a Humboldtean traveler, in turn overlooking a valley of mist. In a comparable 

classic, Neil Armstrong could photograph Aldrin, looking at Armstrong, showing 

the photographer taking the photograph. That shift in perspective captures 

exactly the shift from Enlightenment to Modernism and from Second Age to 

Third. Add to the survey the curious plaques affixed to Pioneer and Voyager, 

surely indecipherable to any entity that might find them.They are a message in 

a bottle dispatched to ourselves. 

Yet there is promise amid the paradox. For a century, Modernism has 

grappled precisely with how to reconcile observer with observed, with 

somehow putting ourselves into the scene. Russell’s paradox, Godel’s proof, 

Heisenberg’s indeterminacy principle-all struggled with self-reflexivity. 

They addressed precisely, if abstractly, the conundrum of exploring without 

an Other. As a result, Modernist art, literature, and philosophy can outfit 

exploration with the intellectual kit it will need to survive such alien scenes and 

self-encounters.They can provision it to move beyond the landscapes of earlier 

eras of discovery. 

The other good news is that the coruscating ethical dilemmas of so much 

earlier exploring and empire-building will disappear. No group need expand at 

the expense of another. Ethnocentricity will vanish: there is only one culture, 

that of the explorer. There is no exoecosystem to foul. With no distinctively 

humun encounter possible, there is no compelling reason for humans to even 

serve as explorers. As long as other life or cultures are not present, there is no 

ethical or political crisis except whatever we choose to impose on ourselves. 

Beyond the Earth there may well be no morality as traditionally understood, 

that is, as a means of shaping behavior between peoples.The morality at issue is 

one of the self, not between the Self and an Other. 

The bad news is that exploration’s moral power-the tensions, awful and 

enlightening both, that are involved in a clash of cultures-also vanishes. The 

price of ethically sanitizing exploration is to strip it of compelling humun drama. 

Planetary probes become technical challenges, to make machines to withstand 

the rigors of space travel, a technological equivalent to extreme sports, like 

white-water kayaking in Borneo or NASCAR’s Daytona 500. The intellectual 
SEEKING NEWER WORLDS: AN HISTORICAL CONTEXT. . . 31 

challenge has telescoped, more or less, into a search for life, notably on Mars. 

Whether this can command the kind of cultural attention that earlier exploration 

did is unclear.What is inescapable is yet another paradox: we are safe as long 

as we don’t find lie. If we do, then the old morality returns. (Here is the real 

intergalactic ghoul.) If we decline to revive those concerns, and withdraw, then 

the primary justification for continued discovery vanishes and the space program 

becomes a hnd of national hobby, a jobs program, or a daytime TV soap opera. 

But the matter gets even worse. 

In past ages, dxovery had to be done by people.There was no other option 

by which to learn the languages, to record data and impressions, to gather 

specimens, to meet other societies and translate their accumulated wisdom. It is 

impossible to imagine the great expeditions of the past without considering the 

personality of individual explorers who inspired, collected, witnessed, fought, 

wrote, sketched, exulted, feared, suffered, and otherwise expressed the aspirations 

and alarms of their civilization. But it is entirely possible to do so now. Not 

only is there no encounter between people, there need not even be a human 

encounterer. People do not have to be physically present at the discoveries of 

the Third Age, and there are sound reasons for arguing that they should not be. 

Nor is the case for planetary colonization truly compelling, not at present, 

any more than it was for Magellan at the Marianas or Peary at the Pole, or 

those fatally premature experiments from promoters like Walter Raleigh. The 

theses advanced to promote outright settlement are historical, culturally bound, 

and selectively anecdotal: that we need to pioneer to be what we are, that new 

colonies are a means of renewing civilization, that the Second Age can have a 

Second Coming. America, in particular, could not survive the closing of the 

final frontier (although the American Century flourished only after the old 

frontier nominally shut down). 

There is little to justify this assertion. Even considered on economic 

grounds, Europe’s imperial nations boomed only after they shed their foreign 

colonies. Moreover, advocates for exploration as a prelude to colonization 

conveniently ignore such fiascos as the Darien debacle-the scheme boosted 

by William Paterson in the 1690s to establish a Scottish settlement in Panama. 

The isthmus would be critical to global trade, he insisted; Scotland’s economic 

future and national identity depended on it seizing control of that geopolitical 

chokepoint; destiny demanded colonization. The outcome was a crushing 

failure that, not incidentally, bankrupted Scotland and drove it into union with 

England. Paterson was a visionary: in 200 years, a canal would join the two 

oceans across Panama. He was also a lethal crank who cost hundreds of lives 

and ruined a national economy. Successful settlements followed a long gestation 

period of reconnaissance and aid from indigenes. Examples abound of societies 

that chose to withdraw into themselves and suffered.There are, equally, examples 

of societies that chose to push outward and suffered. Portugal, as the founding 
32 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGKT 

paradigm, is a good case. Within a generation, it had sunk into collapse, even 

absorbed by Spain, only emerging My as a modern state when it finally shed 

its colonies.The issue is not whether to explore or not, but how to engage the 

wider world: where, with what means, how much. More likely is an era of space 

tourism or historical reenactment-Plymouth Colony on the Moon, Golden 

Goa onVenus, Magellan Tours TakesYou to Phobo~.~~ 

This is precisely what the closest Earth analogues do. No one lives in the 

Marianas Trench or the Laurentian Abyss. No one homesteads in Antarctica. 

There are permanent settlements, but not permanent residents. There are 

no schools because there are no children.There are no families.There is no 

indigenous society. These enclaves are the scientific equivalent of the commercial 

and military posts that characterized the early centuries of European expansion, 

only a fraction of which ever evolved into full-blown colonies, and most of 

those in defiance of the wishes of the commercial joint-stock companies or 

royal monopolies that oversaw them. In some ways, the contemporary colonies 

of the Third Age on Earth offer even less because there are no indigenes with 

whom to co-inhabit, interbreed, or coerce into labor. (The historic outposts of 

Europe’s exploring imperium tended to be populated by indentured servants, 

slaves, serfs, solders, convicts, religious refugees, or company employees, most of 

whom survived thanks to the largesse or forced conscription of native peoples; 

all in all not a formula for the demographic renewal of Earth.) 

Within the realm of the solar system-the dominion of the Third Agethe likelihood is that posts, if established and staffed by humans, would 

involve short tours of duty and high turnovers. The infrastructure would 

remain; the people would not. Exploration could thrive; outright colonization 

would not. 

BACK TO THE FUTURE: BEYOND THE THIRD AGE 

The Third Age encompasses more than space exploration, but the Antarctic 

has not enough undiscovered terrain to sustain a whole era, and oceanographic 

exploration has not yet gripped the public imagination, although it might. The 

future of exploration will depend on the exploration of the solar system. What 

might it look like? 

It will look like what its sustaining society wants it to look 1ike.The possibility 

exists that political contests will boil over into space, perhaps if China declares a 

colony on the Moon as essential to its prestige and the European Union joins the 

27. For a thumbnail of the Darien fiasco, see Arthur Herman, How the Scots Invented the Modern World 

(NewYork:Three Rivers Press, 2001), pp. 15-37. Interestingly, several nations tried to gain a foothold 

in Panama and failed, including the United States in the 1850s. 
SEEKING NEWER WORLDS: AN HISTORICAL CONTEXT.. . 33 

fray, using space as an alternative to military might in the search for a multipolar 

world.There is a prospect that the search for life d take on an imaginative, even 

a theological cast, sufficient that a large fraction of the culture wants to pursue it 

among the planets. It may happen that extreme arts, brash new sciences, an asyet-undeveloped commerce, an astropolitics, and some critical personalities will 

combine to kindle a Third Age echo of the Second Age. In some form or another, 

a virtuous cycle is possible. But it is not likely. For the American economy, the 

world's greatest debtor, cyberspace is far more significant than outer space. Like 

Spain before it, the United States squandered its windfall. Something might reverse 

that slide, but as Damon Runyon advised, the race is not always to the swift nor 

victory to the strong, but that's where you place your money. 

The most plausible prognosis is that the future will resemble the past, that the 

Second Age's monadnock wd mark an axis around which the evolving contours 

wdl unfold with rough historical symmetry. The Third Age will resemble the early 

Second, though in reverse, eventually mimicking with hgh-tech hardware the 

tempo of the First. (Even the attrition of spacecraft resembles that of far-sailing 

mariners.) Expehtions will slide to a new steady state, perhaps on the order of one 

or two a year (see figure below). These will be complicated probes, requiring years 

of preparation, similar to the expeditions launched during the Great Voyages and 

A Prospective Future for Exploration 
34 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

quite unlike the brawling swarm that so inflated the Second Age. The motor for the 

past half millennium of exploration-Europe’s internal quarrels-is now directed 

inward, to the European Union, or in absorbing rivalries that once drove exploration 

outward. Such expeItions d be targeted to some particular purpose-commercial, 

scientific, technological, national prowess, and prestige. They are udkely to spdl out 

fiom colonization: they will rather resemble those expeItions that early established 

trading factories on islands or episo&cally visited coastlines for barter or sought out 

new routes. If the process thrives, there will be several rivals, not some collective 

United Earth Space Agency, and that institutional unrest is what wdl keep the pot 

simmering. Steadily more and more of the solar system will be visited, cataloged, 

mapped, assessed. Perhaps, here and there, an outpost will appear, staffed for a few 

years. Reversing this trend would require an immense, global commitment that could 

only come fiom some dark necessity or irresistible rivalry, say, the discovery amid the 

asteroids of some mineral absolutely vital to national existence-the equivalent of the 

Potosi mines of Mexico, perhaps-or fromVenusians announcing that they intend to 

colonize Mars and the moons of Saturn, and defying Earthlings to stop them. 

What might all this portend for NASA? It likely means that exploration 

will continue to command popular interest, that scientific pursuits may well be 

sufficient to justifjr the further exploration of the solar system, with curiosity 

replacing commerce as a motive force and modern science substituting its own 

fierce competitive for geopolitical rivalry, and that the cultural continuities inherent 

in the long trajectory of geographic discovery by Western civilization wd persist. 

For the near future, exploration’s own inertia will propel more exploration. But the 

interpretation also argues that NASA would do well to attend to the Ifferences. It 

suggests that treklung among the planets will not be the same as crossing a continent 

or sailing the seas.The distinction is not simply one of technology and vessels, but 

of psychology and the meaning, ultimately the morality, of what occurs. It suggests 

that in the future, expeditions wdl be complex, public commitment modest, and the 

vigor of the program measured not by the number of expeltions so much as the 

impact of their novelty. It suggests, as so much other evidence does, that the Apollo 

program was an aberration and the attempt to institutionalize a successor through 

the Space Shuttle, an anomaly. It suggests that the chief novelty unveiled by space 

travel will be the character of exploration itself, that the explorer may be---ought 

to be-robotic and virtual. It is, in truth, more than a little odd that an enterprise 

premised on the discovery of the new should be so obsessed with retaining the 

old, especially cultural archaisms. The vital requirement for future exploration is 

less a new propulsion mechanism than a new appreciation for how geographic 

discovery must proceed in a context beyond Earth. Eponymously named spacecraft 

and planetary rovers may be the future’s prosthetic explorers. An obsession with 

colonization wdl be a burden rather than a boon. 

There may even be a deeper symmetry in the narrative arc of the Great Ages 

of Discovery. The Grand Ages may themselves end. They were created; they can 
SEEKING NEWER WORLDS: AN HISTORICAL CONTEXT. . . 35 

expire.The conditions that sustained them may cease altogether; they may no longer 

inspire interest as a tradition worthy of institutional support. One can even imagine 

a robotic Columbus, ceremoniously announcing an end to the enterprise. If the late 

19th century marks a bilateral middle in this saga, that passing may happen some 

400 years later, the early 23rd century, where Stay Trek now resides in the popular 

imagination. Exploration, even of space, may then exist only in literature, history, 

film, and popular imagination, and in a past where no one, boldly or otherwise, 

wishes any longer to go. 

CHAPTER z 

COMPELLING RATIONALES FOR SPACEFLIGHT? 

HISTORY AND THE SEARCH FOR RELEVANCE 

Roger D. Launius 

re there compelling reasons to travel into space? Assuming that there are, A when did they emerge in the consciousness of the space community, opinion 

leaders, politicos, larger public? How have those compelling reasons for spaceflight 

been articulated and adjusted over time? With all of the changes in the larger 

society during the last half century, do those rationales remain persuasive at the 

dawn of the 21st century? Finding answers to these questions are probably the 

most critical issues currently facing the space policy community. Of course, these 

issues may be considered without the use of historical analysis, and many do so, 

but the debate is immeasurably enriched by an understanding and explication of 

the historical evolution of the rationales that have been offered for why humanity 

seeks to fly in space.This essay begins with a discussion of the motivations for 

spaceflight-ultimately resting on the deep-seated desire to become a multiplanetary species and a quest for utopia beyond this realm-before moving into a 

sustained discussion of the five rationales for spaceflight that have been advanced 

over time: national pride/prestige/geopolitics, human destiny/survival of the 

species, commercial and other applications, national security, and science and 

technology. All of these have been used over time to support the concept of 

spaceflight. But are they compekng rationales today? Were they ever? The 

conclusion of ths essay explores the long-term consequences of these rationales. 

A QUESTION OF MOTIVATION 

Of course, one must ask the question, why did spaceflight advocates 

believe so thoroughly in the necessity of moving beyond “Mother Earth?” 

Certainly, they viewed it as a thrilling adventure, one that would test the 

best that humanity had to offer. Was it simply a problem to be solved, or did 

they envision something more? Ultimately, what was the point of sending 

people into space? Is not the expansion of a human presence throughout the 

cosmos the real, long-term agenda? I am convinced that there was much more 

to it than just trying to solve an engineering problem, although few of the 

spaceflight enthusiasts systematically expressed their long-term objectives. In 
38 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

essence, the advocates have long believed that it is human destiny to become a 

multiplanetary species, not just as an end in itself, but because of the desire to 

create a utopian society free from the constraints of cultures on Earth. 

De Witt Douglas Kilgore has recently noted that this motivation may be 

characterized as “astro!31turism,” the application in the American tradition of 

technological utopianism responding to the political upheavals of the 20th 

century. Kilgore asserts that the pro-space utopian impulse was founded in the 

imperial politics and utopian schemes of the 19th century but envisions outer 

space as an endless frontier that offers solutions to the economic and political 

problems that dominate the modern world. Its advocates used the conventions 

of technological and scientific conquest to express the ideals and contradictions 

endemic to American culture. Astrofuturists, according to Kdgore, imagined 

space frontiers that could extend the reach of the human species and heal its 

historical wounds. Their efforts both replicated dominant social presuppositions 

and supplied the technologies necessary for the critical utopian projects that 

emerged in the latter 20th century.’ 

One critical astrofuturist, the American rocket pioneer Robert H. Goddard, 

wrote effectively about breaking the bonds of Earth to achieve the full potential 

of the human spirit. A native of Worcester, Massachusetts, Goddard had a 

surprisingly metaphysical perspective on the cause of human spaceflight. As a 

boy, while his family was staying at the suburban home of friends in Worcester on 

19 October 1899, he climbed into an old cherry tree to prune its dead branches. 

Instead, he began daydreaming. A5 he wrote later, “It was one of the quiet, 

colorful afternoons of sheer beauty which we have in October in New England, 

and as I looked toward the fields at the east, I imagined how wonderful it would 

be to make some device which had even the possibility of ascending to Mars, 

and how it would look on a small scale, if sent up from the meadow at my feet.” 

From that point on, Goddard enthusiastically pursued the idea of spaceflight 

as a necessary part of human destiny. He wrote in his diary, “Existence at last 

seemed very purposive.” In addition, 19 October became “Anniversary Day,” 

noted in his diary as his personal holiday. He went on to tie space exploration 

to a surprisingly utopian vision of the future.At his high school oration in 1904, 

he summarized his life’s perspective:“It is difficult to say what is impossible, for the 

dream of yesterday is the hope of today and the reality of tom~rrow.”~ Later he 

added, “Every vision is a joke, until the first man accomplishes it.” 

1. See De Witt Douglas Kdgore,Astrofiturism: Sczence, Race, and Visions of Utopia in Space (Philadelpha: 

University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003). 

2.Two solid biographes of Goddard are Mdton Lehman, This HI$ Man.The LI$ ofRobert H. Goddard 

(NewYork: Farrar, Straus, 1963), whch is outdated, and David A. Clary, Rocket Man: Robert H. Goddard 

and the Birth ofthe Space Age (NewYork Hyperion, 2003).The quotahons are from Esther C. Goddard, 

ed., and G. Edward Pendray, assoc. ed., The Papers ofRobert H. Goddard, 3 vols. (NewYork McGraw-Hd 

Book Co., 1970), l:lO, 1:63-66. 
COMPELLING RATIONALES FOR SPACEFLIGHT? 39 

The most powerful justification Goddard ever offered for humanity’s movement into space was an essay called “The Great Migration,” written on 14 

January 1918 but not made public until much later. He scrawled across the 

envelope: “To be given to the Smithsonian Institution, after the owner has 

finished with it, there to be preserved on file, and used at the discretion of the 

Institution. The notes should be read thoroughly only by an optimist.” In this 

essay, Goddard postulated a time in the distant hture when the Sun had cooled 

and life on Earth could no longer be sustained. He envisioned gigantic, 

intergalactic arks taking the essence of the creatures and knowledge of this 

planet to new homes throughout the vastness of the Milky Way. “It has long 

been known,” he wrote,“that protoplasm can remain inanimate for great periods 

of time, and can also withstand great cold, if in the granular state.”There, amidst 

the stars, human society would replicate the best of what it had to offer.3 While 

the issue of utopianism is implicit, it is still present and offered for Goddard a 

reason to dedicate his life to building the technology necessary to achieve 

multiplanetary migration. 

These ideas of human destiny and perfect societies on new and perfect 

worlds have been expanded upon and extended far beyond Goddard’s basic vision 

in numerous subsequent works. Wernher von Braun, the single most important 

promoter ofAmerica’s space effort in the 1950s and 1960s, captured the essence 

ofAmerican utopian idealism and used it to justiftr an aggressive space exploration 

pr~gram.~ Although a German immigrant to the United States afterworld War 11, 

or perhaps because of it, he was remarkable in his grasp of what made Americans 

tick. He spoke often of “The Challenge of the Century” as a continuation of 

American exploration and settlement and the creation of a perfect society in a 

new land. “For more than 400 years the history of this nation has been crammed 

with adventure and excitement and marked by expansion,” he said. “Compared 

with Europe, Africa, and Asia, America was the New World. Its pioneer settlers 

were daring, energetic, and self-reliant. They were challenged by the promise 

of unexplored and unsettled territory, and stimulated by the urge to conquer 

these vast new frontiers.” Americans need the space frontier both physically and 

spiritually, von Braun insisted, and suggested that greater efforts in moving beyond 

the Earth would lead to a society in which “right relationships” pre~ailed.~ 

3. Robert H. Goddard, “The Great Migratlon,” in Papers of Robert H. Goddard, ed. Goddard and 

Pendray, 3:1611-1612. 

4. It is important to understand that this effort to colonize the cosmos was not limted to Goddard. 

Hermann Oberth wrote,“This is the goal.To make avadable for life every place where life is possible. 

To make inhabitable all worlds as yet umnhabitable, and all hfe purposeful” (Hermann Oberth, Man irtto 

Space [NewYork Harper and Brothers, 19571, p. 167). 

5. Wernher von Braun,“The Challenge of the Century,”3 Aprd 1965,Wernher von Braun Biographcal 

Fde, NASA Historical Reference Collecnon,Washngton, DC. 
40 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

Von Braun never wavered in his commitment to creating a perfect society 

in space. In a 1976 speech to the National Space Institute, he pointed to a bright 

future for humanity if it embarked on the high frontier of space. He said space 

would “offer new places to live-a chance to organize a new interplanetary 

society, and make fresh beginning^."^ He believed this was “as inevitable as the 

rising of the sun; man has already poked his nose into space and he is not likely 

to pull it back . . . . There can be no thought of finishing, for aiming at the 

stars-both literally and figuratively-is the work of generations, and no matter 

how much progress one makes, there is always the thrill ofjust beginning.”7 

Gerard K. O’Neill, an experimental physicist at Princeton University, 

emerged during the 1970s to emphasize the possibilities of human settlement 

in space colonies. He left an indelible mark on the utopia-in-space movement 

by advocating the development of gigantic cylinders or spheres of roughly 

one-half by a few miles in size that would hold a breathable atmosphere, all 

the ingredients necessary for sustaining crops and life, and include rotating 

habitats to provide artificial gravity for thousands of inhabitants. While the 

human race might eventually build millions of these space colonies, each 

settlement would of necessity be an independent biosphere. Animals and plants 

endangered on Earth would thrive on these cosmic arks; insect pests would be 

left behind. Solar power, directed into each colony by huge mirrors, would 

provide a constant source ofnonpolluting energy. Positioned at a specific point 

between the Earth and the Moon where the gravitation fields are equalized, 

known as LaGrange Point 5 (L-5), these O’Neill colonies could pursue the 

perfect society absent the problems of the parent society.* 

This bold vision catapulted O’Neill into the spotlight of the space 

community and prompted a collective swoon from the thousands attracted 

to his ideas. They formed the L-5 Society in 1975 and adopted the slogan 

“L-5 in 1995.” A particularly attractive group of space activists, one of their 

members wittily opined that they intended to “disband the Society in a mass 

meeting at L-5.”9 The space settlement mission also received a major boost 

from numerous science fiction and science fact writers, among them Arthur 

6. “For Space BuE-National Space Institute,You Can Join,” Popular Science (May 1976): 73. 

7. Wernher von Braun, “Crossmg the Last Frontier,” Collier’s (22 March 1952): 24-29, 72-73. See 

also Ernst Stuhlinger and Frederick I. Ordway 111, Wernher von Braun, Crusaderfor Space:A Biographical 

Memoir (Malabar, E Robert E. Krieger Company, 1994). 

8. Gerard K. O’Nedl,‘‘The Colonization of Space,” Physics Today 27 (September 1974): 32-40; Gerard 

K. O’Neill, The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space (New York William Morrow, 1976); Peter E. 

Glaser, “Energy fiom the Sun-Its Future,” Science 162 (1968): 857-860; Peter E. Glaser, “Solar Power 

via Satellite,” Astronautics &Aeronautics (August 1973): 60-68; Peter E. Glaser,“An Orbitmg Solar Power 

Station,” Sky and Telescope (Aprd 1975): 224-228. 

9. Michael A. G. Michaud, Reaching for the High Frontier: The American Pro-Space Movement, 1972-84 

(NewYork: Praeger, 1986), pp. 57-102. 
COMPELLING RATIONALES FOR SPACEFLIGHT? 41 

C. Clarke, who popularized O’Neill’s concept for colonies in space.’O The 

strongly utopian impulse present in the O’Neill movement found voice in the 

words of aerospace writer T. A. Heppenheimer. “On Earth it is difficult for 

. . . people to form new nations or region[s] for themselves. But in space it 

will become easy for ethnic or religious groups, and for many others as well to 

set up their own colonies,” Heppenheimer wrote. “Those who wish to found 

experimental communities, to try new social forms and practices, will have 

the opportunity to strike out into the wilderness and establish their ideals in 

cities in space.”“ 

O’Neill’s vision of practical and profitable colonies in space found an 

audience in many quarters of NASA even as it did in the larger pro-space 

movement. He received funding from NASA’s Advanced Programs Officebut only $25,00O---to develop his ideas more fully. Senior NASA officials 

such as Administrator James C. Fletcher and Ames Research Center Director 

Hans Mark encouraged his efforts. At the same time, some discredited his 

vision of colonies in space as hopelessly utopian.” 

In the summer of 1975, NASA officials took O’Neill’s ideas seriously 

enough to convene a study group of scientists, engineers, economists, and 

sociologists at the Ames Research Center, near San Francisco, to review 

the idea of space colonization, and followed it up with a study the next 

summer. Surprisingly, they found enough in the scheme to recommend it. 

Although budget estimates of $100 billion in then-year dollars accompanied 

the colonization project, the authors of this study concluded, “in contrast to 

Apollo, it appears that space colonization may be a paying proposition.” For 

them, it offered “a way out from the sense of closure and of limits which is now 

oppressive to many people on Earth.” The study recommended an international 

project led by the United States that would result in the establishment of a 

space colony at L-5. Most importantly, and decidedly utopian in expression, 

the study concluded: 

The possibility of cooperation among nations, in an 

enterprise which can yield new wealth for all rather than a 

conflict over the remaining resources of the Earth, may be far 

more important in the long run than the immediate return of 

energy to the Earth. So, too, may be the sense of hope and of 

10. Arthur C. Clarke, Rendezvous with Rama (NewYork: Bantam Books, 1973). 

11 .T. A. Heppenheimer, Colonies in Space (Harrisburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 1977), pp. 279-280. 

12. Ths would be completely consistent mth their ideology. See Roger D. Launius, “A Western 

Mormon in Washington, D.C.: James C. Fletcher, NASA, and the Final Frontier,” Pa& Historical Review 

64 (May 1995): 217-241; Hans Mark, The Space StationA Personaljourney (Durham, NC:Duke University 

Press, 1987);“Colonies in Space,” Newsweek (27 November 1978): 95-101. 
42 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

new options and opportunities which space colonization can 

bring to a world which has lost its frontier^.'^ 

O’Neill publicized these findings exhaustively, but with political will for an 

aggressive space effort at low tide in the latter 1970s, nothing came of it.14 

The utopian impulse has been strong in the history of the pro-space 

community since that time and has manifested itself in numerous quarters 

and by various advocates. The libertarian viewpoint of Rick Tumlinson 

and the Space Frontier Foundation clearly evokes a utopian rnindset.l5 The 

commitment of Lyndon LaRouche to space colonization also bespeaks 

a utopian vision for the future modeled on his unique political and social 

ideals.16 At some level, the rise of a conservative space agenda in the last two 

decades of the 20th century represented a utopian impulse as well, oriented 

as it is toward a celebration of the ideology of progress. The placement of the 

history of the Strategic Defense Initiative/“single stage to orbit” (SSTO)/ 

space colonization effort in the context of the United States’ well-documented 

political “right turn” may represent the central thrust of space policy since the 

1980s. The foundation and growth of this conservative space policy agenda 

has been well-documented in several historical works. Its linkage to various 

space advocacy groups, conservative futurists such as Gerry Pournelle, and 

space-power advocates such as Pete Worden ensured that conservative space 

advocates were able to manipulate the political system to achieve funding for 

their technological goals. At sum, they were intent on remaking both this 

world and outer space into a utopia of their own design.17 

13. Richard D. Johnson and Charles Holbrow, eds., Space Settlements:A Design Study in Colonrzation 

(Waslungon, DC: NASA SP-413, 1977), pp. 27-28, a study sponsored by NASA Ames, American 

Society for Electrical Engineering (ASEE), and Stanford University in the summer of 1975 to look at 

all aspects ofsustamed life in space. See also John Bdlingham,Wdliam Gdbreath, Gerard K. O’Neill, and 

Brian O’Leary, eds., Space Resources and Space Settlements (Washington, DC: NASA SP-428,1979). 

14.The latter half of the 1970s might best be mewed as a nadir in human space exploration, wlth 

the Apollo program gone and the Shuttle not yet flying. See Louis J. Halle, “A Hopeful Future for 

Mankind,” Foregn AJam 59 (summer 1980): 1129-1 136. 

15. See kck N. Tumhnson, “Why Space? Personal Freedom,” Message 6 of the Fronner Fdes, 

1995, http://www.space-frontrer.ovg/frontierfi~es.~~ml (accessed 11 April 2001); kck N. Tumhnson, “The 

Foundanon CredeOur View of the Fronher,” Part 4 of 4, Frontier Files, 1995, http://www.spaceS/ontier.org/S/ontierfiles. htnzl (accessed 1 1 April 2001). 

16. See Lyndon H. LaRouche, The LaRouche-Bevel Program to Save the Nation: Reversing 30Years of 

Post-Industrial Suicide (Leesburg,VA: Independents for Economc Recovery, 1992). See especially chap. 

11, “Frontier in Space,” pp. 88-100. 

17.Tlus subject has been discussed in Andrew J. Butrica, Single Stage to Orbit: Politics, Space Technology, 

and the Questfor Reusable Rocketry (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hophns, 2003), andW D. Kay, “Space Pohcy 

Redefined: The Reagan Admimstrahon and the Commerciahzanon of Space,” Business and Economic 

History 27 (fall 1998): 237-247. 
COMPELLING RATIONALES FOR SPACEFLIGHT? 43 

While the quest for utopia in space has been implicit rather than explicit, 

there has never been any question but that the long-term objective ofspaceflight 

is human colonization of the cosmos. Virtually all models for the future of 

spaceflight have at their core human expansion beyond Earth. This model for 

human colonization of the cosmos was first developed in the 1950s, honed to a 

fine edge in later years, and carried to its logical conclusion by many in the more 

recent past. Promises in space of a bountiful future, in which all have enough 

resources to live a rewarding life, where there is unlimited economic potential, 

where peace and justice reign for all, and where the perfectibility of humankind 

is expected are all utopian sentiments. In addition, allusions to spaceflight as 

an attribute of human destiny and the hearkening back to a positive American 

frontier experience also stimulate visions of idyllic, perfect places.” 

There is also a basic belief, utopian at its base, that spaceflight offers 

the only hope for the continuation of the human race. Asteroids or nuclear 

holocaust or environmental degradation or even a supernova all spell eventual 

doom for this planet and all who reside here. Astronaut John Young-veteran 

of Gemini, Apollo, and Space Shuttle missions-believes that the truly endangered species on Earth are humans. The only way to escape is to leave. The 

idea of a series of arks containing the living creatures of Earth is especially 

appealing since Americans so often conceptualize of themselves as called apart 

to “redeem” the world. Time is short, and every day brings humankind closer 

to destruction.” 

Because of spaceflight’s critical role in human colonization beyond Earth, 

it was logical that the early enthusiasts would always envision space exploration 

with humans at the center. For them, it made no sense to send robots as 

surrogates. We had to go ourselves because our ultimate purpose was to move 

outward. And, of course, humans did so with resounding success, landing on 

the Moon only 12 years after the launch of the first Earth-orbital satellite. 

Having reached the conclusion that human destiny requires movement 

outward from Earth and colonization of the solar system and, ultimately, the 

cosmos, the next question revolves around how it is advocated before the larger 

public. What rationales have been advanced in support of the grand design of 

human spaceflight? How effective have they been in garnering support for this 

great adventure? 

18.Whde I do not want to overstate this case, I beheve it is a very real aspect of the current spaceflight 

agenda of a cadre of “true behevers.” I have emphasized ths part of the story in the period since 

the 1970s in “Perfect Worlds, Perfect Societies.The Persistent Goal of Utopia in Human Spaceflight,” 

Journal of the British Interplanetary Sonety 56 (September/October 2003): 338-349. 

19. John W. Young to Steve Hawley et al.,“Why the Human Exploration of the Moon and Mars 

Must Be Accelerated,” 9 March 2001, John Young Fde, folder 18552, NASA Historical Reference 

Collechon, Washington, DC. 
44 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEELIGHT 

FIVE RATIONALES FOR SPACEFLIGHT 

From the defining event of Sputnik in 1957, five major themes have been 

used to justify a large-scale space exploration agenda. None of them explicitly 

advocate the human colonization of space-although that theme is implicit 

throughout-and none even hint at the larger utopian objective, despite its 

fundamental presence within the spaceflight community. The five themes are 

as follows: 

1) Human destiny/survival of the species. 

2) Geopolitics/national pride and prestige. 

3) National security and military applications. 

4) Economic competitiveness and satellite applications. 

5) Scientific discovery and understanding. 

Those themes have continued to motivate American space policy from 

the very beginning of the Space Age to the present. Specific aspects of these 

five rationales have fluctuated over time but remain the primary reasons for the 

endeavor. Indeed, there are no more nor no less than these five basic rationales. 

Human Destiny/Survival of the Species 

The first and most common rationale for spaceflight is that an integral 

part of human nature is a desire for discovery and understanding. In essence, it 

is human destiny to explore, to learn, and to absorb new knowledge and new 

territories into the human experience. With the Earth so well known, space 

exploration advocates argue, explcration and settlement of the Moon and Mars is 

the next logical step in human exploration. Humans must question and explore 

and discover or die, advocates for this position insist. It is the “final fkontier,” and 

Americans have always responded well to their fkontiers. 

When speaking and writing of these possibilities, many space advocates 

explicitly use the language of the “Frontier Thesis,” described for America 

in Frederick Jackson Turner’s famous 1893 essay. Turner’s “Frontier Thesis” 

is perhaps the most influential essay ever read at the American Historical 

Association’s annual conference. It has exerted a powerful force in the 

historiography ofthe United States, in no small measure because ofits powerful 

statement of American exceptionalism and its justification of conquest. Turner 

took as his cue an observation in the 1890 U.S. census that the American 

frontier had, for the first time, closed. He noted, “Up to our own day American 

history has been in a large degree the history of the colonization of the Great 

West. The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the 

advance of American settlement westward explain American development.” 

He insisted that the frontier made Americans American, gave the nation its 
COMPELLING RATIONALES FORPACEFLIGHT? 45 

democratic character, and ensured the virtues of self-reliance, community, and 

the promise ofjustice. He noted that cheap or even free land provided a “safety 

valve” that protected the nation against uprisings of the poverty-stricken and 

malcontented. The frontier also produced a people with “coarseness and 

strength . . . acuteness and inquisitiveness, that practical and inventive turn 

of mind . . . [full ofl restless and nervous energy . . . that buoyancy and 

exuberance which comes with freedom.” It gave the people of the United 

States, in essence, virtually every positive quality they have ever possessed.” 

Repeated use of the frontier analogy for spaceflight, with its vision of 

a new land and a new and better society, has given the American public a 

distinctive perspective on spacefaring. It always tapped a vein of rich ideological 

power. The symbolism of the frontier has been critical to understanding how 

Americans have viewed themselves since at least the end of the 19th century, 

and perhaps much longer. It conjured up an image of self-reliant Americans 

moving westward in sweeping waves of discovery, exploration, conquest, 

and settlement of an untamed wilderness. And in the process of movement, 

the Europeans who settled North America became an indigenous American 

people. The frontier concept has always carried with it the ideals of optimism, 

democracy, and right relationships. 

It also summoned in the popular mind a wide range ofvivid and memorable 

tales of heroism, each a morally justified step toward the modern democratic 

state. While the frontier ideal reduced the complexity of events to a relatively 

static morality play, avoided matters that challenged or contradicted the myth, 

viewed Americans moving westward as inherently good and their opponents as 

evil, and ignored the cultural context of westward migration, it served a critical 

unifying purpose for spaceflight advocates. Those persuaded by this metaphor 

(and many have been) recognize that it summons them not only to recall past 

glories, but also to undertake-or at least to acquiesce in-a heroic engagement 

under the ideal with the forces of social, political, and economic injustice.” 

Turner’s image of the American frontier has been an especially evocative 

and somewhat romantic popular theme for proponents of an aggressive 

space program. The popular conception of “westering” and the settlement of 

the American continent by Europeans has been a powerful metaphor for the 

propriety of space exploration and has enjoyed wide usage by supporters of space 

exploration. It hearkens back to the American West and the frontier in speaking 

of what might be gained in the unknown of space. But more important, it calls 

20. Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” The Frontier in 

21. See Richard Slotkin, Gunzghfer Nation:The Myth of the Frontier in Tienfiefli-Century America (New 

American Hictory (NewYork: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1920), pp. 1-38. 

York Atheneum, 1992). 
46 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

upon the adventurousness of the American people and offers the promise of a 

utopian change in society as it moves to a new, untainted place where it could 

remake society. Such has always been the siren call of the frontier myth. 

From Captain James T. Kirk’s soliloquy-“Space, the final frontier”-at 

the beginning of each Star Trek episode to President John F. Kennedy’s 1962 

speech about setting sail on “this new ocean” of space, the exploration and 

colonization allusion has been a critical component of space program promotion. 

Astronaut, then Senator, John Glenn captured some of this tenor in 1983 when 

he summoned images of the American heritage of pioneering and argued that 

the next great frontier challenge was in space. “It represents the modern frontier 

for national adventure. Our spirit as a nation is reflected in our willingness 

to explore the unknown for the benefit of all humanity, and space is a prime 

medium in which to test our mettle.”22 

Quintessential American novelist James A. Michener also applied this 

frontier analogy to the space program. In two articles in Omni magazine in the 

early 1980s, he explicitly compared the space program to the Anglo-American 

westward movement of the 19th century. He described the American sense 

of pioneering and argued that the next great challenge in this arena is space. 

“A nation that loses its forward thrust is in danger,” he commented; “the way 

to retain it is exploration.” In an eloquent and moving way, he argued for the 

American space program as the logical means of carrying out exploration. 

One of these articles had the ironic title of “Manifest Destiny,” a blatant 

hearkening to the ideology of continental expansion that gained preeminence 

in the 1840s. Michener argued that it is the American destiny to explore and 

colonize, and space is the next logical place to do this. His statement presents 

an eloquent and moving defense of America’s human space program in all its 

 permutation^.^^ 

NASA Administrator for nine years in the 1970s and 1980s, James C. 

Fletcher was especially attracted by the analogy of the American frontier. A 

Caltech Ph.D., he guided NASA during the critical period of redefining the 

space program at the conclusion ofApollo and for three years after the Ckullenger 

accident. But for all his hardheaded practicality, for all his understanding 

of science, he was enthralled with the frontier allusion and made specific 

connections to his pioneering ancestors in Utah. He commented: 

History teaches us that the process of pushing back frontiers on 

Earth begins with exploration and discovery and is followed by 

22. John Glenn,Jr.,“The Next 25:Agenda for the U.S.,” IEEE Spectrum (September 1983): 91. 

23. James A. Michener, “Looking toward Space,” Omni (May 1980): 58. See also James A. Mchener, 

“Mmfest Deshny,” Omni (Aprd 1981): 48-50,102-104. 
COMPELLING RATIONALES FOR SPACEFLIGHT? 47 

permanent settlements and economic development. Space will 

be no different . . . . Americans have always moved toward new 

frontiers because we are, above all, a nation of pioneers with an 

insatiable urge to know the unknown. Space is no exception to 

that pioneering spirit.24 

The frontier myth’s accessibility, coming with its utopian imagery, has served 

the pro-space movement well. Casting decisions on projects as facilitating the 

opening of this frontier has enormous appeal and has been used repeatedly since 

the launch of Sputnik. 

But invoking Frederick Jackson Turner has become increasingly counterproductive for anyone who appreciates postmodern multicultural society. 

Historians appropriately criticize Turner’s approach as excessively ethnocentric, 

nationalistic, and somewhat jingoistic. His rhetoric excludes more than it 

covers, failing to do justice to diverse western people and events. Yale historian 

Howard R. Lamar believes the Frontier Thesis emphasizes an inappropriate 

discontinuity between a mythical rural past and an urban-industrial future. 

Thus, it is unsuitable as a guide for understanding the present or projecting the 

future. Some scholars also discount its central safety-valve proposition. It may 

have applied in antebellum America, when many did “go West,” they suggest, 

but failed to hold after the Civil War as the prospect of migration moved 

beyond the reach of urban slumdwellers and others because of a lack of funds 

for farming and transportation. In fact, later settlers, mostly the children of 

farmers, arrived !Gam the fringes of existing settlements. Despite the criticism, 

the Frontier Thesis has had lasting appeal, in no small measure because it tells 

Americans how perfect they could become and offers an easily understandable 

if simplistic explanation for why that is the case. It is a small wonder that 

the Frontier Thesis would find service among those advocating an aggressive 

space exploration program!25 

President George W. Bush also supported space exploration as a humandestiny program in his 14 January 2004 announcement of a new vision for NASA. 

He stated that NASA would return to the Moon and eventually send astronauts 

to Mars. Doing so, as stated in the White House release on this subject, was 

human destiny: 

24. James C. Fletcher, “Our Space Program Is Already Back on Track,” USA Today (28 July 1987); R. 

Scott Lloyd,“NASA Head IsVeteranTeacher,” Salt Lake City (UT) Church News (25 May 1986). 

25. See John Mack Faragher, Rereading Frederick Jackson Turner:The Signijcance of the Frontier in American 

History, and Other Essays (NewYork Henry Holt, 1994);Allan G. Bogue, Frederick Jackson Turner: Strange 

Roads Going Down (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998); Ray Men Bdhngton, America? 

Frontier Heritage (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1974). 
48 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

America’s history is built on a desire to open new frontiers 

and to seek new discoveries. Exploration, like investments in 

other Federal science and technology activities, is an investment 

in our future. President Bush is committed to a long-term space 

exploration program benefiting not only scientific research, but 

also the lives ofall Americans. The exploration vision also has the 

potential to drive innovation, development, and advancement 

in the aerospace and other high-technology industries.26 

In explicitly raising the issue of the space frontier, the President followed a 

long succession of advocates who invoked the happy metaphor of America’s 

westward expansion to support his idea of human destiny. 

If human destiny is a positive attribute that generally finds resonance 

among spaceflight advocates and the general public, there is also a terrifying 

aspect to this rationale. The flip side of the human-destiny argument is that 

humanity will not survive if it does not become multiplanetary. Carl Sagan 

wrote eloquently about the last perfect day on Earth, before the Sun would 

fundamentally change and end our ability to survive on this planet.27 In their 

astrobiology book, The Liji and Death ofplanet Earth, Peter Ward and Donald 

Brownlee describe the natural life cycle of stars such as our Sun and the planets 

that circle them. They describe several possible scenarios for the end of life 

on Earth. Life on Earth will definitely end when the Sun, having used up too 

much of its hydrogen will become a red giant star and heat the Earth until 

every living thing, no matter how deep underground, is dead.28 

While this will happen billions of years in the future, any number of 

catastrophes could end life on Earth beforehand. A much earlier and quite 

likely way for life (or at least life as we know it) to end is the way life almost 

ended 65 million years ago when either an asteroid or a comet crashed into 

the Earth. The consequences of this collision caused the extinction of the 

dinosaurs and probably two-thirds of all life on Earth at that time. Enough 

life survived the harsh environmental aftermath and gave rise to mammals, a 

highly adaptable species that even survived the last Ice Age. 

In 1992, a noted scientist spoke to the American Astronautical Society on 

the subject “Chicken Little Was Right.” The scientist claimed that humans had 

a greater chance ofbeing killed by a comet or asteroid falling from the sky than 

dying in an airplane crash. This is true; mathematical calculations confirm 

26. White House Press Release, “President Bush Announces New Vision for Space Exploration 

27. Carl Sagan, Cosmos (NewYork: Random House, 1980), pp. 231-232. 

28. See Peter D.Ward and Donald Brownlee, The L$e and Death ofplanet Earth: How the New Science 

Program,” 14 January 2004, http://www. whitehouse.gov/infocus/space/# (accessed 30 December 2004). 

ofAstrobiology Charts the Ultimate Fate of Our World (NewYork Henry Holt and Co., 2002). 
COMPELLING RATIONALES FORPACEFLIGHT? 49 

that every individual faces a I-in-5,000 chance of being killed by some type of 

extraterrestrial impact. Throughout history, asteroids and comets have struck 

Earth, and a great galactic asteroid probably killed the dinosaurs. An object 

probably only 6 to 9 miles wide left a crater 186 miles wide in Mexico’s Yucatan 

Peninsula. This reality entered most people’s consciousness in July 1994, when 

humans for the first time witnessed the devastating impact of a large NearEarth Object (NEO) into one of the planets in the solar system when Comet 

Shoemaker-Levy 9 crashed into Jupiter with spectacular results.29 

With time, a comet or meteoroid will again hit Earth with disastrous 

consequences. Efforts to catalogue all Earth-crossing asteroids, track their 

trajectories, and develop countermeasures to destroy or deflect objects on a 

collision course with Earth are important, but to ensure the survival of the 

species, humanity must build outposts elsewhere. Astronaut John Young said 

it best, to paraphrase Pogo, “I have met an endangered species, and it is us.”30 

Geopolitics/National Pride and Prestige 

In addition, geopolitics and national prestige have dominated so many of 

the spaceflight decisions that it sometimes seems trite to suggest that it has been 

an impressive rationale over the years. Yet thkre is more to it than that, for while 

all recognize that prestige sparked and sustained the space race of the 1960s, 

they fail to recognize that it continues to motivate many politicians to support 

NASA’s programs. John F. Kennedy responded to the challenge of the Soviet 

Union by announcing the Apollo decision in 1961, and that rivalry sustained 

the effort. Kennedy put the world on notice that the U.S. would not take a back 

seat to its superpower rival. As John M. Logsdon commented, “By entering the 

race with such a visible and dramatic commitment, the United States effectively 

undercut Soviet space spectaculars without doing much except announcing its 

intention to join the ~ontest.”~’ Kennedy said in 1962 that “we mean to be a part 

of it [spaceflight]-we mean to lead it. For the eyes of the world now look into 

space, to the moon and to the planets beyond, and we have vowed that we shall 

29. K. Zahnle and M. M. Mac Low,“The Collision ofJupiter and Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9,” Icarus 108 

(1994): 1-17; Paul W. Chodas and Donald KYeomans, “The Orbital Mohon and Impact Circumstances 

of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9,” in International Astronomical Union (MU) Colloquium 156: Proceedings of 

the Space Telescope Science Institute Workshop (held in Baltimore, MD, 9-12 May 1995), ed. Keith S. Noll, 

Harold A.Weaver, and Paul D. Feldman (NewYork Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 1-30. On 

the mass extinchon of the dinosaurs, see Walter Alvarez, T Rex and the Crater of Doom (Princeton, NJ: 

Princeton University Press, 1997). 

30. John W.Young, “The Big Picture: Ways to Mitigate or Prevent Very Bad Planet Earth Events,” 

Space Times: Magazine ofthe American Astronautical Society 42 (November/December 2003): 22-23. 

31. John M. Logsdon,“An Apollo Perspective,” Astronautics GAeronautics (December 1979): 112-1 17, 

quotation horn p. 115. See also John M. Logsdon, The Decision to Go to the Moon: Project Apollo and the 

National Interest (Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology [MIT] Press, 1970). 
50 CRITICAL ISSUES INTHE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

not see it governed by a hostile flag of conquest, but by a banner of freedom and 

peace. We have vowed that we shall not see space filled with weapons of mass 

destruction, but with instruments of knowledge and under~tanding.”~~ Apollo 

was a contest of wills, of political systems, of superpowers. And the United 

States had to win it. Lyndon Johnson summed this up well with his assertion, 

“Failure to master space means being second best in every aspect, in the crucial 

area of our Cold War world. In the eyes of the world first in space means first, 

period; second in space is second in e~erything.”~~ 

Through the decade of the 1960s, prestige dominated much of the 

discussion of Apollo, even penetrating to the popular culture. Actor Carroll 

O’Connor perhaps said it best in an episode of All in the Family in 1971. 

Portraying the character ofArchie Bunker, the bigoted working-class American 

whose perspectives were more common in our society than many observers 

were comfortable with, O’Connor summarized well how most Americans 

responded to the culture of competence that Apollo engendered. He observed 

that he had “a genuine facsimile of the Apollo 14 insignia. That’s the thing 

that sets the US of A apart from . . . all them other 1ose1-s.”~~ In very specific 

terms, Archie Bunker encapsulated for everyone what set the United States 

apart from every other nation in the world: success in spaceflight. At a 

basic level, Apollo provided the impetus for the perception of NASA as a 

culture of competence, one of the great myths emerging from the lunar 

landing program. 

The United States went to Moon for prestige purposes, but it also built 

the Space Shuttle and embarked on the space station for prestige purposes as 

well. The turning point for Richard Nixon’s decision to proceed with the 

Space Shuttle for post-Apollo spaceflight came in August 1971 when Caspar 

Weinberger wrote an impassioned memorandum to the President that not to 

do so “would be confirming in some respects, a belief that I fear is gaining 

credence at home and abroad: That our best years are behind us, that we are 

turning inward, reducing our defense commitments, and voluntarily starting to 

give up our super-power status, and our desire to maintain world superiority.” 

Weinberger appealed directly to the prestige argument by concluding, “America 

should be able to afford something besides increased welfare, programs to 

repair our cities, or Appalachian relief and the like.” In a handwritten scrawl on 

32. President John E Kennedy, “Address at Rice Umversity on the Nation’s Space Effort,” 12 

September 1962, Houston, TX, John Fitzgerald Kennedy Library, Boston, MA, avadable onhe at 

http://www.rc rrmb.edu/ifklibrury/J091262.htm (accessed 27 October 2002). 

33. Lyndon B. Johnson, quoted in Walter A. McDougall, “Technocracy and Statecraft in the Space 

Age: Toward the History of a Saltation,” American Hutoricul Review 87 (October 1982): 1010-1040, 

quotation from p. 1025. 

34. “Carroll O’Connor Obituary,’’ on Morning Editton (National Pubhc Radio program), 22 June 

2001.This report by Andy Bowers IS avadable onhne at http://www.npr.org (accessed 2 July 2001). 
COMPELLING RATIONALE5 FOR SPACEFLIGHT? 51 

Weinberger’s memo, Richard Nixon indicated, “I agree with Cap.”35 Prestige 

also entered into the decision in one other way. Nixon was also unwilling to 

go down in history as the President who gave away the nation’s leadership 

in the exploration of space and ended the practice of flying astronauts, and a 

decision against the Shuttle, in his mind, would have done both.36 

. .., . 

An object lesson in the role of humans ip space exploration. Charles Conrad, Jr., 

Apollo 12 commander, examines the robotic Surveyor Ill spacecraft during the second 

extravehicular activity (EVA-2) in 1969. The Lunar Module (LM) Intrepdis in the right 

background. This picture was taken by astronaut Alan L. Bean, Lunar Module pilot. 

The lntrepidlanded on the Moon’s Ocean of Storms only 600 feet from Surveyor Ill. 

The television camera and several other components were taken from Surveyor Ill and 

brought back to Earth for scientific analysis. Surveyor Ill soft-landed on the Moon on 

19 April 1967. Interestingly, microbes from Earth on the Surveyor spacecraft survived 

in hibernation during a three-year stay on the lunar surface and revived upon return to 

Earth. This suggests the resilience of life in the harsh environment of space. (NASA 

JSC photo no. AS72-48-7136) 

35. CasparW.Weinberger to President kchard M. Nixon, ma George Shultz,“Future of NASA,” 12 

August 1971,White House, kchard M. Nuton, President, 1968-1971 File, NASA Historical Reference 

Collection, Washington, DC. 

36. John Erlichman interview,Washmgton, DC, by John M. Logsdon, 6 May 1983, NASA Historical 

Reference Collection, Washington, DC. See also George M. Low, NASA Deputy Admrustrator, to 

James C. Fletcher, NASA Admnistrator, “&ems of Interest,” 12 August 1971, and James C. FIetcher, 

NASA Adrmnistrator, to Jonathan Rose, Special Assistant to the President, 22 November 1971, both in 

Fletcher Correspondence, folder 4247, NASA Historical Reference Collection, Washington, DC. 
52 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

Prestige also played a key role in the decision to build a space station. At 

a 1 December 1983 meeting in the White House, NASA Administrator James 

M. Beggs asked President Ronald Reagan to approve his agency’s space station 

plans. Beggs stressed the space station’s potential contribution to the leadership 

of the United States on the world’s stage. He knew that Ronald Reagan had 

long been concerned with a perceived withering of American prestige vis-&vis 

the Soviet Union. The station, he argued, would help to quell that declension. 

But as the punch line for the briefing, Beggs hit Reagan between the eyes with 

a photo of a Salyut space station overflying the United States. He emphasized 

that the Soviet Union already had this modest space station and was planning 

a larger orbital facility. Should not the United States have one as well? Reagan 

agreed it 

Prestige will ensure that no matter how difficult the challenges and overbearing the obstacles, the United States will continue to fly humans in space 

indefinitely. In the aftermath of the Columbia accident on 1 February 2003 that 

took the lives of seven astronauts, when it appeared that all reason for human 

spaceflight should be questioned, no one seriously considered ending the program. 

Instead, support for the effort came from all quarters. Even President George W. 

Bush, who had always been silent on spaceflight before, stepped forward on the day 

of the accident to say that “the cause in which they died will continue. Mankind 

is led into the darkness beyond our world by the inspiration of discovery and the 

longing to understand. Our journey into space will go 

Of course, there is a positive aspect to this prestige that is very present 

throughout the age of spaceflight. One might call this pride, which aims to 

make Americans feel good about what they are doing. There is a genuine 

excitement and interest in space science/technology that the human spaceflight 

program produces. This is not new, and it remains critical to understanding 

this rationale for spaceflight. One might ask, as John Krige recently did, “How 

many people would come to the National Air and Space Museum [NASM] 

if it was just the NAM, and why are the human in space objects the ones that 

attract the most attenti~n?”~~ As Krige asserts, the prestige factor disguises a 

critical foreign policy component in all of these human spaceflight programs. 

National leaders supported Apollo, the Space Shuttle, and the space station 

efforts not on their merits, but on the image they projected. Their initial 

37.“RevlsedTallung Pomts for the Space Stahon Presentahon to the President and the Cabinet Councd,” 

30 November 1983, with attached “Presentahon on Space Stahon,” 1 December 1983, Reagan/NASA 

Correspondence, folder 12766, NASA Historical Reference Collechon,Washngton, DC. 

38. Statement by President George W. Bush, The Cabinet Room, 2:04 p m. eastern standard time 

(EST), 1 February 2003, in Bush, George W, folder 18262, NASA Historical Reference Collechon, 

Washington, DC. 

39. John Krige to author, e-mall message,“Space Rationales,” 2 February 2005. 
COMPELLING RATIONALES FOR SPACEFLIGHT? 53 

and continued support rested on the value they offered not as instruments 

of science, military prowess, economics, or the like, but on their usefulness 

as icons mobilized to buttress America’s position in the world. Accordingly, 

despite some truly significant accomplishments, they have been in no small 

measure symbolic for the majority of those observing them. That is certainly 

not all bad, and one might say essentially the same thing about the United 

States’ nuclear arsenal during the Cold War. The missiles and strategic bombers 

served to deter the Soviet Union, offering a symbolic threat more than one 

in reality since the doomsday scenarios their use would unleash were too 

devastating to ~ontemplate.~~ Might this be a powerful enough motivation to 

continue human spaceflight indefinitely? 

The fundamental importance of human spaceflight as an instrument of 

U.S. foreign policy-which is not necessarily identical with national prestige 

and geopolitics but is closely allied-should not be mislaid in this discussion. 

It served, and continues to do so, as an instrument for projecting the image 

of a positive, open, dynamic American society abroad. What of the good will 

generated by the United States in opening spaceflight to foreign astronauts 

during the Shuttle era? What about the significance of binding allies more 

closely to the United States through numerous international efforts ranging 

from robotic missions to the International Space Station? The foreign policy 

dimension of international human spaceflight should not be underestimated. 

National Security and Military Applications 

Another rationale for spaceflight has involved national defense and military 

space activity. From the beginning, national leaders sought to use space to ensure 

U.S. security from nuclear holocaust. In October 1951, Wernher von Braun 

proposed in the pages of Popular Science the building of a space station because 

“the nation which first owns such a bomb-dropping space station might be in 

a position virtually to control the earth.”41 In 1952, a popular conception of 

the U.S.-occupied space station showed it as a platform from which to observe 

the Soviet Union and the rest of the globe in the interest of national security. 

As the editors of Collier’s magazine editorialized, “The U.S. must immediately 

embark on a long-range development program to secure for the West ‘space 

superiority.’ Ifwe do not, somebody else will . . . . A ruthless foe established on 

a space station could actually subjugate the peoples of the world.”42 

40.There has been an enormous amount of historical literature on ths Subject. See especially Fred 

Kaplan, The Wizardr of Armugeddon (Stanford, CA Stanford Unlversity Press, 1991); Herman Kahn, 

Thinking about the Unthinkable (NewYork:Touchstone Books, 1985); Paul S. Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early 

Light:American Thought and Culture at the Dawn ofthe AtomicAge (NewYork Pantheon Books, 1985). 

41. “Giant Doughnut is Proposed as Space Station,” Popular Science (October 1951): 120-121. 

42. “What Are We Waiting For?” Collier’s 129 (22 March 1952): 23. 
54 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

Early in the 1950s, the U.S. military recognized that space represented the 

new high ground and that they had to control it. Numerous defense officials 

referred to space as the high seas of the future. The nation that could exploit the 

potential benefits of this ultimate strategic high ground for military purposes 

would dominate the rest of the world. The nation’s goals for space dominance 

have revolved since that time around four interrelated strategic issues: 

1) Space is a geographic location like air, land, and sea. Any national 

security capabilities for these other regions must be replicated in space. 

The Department of Defense, therefore, must control the use of space 

and defend its military and civil assets from foreign attack. 

2) A strong national security presence in space is vital, even during times 

of peace. Military strategists long have maintained that those nations 

most successful at controlling the seas are the same nations that tend 

most to succeed politically and economically. Space is becoming the 

seas of the future. 

3) Space must be dominated during wartime. That requires that the U.S. 

be prepared to protect U.S. access to space while denying its enemies’ 

access to space. It also means that the U.S. must be capable of exploiting 

the space regime, especially preferred orbits and missile lanes. 

4) National security requires that the United States enhance space resources 

for a variety of Earth-oriented missions: command, control, communications, and intelligence (C31); early warning; weather forecasting; navigation; antisatellite; space-to-ground attack; and missile defense.43 

The US. military also argued for a human capability to fly in space 

for rapid deployment of troops to hot spots anywhere around the Earth, but 

they never managed to convince the political leadership of the nation and, 

despite periodic attempts, never gained a human military mission. The human 

spaceflight enterprise also gained energy from Cold War rivalries in the 1950s 

and 1960s as international prestige, translated into American support from 

nonaligned nations, found an important place in the space policy agenda. 

Human spaceflight also had a strong military nature during the 1980s, when 

astronauts from the military services deployed reconnaissance satellites into 

Earth orbit from the Space Shuttle. A human military presence in space promises 

to remain a prospect for national security well into the 21st century.44 

43. Bryan Johnson, “Pohhcal Economy-The Mihtary Use of Space,” 14 May 1999, http://www. 

44. See Roger D. Launius, Space Stations: Base Camps to the Stars (Waslungon, DC: Srmthsonian 

suite 101 .com /article.& /political-economy/ 19993 (accessed 3 1 December 2004). 

Books, 2003), pp. 26-35,114-121. 
COMPELLING RATIONALES FOR SPACEFLIGHT? 55 

As it stands, the military has employed space-based and space-transiting 

resources for more than 40 years. The major systems include the following: 

* Ballistic missiles. 

* Reconnaissance satellites, both imagery and signals intelligence. 

Navigational satellites, the Global Positioning System. 

Weather and communications satellites. 

0 Early-warning satellites. 

* Ballistic missile defense. 

Collectively, these resources have been enormously important in winning 

the Cold War and ensuring American preeminence at the dawn of the 21st 

century.45 No one questions the legitimate role of space resources in the 

security of the United States. Indeed, the national defense space budget of the 

United States exceeded NASA‘s space budget in 1982 and has far outdistanced 

its spending since that time. In fiscal year 2003, for example, the Department 

of Defense’s spending on space was $19.39 billion, while NASA’s space budget 

was $14.36 

Economic Competitiveness and Satellite Applications 

The fourth rationale of economic competitiveness and commercial 

applications has provided another reason for engaging in spaceflight. Satellite 

communications is still the only truly commercial space technology to be 

developed in the more than 45 years since the beginning of the Space Age in 

1957. It generates billions of dollars annually in sales of products and services. 

The first inkling of what this business might look like appeared in the fall of 

1945 when a then-obscure RAF electronics officer and member of the British 

Interplanetary Society, Arthur C. Clarke, wrote a short article in Wireless 

World that described the use of satellites in 24-hour “geosynchronous” orbits 

some 26,000 miles above the Earth to distribute television programs.47 

Perhaps the first person to evaluate both the technical and financial possibilities of satellite communications was John R. Pierce of AT&T’s Bell Labs. 

In the mid-l950s, he argued that a communications “mirror” in space would 

be worth as much as a billion dollars. His estimate was conservative. Following 

45. See Everett Carl Dolman, Astropolitik: Classical Geopoliticr in the SpaceAge (Portland, OR Frank Cass 

Publishers, 2001); M. Mowthorp,“U.S. Wtary Space Policy, 1945-1992,” Space Policy 18 (February 2002): 

25-36; Roger Handberg, ‘‘Review Article: Military Space Policy: Debating the Future,” Astropoliticr 2 

(spring 2004): 79-89. 

46. Aeronauticz and Space Report of the President, Fiscal Year 2003 Activities (Washington, DC: NASA 

NP-2004-17-389-HQ, 2004), p. 139. 

47. Arthur C. Clarke, “Extra-Terrestrial Relays: Can Rocket Statlons Give World-Wide Radio 

Coverage?’ Wireless World (October 1945): 305-308. 
56 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

Pierce’s leadership, in 1960 AT&T filed with the Federal Communications 

Commission (FCC) for permission to launch a communications satellite as an 

e~periment.~~ This shocked the Kennedy administration, many of whose senior 

officials believed that AT&T was seeking to extend its telephone monopoly into 

the “new high ground” of space.They did not approve, and the U.S. government 

scrambled to implement a new regulatory environment, something that cheered 

AT&TS telecommunications rivals if not AT&T itself. Accor&ngly, NASA was 

directed to enter the fray in developing this new technology, and in 1961, it 

awarded contracts to RCA and Hughes Aircraft to build communication 

satellites, Relay and Syncom. Both, government officials believed, would help 

offset AT&T’s technological lead in the field. This policy succeeded. By 1964, 

two AT&T Telstars, two Relays, and two Syncoms had operated successfully 

in space and technological “know-how” had been transferred to companies 

other than AT&T. 

At the same time and largely for similar reasons, the Kennedy administration sponsored the Communications Satellite Act of 1962. This law created 

the Communications Satellite Corporation (COMSAT), with ownership &vided 50-50 between the general public and the various telecommunications corporations. Later, COMSAT became the American manager of an emerging global 

system known as the International Telecommunications Satellite Consortium 

(INTELSAT) formed on 20 August 1964. On 6 April 1965, COMSAT’s 

first satellite, Early Bird, was launched from Cape Canaveral. Global satellite 

communications had begun.49 From a few hundred telephone circuits in 1965, 

the INTELSAT system rapidly grew to become a massive organization providmg 

millions of telephone circuits. And the costs persistently declined, making 

the backers of this technology appear geniuses. Whereas customers had paid 

as much as $10 per minute using older, cable-based technology, the new 

satellites reduced costs to less than $1 per minute.50 Even before this time, 

government officials realized they had a “winner” on their hands. In 1964, 

NASA Administrator James E. Webb asked his staff, “How did we get so 

much communication satellite technology for so little money?”51 His question 

was not satisfactorily answered by his NASA lieutenants, but space commerce 

48. This story is well told in David J. Whalen, The Origins of Satellite Communications, 1945-1965 

(Washmgton, DC: Smthsoman Inshtution Press, 2002). 

49. See Hugh R. Slotten, “Satellite Commumcatlons, Globalizatlon, and the Cold War,” Technology 

and Culture 43 (April 2002): 315-360;Whalen, The Origins of Satellite Communications; Andrew J. Butrica, 

ed., Beyond the Ionosphere: F$y Years of Satellite Communication (Washington, DC NASA SP-4217, 1997); 

Heather E. Hudson, Communications Satel1ites:Their Development and Impact (NewYork: Free Press, 1990). 

50. David J. Whalen, “Commumcations Satelhtes: Malung the Global Village Possible,” http://www. 

hq. nara.gov/o~e/pao/History/satcomhistory. html (accessed 1 January 2005). 

51. Paraphrase of Webb’s comments at the 22 September 1964 Program Review, referred to in 

W. A. Radius to ADA/Shapley, 10 December 1965, Thompson papers, NASA Historical Reference 

Collection,Washington, DC. 
COMPELLING RATIONALES FOR SPACEFLIGHT? 57 

has been dominated by satellite communications, and Webb and his successors 

have ballyhooed it ever since. The sale of all components associated with 

satellite communications-development, launch, operations-surpassed $100 

billion a year in the first part of the 21st century. 

There may be other commercially viable space-based industries that will 

prove lucrative, but they do not yet exist. Many believed that the Landsat Earth 

remote sensing efforts of the 1970s and since would turn into a commercial 

activity, but it failed to gain a market despite its significance as a scientific effort. 

More recently, remote sensing of various types and for a multitude of activities 

may be on the verge of takeoff, but this remains to be seen. Many observers 

point to the growth of space-based navigation as another economically viable 

activity, but they tend to omit the fact that the constellation of satellites-the 

Global Positioning System (GPS)-is provided gratis by the Department of 

Defense, and without this critical infrastructure, it is problematic that much 

commercial activity would be forthc~ming.~~ 

In recent years, the economic rationale has become stronger and even 

more explicit as space applications become increasingly central for maintaining 

United States global economic competitiveness. Ronald Reagan’s presidential 

administration especially emphasized enlarging the role of the private sector, 

and its priorities have remained in place thereafter. For instance, in the 

context of space access, the American political right argued an ideology of 

progress aimed at private development of space-access technology. This led 

to changes in the government environment, especially regulations that eased 

authorizations for launch services, and in the encouragement of private rocketdevelopment projects. Such success stories as the Pegasus air-launched booster 

for small payloads built by Orbital Sciences, Inc., emerged from this cauldron of 

entrepreneurship. Even such projects as the X-33/VentureStarTM, begun in 1995, 

used a public-private partnership model between NASA and Lockheed Martin, 

with each contributing to the development of a small suborbital vehicle that 

could demonstrate the technologies required for an operational SSTO launcher. 

The X-33 project had an ambitious timetable to fly by 2001, but instead, NASA 

canceled the program without flying any hardware.53 

52. Ray A. Wdiamson and John C. Baker, “Current US. Remote Sensing Policies: Opportunities 

and Challenges,” Space Policy 20 (May 2004): 109-116; Sameer Kumar and Kevln B. Moore, “The 

Evolution of Global posihoning System (GPS) Technology,”Journal of Science Education and Technology 11 

(March 2002): 59-80; Irene A. Mder, “GPS and Beyond: How the Aviation Industry is Advancing the 

Usefulness of GPS,” Quest:The History ofspacdight Quarterly 7 (winter 1998): 41-45. 

53. Frank Sietzen, “Venturestar Will Need Public Fundmg,” Space Daily Express, 16 February 1998, 

NASA Historical Reference Collection, Washington, DC; Butrica, Single Stage to Orbit, pp. 13-28; 

Leonard David, “NASA Shuts Down X-33, X-34 Programs,” Space.com, 1 March 2001, http://www. 

space.com /missionlaunches/missions/x33~cancel~O 1030 1. html (accessed 28 March 2003);Andrew J. Butrica, 

“The Quest for Reusabdity,” in To Reach the High Frontier:A History ofus. Launch Vehicles, ed. Roger I). 

Launius and Dennis R. Jenkins (Lemngton: Uruversity Press of Kentucky, 2001), pp. 443-469. 
58 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

One of the key initiatives in this effort for human spaceflight is tourism, a 

major aspect that envisages hotels in Earth orbit and lunar vacation packages. In 

1995, Patrick Collins, Richard Stockmans, and M. Maita undertook a market 

study on the potential demand for space tourism for the National Aerospace 

Laboratory in Tokyo, Japan. In the first actual market research of its type, they 

suggested that space tourism services would be very popular both in North 

America and Japan, the two leading economies in the world. Overall, 60 

percent of the people surveyed “want to visit space for themselves” and were 

interested in traveling to space for a vacation. Accordingly, the authors found 

that a market of 1 million passengers per year paying $10,000 per person 

would generate revenues of $10 billion per year. Thus the market potential of 

space tourism is somewhat similar to that of the C~ncorde.~~ Adding fuel to 

this belief, NASA engineer Barbara Stone opined at a 1996 conference that 

“studies and surveys world-wide suggest that space tourism has the potential 

to be the next major space business.”55 

Several futurists believe that by the year 2030, there will be space tourists 

taking their vacations, albeit exceptionally expensive ones, in low-Earth orbit. 

Market studies suggest that there are more than 1,000 people per year willing to 

spend $1 million each for a weekend in space. Even at multimillion-dollar prices, 

it could become a billion-dollar-per-year business, space economist Patrick 

Collins believes, and could grow significantly in the future. If the cost of a space 

vacation dropped to about $25,000 per person, the number of people making 

the flight would rise to about 700,000 each year, he predicts. This represents a 

revenue stream of $17.5 billion per year.56 

The industry is already beginning to see the first space tourists, as Dennis 

Tito pioneered the way by spending 3 week in April 2001 on the International 

Space Station (ISS). In so doing, advocates of space tourism believed that he 

has challenged and overturned the dominant paradigm of human spaceflight: 

national control of who flies in space overseen with a heavy hand by NASA 

and the Russian Space Agency. Dennis Tito’s saga began in June 2000 when 

54. Patrick Collins, Richard Stockman, and M. Maita, “Demand for Space Tourism in America and 

Japan, and its Implications for Future Space Activlties,” AAS (American Astronautical Society) paper 

no. AAS 95-605,AAS vol. 91,1995, pp. 601-610.Avallable online at http://www.spacejiuture.com/archive/ 

demand_for_space-tourrism_in_america_and-japan.shtml (accessed 2 January 2005). 

55. Barbara A. Stone, “Space Tourism: The Making of a New Industry” (paper presented at the 

International Symposium on Space Technology and Science [ISTS], 1996), copy avallable in NASA 

Historical Reference Collecnon, Washington, DC. 

56. Patrick Collins, “The Space Tourism Industry in 2030,” in Space 2000: Proceedings of the Seventh 

International Con@rence and Exposition on Engineering, Construction, Operations, and Business in Space, 

ed. Stewart W. Johnson, Koon Meng Chua, Rodney G. Galloway, and Philip J. Richter (Reston,VA 

American Society of Civil Engineers, 2000), pp. 594-603; Roy W. Estess interview, Johnson Space 

Center Director, Stennis Space Center, MS, 25 June 2002. 
COMPELLING RATIONALES FORPACEFLIGHT? 59 

he signed a deal with MirCorp to fly aboard a Soyuz rocket to the Russian 

space station Mir. MirCorp acted as Tito’s broker with the Russian space firm 

Energia, which owned both Mir and the rocket that would get Tito into space. 

While MirCorp had grandiose plans for operating a space station supporting 

tourists and commercial activities, they failed to obtain the venture capital 

necessary to make it a reality. Despite these efforts, MirCorp failed to raise 

enough money to keep Mir in orbit, and the Russians announced in December 

2000 that they would deorbit the space station. 

This forced Tito to look elsewhere for a trip into space, and he negotiated 

a deal with the Russians fly aboard a Soyuz rocket to the International Space 

Station. While the cash-starved Russian Space Agency was happy to make 

this deal, no one bothered to discuss it with any of the international partners 

building ISS. A meltdown in public relations ensued, and NASA led the 

other partners in a rebellion that reached high into the political systems of the 

United States and Russia. NASA tried to persuade Tito to postpone his flight 

in February 2001, ostensibly to undergo two months of additional training 

before flying in October, but really to win time to convince the Russians not 

to allow Tito to fly to ISS. NASA and the other international partners building 

ISS argued that this slippage was paramount because of safety considerations 

on orbit. Ever a cagey gamester, Tito saw the trap and refused. He forced a 

confrontation with NASA at the gates of Johnson Space Center in March, 

where he planned to undergo training in preparation for an April 2001 flight. 

NASA lost that argument and was crucified by space enthusiasts for trying to 

block access to space for ordinary tourists. The Johnson Space Center acting 

Director at the time, Roy W. Estess, reflected a year later that he and his 

staff did not handle the Tito episode well and would have been better off to 

embrace the effort, as always ensuring the safety of the mi~sion.’~ 

With that one incident in Houston, Tito became a cause cClGbre among 

space activists and NASA haters, who viewed him as the vanguard of a new 

age of space for everyone. Space psychologist Albert A. Harrison summarized 

the beliefs of many when he opined that “tourism is one of the world’s largest 

industries and Russia’s sale of a twenty million-dollar space station ticket to 

Dennis Tito represents but the first attempt to pry open the door for civilians 

in space. (Is there an irony that the Russians are the entrepreneurs prying open 

the door for space tourism while the Americans try to preserve a government 

monop~ly?)”~~ A Space.com Web site visitors poll taken in early May 2001- 

which did not represent a random sample by any means but suggested where 

57. Estess interview, 25 June 2002. 

58. Albert A. Harrison, “Our Future Beyond Earth,” Space Times: Magazine oj the American Astronautical 

Society 40 (july-August 2001): 12. 
60 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

the space enthusiasts came down on the issue-showed that 75 percent of 

respocdents supported Tito’s flight, 24 percent believed he should not have 

flown, and 1 percent were ~ndecided.~~ 

Tito would not allow anything or anyone to stand in his way, and many 

space activists cheered as he thumbed his nose at “big, bad NASA” to take his 

week-long vacation on the ISS at the end ofApril 2001. In making his way over 

the objections of NASA, Tito may have paved the way for other millionaires to 

follow. South African millionaire Mark Shuttleworth also flew aboard ISS in the 

fall of 2001, without the rancor of the Tito mission. Others may make similar 

excursions in the future, either paying their own way or obtaining corporate 

sponsorships. Space policy analyst Dwayne A. Day does not believe this is the 

best way to open the space frontier. He wrote, “Now that Tito has flown, it will 

not be the Earth-shattering precedent that space enthusiasts hoped for . . . . 

[Ils it any easier for the average citizen to raise $20 million in cash and buy a 

seat on a Soyuz than it is to get a Ph.D. in engineering and join the astronaut 

corps? No. Far from opening a frontier, Tito’s flight symbolizes just how out 

of reach space remains for the common 

The flight of Dennis Tito offers an ambivalent precedent for the opening of 

spaceflight to the average person. Space tourism seems only a little closer today, 

even with the ISS, than it did in earlier eras. If there is a way to bring down the 

cost of access to space, then this dynamic may change, but until then, it does 

not much matter how many space stations are in orbit. Without a convenient, 

safe, reliable, and less costly means to reach them, little will change.61 Once less 

expensive access to space is attained, an opening of the space frontier may take 

place in much the same way as the American continental frontier emerged in the 

19th century, through a linkage ofconrage and curiosity with capitalism. As it does 

so, the role of the government should become less dominant in space. NASA will 

continue research and development for space systems and carry out far-reaching 

space science activities. But widespread human spaceflight should become the 

province of the commercial sector in the first half of the 21st century. 

59. “SPACE.com Survey Reveals Strong Public Support for Denms Tito’s Flight,” Space.com, 7 May 

2001, http://www.space.com/news/tito_poll~O10507.html (accessed 14 August 2002). 

60. Ibid.; Dwayne A. Day,“From Astropower to Everyman to Rich Man: The Changing Human Face 

of Spaceflight,” Space Times: Magazine ofthe American Astronautical Society 40 (July-August 2001): 22-23. 

61. The issue of space access is critical to opening any part of space to broad usage. See Roger 

D. Launius and Lori B. Gamer, “Between a Rocket and a Hard Place: Episodes in the Evolution of 

LaunchVehicleTechnology,” IAA-00-IAA.2.2.02 (paper presented at the 51st Internahonal Astronautical 

Congress, RIO de Janeiro, Brazil, 2-6 October 2000); Roger D. Launius and Dennis R. Jenhns, eds., To 

Reach the High Frontrer:A History of US. Launch Ehrcles (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2002); 

Howard E. McCurdy, “The Cost of Space Flight,” Space Policy 10 (November 1994): 277-289; Craig 

R. Reed, “Factors Mectig U.S. Commercial Space Launch Industry Competitiveness,” Business and 

Economic Hrsto?, 27 (fill 1998): 222-236. 
COMPELLING RATIONALES FOR SPACEFLIGHT? 61 

In addition to the ISS efforts of Tito and Shuttleworth, to help make 

space tourism a reality, Peter Diamandis publicly announced the “X Prize” 

project at a gala dinner in St. Louis, Missouri, on 18 May 1996. Designed to 

encourage private space investment, the X Prize offered $10 million to the 

first team that could launch a privately funded space vehicle into a suborbital 

trajectory twice within a two-week period. It had to be capable of carrying 

a pilot and two passengers more than 100 kilometers above the Earth. At 

the kickoff, numerous commentators linked the X Prize to the prospects for 

space tourism. NASA Administrator Daniel S. Goldin attended this event 

and said, “I hope my grandson who is 2 years old will be able to go on a trip 

to a lunar hotel.” Of course, in October 2004, Burt Rutan’s entry into the 

X Prize competition, SpaceShipOne, successfully claimed the prize. He and his 

benefactor, Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen, received numerous accolades for 

this accomplishment, including Time magazine’s award for “coolest invention” 

of the year.62 

Does the success of SpaceShipOne signal an opening of a new commercial 

space market? Brian Berger, writing for Space.com, made this observation on 

29 December 2004: 

The dream of opening space to the general public was 

given a tremendous boost in 2004 with SpaceShipOne’s 

prize-winning suborbital jaunt and congressional legislation 

to help establish a space travel industry in the United States. 

But even the biggest champions of commercial spaceflight 

acknowledge that a vital space tourism market is still years 

from becoming reality.63 

It remains to be seen whether these efforts signal a new and exciting possibility 

of future space tourism. There are many questions yet to be answered, ranging 

from safety to economic viability to legal restrictions. While there have been 

some interesting developments in the last few years, much has yet to happen 

before space tourism finds realization; it remains a tantalizing possibility for 

the first half of the 21st century. 

Scientific Discovery and Understanding 

Finally, there exists the ideal of the pursuit of abstract scientific knowledgelearning more about the universe to expand the human mind-and pure science 

and exploration of the unknown will remain an important aspect of spaceflight 

62. Chris Taylor and Kristina Dell,“The Sky‘s the Limit,” Time (29 November 2004): 62. 

63. Brian Berger, “2004: The Year Space Tourism Finally Took Off,” Space.com, 29 December 2004, 

http: //www.space.com/spacenews/business_tourism2004~04 2229. html (accessed 2 January 2005). 
62 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

well into the foreseeable hture. This goal clearly motivates the scientlfc probes 

sent to all of the planets of the solar system save Pluto. It propels a wide range 

of efforts to explore Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn projected for the early part of the 

21st century.64 It energizes such efforts as the James Webb Space Telescope, which 

promises to revolutionize our knowledge of the universe through, among other 

possibilities, the imaging of Earth-like planets around other stars. 

And from the beginning, science has been a critical goal in spaceflight. 

The National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958 that created the National 

Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) stated that its mandate included 

“the expansion of human knowledge of phenomena in the atmosphere 

and space.” This idea has continually drawn verbal and fiscal support, but 

knowledge for its own sake has proven less important than the pursuit of 

knowledge that enables some practical social or economic payoff.65 

Even the Apollo missions to the Moon, certainly inaugurated as a Cold 

War effort to best the Soviet Union and establish the United States as the 

preeminent world power, succeeded in enhancing scientific understanding.‘j6 

The scientific experiments placed on the Moon and the lunar soil samples 

returned through Project Apollo have provided grist for scientists’ investigations 

of the solar system ever since. The scientific return was significant, even though 

the Apollo program did not answer conclusively the age-old questions of lunar 

origins and evolution. For example, the origin of the Moon is still a subject of 

considerable scientific debate, but because of the harvest from lunar exploration 

during the Apollo era, currently the most accepted theory is that the Moon 

was formed by debris from a massive collision with the young Earth about 4.6 

billion years ago. Prior to the study of the Apollo lunar rock and soil samples 

in the 1970s, however, confusion ruled among scientists about lunar origins as 

competing schools battled among themselves for dominance of their particular 

viewpoint in the textbooks. Indeed, determining the Moon’s origins became 

the single most significant scientific objective of Project Ap0ll0.~~ 

64.An excellent discussion of all space probes launched to date may be found in AslfA. Siddqi, Deep 

Space Chronic1e:A Chronology ofDeq Space and Planetary Probes, 1958-2000 (Washmgton, DC: NASA SP2002-4524,2002). 

65. John M. Logsdon, moderator, The Legislative Origins ofthe National Aeronautirc and Space Act of 1958: 

Proceedings ofan Oral History Workshop (Washmgton, DC: Monographs in Aerospace History, No. 8,1998). 

66. See W. Davld Compton, Where No Man Has Gone B$ore:A Hstory ofApollo Lunar Exploration 

Misrions (Washmgton, DC: NASA SP-4214, 1989); Dawd M. Harland, Exploring the Moon: The Apollo 

Expeditions (Chchester, U.K.: Springer Praxis, 1999); Don E. Wdhelms, To a Rocky Moon: A Geologist’s 

History $Lunar Exploration (Tucson: Umveeity ofArlzona Press, 1993); Paul D. Spuds, The Once and Future 

Moon (Washmgton, DC: Smthsoman IiIShtUhOn Press, 1996); Donald A. Beattie, Taking Science to the Moon: 

Lunar Experiments and the Apollo Program (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkms, 2001). 

67. Stephen G. Brush, “Early History of Selenogony,” in Origin ofthe Moon, ed. Wdham K. Hartman, 

Roger J. Phillips, and G. Jefiey Taylor (Houston, TX Lunar & Planetary Institute, 1986), pp. 3-15; 

continued on the next page 
COMPELLING RATIONALES FORPACEFLIGHT? 63 

Through a laborious polling of lunar scientists in the mid-l990s, the staff 

of the Curator for Planetary Materials Office at the Johnson Space Center, 

Houston, Texas, compiled a list of the top 10 scientific discoveries made as a result 

of the Apollo expeditions to the Moon. Collectively, they describe the current 

state of knowledge about this fascinating astronomical The quest for 

knowledge about the Moon continues. In the 1990s, more than 60 research 

laboratories throughout the world continued studies of the Apollo lunar samples. 

Many analytical technologies, including some that did not exist in 1969-1972, 

when the Apollo missions returned the lunar samples, were being applied by a new 

generation of ~cientists.~~ 

In the case of Apollo, and many others both before and since, a linkage 

between the spirit and need of scientific inquiry and the spirit and need for 

exploration served as strong synergetic forces for human spaceflight. This 

synergy arose explicitly in the National Research Council’s 2005 study, Science 

in NASA’s Vision for Space Exploration. It asserted: “Exploration is a key step in 

the search for fundamental and systematic understanding of the universe around 

us. Exploration done properly is a form of ~cience.”’~ As commentator David 

West Reynolds has noted, “Space probes like Voyager, Hubble, and Sojourner 

can accomplish space exploration as well as space science when they send back 

compelling images that can be appreciated by the public. Space science is at its 

best when it offers new vista along with its valuable data.”71 

The performance of scientific experiments on the Space Shuttle and the 

science program envisioned for the ISS demonstrate the same positive linkages 

at the beginning of the 21st century. Without question, the Space Shuttle has 

served as a significant test bed for scientific inquiry.While the program was not 

conceptualized as a science effort-rather it was a technology demonstrator 

and workhorse for space access-it has been used as a platform for all manner 

continuedfrom the previous page 

Stephen G. Brush,“From Bump to C1ump:Theories of the Origms of the Solar System, 1900-1960,” 

In Space Science Comes ofAge: Perspectives in the History @the Space Sciences, ed. Paul A. Hade andVon D. 

Chamberlain (Washngton, DC: Smthsonian Insmution Press, 1981), pp. 78-100; Stephen G. Brush,“A 

History of Modern Se1enogony:Theoretical Origins of the Moon from Capture to Crash, 1955-1984,” 

Space Science Reviews 47 (1988): 21 1-273; Stephen G. Brush, “Nickel for Your Thoughts: Urey and the 

Origin of the Moon,” Science 217 (3 September 1982): 891-898. 

68. Curator for Planetary Materials, Johnson Space Center, “Top Ten Sclenhfic Discoveries Made 

During Apollo Exploration of the Moon,” 28 October 1996, NASA Historical Reference Collection, 

Washington, DC. 

69. See G. Ryder,“Apollo’s Gift: The Moon,”htronomy 22 (July 1994): 40-45; G. Je&eyTaylor,“The 

Scientific Legacy ofApollo,” Scientijic American 271 (Jdy 1994): 26-33. 

70. Natlonal Research Council, Science in NASA’s Vision for Space Exploration (Washington, DC: 

National Academies Press, 2005), p. 1. 

71. Davld West Reynolds,“Astronauts: Only Exploration Jushfies the Cost and ksk,” Space 7’imes:The 

Magazine of the American Astronautical Society 42 (NovembedDecember 2003): 4-7, quotation from p. 6. 
64 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

In an instance of irony of the first order, astronaut Dale A. Gardner, having just 

completed the major portion of his second EVA in three days, holds up a “For Sale” 

sign during STS-51A in 1984. While he was probably referring to the two satellites, 

Palapa B-2 and Westar 6, that they retrieved from orbit, the sign speaks volumes 

about the lack of a compelling rationale for human spaceflight. On-orbit services 

provided a reason to send humans into space, but it was very much an approach that 

was not economically viable, as each Shuttle mission was estimated to cost at least 

$400 million, whereas a normal satellite and launch services cost less than half of 

that. (NASA JSC photo no. 5lA-104-0491 

of microgravity and space science enterprises. President Nixon, announcing 

the decision to build the Space Shuttle in 1972, minimized its scientific role. 

Instead, he argued that it was “the right step for America to take, in moving out 

from our present beach-head in the sky to acheve a real working presence in 

space-because the Space Shuttle will give us routine access to 

Even so, the Space Shuttle has been a useful instrument in the hands of 

scientists. Each of its more than 100 flights has undertaken some scientific 

experiments, ranging from the deployment of important space probes to other 

planets, through the periodic flight of the European-built “Spacelab” science 

72. As an example of the scientific activities undertaken on the Shuttle see Kenneth Souza, Guy 

Etheridge, and Paul X. Callahan, Lij2 into Space: Space Lij2 Sciences Experiments, Ames Research Center, 

Kennedy Space Center, 1992-1998 Washington, DC: NASA SP-2000-534,2000). On Nixon and the 

Shuttle decision, see T.A. Heppenheimer, Space Shuttle Decision, 1965-1972, vol. 1, History ofthe Space 

Shuttle Washmgton, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2002). 
COMPELLiNG RATIONALES FORPACEFLIGHT? 65 

module, to a dramatic set of Earth observations over a 20-year period.73 One 

example of a momentous science experiment, among others that might be 

offered, is the flight of the ItalianTethered Satellite System, designed to investigate 

new sources of spacecraft power and ways to study Earth’s upper atmosphere, 

on STS-75 in 1996. It demonstrated that tethered systems might be used to 

generate thrust to compensate for atmospheric drag on orbiting platforms such 

as the International Space Station. Deploying a tether towards Earth could place 

movable science platforms in hard-to-study atmospheric zones. Tethers also 

could be used as antennas to transmit extremely low-frequency signals able 

to penetrate land and seawater, providing for communications not possible 

with standard radio. In addition, nonelectrical tethers may be used to generate 

artificial gravity and to boost payloads to higher orbits.74 

Of course, some astoundingly significant scientific discoveries have resulted 

hm robotic missions. But, if the purpose of spaceflight is to create a perfect 

society elsewhere, this necessitates human migration as its core activity. There 

would be very little reason to limit spaceflight to robotic explorers in this 

context. Robots might be useful servants-even the modern equivalent of slaves 

making our lives luxurious-but scientific understanding that might be gained 

by satellites remote from Earth would be decidedly less important than human 

spaceflight since the goal is migration. Second, while we seek to migrate into 

space as a method of ensuring human survival, such a goal is essentially a utopian 

dream based on expedition myths, and the popular culture treatment of robotics 

wholly failed to anticipate the degree to which we could send surrogates to 

do our work. This situation led to specific policy decisions and programs that 

focused on human spaceflight as the core function of the endeavor. 

Many scientists believe that robotic spaceflight is the sine qua non of the 

Space Age, to the exclusion of a human presence.This is a dichotomy that began 

with the launch of the first missions into space and has been a perennial debate 

ever since. If anything, it has grown even more heated as robotic spacecraft have 

advanced in capability over time. Homer E. Newell, who directed NASA? space 

science program between 1958 and 1973, commented on this problem during 

the Apollo program: 

73. Dand Shapland and Mchael Rycroft, Spacelab: Research in Earth Orbit (Cambridge, England: 

Cambridge University Press, 1984); Douglas R. Lord, Space1ab:An International Success Story (Washgton, 

DC NASA, 1987); Science in Orbit: The Shuttle and Spacelab Experience, 1981-1986 (Washgton, DC 

NASA, 1988); Arturo Russo, Big Technolog, Little Science: The European Use of Spacelab (Netherlands: 

European Space Agency [ESA] Publications Division, ESA HSR-19, August 1997); Lorenza Sebesta, 

Spacelab in Context (Netherlands: ESA Publicahons Division, ESA HSR-21, October 1997). 

74. Dems Papadopoulos, Adam T. Drobot, and Nobie Stone, “The Flight of the Tethered Satellite 

System,” EOS 73 uuly 1992): 321-323; L. R. 0. Storey, “The Shuttle Electrodynamic Tether Mission,” 

Environmental and Space Electromagnetics (1991): 37-41. 
66 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

The most spectacular aspects of space exploration in that last 30 years have been 

accomplished by robotic probes to other planets of the solar system. Here in the 

Spacecraft Assembly and Encapsulation Facility-2 (SAEF-2). Jet Propulsion Laboratory 

workers are closing up the metal "petals" of the Mars Pathfinder lander in 1996. The 

small Sojourner rover is visible on one of the three petals. On 4 July 1997, Pathfinder 

soft-landed on the Martian surface and provided spectacular imagery and important 

scientific data about the red planet's past. Among other findings, scientists learned 

that Mars had once been a watery planet. (NASA JPL photo no. 96PC-11301 

For space science one of the most difficult problems 

of leadership, both inside and outside NASA, concerned the 

manned spaceflight program. Underlying the prevailing discontent in the scientific community regarding this program 

was a rather general conviction that virtually everything that 

men could do in the investigation ofspace, including the moon 

and planets, automated spacecraft could also do and at much 

lower cost. This conviction was reinforced by the Apollo 

program's being primarily engineering in character. Indeed, 

until after the success ofApollo 11, science was the least ofApollo 

engineers' concerns. Further, the manned project appeared to 

devour huge sums, only small fractions of which could have 

greatly enhanced the unmanned space science pr0gram.7~ 

The scientists viewed the debate over human versus robotic space missions in 

part as a zero-sum game. The expansive costs of human spaceflight might be 

75. Newell, Beyond the Atmosphere, p. 290. 
COMPELLING RATIONALES FORPACEFLIGHT? 67 

more effectively utilized for scientific purposes by sending only robots. They 

perceived ineficiency, redundancy, and enormous costs to keep astronauts alive 

as waste, and with only a small percentage of that funding, they believed they 

could accomplish so much. 

The internecine warfare between advocates of human exploration and 

colonization of regions beyond Earth and the supporters of spaceflight for 

scientific purposes grew more heated as time passed. Space science leaders such 

as Homer Newell, Lloyd Berkner, and John E. Naugle established the science 

element ofspaceflight during the 1960s and achieved stunning success in gaining 

a significant percentage of the NASA budget each year for those activities, 

usually about 25 to 30 percent. Using that funding, throughout the 1960s they 

created meaningful missions yielding useful scientific data and, in the process, 

established a community of scientists dedicated both to NASA and to robotic 

missions.”j For example, by 1967, NASA had 942 scientists from 297 institutions 

involved as investigators in its various science projects. In 1996 alone, it flew 

121 experiments on spacecraft and 99 sounding rockets. As Homer Newell 

reported, “In 1966 we evaluated 366 proposals for flight experiments, 248 of 

which were selected for flight. An additional 1,329 unsolicited proposals for 

SR&T work were At some level, as these statistics suggest, NASA 

co-opted some of the opposition to human spaceflight by, in effect, placing 

scientists on its payroll. Indeed, some NASA officials have expressed anger 

at University of Iowa astrophysicist James A. Van Allen’s persistent criticism 

of human spaceflight as ungratefulness for all of the space agency’s support 

over the years. One told a group of NASA public affairs officers in 1996 that 

“NASA made Van Allen, and now all he does is condemn us.’’78 

Space science missions remain one of the most visible and popular aspects 

of the spaceflight agenda. While some of the work requires a human presence, 

usually to undertake scientific experiments aimed at understanding the biomedical aspects of long-duration spaceflight, most of it is done exceptionally 

well by robotic explorers. The stunning success of a succession of missions to 

Mars, as well as to other places, demonstrates this beyond all doubt. No one 

questions the value of scientific space missions, but many question the necessity 

of placing humans aboard spacecraft undertaking those scientific efforts. 

76. This story is well told in Joseph N.Tatarewicz, SpaceTechnology G. Planetary Astronomy (Bloomngton: 

Indiana University Press, 1990) and Ronald E. Doel, Solar System Astronomy m America: Communities, 

Patronage, and Interdiscqhmy Research, 1920- 1960 (New York: Cambridge Umversity Press, 1996). 

77. NASA Office of Space Science and Apphcahons, “Program Review: Science and Applications 

Management,” 22 June 1967, Space Science and Applications Files, NASA Historical Reference 

Collechon,Washmgton, DC. 

78. Roger Launius wtnessed this discussion on 17 October 1998, during a meeting discussing the 

upcoming flight ofJohn Glenn on STS-95. 
68 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

HISTORY AND THE SEARCH FOR RELEVANCE 

Of the five rationales that may be advanced in support of spaceflight, 

the human dimension is the only part that is seriously questioned. Military, 

economic, and scientific efforts in space, many observers have concluded, do 

not require human missions beyond the Earth. Even though the possibility of a 

human presence might be desirable in the future-such as in the case of space 

tourism, certain types of scientific inquiry, and a possible human military 

presence-thus far, reasons for humans in space to support these activities 

have remained elusive. Only the human destiny/survival of the species and 

the national prestige and geopolitics agendas require humans to fly in space. 

Not all are persuaded by these rationales to expend the considerable resources 

necessary to continue them. This especially occurred in the aftermath of the 

Columbia accident of 1 February 2003, with the grounding of the Shuttle fleet 

while an investigation of the cause of the accident took place and the fleet 

could be retrofitted to overcome the cause of the accident. Initially, NASA 

leaders promised to return to flight in the fall of 2003. Most observers believed 

that was unrealistic and possibly motivated by a “can-do” agency’s optimism 

and bravado. Then it slipped into 2004 and finally to the middle 2005 as the 

Agency’s engineers found more and more that needed to be fixed in the aging 

fleet of orbiters. At the same time, the price tag associated with the Shuttle’s 

return to flight ~limbed.7~ 

The accident called into question long-term assured human access to 

space. After more than four decades of human spaceflight, this problem is 

now thornier than ever because of the Shuttle’s grounding and compounded 

every day that the fleet remains inactive. Is the United States as a nation 

willing to endure a period of several years when humans do not fly in space 

like we did between the time of the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project in 1975 

and the first Shuttle mission in 1981? Are American citizens willing to end 

human spaceflight altogether? The answer to both of these questions for most 

Americans is probably ‘‘no,” but while the support for human spaceflight is 

broad, it does not seem to be very deep. 

Many Americans hold seemingly contradictory attitudes on human space 

exploration. Most are in favor of the human exploration and development 

of space and view it as important but also believe that federal money could 

be well spent on other programs. This relates closely to empirical research 

on other aspects of public policy. The American public is notorious for its 

willingness to support programs in principle but to oppose their funding 

79. Richard 0. Covey et al.,“Interim Report: Return to Flight Task Group,”20 January 2004, NASA 

Historical Reference Collection,Washington, DC. 
COMPELLING RATIONALES FORPACEFLIGHT? 69 

at levels appropriate to sustain them. Most are also in favor of NASA as an 

organization but are relatively unfamiliar with the majority of its activities 

and objectives and sometimes question individual projects. It is a little like 

how the overlanders traveling to Oregon in the 19th century described the 

Platte River on the Great Plains: “a mile wide and an inch deep.” Americans 

appreciate and support-in principle-human spaceflight and recognize the 

astronauts as heroes but believe it is overly expensive. So what do we do for 

the future? It seems uncertain at present.” 

Are these sufficient rationales to sustain human spaceflight indefinitely? 

Only time will tell. The first three rationales have not up to now required a 

human presence to be effective, but the last two have been used repeatedly 

to justify an aggressive human spaceflight agenda. The last two rationalesthe human destiny/survival of the species and national prestige/geopolitics 

arguments-have been salient from the beginning of the Space Age. As John 

M. Logsdon, the dean of space policy, recently wrote: 

Most public justifications for accepting the costs and risks 

of putting humans in orbit and then sending them away from 

Earth have stressed motivations such as delivering scientific 

payoffs, generating economic benefits, developing new technology, motivating students to study science and engineering, 

and trumpeting the frontier character of the U.S. society. 

No doubt space exploration does provide these benefits, but 

even combined, they have added up to a less-than-decisive 

argument for a sustained commitment to the exploratory 

enterprise. The United States has committed to keeping 

humans in space, but since 1972 they have been circling the 

planet in low-Earth orbit, not exploring the solar system. The 

principal rationales that have supported the U.S. human 

spaceflight effort to date have seldom been publicly articulated. 

And those rationales were developed in the context of the 

U.S.-Soviet Cold War and may no longer be relevant.’l 

80. Howard E. McCurdy to author, 12 December 2002, copy in possession of author; Roger D. 

Laumus, “Public Opinion Polls and Perceptions of U.S. Human Spaceflight,” Space Policy 19 (August 

2003): 163-175. The best book on the overland rmgration to Oregon and California remins John 

D. Unruh, The Plains Across: The Overland Emgrants and the Trans-Mississippi West, 184&60 (Urbana: 

University of Ilhnoa Press, 1979). In it, Unruh describes the overlanders’ view of the Platte River: it 

was something they recognized as necessary but did not enjoy. 

81. John M. Logsdon,“A Sustamable Fbtionale for Human Spaceflight,” Issues in Science andEchnology 

(winter 2003), available online at http://wwwissues.org/issues/20.2/p~logsdon.ht~nl (accessed 3 August 

2004). 
70 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

Indeed, over time, the traditional arguments have become less powerful as drivers 

of support for the space program. Since the age of Apollo in the early 1970s, 

most Americans have taken human spaceflight as a reality that is unchanging 

but treated the NASA efforts to fiy the Space Shuttle and build a space station 

as necessary rather than desirable. No national commitment to a multibilliondollar investment for this effort ever took place. Instead, the effort proceeded on 

inertia not unlike that seen in many other public policy sectors where there is 

no perceived crisis. 
SECTION I1 

HUMAN AND ROBOTIC EXPLORATION 

INTRODUCTION 

o one realized it initially, but the intricate linking of humans and N machines in spaceflight has been one of the most significant aspects 

of the endeavor. While humans have always been viewed as preeminent in 

spaceflight, the technology they employed-either in piloted spacecraft or in 

semiautonomous robots-proved critical to space exploration. This section 

explores the relationship between humans and machines in the evolution 

of spaceflight. The three essays consider strikingly different approaches to 

analyzing the human-machine interface in space exploration. 

The chapter by Howard E. McCurdy, a senior space policy historian, 

addresses the classic debate over the primacy ofhumanversus robotic spaceflight. 

He finds that the development of spaceflight technology always outstripped 

the slow evolution of human spaceflight, despite the overwhelming excitement 

associated with the human element. Virtually no one in history succeeded in 

making meaningful predictions about this discrepancy. For example, when 

Arthur C. Clarke envisioned geosynchronous telecommunications satellites 

in 1945, he believed that they would require humans working on board to 

keep the satellite operational. In such a situation, it is easy to conceive of the 

motivation that led people like Clarke and Wernher von Braun to imagine the 

necessity to station large human crews in space. Some of the most forwardthinking spaceflight advocates, in this instance, utterly failed to anticipate 

the electronics/digital revolution then just beginning. Humans, spaceflight 

visionaries always argued, were a critical element in the exploration of the 

solar system and, ultimately, beyond.’ 

With the rapid advance of electronics in the 1960s, however, some began 

to question the role of humans in space exploration. It is much less expensive 

and risky to send robot explorers than to go ourselves. This debate reached 

saliency early on and became an important part of the space policy debate by 

the latter 20th century. This has led many scientists and not a few others to 

question its merits. In the summer of 2004, esteemed space scientist James 

A. Van Allen asked the poignant question, “Is human spaceflight obsolete?” 

He commented: 

1. Arthur C. Clarke, “Extra-Terrestrial Relays: Can Rocket Stations Give World-Wide Radio 

Coverage?” Wireless World (October 1945): 305-308; Wernher von Braun with Cornelius Ryan, “Can 

We Get to Mars?” Collier’s (30 April 1954): 22-28; Randy Liebermann,“The Collier’s and Disney Series,” 

rn Bluepintfor Space: From Science Fiction to Science Fact, ed. Frederick I. Ordway 111 and Randy Liebermam 

(Washington, DC Smthsonian InShtUtiOn Press, 1991), pp, 135-144; ‘‘Glant Doughnut 1s Proposed as 

Space Station,” Popular Science (October 1951): 120-121. 
74 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

My position is that it is high time for a calm debate on 

more fundamental questions. Does human spaceflight continue 

to serve a compelling cultural purpose and/or our national 

interest? Or does human spaceflight simply have a life of its 

own, without a realistic objective that is remotely commensurate with its costs? Or, indeed, is human spaceflight now 

obsolete? . . . Risk is high, cost is enormous, science is insignificant. Does anyone have a good rationale for sending 

humans into space?’ 

The response offered is one that emphasizes human colonization on other 

planets, moons, and asteroids. As one observer who went by the pseudonym 

Hans L. D. G. Starlife noted on an Internet discussion list where Van Allen’s 

arguments arose: 

Sure, if it’s all about science, you can always raise these 

questions. But it’s not, and it never has been-whatever the 

scientists themselves try to make us believe. The human 

expansion into space is about totally different things-although 

like many times before, it isn’t fully apparent until we can see 

it in the light of history . . . . 

In a very long-range perspective, it’s easy to see that these 

ventures, simply make up the path of evolution for Human 

civilization, not much different from how biological evolution 

works. Indeed, Human spaceflight is precisely what Van Allen 

argues it’s not: it does and should have a life of its own. Now is 

the time to once and for all to SEPARATE the case for Human 

spaceflight with the case for science. These are two different 

agendas-both worthwhile-and sometimes crossing their 

paths, but having their own sets of motives and rationale^!^ 

Indeed, for people of this persuasion, spaceflight is all about making human 

civilization anew, making ic in the mold of the best ideas of those who are 

founding settlements beyond Earth. It is, and in reality always has been, about 

creating a technological utopia. 

2. James A.Van Allen, “Is Human Spacefhght Obsolete?” Issues in Science and Ethnology 20 (summer 

3. Hans L. D. G. Starlife, “On to Mars,” Quark Soup, 27 July 2004, http://daviduppell.com/ 

2004), http://wwto.issues.org/20.4/p-van-allen. html (accessed 3 August 2004). 

archives/00000202.htm (accessed 3 August 2004). 
INTRODUCTION - SECTION I1 75 

McCurdy finds that while this debate over primacy in space missions 

has intensified with time, it does not really consider the core issues at play in 

space policy. As he notes, the human-robotic debate leaves unaddressed the 

manner in which humans and machines might become even more tightly 

linked in future spaceflight activities. McCurdy comments that “the classical 

visions of human and robotic spaceflight as presented in the popular culture 

contain instabilities likely to lessen the future influence of these visions. The 

emerging alternatives are quite exotic and beyond the mainstream of current 

thinking, yet interesting to contemplate. They may or may not occur. Their 

consideration, nonetheless, helps to enlarge the contemplation of the directions 

that future space exploration might take.” 

In essence, McCurdy suggests that the old paradigm for human explorationultimately becoming an interstellar species-is outmoded and ready for 

replacement. He specifically looks to the future of humans and robots in space 

and suggests that a posthuman cyborg species may realize a dramatic future 

in an extraterrestrial environment. This form of speculative futurism in a 

postbiological universe in which humans may become more robotlike may 

seem inappropriate for some historians. A question that might be considered is 

whether or not McCurdy has abandoned traditional modes of argumentation 

and analysis in favor ofpolitical commentary. A related question might focus on 

whether there even is a traditional mode of argumentation. Regardless of the 

answers to these questions (and those answers are highly idiosyncratic), there is 

no question but that McCurdy’s essay is highly stimulating and provocative. 

Alternatively, Slava Gerovitch’s essay on “Human-Machine Issues in 

the Soviet Space Program” takes a much more traditional historical approach 

of narrating the evolution of relationships in the Soviet space program 

between humans and machines. He finds that from the early days of human 

spaceflight in the Soviet Union, a debate raged between the pilots/cosmonauts and the aerospace engineers over the degree of control held by each 

group in human-rated spacecraft. The engineers placed much greater emphasis on automatic control systems and sought to reduce drastically the role 

of astronauts on board a spacecraft. These space engineers often viewed 

the astronaut as a “weak link” in the spacecraft control system. Of course, 

the question of whether machines could perform control functions better 

than people became the subject of a considerable internal controversy. The 

cybernetics movement attempted to undermine the existing hierarchies of 

knowledge and power by introducing computer-based models and decisionmaking mechanisms into a wide range of scientific disciplines. By focusing 

on the debate over the nature and extent of on-board automation in Soviet 

spacecraft, Gerovitch illuminates a fascinating world of divergent professional 

groups within the Soviet space community and how they negotiated their 

place and their priorities in the system. 
76 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

Finally, “Human and Machine in the History of Spaceflight,” by David A. 

Mindell, argues for a new research agenda in the history of human spaceflight 

that moves beyond the virtual catechism of retelling of a specific myth and in 

that retelling performing a specific purpose. Much of this work has been not 

so much history as it has been “tribal rituals, meant to comfort the old and 

indoctrinate the young.’” He notes that “a series of questions about human/ 

machine interaction in the history of spaceflight can open up new research 

avenues into what some might think is a well-worn historical topic . . . . The 

humadmachine relationship, as a meeting point for the social and technical 

aspects of a system, provides access to a variety of other aspects of space history 

that are otherwise difficult to integrate.” 

Collectively, these three essays provide a window into a unique area for 

consideration in the history of spaceflight. All are intellectually, artistically, 

and historically sound. All make important contributions to the history of 

human spaceflight and its relationship to robotics and space technology. All 

offer stimulating conclusions to be pondered, accepted, rejected, or revised as 

appropriate. 

4. Alex Roland, “How We Won the Moon,” New York Times Book Review (17 July 1994): 1,25. 
CHAPTER 3 

OBSERVATIONS ON 

THE ROBOTIC VERSUS HUMAN ISSUE 

IN SPACEFLIGHT 

Howard E. McCurdy 

ince the beginning of the Space Age, people have debated the merits of S human versus robotic flight. Some have argued for automated activities or 

what many-without apparent reference to the presence of women in spaceterm “unmanned” flight. Astrophysicist James A. Van Allen, designer of the 

experiment package for the first U.S. orbital satellite, insists that the whole 

history of spaceflight provides “overwhelming evidence that space science is 

best served by unmanned, automated, commandable spacecraft.”’ Historian 

Alex Roland maintains that “for virtually any specific mission that can be 

identified in space, an unmanned spacecraft can be built to conduct it more 

cheaply and reliably.”* 

To supporters of human spaceflight, such arguments are misplaced. 

The relative effectiveness of humans and robots seems irrelevant to people 

whose primary objective remains the movement of humankind into space. 

When asked to justify his upcoming lunar voyage, astronaut Neil Armstrong 

explained that “the objective of this flight is precisely to take man to the moon, 

make a landing there, and ret~rn.”~ From that point of view, human spaceflight 

provides its own justification. Robots serve as precursors to human flight, not 

as substitutes for it. Even if robots were more effective, advocates of human 

flight would not rely entirely upon them. The whole purpose of spaceflight is 

to prepare humankind to migrate off of the Earth and into the cosmos. 

This essay presents a series of observations regarding the relative merits of 

the longstanding historical debate over human and robotic flight; it is speculative 

in nature and suggestive of future scholarship. It is also provocative and tentative. And it is an important debate. In many ways, the human and robotic 

1. JamesVan Allen,“Space Station and Manned Flights Raise NASA Program Balance Issues,”Aviah‘on 

2.Alex Roland,“NASA’s Manned Space Nonsense,” NewYork Times (4 October 1987): sec. 4, p. 23. 

3. Apollo 11 crew premission press conference, 5 July 1969, 2:OO p.m., Apollo 11 mission file, 

Week G Space Technology (25 January 1988): 153. 

NASA Historical Reference Collection, Washington, DC. 
78 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

perspectives present the two principal visions that motivate space exploration. 

The first anticipates the widespread migration of humans off the Earth’s surface, 

while the latter emphasizes the advantages of scientific discovery. 

In its speculative sections, the essay anticipates the manner in which the 

human versus robotic issue might change as space exploration matures. If 

cosmic exploration continues over the timespans anticipated by its advocates, 

changes in the dominant visions are probably inevitable. For many years, 

the robotic vision has stood as the sole alternative to the dominant vision of 

human spaceflight articulated by early advocates such as Wernher von Braun. 

This essay suggests that the classical visions of human and robotic spaceflight 

as presented in the popular culture contain instabilities likely to lessen their 

future influence. Two emerging alternatives are quite exotic and beyond the 

mainstream of current thinking, yet interesting to contemplate. They may 

or may not occur. Their consideration, nonetheless, helps to enlarge the 

contemplation of the directions that future space exploration might take. 

CLASSICAL APPROACHES TO SPACE EXPLORATION 

One of the most influential visions of spaceflight, prepared before humans 

entered space, appeared in the 22 March 1952 issue of Collier’s magazine. 

Accompanying an article by Wernher von Braun, a two-page panorama 

prepared by Chesley Bonestell artistically illustrates human activity in lowEarth orbit. From a point of view well above the Isthmus of Panama, the 

viewer receives an enticing vision of small space tugs transporting astronauts 

between a winged space shuttle and a large, rotating space tat ion.^ 

Visions of space exploration, often initiated in science fiction and 

articulated in popular outlets, shape public policy. They generate public 

interest, help place exploration on the governmental agenda, and prepare the 

citizenry for concrete proposals. Especially in the United States, the popular 

culture of space exploration has played a significant role in determining the 

types of activities public officials have sought to acc~mplish.~ Not by accident 

did the members of the 1986 National Commission on Space choose to begin 

their report with a reproduction of the famous Bonestell diorama, juxtaposed 

with a Robert McCall painting of the actual facilities6 

Less well recalled is an object in the painting that Bonestell placed 

between the winged shuttle and the 250-foot-wide space station. The cylin4.Wernher von Braun, “Crossing the Last Fronher,” Collier’s (22 March 1952): 24-25. 

5. See Howard E. McCurdy, Space and the American Imagination (Washington: Smithsonian 

6. National Commission on Space (Thomas 0. Paine, chair), Pioneering the Space Frontier (New 

Institution Press, 1997). 

York: Bantam Books, 1986). 
OBSERVATIONS ON THE ROBOTIC VERSUS HUMAN ISSUE 79 

drical object, surrounded by three astronauts, is an orbiting space telescope. 

Von Braun explained that the telescope would operate in a robotic fashion, 

without humans on board, since “the movements of an operator would disturb 

the alignment.”7 The panorama contains both human and robotic elements, 

yet the presence of a facility that anticipated the Hubble Space Telescope is not 

well remembered. 

As is typical of images transmitted through popular culture, people 

selectively emphasize elements of the motivating material. The elements that 

emerge typically resonate with traditions and ideas popular at that time, being 

so familiar as to require little explanation. The early use of frontier analogies 

to explain space exploration is a preeminent example of this tendency. The 

editors at Collier’s titled the accompanying article “Crossing the Last Frontier.” 

Building transportation systems to transport people to the equivalent of 

frontier stations resonated well with the pioneering experience from which 

Americans had only recently emerged. 

The inclusion of an orbiting telescope helped von Braun justify the 

presence of humans in this new frontier. What are astronauts doing to the 

remotely controlled observatory, and why is it orbiting near the space station? 

Given the existing state of technology for collecting images from space, von 

Braun explained, humans would be needed to retrieve and change the film. 

As is typical of motivating visions, the expectations made powerful by 

reference to analogies from the past can be made weak by their encounter with 

the future. It is a familiar pattern. A vision of the future emerges and becomes 

part of the popular culture when it resonates so well with the experience of 

people contemplating a common past. To the extent that the vision is rooted 

in old and inapplicable analogies, or fails to account for developments yet to 

fully emerge, it acquires instabilities likely to plague its accomplishment. 

The people who popularized the dominant vision of human spaceflight 

failed to anticipate technical developments that would make the conduct 

of robotic activities much easier than anticipated. Von Braun believed that 

astronauts would be needed to change the film in space telescopes. Arthur C. 

Clarke thought that astronauts would be needed to operate communication 

satellites. Producers ofthe classic 1950 film Rocket&@ X-Mreinforced a popular 

misconception when they announced that radio waves from control stations 

on Earth would not be able to reach a spacecraft bound for Mars, thereby 

requiring a thinking presence on all missions into the celestial realm.’ 

7. Von Braun,“Crossing the Last Frontier,” p. 72. 

8. Arthur C. Clarke, “Extra-Terrestrial Relays: Can Rocket Stations Give World-wide Radio 

Coverage?” Wireless World (October 1945): 305-308; Kurt Neumann, Rocketship X-M (Kippert, 

1950). 
80 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

Generated at the midpoint of the 20th century, the dominant visions 

helping to define the impending Space Age failed to anticipate the manner 

in which electronic technology would expand robotic capabilities. The 

anticipated difficulties of operating remotely controlled telescopes and satellites 

provided a major justification for the presence of human crews. Real advances 

in remote sensing, solid-state transistors, and deep space communications 

allowed robotic flight to advance well beyond initial expectations and more 

rapidly than human flight. 

What appears to be a failure ofanticipation may in large measure arise from 

a failure of vision, a subtle but important distinction. A failure of anticipation 

implies an inability to foresee (one could say imagine) future events. Vision, 

as the term is commonly employed, represents a process in which imagination 

is joined with forces that motivate people to accept the dream? 

It is my contention that both the human and robotic space visions contain elements that make them attractive when viewed as continuations of 

past traditions. The visions do not fare as well when contemplated from the 

perspective of emerging trends. In essence, the dominant human and robotic 

visions account for the past more effectively than they address the future. This 

explanation requires an historical survey of the human and robotic visions, 

especially as they appear in popular culture, and some speculation about future 

developments. 

HISTORY AND THE HUMAN SPACEFLIGHT VISION 

The vision of human spaceflight is a familiar one. It begins with brave 

souls venturing in small ships through difficult substance to distant lands. 

Voyages of discovery produce scientific insights, including the identification of 

new species. Scientific gain, however, did not provide the ultimate motivation 

for new voyages. Settlers and entrepreneurs followed the early expeditions, 

extending technological civilization into new realms and distant lands. 

Familiar analogies for the spacefaring vision are easy to find. Rocket 

ships are the equivalent of sailing vessels that cross terrestrial seas and flying 

machines that plow through the air. Space stations and extraterrestrial bases 

serve as the 2lst-century equivalent of forts on the outer edges of settlement, 

providing sanctuaries from hostile forces as well as departure points for places 

beyond. The expectation of extraterrestrial life grows out of the manner in 

which the leaders of terrestrial expeditions returned with samples of strange 

life-forms from the lands they explored. Extraterrestrial colonies are portrayed 

as pioneer settlements, with their promise of fresh starts and the abandonment 

of old ways. 

9. See John P. Kotter, Leading Change (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1996). 
OBSERVATIONS ON THE ROBOTIC VERSUS HUMAN ISSUE. . . 81 

The power of the human spaceflight visions rests on a set of mutually 

compatible images, drawn from the recent (and frequently romanticized) 

memory of terrestrial events. Space offers a realm in which humans can continue 

the centuries-old tradition of terrestrial exploration. It allows nations to 

demonstrate their technological prowess and provides new lands for settlement 

and exploitation. It satisfies the apparent human need for human migration. It 

promotes the utopian belief that life will be better in newly created settlements 

beyond the reach of the “old world.” These are familiar images, not hard to 

An iconic image seen everywhere, this photograph shows Gemini astronaut Edward 

H. White II on 3 June 1965, when he became the first American to step outside his 

spacecraft for a “spacewalk.” For 23 minutes, White floated and maneuvered himself 

around the Gemini spacecraft while logging 6,500 miles during his orbital stroll. The 

astronaut as central figure in space exploration has dominated imagery since before 

the beginning of the Space Age, but is it an accurate depiction of the future? (NASA 

JSC photo no. S65-30433) 
82 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

explain to an often inattentive public. It is not hard for the average person to 

understand what is meant by space as “this new ocean” or new initiatives as 

“pioneering the space frontier.”1° 

The human spaceflight vision arose during the first half of the 20th 

century, at a time when the opportunities for terrestrial exploration of the 

traditional sort seemed to be winding down. The rise ofthe human spacefaring 

vision with the nearly simultaneous decline of the heroic age of terrestrial 

exploration was not coincidental. The spacefaring vision offered an opportunity 

to continue the virtues thought to accompany terrestrial exploration and 

settlement in a new realm. Few developments had more influence on the 

popular acceptance of space exploration in the mid-20th century than the 

recent memory of terrestrial expeditions crossing Earthly lands and seas. 

Intensive promotion of space exploration began just as the heroic era of 

terrestrial exploration came to a close. The latter is generally marked by the 

1929 expedition of Richard E. Byrd to Antarctica, the first such incursion to 

substitute fully modern technology for dependence upon human skills. Byrd’s 

expedition followed a series of polar expeditions that depended heavily upon 

the personal qualities of their human leaders. Among these were the efforts of 

separate parties led by Roald Amundsen and Robert Scott to reach the South 

Pole during the Antarctic summer of 1911-12 and the survival of the TransAntarctic Expedition of 1914 led by Ernest Shackleton. Both Amundsen and 

Scott reached the South Pole, but Scott and his four companions perished on 

the return voyage. Trapped in the polar ice, Shackleton led the crew of the 

Endurance on a 17-month odyssey that remains one of history’s greatest stories 

of human triumph over extreme adversity. The polar expeditions followed a 

century marked by similarly heroic expeditions such as those led by Meriwether 

Lewis and William Clark and John Wesley Powell in the American West, 

Henry Morton Stanley in Africa, and the astonishingly influential voyage of 

Charles Darwin as the ship’s naturalist on the HMS Beagle. 

Expeditions in the heroic mold followed a well-established formula. 

Expedition leaders operated autonomously, without the technology necessary 

to maintain regular contact with their sponsors or home base. Typically, the 

public did not learn of their expeditions’ achievements until the leaders 

emerged from isolation and reported their findings through lectures and 

10. Loyd S. Swenson, James M. Grimwood, and Charles C. Alexander, This New Ocean: A 

History of Project Mercury (Washington, DC: NASA SP-4201, 1966), about connecting two distant 

points within the universe; National Commission on Space, Pioneering the Space Frontier. The term 

“this new ocean” is derived from “this new sea,” a phrase employed by John F. Kennedy’s “Address 

at Rice University in Houston on the Nation’s Space Effort,” 12 September 1962, in U.S. President 

(1961-1963 Kennedy), Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: john F. Kennedy, 1962 

(Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1963), p. 373. 
OBSERVATIONSN THE ROBOTIC VERSUS HUMAN ISSUE. . . 83 

publications. In nearly all cases, the public did not know whether the members 

of the expedition under way were dead or alive. Cut off from their sponsors 

and home port, members of terrestrial expeditions were obliged to rely on 

their own skills to repair equipment and gain sustenance from local resources. 

Given the conditions they faced, expedition leaders depended upon human 

ingenuity rather than machine technology to survive and complete their 

discoveries. Terrestrial expeditions in the heroic tradition served as an 

expression of the power of humans to overcome natural obstacles without 

resorting to the conveniences of the industrializing world. 

Such traditions provided the inspiration for the vision of human spaceflight that gained popular acceptance during the middle years of the 20th 

century. Between 1950 and 1954, Wernher von Braun prepared a series of 

plans for the exploration of the Moon and Mars that recounted the heroic 

expeditions of preceding centuries. His proposal for a Mars mission was 

especially impressive. It called for a flotilla of 10 ships, guided by a 70-person 

crew, departing on a 30-month voyage. To prepare their landing site, pilots 

would descend in one of the ships to the polar ice cap of Mars-the only 

surface thought to be sufficiently smooth to permit a skid-assisted landing. 

From there, the crew would commence a 4,000-mile trek in pressurized tractors over unfamiliar terrain to the Martian equator, where they would bulldoze 

a landing strip for additional craft. Commenting on the attractive power of such 

schemes, von Braun remarked, “I knew how Columbus had felt.”*’ 

Von Braun’s vision dominated popular presentations of the spacefaring 

vision during the mid-20th century. The image of winged spaceships, orbiting 

space stations, lunar expeditions, and voyages to Mars reappeared in the earliest 

long-range plans of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The 

vision remained the dominant paradigm for human spaceflight from the 1961 

decision to go to the Moon through the 2004 presidential call for a return 

to the lunar surface and expeditions to Mars.I2 Yet this vision was already 

outdated in terrestrial terms when it first appeared. 

Beginning with the Byrd expedition to Antarctica in 1929, expedition 

leaders came to rely much more on machines than on human heroics to 

11. Quoted in Daniel Lang,“A Reporter at Large:A Romantic Urge,”NewYorker 27 (21 Aprd 1951): 

74. See also Wernher von Braun, The Mars Project (Champagn: Umversity of Illinois Press, 1991); von 

Braun wlth Cornehus Ryan,“Can We Get to Mars?” Collier’s (30 Aprd 1954): 22-28; von Braun,“Man 

on the Moon:The Journey,” Collier’s (18 October 1952): 52-60; Fred L.Whpple and von Braun,“The 

Exploration,” Collier’s (25 October 1952): 3-8. 

12. NASA Office of Program Planning and Evaluation, “The Long Range Plan of the National 

Aeronautics and Space Administration,” 16 December 1959; Space Task Group, The Post-Apollo 

Space Program: Directtonsfor the Future (Washington, DC: Executive Office of the President, 1969); 

NASA, “President Bush Delivers Remarks on U.S. Space Policy,” news release, 14 January 2004. 
84 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

accomplish their goals. Byrd and his compatriots brought three airplanes and 

an aerial camera to Antarctica, which they flew over the South Pole. They 

brought 24 radio transmitters, 31 receivers, and 5 radio engineers, which 

they used to maintain communication with the outside world. The Byrd 

expedition, like others that followed, replaced the need for exceptional heroics 

with a dependence upon machines. 

Basic plans for human spaceflight embodied language that recounted the 

spirit of heroic exploration. This occurred in spite of the program’s obvious 

dependence upon machines of the sort that had caused the heroic tradition to 

disappear on Earth. The earliest astronauts were portrayed as heroic explorers 

even though they were selected to be mostly passive passengers on spacecraft 

treated more like guided missiles than ships at sea. Winged spaceships and large 

space stations proved much harder to construct than airplanes and frontier 

forts, notwithstanding the relative simplicity of their terrestrial analogies. 

Human space missions were controlled extensively from the ground, thereby 

forgoing the heroic tradition established by ship captains at sea. 

Hence, the vision of human spaceflight was outmoded in terrestrial terms 

30 years before it began. Yet spaceflight advocates clung to it, a testament to its 

motivating power. Much of its persistence arose from a supporting featurethe belief in American exceptionalism and the ability of space activities to 

maintain it. 

The doctrine of American exceptionalism has appeared in a number of 

forms. Alexis de Tocqueville noted how conditions in New World settlements 

promoted innovation and a spirit of cooperation. This insight reappeared in the 

writings of 20th-century social scientists such as the historian Louis Hartz and 

the political scientist Aaron Wildavsky. Hartz traced American exceptionalism 

to the absence of rigid class distinctions such as those that dominated feudal 

arrangements in Europe. The doctrine achieved its most influential form in 

the frontier thesis promulgated by Frederick Jackson Turner in 1893. Jackson 

traced what he saw as the distinctive characteristics of American society to 

the presence of open land on a continental frontier. From this perspective, 

inquisitiveness, inventiveness, individualism, democracy, and equality grew 

out of the experience of founding new settlements free from the persistence 

of old arrangement^.'^ 

Turner’s thesis has been dismissed by academic historians, yet it continues 

to possess special appeal to people unschooled in the nuances of historical 

13 Alexls de Tocquevdle, Democracy in America (New York Random House, 1994); Louis Hartz, The 

Liberal Tradition in America. an Interpretation ofAmerican Political Thought Since the Revolution (New York: 

Harcourt, Brace, 1955); Aaron B.Wddavsky, The Rise ofRadical Egalrtarianrsrn (Washington, DC.American 

Umversity Press, 1991); Frederick JacksonTurner,“The Sigmficance of the Frontier in American History,” 

in Rereading Frederick Jackson Turner, ed. John M. Faragher (NewYork: Henry Holt, 1994). 
OBSERVATIONSN THE ROBOTIC VERSUS HUMAN ISSUE . . . 85 

research. The gap between academic intellectualism and popular opinion is 

in few places more pronounced than in the advocacy of human spaceflight. 

Human spaceflight advocates repeatedly cite the importance of “new frontiers” 

in sustaining the values of American exceptionalism. 

At its heart, American exceptionalism is a utopian doctrine closely associated with the belief that people can improve the human condition by moving 

to new lands. Much of the interest in transforming Mars into an inhabitable 

sphere and establishing other space colonies arises froin the utopian belief that 

life gets better when humans are allowed to start anew. The settlement schemes 

of space advocates such as Gerard O’Neill and Robert Zubrin embrace utopian 

themes, as does the work of science fiction writers such as Ray Bradb~ry.’~ 

Academic historians point out that distinctive characteristics such as those 

valued by space advocates can arise from a number of cultural conditions and 

that the association of frontier life with values such as equality and individualism ignores actual events. Such criticism has had little effect on the 

popular promotion of human spaceflight. Its advocates continue to emphasize 

American exceptionalism and its linkage to the opportunities provided by the 

space frontier. Given the cultural history of the United States, this is a 

particularly appealing doctrine to the descendants of European settlers. The 

thought that the United States is becoming more like countries of the “old” 

world simply increases the interest in recreating conditions thought to make 

America unique. 

The theory of American exceptionalism and its association with frontier 

life is dubious history. Whatever controversy it engenders as a historical doctrine, however, is overshadowed by the biological issues involved. Humans are 

a remarkably well-suited species for terrestrial migration. In fact, the ability of 

humans to adapt to a very wide range of terrestrial conditions through their 

tool-making capabilities may be the most distinguishing characteristic of the 

species as an earthly life-form. That adaptation has taken place on a terrestrial 

surface marked by a specific gravity condition, a protective atmosphere, and 

a magnetic field that shields earthly life-forms from cosmic violence. None of 

those conditions exist in outer space. Nearly all of the biological advantages 

that humans possess for Earthly migration disappear as they move away from 

the Earth. One pair ofauthors likens the use ofhuman tool-making capabilities 

to overcome cosmic conditions to the thought that a fish might be able to 

survive on land if it had the ability to surround itself with a bubble of water.I5 

14. Gerard K. O’Nedl, The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space (NewYorkWilliam Morrow, 1976); 

Robert Zubrin, Entering Space: Creating a Spacefaring Civilization (NewYork Jeremy P.Tarcher/Putnam, 

1999); Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles (NewYork: Bantam Books, 1950). 

15. Manfred E. Clynes and Nathan S. Kline, “Cyborgs and Space,” Astronautics (September 

1960): 29-33. 
86 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

Early experience suggests that the ability of humans to transport conditions 

favorzble to the maintenance of life in outer space is severely limited. 

Accomplishments during the first half century of spaceflight have not 

favored human spaceflight. The human space endeavor has not kept pace 

with expectations. The inspirational value of elaborate visions such as those 

contained in the 1969 report of the Space Task Group or the popular film 

2001: A Space Odyssey far exceeded the capacity of humans to achieve them. 

The relatively uninspiring tasks of constructing near-Earth space stations and 

reusable spacecraft have taken far longer and cost far more than anticipated. 

With the exception of the landings on the Moon, human spaceflight has 

turned out to be much harder than people standing at the beginning of the 

Space Age envisioned it to be. 

In practical terms, humans will probably return to the Moon and visit 

Mars. By necessity, they may rendezvous with nearby asteroids. They may 

establish Martian bases of the sort found at the Earth’s South Pole, for reasons 

of scientific inquiry and national prestige. Their ability to populate Mars or 

other local spheres is debatable, and the idea that humans in large numbers 

may undertake interstellar journeys using conventional spacecraft is more 

doubtful still. 

The human spaceflight vision is likely to end at Mars or some nearby 

place in the inner solar system. Ultimately, the human spaceflight vision will 

disappear because it is an old vision, tied to past events that become more 

distant with each succeeding generation. The spacefaring vision helped people 

standing at the midpoint of the 20th century express their loss at the passing 

of the heroic age of terrestrial exploration. Such nostalgia is likely to hold less 

appeal as new generations and developments emerge. 

ROBOTS IN SPACE 

While attractive in a number of respects, the robotic spaceflight alternative suffers from many of the same difficulties as the human flight paradigm. 

On the surface, as its advocates insist, robots may seem better suited to spaceflight than human beings. Yet as cultural phenomena, the robotic perspective 

similarly draws its motive force from social movements located in a rapidly 

receding past. The image of robotics contained in those movements fails to 

account for many new developments in technology. 

The term “robot” is taken from the Czech word vobota. In its purest 

form, it refers to statute labor or compulsory service of the type demanded 

of European peasants. In feudal Europe, aristocrats required peasants to work 
OBSERVATIONS ON THE ROBOTIC VERSUS HUMAN ISSUE . . . 87 

This image represents the epitome of the NASA perspective that humans and robots 

will explore the solar system together. Here Sojourner, the Mars Pathfinder rover of 

1997 named after former slave and famous abolitionist Sojourner Truth, is visited 

many years after its mission by a descendant of its namesake in this artist's rendering 

by Pat Rawlings. Sojourner the rover paved the way for those that followed. (NASA 

image no. S99-04192) 
88 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

without remuneration for limited periods of time in the fields of noblemen. 

The Czech playwright Karel Capek used the term in a 1921 play, R.U.R. 

(Rossum’s Universal Robots) to characterize mandatory factory work that 

was tedious and unrewarding. In Capek’s play, factory work is performed not 

by people but by biologically produced human substitutes who are engineered 

to complete their work more efficiently than human counterparts.“j 

Therein lies the fundamental difficulty with robotics as a social phenomenon. Robots are viewed as machine-age products designed to serve as 

human substitutes. To anyone vaguely familiar with industrial-age technology, 

the implications are obvious. At the least, robots serve in the master-servant 

relationship characteristic of Edwardian times. At the worst, they are slaves. 

The concept of slavery or involuntary servitude was well understood 

during the early stages of the industrial revolution. The practice of slavery 

existed scarcely a generation before the advent of wide-scale industrialization 

in America, and social commentators criticized the practices that tended to 

create “wage slavery” in industrial plants. Nineteenth-century law treated slaves 

as property without the rights accorded citizens of the United States, while 

factory practices treated workers as elements of production interchangeable 

with machines. 

As servants or slaves, robots are not expected to possess human or sentient 

qualities. Even where robots take the physical form of human beings, they 

remain machines. The ultimate trust in the ability of humans to control robots 

forms the basis for Isaac Asimov’s three laws of robotics, first elucidated in a 

1942 story titled “Runaround”: 

A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, 

allow a human being to come to harm . . . . A robot must obey 

the orders given it by human beings except where such orders 

would conflict with the First Law. . . . A robot must protect 

its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict 

with the First or Second Laws.” 

In the dominant fictional depiction of their relationships in space, robots 

commonly serve as companions to humans engaged in various extraterrestrial 

activities. This approach is well represented by robots such as Asimov’s QT1 from his early short story “Reason,” Lieutenant Commander Data from 

Star Trek: the Next Generation, and the high-strung C3PO and the astromech 

16. Peter Russi, ed., Toward the Radical Center: A Karel Capek Reader (Highland Park, NJ: Catbird 

17. Isaac Asimov, I, Robot (New York: Random House, 1950), p. 37. 

Press, 1990). 
OBSERVATIONSN THE ROBOTIC VERSUS HUMAN ISSUE.. . 89 

R2D2 of Star Wars fame. In the realm of fiction, Space Age robots exist to 

extend the capabilities of humans who travel alongside them. This creates a 

fundamental contradiction in the use of robots for space activities. If robots 

are merely machines, they can be treated as subhuman objects. They can be 

sent on perilous missions and programmed to perform their duties without the 

opportunity for earthly return, requirements that would never be permitted 

for expeditions with humans on board. At the same time, developments in 

robotics promise ever-increasing levels of sophistication-even to the level 

that they become sentient beings. 

In the fictional setting, exploitive treatment of robots is rarely regarded as 

ethical. Even if robots are machines, humans treat them in considerate ways. 

Thoughtfulness for the “feelings” of robots grows directly out of misgivings 

regarding the treatment of factory workers, servants, and slaves. In a direct 

retelling of the Dred Scott case, writers for the Star Trek episode “The Measure 

of a Man” question whether the android Data should be treated as property 

or a human being. Data is a machine, albeit one that resembles a human 

being, and as such can be reassigned by a commander under the regulations 

governing the disposal of Federation property. Dred Scott was a 19th-century 

slave who sued in U.S. courts to maintain his freedom on the grounds that 

he was being reassigned from a state in which slavery was illegal into one 

which still permitted its practice. The Supreme Court ruled in 1857 that the 

provisions of the U.S. Constitution applicable to Scott were the ones that dealt 

with the property rights of owners rather than the personal rights of citizens, 

thereby helping to precipitate the Civil War. The Judge Advocate General in 

the Star Trek episode issues a contrary opinion. Data may be a machine, the 

jurist rules, but he has the right to be treated like a person.’* 

Social commentators find themselves caught between their insistence 

that robots are merely machines and the necessity of treating them with 

respect. In his classic work Do Androids Dream $Electric Sheep?, Philip K. Dick 

contemplates the morality oflocating and shutting down wayward robots. (The 

story formed the basis for the classic 1982 science fiction film Blade Runner.) 

In a retelling of the fugitive slave law, the novel deals with android servants 

who escape from their masters on Mars and attempt to hide on Earth. To 

encourage emigration to Mars, the government grants each settler a personal 

android servant which becomes the emigrant’s private property. The androids 

attempt to escape and sometimes murder their masters. The circumstances 

posed by the novel, Dick admits, duplicate the conditions of the Nat Turner 

rebellion in the pre-Civil War American South. 

18. Robert Scheerer, “The Measure of a Man,” Star Trek: The Next Generation, 13 February 1989, 

production 135, Paramount Pictures. 
90 CRITICAL ISSUES INTHE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

Dick eventually concludes that the androids are merely machines. They 

are worthy of careful treatment, as would be the case with any piece of 

expensive equipment, but are not persons in the conventional use of that term. 

Answering the title of his book, Dick concludes that androids would not 

dream of electric sheep unless they were programmed to do so, nor would 

they assign any particular value to the experience unless so in~tructed.’~ 

Isaac Asimov wrestled with the same conundrum throughout his literary 

career. On the one hand, he railed against what he termed the “Frankenstein 

complex”-the tendency of writers to produce stories about robots gone bad. 

Nearly every robot story Asimov read as a young person presented “hordes of 

clanking murderous robots.” The basic story, he observed, was “as old as the 

human imaginati~n.”~~ Humans who attempted to improve their condition 

through invention, like Icarus who flew too close to the Sun, were penalized 

by the gods. In a similar manner, humans who invented exceptional machines 

would be punished by their creations. Asimov absolutely rejected that point 

of view. All technologies, from fire to the automobile, possess dangers when 

misused. To Asimov, that did not justify their abandonment. 

Robots were merely machines, Asimov insisted. Some aspects of their operation might prove faulty but were always subject to improvement.SaidAsimov ofhis 

robotic creations: “I saw them as machines-advanced machines-but machines. 

They might be dangerous but surely safety factors would be built in.”21 

At the same time, Asimov could not resist the temptation to treat his 

creations anthropomorphically. He gave them human faces and human emotions and human needs. In one of his most famous robot stories, “Bicentennial 

Man,” Asimov describes a robot that wants to become a person. Originally 

programmed to work as a household servant, the robot acquires artistic 

sensitivity through an error in the plotting of what Asimov terms its positronic 

pathways. Over a period of nearly 200 years, the robot replaces its machine 

parts with human prosthetics and wins its freedom. Yet it does not possess a 

human brain, a distinction that Asimov characterizes as “a steel wall a mile 

high and a mile A human brain is subject to irreplaceable decay. The 

price for becoming human, Asimov declares, is eventual death. It is a price 

that the robot is willing to pay. 

The conceptual challenges of resolving the treatment of robots in practice are not as farfetched as they may seem. Throughout the early stages of 

19. Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream $Electric Sheep? (New York: Ballantine Books, 1968). 

20. Isaac Asimov, Gold: The Final Science Fiction Collection (New York: Eos, 2003), pp. 192, 193, 

21. Ibid., p. 195. 

22. Isaac Asimov, Robot Visions (New York: Penguin Putnam, 1991), p. 287. The story first 

196. 

appeared in 1976. 
OBSERVATIONSN THE ROBOTIC VERSUS HUMAN ISSUE . . . 91 

the space program, humans allowed robots little autonomy. Robots operated 

under tight constraints and remote control. With the advent of planetary 

rovers, robots were allowed higher degrees of freedom. Should robots ever be 

used for interstellar investigation, they will require autonomous operating 

capability. They will need the capability to repair themselves without human 

intervention and possibly the ability to reproduce their parts. 

The extent to which this will require the treatment of robots as sentient 

beings is as yet unknown. From a strictly industrial-age point of view, they 

will remain machines. Industrial thinkers like Frederick Taylor treated humans 

like machinery with interchangeable parts. Why would someone who adopts 

industrial-age thinking assign a higher status to intelligent equipment? A 

necessary requirement of space exploration, however, is the disappearance of 

organizational doctrines rooted in a pure mechanistic point of view. Space 

exploration requires organizational techniques that promote exceptionally 

high levels of creativity, reliability, and interactive complexity. It requires 

electronic equipment, most notably computers, whose basic conception rests 

more in the postindustrial age than the industrial. The traditional, assemblyline mentality that characterized the early industrial revolution is no longer 

appropriate for space travel, neither from an organizational nor a technological 

point of view. 

Yet this is the very point of view around which the doctrine of robotics 

revolves. As a cultural phenomenon, robotics is rooted in an industrial-era 

vision of machinery and the period of human servitude from which it emerged. 

Whatever one may think about the technical advantages of unmanned 

spaceflight, its origins as a cultural doctrine are as traditional as those associated 

with human cosmic travel. The latter draws its force from romantic images of 

terrestrial exploration and frontier settlements; the former finds its potency in 

the fascination with machines that characterized the early industrial revolution 

and an idealized image of master-servant relationships. 

The limitations of the robotic perspective are apparent in the seeming 

inability of its advocates to imagine such machines operating without direct 

human control. Very few of the robot stories prepared by Isaac Asimov present 

robots working alone. One notable exception is “Victory Unintentional,” in 

which three incredibly hardy robots visit an invidiously hostile civilization on 

the planet Jupiter preparing for space The Jovians mistakenly identify 

the robots as human emissaries from Earth and, convinced that the Earthlings 

are indestructible, decide to abandon their spacefaring plans. The story departs 

so radically from Asimov’s standard robot fare that he excluded it from his 

collection of I, Robot tales. 

23,“Victory Unintentional” was published in the August 1942 issue of Super Science Stories. 
92 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

The standard robot story involves machines working alongside human 

beings. The television series Lost in Space that ran from 1965 to 1968 featured a 

large robot that one critic characterized as a metal version of the canine Lassie, 

another popular television show from that period.24 The Robinson family 

treated the robot as a member of the family, much like an intelligent pet. In 

The Day the Earth Stood Still, the alien portrayed by Michael Rennie travels 

with a robot named Gort who serves as the ship’s chief medical officer and a 

ruthless enforcer of the extraterrestrial doctrine of arms control. 

The official NASA policy for the use of robots in space exploration remains 

one of complementary capability When pressed to comment on the virtues of 

manned and unmanned spaceflight, NASA? leaders repeat the dominant vision 

that it will be “robots and humans together.”25 

The treatment of robots in fiction is not unlike that accorded animals in 

space. The first animal to orbit the Earth, a Russian dog named Laika, was 

allowed to die in space. In a 1953 proposal for the use of monkeys to test living 

conditions on board a “baby space station,” Wernher von Braun suggested 

that the animals be euthanatized before reentry using “a quick-acting lethal 

gas.”26 To a certain extent, this recalled the polar practice wherein expedition 

members ate their dogs as the animals’ usefulness for transport declined. Such 

treatment was not enforced upon the chimpanzees that tested conditions in 

NASA’s Mercury space capsules before humans climbed in. The chimpanzees 

returned home, as did most of the subsequent Russian dogs to fly in space. 

In spite of their lower status as flight subjects, these animals were accorded 

appropriate respect. They came to be treated more like sentient beings. 

Visionaries like Asimov predicted the widespread use of robots as personal 

servants by the end of the 20th century. His initial robot story, titled “Robbie,” is 

set in NewYork City in the year 1998, a time by which Asimov anticipated the 

mass production of robotic servants for service on Earth and in space. People like 

Asimov anticipated a new machine age dominated by intelligent robots. In fact, 

the machine age departed. In its place, the postindustrial era appeared. In spite 

of his abiding interest in the workings of his robots’ “positronic brains,” Asimov 

wholly failed to anticipate the advent of personal computers and information 

networks that have come to characterize the postindustrial era. 

Early images of computers in popular space literature are similar to those 

accorded mechanical robots. Sophisticated computers acquire a sense of their 

own existence and often behave in a roguish fashion. In the classic film and 

24. “Robot B9 from Lost in Space,” http://wwwjeffbots.com/b9robot.html (accessed 10 July 2004). 

25. See, for example, NASA, “Humans, Robots Work Together to Test ‘Spacewalk Squad’ 

26. Wernher von Braun with Cornelius Ryan, “Baby Space Station,” Collier’s (27 June 1953): 40. 

Concept,” news release 03-227, 2 July 2003. 
OBSERVATIONS ON THE ROBOTIC VERSUS HUMAN ISSUE. . . 93 

novel 2002: A Space Odyssey, the HAL-9000 computer attempts to seize control 

of the ship and kills all but one member of the crew. It resists the efforts of the 

remaining astronaut to disconnect it. The notion that humans might construct 

computers so advanced that they acquire self-awareness appears frequently in 

fictional and popular treatments of the subject. 

Robots have already been used to explore the solar system. They have 

returned samples from the Moon, and they will likely return samples from 

Mars. They will closely inspect other planets and their moons. They will rove, 

dig, possibly swim, and explore. They have and will continue to reach the 

outer limits of the local solar system. 

As a philosophy of exploration, nonetheless, robotics is full of contradictions and outdated metaphors. It remains a machine-age concept in a cybernetic 

world. Machine-age philosophies are fundamentally concerned with control, 

both in large organizations and the design ofprocesses such as the assembly line. 

As with Asimov’s three laws, the means of control are rooted in jurisprudence. 

Rules remain the primary means of control under the machine philosophy. 

Yet rules are largely inappropriate to the cybernetic models associated with 

postindustrial processes and information networks. The dominant metaphor 

for the cybernetic world is the brain, with its qualities of redundancy and 

creative problem solving. 

Robots will surely continue to explore the local solar system. They may 

develop sufficient capacities to explore regions beyond. Such capabilities, as 

in the field of artificial intelligence, may lead to sentient qualities of the sort 

currently found in science fiction. Developing levels of self-consciousness, 

they might even come to think of themselves as superior beings. This is 

not guaranteed, but one cannot rule out the possibility. If this occurs, such 

robots would probably be treated with ever-increasing degrees of respect and 

kindness. This is the Asimov vision-sophisticated machinery with sentient 

characteristics operating under human control treated in a humane manner. 

The scenario is farfetched, but one that would pose no basic difficulty to the 

expanded use of robots for space explorati~n.~~ 

A darker alternative exists. It is the vision presented in fictional devices 

such as Blade Runner and the behavior ofthe HAL-9000 in 2001. Humans might 

treat such creations inhumanly. In BZade Runner, biologically manufactured 

robots are programmed to die after four years of operation. Having achieved 

self-consciousness, they understandably object to this policy. The HAL-9000 

computer does not want to be shut off either. This scenario, while entertaining, 

seems flawed in a number of ways. It requires humans to treat intelligent 

27. Some theorists believe that this is a given. See Ray KurzweiI, The Age of Spiritual Machines: 

When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence (New York: Penguin, 2000). 
94 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

robots like slaves, a philosophy not too compatible with the guiding moral 

doctrines of the postindustrial world. It also suggests that humans would use 

advanced technology to build robots. As will be seen in a following section of 

this paper, a more likely scenario is that humans would use such technology 

to improve themselves. If humans ever develop the technology to construct 

biologically derived androids, they will by necessity acquire the technology to 

recreate themselves. That is a more profoundly interesting possibility. 

Nonetheless, the image of intelligent but angry robots is not an impossibility. Humans are capable of great kindness toward their creations, but also 

great cruelty. The image of the mad robot attracts great interest because it says 

something cogent about human behavior. The concept of machines as slaves 

may be outmoded, but the worldwide traffic in humans pressed into forms of 

slavery continues. 

In practical terms, the robotic vision will be weighed against the advantages and disadvantages of alternative schemes. This is inevitable. In that 

respect, the robotic vision, with its traditional quality, may have difficulty 

competing with approaches that better fit modern technological and cultural 

developments. One of the most challenging alternatives arises out of the 

developments in the increasingly strange world of astrophysics. 

ASTROPHYSICS AND 

THE ELECTROMAGNETIC SPACE PROGRAM 

Recount for a moment the framework for the observations presented in 

this essay. To a substantial degree, the vision of space travel is a blank tablet onto 

which its advocates project images drawn from their own hopes for the culture 

at large. By necessity, those images change as actual ventures encounter reality. 

They also change as new generations of people project fresh hopes and cultural 

beliefs onto the space tableau. As reality intrudes and old cultural fascinations 

fade, so may old visions. This often encourages advocates to draw selectively 

what appear to be new ideas from old images-statements and visions not fully 

recognized until the new visions begin to take form. 

One of the most pervasive expectations of the early 20th century held 

that Mars and Venus would turn out to be habitable planets not far different 

from the Earth. This expectation, presented in works both scientific and 

fictional, fueled much of the public interest in human spaceflight. Spaceflight 

enthusiasts hoped to fly to Mars and Venus and discover new life. Revelation of 

their inhospitable nature did not destroy that expectation so much as redirect 

it. Beginning in the last decade of the 20th century, much of the interest in 

habitable objects began to shift toward extrasolar planets. 

The variance between the proximity of the inner planets of the local 

solar system and the challenges of reaching extrasolar spheres is extreme. 
OBSERVATIONSN THE ROBOTIC VERSUS HUMAN ISSUE . . . 95 

One can speculate on the manner by which this reality, joined with the 

continuing search for habitable objects, may affect the spaceflight vision. One 

commentator, proceeding from the mathematics of probabilities, estimates 

the average distance between life-supporting planets within the Milky Way 

galaxy to be about 50 light-years. (This is the estimated distance to planets 

on which life as we understand it might live. The average distance between 

planets possessing complex or intelligent life-forms may be substantially more.) 

Fifty light-years is merely an estimate-the actual number is unknown at this 

time. Nonetheless, it does illustrate the nature of the reality. 

A typical voyage from Earth to Mars, using a fast-transit approach, covers 

about 500 million kilometers (300 million miles). This is the route followed 

by the robots Spirit and Opportunity that arrived at Mars in 2004. The 

difference between a fast-transit voyage to Mars and a journey of 50 light-years 

is a factor of 1 million. The two robots took seven months to reach Mars; a 

similar journey to a planet really capable of supporting human life might take 

500,000 years. Regardless of the accuracy of the underlying estimate (it could 

be wrong by a factor of lo), the resulting distances pose a substantial barrier 

to people embracing the traditional vision of space exploration. 

The energy requirements for crossing such distances are prodigious in the 

extreme. Fictional space captains may zip around the galaxy at warp speed, 

but serious proposals for interstellar flight have been confined to fractions 

in the 10 to 20 percent of light-speed range. Accelerating spacecraft to such 

velocities would require energy sources as yet undeveloped, such as fusion 

power or antimatter drives. For human flight, it would also require very large, 

multigenerational spacecraft. The people who began any such a voyage would 

not live to see its completion.’’ 

The substantial engineering challenges involved in interstellar transit 

have forced its most serious advocates to emphasize robotic payloads. Even 

so, robotic expeditions suffer severe restrictions. A proposal by members 

of the British Interplanetary Society for a 50-year expedition to Barnard’s 

Star promised a scientific payload with the impressive mass of 500 tons. The 

energy requirements needed to accelerate the robotic payload to one-eighth 

light speed proved so prodigious, however, that no fuel remained to help 

the spacecraft slow down. The expedition pian, named Project Daedalus, 

called for the spacecraft to zip past its destination at interstellar speeds. NASA 

executive George Mueller attempted to resolve this difficulty in his proposal 

for a 25-year voyage to Alpha Centauri 3, powered again by antimatter drive 

and achieving a peak velocity of two-tenths light speed. Assuming sufficient 

28. On the technologies of this type of spaceflight, see Yoji Kondo, ed., Interstellar Travel G MultiGenerational Space Ships (Burlington, Ontario: Apogee Books, 2003). 
96 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

fuel for deceleration, the resulting calculations left room for a robotic payload 

that weighed just 1 

The practical challenges of traveling to nearby solar systems, whether with 

human or robotic payloads, well exceed those of local flight. Concurrently, 

popular interest in the machine-age social issues that helped to spawn robotic 

dreams has declined. Might some other approach prove more compatible 

with the personal experiences of postindustrial people, while at the same time 

offering a better solution to practical difficulties of interstellar contact? 

Such an approach exists-and if the combination of personal imagination 

and practical reality affecting previous spacefaring visions continues to foster 

new ones, it could create a significant variation in the classic human versus 

robotic debate. The new vision could arise from that pervasive symbol of 

postindustrial life, the computer. As noted in the previous section, the use 

of personal computers is as widespread as people in the early 20th century 

believed the employment of robots would be. The computer is as compatible 

with the electronic thinking that dominates the postindustrial age as the 

fascination with rockets and other machines was with the industrial. 

A method for achieving light-speed velocities with very low energy 

requirements exists within the world of electronics. In 1974, astronomers Frank 

Drake and Carl Sagan aimed the Arecibo Radio Telescope at the globular 

star cluster M-13 and dispatched a binary code message at light speed. When 

properly deciphered, the message contained diagrams depicting a human 

being, the chemical makeup of Earth life, and the position of the home planet 

in the solar system. Sagan estimated that the chances of communicating with 

a civilization residing in the 100,000-star cluster were 50-50. Since the star 

cluster resides outside of the Milky Way galaxy, however, any return message 

traveling at light speed will not arrive for 48,000 years. 

Civilizations capable of communicating in the electromagnetic spectrum 

may exist much closer to the Earth. During the 1970s, space advocates proposed 

a $20-billion government-funded listening system called Project Cyclops. In 

support of the initiative, NASA Administrator James Fletcher told a gathering 

of engineers that the Milky Way galaxy “must be full of voices, calling from 

star to star in a myriad of tongues.” Fletcher was a lay minister in the Church 

ofJesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which subscribes to the theological doctrine 

that God has created a plurality of worlds populated with human beings.30 

29. Alan Bond and Anthony R. Martin, “Project Daedalus: The Mission Profile,” in “Project 

Daedalus-The Final Report of the BIS Starship Study,” ed. A. R. Martin,jBIS:journal ofthe British 

Interplanetary Society (Supplement, 1978): 537-542; George Mueller, “Ammatter & Distant Space 

Flight,” Spaceflight 25 (May 1983): 104-107. 

30. James C. Fletcher, “NASA and the ‘Now’ Syndrome,” NASA brochure, text from an address 

to the National Academy of Engineering, Washington, DC, November 1975, p. 7, NASA Historical 

continued on the next page 
OBSERVATIONS ON THE ROBOTIC VERSUS HUMAN ISSUE. . . 97 

The prospect of spending billions of dollars on an approach to space 

exploration departing so radically from the traditional human and robotic 

vision sunk the initiative. Bereft of public funding, advocates sought private contributions for what became known as the Search for Extraterrestrial 

Intelligence (SETI) .31 

Technical developments of a practical nature may cause future lawmakers 

to fund extrasolar investigations. Propelled by widespread interest in the 

discovery of extrasolar planets, NASA officials have recommended the creation 

of space telescopes capable of recording light waves reflected from such objects. 

Beginning in the last decade ofthe 20th century, astronomers began confirming 

the presence of planets orbiting nearby stars using indirect means, such as 

variations in the positions of central stars as would be produced by orbiting 

spheres. More than 100 planets were discovered in the first decade of observation. Space-based telescopes utilizing the technology of interferometry could 

capture images ofsuch bodies. This would require a large number oftelescopes, 

flying in formation, assembling light waves from nearby solar systems in such 

a manner that the electromagnetic waves from the central star nullify each 

other. The bright glare from the central object would disappear, revealing the 

reflected light from objects orbiting the central star. 

NASA officials created a hint of what such a technology might produce 

in 2003 when they aimed the Mars Global Surveyor toward the inner solar 

system and captured an image ofEarth some 86 million miles away. The image 

shows Earth half lit. Cloud cover is clearly visible. With small adjustments in 

technology, the color of the seas appeared. Spectral studies of such an image 

would reveal water vapor, free oxygen, and trace amounts of methane and 

carbon dioxide-signatures of a planet populated with living beings. 

Space scientists would like to know how many such spheres occupy 

the stellar neighborhood and the fraction of such bodies that might support 

complex life. Inspection through the electromagnetic spectrum is a far more 

efficient means of locating such bodies than the random dispatch of very large 

spacecraft with extraordinarily large energy requirements. Given 2lst-century 

technologies, the electromagnetic spectrum would prove superior to human 

and robotic flight for investigations outside of the local solar system. 

Where this may lead is as yet unknown. It is a history that has not yet 

occurred. Nonetheless, the confluence of social interest and practical reality 

suggests that it might form the basis for an alternative vision of considerable 

continuedfrom the previous page 

Reference Collection, Washington, DC. On Fletcher’s religious background, see Roger D. Launius, 

“A Western Mormon in Washington, D.G.: James C. Fletcher, NASA, and the Final Frontier,” Pat@ 

Historical Review 64 (May 1995): 217-241. 

31. See Steven J. Dick and James E. Strick, The Living Universe: NASA and the Development of 

Astrobiology (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004). 
98 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

power. At the present time, it is relatively undeveloped-but no more so than 

the conventional reality of spaceflight remained until its popularization during 

the mid-20th century. 

The electromagnetic space program anticipates possible communication 

at or even exceeding light speeds. The possibility of such developments has 

caused some people to contemplate the manner in which electromagnetic 

communication might be combined with traditional interest in human spaceflight. 

In 1985, one of the principal proponents of the Search for Extraterrestrial 

Intelligence, Carl Sagan, presented a draft of a science fiction novel to physicist 

Kip Thorne. Sagan suggested that Earthlings searching through the electromagnetic spectrum might discover devices that would cause objects to 

evade the cosmological limits imposed by conventional space and time. In the 

novel and film, titled Contact, the plans for such a device are supplied through 

a radio message received from outer space. The device, in Sagan’s original 

draft, allowed humans to create a black hole. Thorne, who was completing a 

book on black holes and hyperspace, suggested that Sagan instead employ a 

series of wormholes.32 

The laws of quantum gravity, Thorne observes, require that nature 

produce “exceedingly small wormhole^."^^ A wormhole is a short tunnel 

connecting two distant points within the universe, moving outside the four 

dimensions that humans conventionally experience. Theory suggests that 

wormholes disappear as soon as they appear, but Thorne speculates that a 

technologically advanced civilization might employ the laws of quantum 

gravity to hold a wormhole open long enough to travel through it.34 In this 

respect, fantastic tales in which children drop into rabbit holes or step through 

wardrobes and emerge in other worlds might provide the cultural inspiration 

for 2lst-century space travel. 

In Sagan’s novel, engineers construct a device that creates an access 

point to an exit located in the vicinity of Vega some 26 light-years away. 

This cosmological tunnel provides access to additional passageways leading 

throughout the galaxy. Raised on the conventional image of space exploration, 

Sagan cannot resist the temptation to dispatch a human crew through the 

transit device. In the book, five individuals travel in a dodecahedron to Vega 

and beyond. Movie producers simplified the narrative to a single passenger, 

the central character played by actress Jodie Foster. 

32. Kip S. Thorne, Black Holes G Time Warps (New York W. W. Norton, 1994), pp. 483-484; Carl 

Sagan, Contact:A Novel (NewYork Simon and Schuster, 1985). Sagan continued to refer to the tunnel 

as “the black hole, if that was what it really was,” p. 335. 

33. Thorne, Black Holes G Time Warps, p. 55. 

34. Michael S. Morris and Kip S. Thorne, “Wormholes in spacetime and their use for interstellar 

trave1:A tool for teaching general relativi~,”Americunlournal OfPhysiCs 56 (May 1988): 395-412. 
OBSERVATIONSN THE ROBOTIC VERSUS HUMAN ISSUE. . . 99 

In his book and a series ofaccompanying articles, Thorne explores whether 

a wormhole might be used for communication or transport of the conventional 

sort. Unlike a black hole, whose force would stretch and destroy any conventionally arranged object or message that entered it, a wormhole provides some 

possibility of transit. “We do not understand the laws of quantum gravity well 

enough to deduce . . . whether the quantum construction of wormholes is 

possible,” Thorne observes. Nonetheless, physicists do understand how such a 

wormhole, if one were constructed, might be held open “by threading it with 

exotic material.”35 

Viewed from the perspective of conventional spaceflight, visions of 

electromagnetic communication and shortcuts through space and time are 

certainly strange. So far, no significant public funds have been provided for 

such activities. Yet the possibility of studying extrasolar planets is no more 

fantastic today than space travel seemed to a public raised on images of Martian 

canals and Buck Rogers in the early 20th century, and advances in modern 

physics continue to produce startlingly strange results. No one can predict 

with certainty where such developments might lead. The history of space 

travel does suggest, however, that prevailing visions depend considerably upon 

public interests and technological reality. 

A POSTBIOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE 

The other alternative perspective on space travel is so strange that it 

makes the discussion of wormholes and extraterrestrial communications 

appear commonplace by comparison. For many years, NASA leaders have 

insisted that humans and robots will explore space together. The other 

alternative suggests that humans and machines will do more than travel 

together. As a result of space travel, they might merge into what Steven Dick 

has characterized as a “postbiological universe.”36 

A curious discussion surrounding the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence 

provided the reality check helping to motivate this perspective. In assessing 

the possibility of contacting extraterrestrial beings, Frank Drake prepared a 

formula that famously calculated the number of communicative civilizations 

that might exist within the Milky Way galaxy at the present time. The final 

parameter in the equation measures the average length of time that a 

communicative civilization survives. The parameter, labeled L, imposes a 

paradox raised by the physicist Enrico Fermi. If the value of L is small-on the 

35. Thorne, Black Holes G Time Warps, p. 498. 

36. Steven J. Dick, “They Aren’t Who You Think,” Mercury (November-December 2003): 18-26; 

Dick, “Cultural Evolution, the Postbiological Universe and SETI,” InternationalJoumal ofAstrobiology 2, 

no. 1 (2003): 65-74. 
100 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

order of a few hundred years-then the predicted number of civilizations 

capable of communicating with one another in the Milky Way at any time 

rapidly approaches “one.” In other words, humans are alone-and destined 

soon to revert to some pretechnological state. 

Conversely, suppose that the value of L is very large. Given the age of 

the universe and the history of stars, the first technological civilizations could 

have emerged 3 billion years ago. Those that managed to survive infancy 

could have endured for hundreds of millions of years. The potential age of 

technological civilizations existing at the present time might range from 1 to 3 

billion years.37 Therein arises the paradox. Given the amount of time required 

for interstellar travel relative to the parameter L, intelligent extraterrestrials 

should already be here. Since this does not appear to be the case, it follows on 

the basis of the Drake formula that the longevity of technological civilizations 

must be very small. This is very disappointing to people anticipating a lengthy 

lifespan for human culture. 

The fault, however, may lie in the formula. Drake’s formula contains 

no parameter for the probability that the beings creating a technological 

civilization may evolve into something else. Yet this possibility has been 

raised repeatedly by science fiction writers. Many have foreseen the arrival of 

mutated life-forms, often as a result of horrible wars. H. G. Wells described 

a world full of Morlocks and Eloi in The Time Machine, while Pierre Boulle 

predicted the rise of intelligent chimpanzees in Planet Ofthe Apes. In his early 

science novel Orphans ofthe Sky, Robert Heinlein allows the alterations to 

occur on an intergenerational spaceship bound for the Alpha Centauri star 

system. Succeeding crew members become mutants that dwell in the ship’s 

core and simple farmers who, blissfully unaware that they live on a giant 

spaceship, occupy the outer 

In the works of Arthur C. Clarke, similar transformations occur. Unlike 

other authors, Clarke presents such transformations in a uniformly positive 

way. To Clarke, space travel provides access to technologies that transform 

biological creatures into more immortal, spiritual beings. This optimistic 

vision forms the principal theme in Clarke’s fictional work. It appears in 

Childhood’s End, one of his first novels, in which alien beings oversee the 

total transformation of the human race. It reappears in Rendezvous with Rama, 

in which the extraterrestrial creators of a gigantic starship have long since 

37. Mario Livio, “How Rare Are Extraterrestrial Civlzations, and When Did They Emerge?” 

AstrophysicalJournal 51 1 (20 January 1999): 429-431; N. S. Kardashev, “Cosmology and Civilizations,” 

Astrophysics and Space Science 252 (1997): 25-40. 

38. H. G. Wells, The Time Machine (London: Everyman, 1995); Pierre Bode, La plane’te des singes, 

translated by Xan Fielding as Planet ofthe Apes (New YorkVanguard Press, 1963); Robert A. Heinlein, 

Orphans ofthe Sky:A Novel (NewYork: Putnam, 1963). 
OBSERVATIONS ON THE ROBOTIC VERSUS HUMAN ISSUE. . . 101 

evolved into a higher spiritual form. Most significantly, it dominates the central 

narrative in Clarke’s classic novel and screenplay, 2001: A Space Odyssey. In 

that story, an alien monolith provides a passageway for the transformation of 

the sole surviving astronaut on a deep space mission. The astronaut enters a 

passageway generated by the monolith and reappears as a “star child” with 

supernatural powers. 39 

From a cultural perspective, the transformations Clarke presents contain 

a message quite familiar to human beings. Clarke’s characters achieve forms 

of immortality through space travel. Practically every human culture and 

nearly all religions contain messages about resurrection, typically achieved 

through some sort of physical dying and rebirth. Most space advocates are 

reluctant to discuss the possibility of physical transformation through space 

travel, perhaps out of a desire to appear scientifically sober. To the extent 

that visions of space travel rest upon a foundation of cultural expectations, 

however, few expectations are more widespread than those concerning the 

desire for immortality through some sort of physical transformation. 

The existence of those expectations has provided the cultural foundation 

for a modern movement known as “transhumanism.” This rather strange 

philosophy is a product of conversations taking place largely on the Internet. 

Transhumanism is “a radical new approach to future-oriented thinking” 

that utilizes advances in science and technology “to eliminate aging and 

greatly enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacitie~.”~’ 

Transhumanists believe that advances in computer capacity and nanotechnology 

will allow genetic change to occur very soon-possibly within the 21st 

century. The result, they believe, will be a “posthuman” species as superior to 

homo sapiens as humans are to the primates. The new species will survive for 

very long periods of time, perhaps approaching immortality. 

Transhumanism is not a movement focused on space travel, although its 

applications to that endeavor are readily apparent. If humans or the species they 

produce are able to live under the severe condtions and extraordinarily long 

periods of time required for interstellar travel, many of the barriers to extended 

journeys would disappear. Physical modifications beneficial for space travel might 

include induced hibernation, a staple element in science fiction stories.41 It could 

extend to physical alterations experienced by humans born on worlds with 

different gravities. Extraordinary lifespans would change the human perspective 

39. Arthur C. Clarke, Childhood’s End (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1953); Clarke, 

Rendezvous with Rama (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1973); Clarke, 2001: A Space 

Odyssey (New York: New American Library, 1968). 

40. Nick Bostrom, “The Transhumanist FAQ,” October 2003, http://www. transhumanixm.ovg/ 

resources/faaq.html (accessed 5 January 2005). 

41. See Stanley Kubnck, 2001: A Space Odyssey (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1968); Gordon Carroll, 

David Giler, and Walter Ha, Alien (20th Century Fox, 1979). 
102 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

of time and might allow the completion of lengthy interstellar voyages within a 

single generation. Combined with new insights into the structure of the universe, 

it might allow reconstructed beings to move through space in ways that humans 

could not survive. Given sufficient time, posthumans or their descendants might 

fulfill the science fiction dream of space travel by experiencing near immortality. 

As is typical of such movements, the new approach has motivated current 

generations to rediscover words and works not previously emphasized under 

conventional visions. A leading approach within the transhumanist movement 

envisions the merging of human and machine parts. The resulting creatures 

are known as cyborgs, a term originally presented in a 1960 paper by Manfred 

Clynes and Nathan Kline on the challenges of space travel. Clynes and Kline 

suggested a number of modifications to the human body that would allow 

some of the basic requirements of extraterrestrial survival to take place 

automatically. They proposed induced hypothermia as a means of reducing 

energy requirements, drugs that might combat weightlessness, and an inverse 

fuel cell that would take the place of lungs.42 

Cyborgs appear frequently in science fiction stories. The concept received 

popular attention in a 1972 novel by Martin Caidin that formed the basis 

for the television series The Six Million Dollar Man. A number of Star Trek 

episodes feature cyborgs, and the 1996 Star Trek movie First Contact presents 

an extraterrestrial life-form known as “the Borg.” Part organic, part machine, 

the Borg are insectlike creatures that share a single mind.43 

A person no less notable than Robert Goddard contemplated methods 

for transporting creatures through space in something other than their current 

bodily form. To assure the continuation of Earthly life, he recommended that 

distant spheres be seeded with what he termed protoplasm, dispatched on oneway journeys from Earth to distant spheres. Over time, the material would 

evolve into Earthly life-forms. Goddard suggested that the spacecraft also 

transport the accumulated knowledge of humankind “in as light, condensed, 

and indestructible a form as possible.”44 Goddard’s proposal anticipated the 

development of microtechnologies and discovery of human DNA, which were 

unknown at the time. Lying so far from conventional visions of space travel, 

Goddard’s speculations on interstellar flight received much less attention than 

his work on rocketry, but they could be selectively rediscovered if interest in 

transhumanistic space travel appears. 

42. Clynes and Kline, “Cyborgs and Space.” 

43. Martin Caidin, Cybovg: A Novel (New York: Arbor House, 1972); Glen A. Larson et al., 

The Six Mtllion Dollar Man (Silverton and Universal Production for the American Broadcasting 

Company [ABC], 1973-78); Rick Berman, Star Trek: First Contact (Paramount Pictures, 1996). 

44. Esther C. Goddard, ed., and G. Edward Pendray, assoc. ed., Tne Papers of Robert H. Goddard, vol. 3 

(NewYork McGraw-Ha Book Co., 1970), p. 1612. 
OBSERVATIONS ON THE ROBOTIC VERSUS HUMAN ISSUE.. . 103 

In his discussion of postbiological civilizations, Steven Dick refers to the 

work of the British philosopher Olaf Stapledon, who wrote science fiction 

novels and essays during the first half of the 20th century. Speaking of homo 

supiens, Stapledon, in a classic 1948 address to the British Interplanetary Society, 

insisted that maintenance of the human physical form need not provide the 

ultimate justification for space travel. Rather, he emphasized the preservation of 

what he called the ‘‘spiritual experience” of being human. Stapledon surmised 

that the process of adapting humans to fit alien environments might prove easier 

given sufficient time than carrying Earthly conditions and unaltered humans to 

distant objects. Stapledonian thinking, as Dick describes it, takes into account 

“the evolution of biology and culture” alongside the process of space travel over 

very long time periods.45 The works of Stapledon and those of the early-20thcentury philosopher J. D. Bernal, on which he drew, are considered ‘‘classics” in 

a modern movement that did not exist when the works first appeared.46 

In a half-serious sort of way, Steven Dick uses the postbiological perspective to solve the Fermi paradox. People searching for extraterrestrial 

civilizations listen for radio transmissions of the sort produced by human 

technology. Radio and television signals from Earth, however, are hardly 100 

years old. As noted above, an extraterrestrial civilization mastering advanced 

technologies might have survived for billions ofyears. Over those time periods, 

such creatures would have evolved either naturally or through self-imposed 

means. As Dick notes, the transformation could have produced beings that no 

longer communicate through the electromagnetic spectrum. Fulfilling one of 

the ultimate spacefaring dreams, they might have attained a form of spiritual 

or electronic immortality. 

The ultimate result of many such evolutionary sequences is hard to 

imagine. It might result in the modification of biological creatures into forms 

more suitable for living under conditions beyond their home planet. It might 

result in species that prefer not to be confined to wet, rocky spheres. Perhaps 

such species prefer to communicate over vast distances at speeds that seem 

sluggish to homo supiens with traditionally short lifespans. Over lengthy periods 

of time, the iterations might produce creatures with little resemblance to species 

from which they emerged. Referring to such creatures on other planets, Dick 

observes, “It is entirely possible that the differences between our minds and 

theirs is so great that communication is impossible.” His comments are equally 

applicable to new forms that might someday arise from Earthly life.47 

45. Olaf Stapledon, “Interplanetary Man?” in An Olaf Stapledon Reader, ed. Robert Crossley 

(Syracuse, NY Syracuse University Press, 1997), p. 234; Dick, “Cultural Evolution, the 

Postbiological Universe and SETI,” p. 65. 

46. J. D. Bernal, The World, the Flesh, and the Devil (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 

1969; original publication, 1929). 

47. Dick, “Cultural Evolution, the Postbiological Universe and SETI,” p. 72. 
104 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

CONCLUSION 

The original vision that helped to motivate the first phase of space travel 

favored human over robotic flight. Completion of the human spaceflight vision, 

with its winged spaceships, orbiting space stations, lunar bases, and planetary 

expeditions, proved more difficult than anticipated. During the same period, 

robotic activities overcame many of the technical obstacles expected to retard 

that approach. In spite of its rapid development, however, robotic technology 

did not supplant human activities. On balance, the two approaches achieved a 

state of approximate parity after one-half century of cosmic flight. 

Scientists and engineers provided a vivid demonstration of the relative 

status of robotic and human flight during the 2004 debate over the repair 

of the Hubble Space Telescope. Rarely does a single flight activity permit 

a direct, head-to-head comparison between human and robotic approaches. 

More often, the debate arises in the context of different missions, such as 

the choice between the replacement of an aging Space Shuttle and the desire 

to launch another robotic probe to the outer planet^.^' In 2004, however, a 

special group from U.S. National Academy of Sciences reported on the relative 

merits of robotic and human spaceflight approaches to the task of servicing 

the batteries and gyroscopes on the 14-year-old Hubble Space Telescope. The 

group concluded that a robotic mission was not inherently superior but would 

probably involve more time and risk than an astronaut-guided repair. Further 

analysis suggested that the robotic mission would cost as much a Shuttle flight 

for the same purpose.49 

Exploring the relative advantages of human and robotic flight in a manner 

similar to the calculations performed for the Hubble rescue mission is a 

productive avenue for future research. So is a reexamination of the underlying 

visions. As the generation of space advocates raised on the pioneering paradigm 

of human flight is replaced by young people raised in the computer age, the 

underlying cultural interests in space exploration may shift. Few people have 

attempted to study the manner in which a generation shift could affect the 

supporting visions of spaceflight possessed by the public at large. 

So faqneither the human nor the robotic approach has achieved a commanding advantage over the other. Both continue to receive substantial support. 

Human space travel has fallen well short of the original vision, and robotic 

48. See James A. Van Allen, “Space Science, Space Technology and the Space Station,” ScientGc 

American 254 (January 1986): 32-39. 

49. Committee on the Assessment of Options for Extending the Life of the Hubble Space 

Telescope, Space Studies Board, Aeronautics and Space Engineering Board, National Research 

Council, Assessment of Options for Extending the Llfe of the Hubble Space Telescope: Final Report 

(Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2005). See also U.S. House of Representatives 

Committee on Science, Hearing Charter, “Options for Hubble Science,” 2 February 2005. 
OBSERVATIONSN THE ROBOTIC VERSUS HUMAN ISSUE.. . 105 

flight has exceeded initial expectations. Such observations, however, rest on a 

remarkably short base of practical experience and public perspectives, especially 

when viewed in cosmic terms. Over much longer timespans, the situation as 

it presently exists will probably change and do so in fundamental ways.These 

changes are not well represented in the current human versus robotic debate. 

Ultimately, the classic human versus robotic debate fails to capture the full 

scope of the space endeavor because it fails to account for time. Time will present 

new opportunities, new visions, and new generations with hfferent dreams to 

fulfii. The tra&tional human versus robotic controversy will suffer as time passes 

because it is essentially rooted in the past. Whatever technical merits guide the 

two points of view, the cultural context of both perspectives draws upon social 

movements that no longer play a dominant role in terrestrial affairs. 

Seen from the perspective of the past, the human spaceflight movement 

resides in a utopian vision of Earthly activities that romanticizes events such 

as the settlement of the North American continent by Europeans and the 

“golden age” of terrestrial exploration. Even if the motivating events did 

occur as described by advocates of space travel-which is doubtful-they are 

not easily transferred to the reality of space. 

Robotic flight does not fare much better. An analysis of the social commentary on robotics sets that movement squarely in the context of the industrial 

revolution and the disappearance of involuntary servitude. Support for robotics, 

especially as it appears in science fiction, arises from the utopian belief that 

industrial-age machines can be engineered to work like obedient servants, toiling 

alongside humans and relieving them of the need to perform dangerous or 

tedious space activities. This outlook is well expressed by the early belief that 

space robots would take the form of androids-machines in human form 

performing human work. In general, however, robotic spacecraft have not 

adopted the human form.When urged to propose a robot for the Hubble repair, 

NASA officials eschewed plans for an androidlike Robonaut in favor of a 

mechanism that looked like aTransformers toy. A concept under development at 

NASA’s Johnson Space Center, Robonaut is an automated device with the arms, 

torso, and head of an astronaut. It looks like a human being. NASA officials 

instead suggested a design based on the Canadian-built Special Purpose Dexterous 

Manipulator (Dextre) designed for the International Space Station.” 

The industrial age, with its emphasis upon machines that perform human 

functions like lifting and digging, encouraged the contemplation of robots 

that did the work of human beings. The industrial age, however, has been 

50. NASA, “Robonaut,” http://robonaut,jsc.nasa.gov (accessed 5 January 2005); Francis Reedy, 

“Hubble: Robot to the Rescue?” Astronomy, 12 August 2004, http://www.astronomy.com/asy/dt$aulf. 

aspx?c=aGid=2377 (accessed 5 January 2005). 
106 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

supplanted by the postindustrial, with its emphasis upon electronic networks 

and computers. This may encourage popular interest to move away from space 

robots as human substitutes toward machines of a different sort. In the future, 

such machines might take the form of elaborate space telescopes that rely upon 

electromagnetic techniques to investigate extraterrestrial phenomena, cosmic 

listening posts, or even devices built to evade the conventional notions of 

space and time. 

At the highest level, the human versus robot debate fails to account for 

changes in the species who frame it. People who envision the ultimate purpose 

of space activity anticipate its continuation over extraordinarily long periods. 

Commenting on the necessity of spaceflight, Robert Goddard noted that 

homo sapiens would need to move once “the sun grows colder,” an event not 

likely to occur for billions of years. Setting a shorter but nonetheless epochal 

timeframe, astronomer Carl Sagan predicted that the galactic collisions that 

destroy species every 10 to 30 million years would force human migration. 

“Such a discussion may seem academic in the extreme,” Goddard remarked, 

noting the very long time periods involved. Yet people who investigate space 

tend to think in cosmological terms. The ultimate choice, concluded Sagan, 

“is spaceflight or e~tinction.”~’ 

The introduction of very long periods of time creates a dynamic situation 

not extensively analyzed in the traditional human versus robot debate. A species 

that survives long enough to overcome solar destruction would certainly 

undergo genetic modification. This could occur gradually, or the species might 

acquire the means to reengineer lifeforms, including its own, in ways that 

make space travel more accessible. Either way, changes will occur over the 

periods of time during which space enthusiasts hope to prosper and survive. 

Under such conditions, reconsideration of original expectations is inevitable. The human and robotic visions that motivated the first half century of 

spaceflight may continue to play a powerful role, especially for the exploration 

of the solar system. Yet it would be foolish to assume that they will be the only 

visions to ever inspire public policy and captivate public attention. 

Rather than view the progress of space exploration as a two-sided contest 

between humans and robots, it is probably wise to consider what other visions 

might emerge. The history ofspace exploration suggests that motivating visions 

arise from social outlooks and the tempering influence of physical reality. This 

chapter has reviewed the human and robotic spaceflight visions and, from this 

perspective, speculated on the type of visions that might motivate future space 

activities. What arises is something more than the conventional two-sided 

debate-a future with perhaps four points of view. 

51. Goddard and Pendray, eds., Papers ofRobert H. Goddard, vol. 3, p. 1612; Carl Sagan, Pale Blue 

Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space (New York: Random House, 1994), p. 327. 
CHAPTER 4 

HUMAN-MACHINE ISSUES IN 

THE SOVIET SPACE PROGRAM’ 

Slava Gerovitch 

n December 1968, Lieutenant General Nikolai Kamanin, the Deputy Chief I of the Air Force’s General Staff in charge of cosmonaut selection and training, 

wrote an article for the Red Stay, the Soviet Armed Forces newspaper, about the 

forthcoming launch of Apollo 8. He entitled his article “Unjustified Risk” and 

said all the right things that Soviet propaganda norms prescribed in this case. 

But he also kept a private diary. In that diary, he confessed what he could not 

say in an open publication.“Why do the Americans attempt a circumlunar flight 

before we do?” he asked. Part of his private answer was that Soviet Spacecraft 

designers “over-automated” their spacecraft and relegated the cosmonaut to 

the role of a monitor, if not a mere passenger. The attempts to create a fully 

automatic control system for the Soyuz spacecraft, he believed, critically delayed 

its development. “We have fallen behind the United States for two or three 

years,” he wrote in the diary. “We could have been first on the Moon.”2 

Kamanin’s criticism was shared by many in the cosmonaut corps who 

described the Soviet approach to the division of function between human and 

machine as “the domination of a~tomata.”~ Yet among the spacecraft designers, 

1. I wish to thank David Mindell, whose work on human-machine issues in the U.S. space program 

provided an important reference point for my own study of a parallel Soviet story. Many ideas for this 

paper emerged out of discussions with David in the course of our collaboration on a project on the 

history of the Apollo Guidance Computer between 2001 and 2003, and later during our work on a 

joint paper for the 2004 annual meeting of the Society for the History of Technology in Amsterdam. 

I wish to express my gratitude to Asif Siddiqi and Valentina Ponomareva for sharing their insights 

into the hstory of the Sovlet space program, as well as copies of relevant archval documents. I am 

also indebted to Stanislav Marchenko, Georgii Prns, Viktor Przhiyallcovsky, Irina Solov’eva, Vlammr 

Syromatmkov, Iurii Tiapchenko, Iurii Zybin, and the staff of the Archive for Scientific and Techmcal 

Documentation in Moscow for providmg invaluable help with my research. I am especially thankfd to 

John L. Goodman for hs detded comments on early versions of this paper. 

2. Nikolai Kamanin, Skrytyr kosrnos, vol. 3, 2967-2968 (Moscow: Novosti kosmonavtiki, 1999), 

p. 335 (12 December 1968). 

3. Georgii Beregovoi, as quoted in Valentina Ponomareva, “Nachalo vtorogo etapa razvitiia 

pilotiruemoi kosmonavtiki (1965-1970 gg ),” in lssledovanrra po rstorii 1 teoni razvrtira avratsronnoi i 

raketno-kosmrcheskoi tekhnrki, vyp. 8-10, ed. Boris Raushenbakh (Moscow: Nauka, 2001), p 166. 
108 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

a different point of view prevailed. They regarded the high degree of automation on Soviet spacecraft as a remarkable achievement. The leading control 

system designer Boris Chertok, for example, praised the implementation of fully 

automatic docking on Soyuz, in contrast to the human-mediated rendezvous 

procedure on Apollo. “We did not copy the American approach,” he argued, 

“and that proved to be one of the strengths of Soviet cosm~nautics.”~ 

The historiography of the Soviet space program has devoted little attention 

to on-board automation, treating it largely as a narrow technical issue.Yet the 

intensity of debates within the Soviet space program over the &vision of control 

functions between human and machine, both in the design phase and during 

spaceflights, indicates that the issue has fundamental importance. The success or 

failure of specific missions often depended on crucial control decisions made by 

the crew, the on-board automatics, or the ground control. The correctness and 

timeliness of such decisions critically depended on the integration of human 

decision-makers into a large, complex, technological system. 

The problem of on-board automation, which tied together the interests 

of different professional groups, provides a window into the internal politics 

of the Soviet space program. Recent scholarship on the Soviet space program 

has largely been devoted to biographies, organizational history, and policy 

analysis, emphasizing the competition among different design bureaus and the 

lack of a coherent government p01icy.~ While most accounts focus on only one 

of the relevant groups-the cosmonauts, the engineers, or the policy-making 

community-a study of human-machine issues illuminates the roles of all major 

professional groups within the Soviet space program. Aviation designers, rocket 

engineers, human engineering specialists, and cosmonauts had very different 

assumptions about the role of the human on board a spacecraft. A study of the 

actual division of function between human and machine on board would help 

us understand the role of these groups in shaping the Soviet space program. 

The issue of on-board automation is also closely linked to the definition of 

the cosmonaut profession.Debates on the relative importance ofcosmonauts’skills 

as pilots, engineers, or researchers reveal the connections between technological 

choices, professional identity, and the social status of cosmonauts.The seemingly 

4. Boris E. Chertok, Rakety i lrudi, vol. 3, Goriachie dni kholodnoi voiny, 3rd ed. (Moscow: 

Mashinostroenie, 2002), p. 393. 

5. For recent biographies, see Iaroslav Golovanov, Korolev: Fakty i m$y (Moscow: Nauka, 1994); 

James Harford, Korolev: How One Man Masterminded the Soviet Drive to Beat America to the Moon (New 

York: John Wiley & Sons, 1997). For analysis of the inner workings of space policy-making and 

institutional conflicts, see William P. Barry, “The Missile Design Bureaux and Soviet Piloted Space 

Policy, 1953-1974” (Ph.D. diss., Oxford Universlty, 1995); Roger D. Launius, John M. Logsdon, 

and Robert W. Smith, eds., Reconsidering Sputnik: Forty Years Since the Soviet Satellite (Amsterdam, 

Netherlands: Harwood Academic Publishers, 2000); Asif A. Siddiqi, Challenge to Apollo: The Soviet 

Union and the Space Race, 1945-1974 (Washington, DC: NASA SP-4408,2000). 
HUMAN-MACHINE ISSUES IN THE SOVIET MANNED SPACE PROGRAM 109 

The original 1960 group of cosmonauts is shown in May 1961 at the seaside port of 

Sochi. The names of many of these men were considered state secrets for more than 

25 years. Sitting in front, from left to right: Pavel Popovich, Viktor Gorbatko, Yevgeniy 

Khrunov, Yuri Gagarin, Chief Designer Sergey Korolev, his wife Nina Koroleva with 

Popovich’s daughter Natasha, Cosmonaut Training Center Director Yevgeniy Karpov, 

parachute trainer Nikolay Nikitin, and physician Yevgeniy Fedorov. Standing the second 

row, from left to right: Aleksey Leonov, Andrian Nikolayev, Mars Rafikov, Dmitriy Zaykin, 

Boris Volynov, German Titov, Grigoriy Nelyubov, Valeriy Bykovskiy, and Georgiy Shonin. 

In the back, from left to right: Valentin Filatyev, Ivan Anikeyev, and Pavel Belyayeu. 

Four cosmonauts were missing from the photograph: Anatoliy Kartashov and Valentin 

Varlamov had both been dropped from training because of injuries; Valentin Bondarenko 

died in a training accident a few months before; and Vladimir Komarov was indisposed. 

I. Snegirev took the original photo. (NASA photo no. cosrnonaurs0ll 

technical problem of on-board automation raises larger questions of the nature 

and purpose of human spaceflight. An examination of different approaches to 

human-machine issues uncovers competing visions of spaceflight as a piloting 

mission, an engineering task, or a research enterprise. 

Comparative studies of the American and Soviet aerospace industries 

have addressed the role of the national context in space engineering.6 Soviet 

space program participants often regarded the U.S. as the paragon of a “humancentered” approach to spacecraft design. A leading spacecraft designer, for exam6. See Stephen J. Garber, “Birds of a Feather? How Politics and Culture Affected the Designs 

of the U.S. Space Shuttle and the Soviet Buran” (master’s thesis, Virginia Institute of Technology, 

2002); Leon Trilling, “Styles of Military Technical Development: Soviet and U.S. Jet Fighters, 

1945-1960,” in Science, Technology, and the Military, ed. E. Mendelsohn, M. R. Smith, and P. 

Weingart (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer, 1988), pp. 155-185. 
110 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

ple, remarked “‘Americans rely on the human being, while we are installing 

heavy trunks of triple-redundancy automatic^."^ A closer look at both American 

and Soviet space programs through the prism of on-board automation reveals 

a more complex picture. By exploring the arguments of internal debates, the 

diversity of engineering cultures, and the negotiations among various groups 

favoring different approaches to automation, one could critically reexamine the 

stereotype of fixed “national styles” in space engineering. 

In this essay, I shall review a number of human-machine issues raised at 

different phases in the Soviet space program from the early 1960s to the late 1970s. 

From my perspective, the problem of on-board automation was not a purely 

technical issue, but also a political issue-not in terms of big politics, but in terms 

of “small” politics, local politics. My approach is to examine how technological 

choices were shaped by power relations, institutional cultures, and informal 

decision-malung mechanisms, and how these choices, in turn, had significant 

ramifications for the direction of the Soviet space program and ultimately defined 

not only the functions of machines, but also the roles of human beings. 

I will argue that the Soviet approach to the problem ofon-boardautomation 

was neither fixed nor predetermined; it evolved over time and diversified across 

different institutions and projects. Instead of a single, dominating approach, 

we find a series of debates, negotiations, and compromises. In my view, the 

division of function between human and machine on board had much to do 

with the division of power on the ground among different groups involved 

in the debates over automation. I will illustrate how these episodes can be 

taken as entry points into larger historical issues about politics, organization, 

and culture of the Soviet space enterprise. Finally, I will suggest directions for 

further research into this subject. 

AUTOMATION ON VOSTOK: 

TECHNOLOGICAL, DISCIPLINARY, AND MEDICAL FACTORS 

The first spacecraft-the Soviet Vostok and the American Mercury-were 

both fully automated and were flight-tested first in the unpiloted mode. Yet 

there was one important difference: the astronaut on board had a wider range 

of manual control functions than the cosmonaut. This can be illustrated by a 

simple comparison of the control panels of Vostok and Mercury. The Vostok 

panel had only 4 switches and 35 indicators, while the Mercury instrument 

panel had 56 switches and 76 indicaton8 There were only two manual control 

7. Chertok, Rakety i liudi, vol. 3, p. 257. 

8. For a comparison of the technical parameters of manual control panels on American and Soviet 

spacecraft, see Georgii T. Beregovoi et al., Eksperimentalno-psikhologicheskie issledovaniia v aviatsii i 

kosmonavtike (Moscow: Nauka, 1978), pp. 62-63. 
HUMAN-MACHINE ISSUES IN THE SOVIET MANNED SPACE PROGRAM 11 1 

functions that a cosmonaut could perform in case of emergency: orientation of 

the spacecraft into correct attitude and firing of the retrorocket for descent? 

The range ofmanual control functions available to and actually performed 

by American astronauts was much wider. They could override the automatic 

system in such essential tasks as separating the spacecraft from the booster, 

activating the emergency rescue system, parachute release, dropping the main 

parachute in case of failure and activating the second parachute, correcting 

the on-board control system, and many other functions not available to Soviet 

cosmonauts.1° 

Different authors have offered a number of explanations for the Soviet 

reliance on automation in the case of Vostok: 

1) High reliability ofautomatic control: Soviet rockets could lift greater weights, 

and therefore the Soviets could install redundant sets of automatic 

equipment to ensure its reliability. 

2) Disciplinary bias of rocket engineers: Unlike American space engineers, 

who came from the aviation industry, Soviet spacecraft designers drew 

on specific engineering traditions in rocketry, and they were not 

accustomed to assign humans a significant role on board. 

3) Health and safety concerns: There existed doubts about the cosmonaut’s 

mental and physical capacity to operate the spacecraft in orbit. 

Some of these explanations do have a grain of truth. Yet they mostly reflect 

partisan positions in internal Soviet debates over the proper division of control 

functions between human and machine. 

The first, ‘‘technological” explanation is most favored by spacecraft designers, who view it as an “objective” basis for automation. Indeed, the Vostok 

rocket could lift to the orbit a 4.5-ton spacecraft, while the Americans could 

launch only 1.3 to 1.8 tons. Using this extra weight, the argument goes, 

the Soviets could afford to build redundant, more reliable systems and to 

construct a fully automatic spacecraft, while the Americans were forced to 

delegate some of the functions to the astronaut on board. The space journalist 

Iaroslav Golovanov wrote: “The American astronaut had to work more than 

the Soviet cosmonaut because the weight of Vostok was more than twice 

9. Valentina Ponomareva, “Osobennosti razvitiia pilotiruemoi kosmonavtiki na nachal’nom 

etape,” in Iz istorii raketno-kosmicheskoi nauki i tekhniki, vyp. 3, ed. V. S. Avduevskii et al. (Moscow: 

IIET RAN, 1999), pp. 132-167; Siddiqi, Challenge to Apollo, p. 196. 

10. Robert B. Voas, “A Description of the Astronaut’s Task in Project Mercury,” Human Factors 

(July 1961): 149-165. 
112 CRITICAL ISSUES INTHE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

the weight of Mercury, and this made it possible to relieve [the cosmonaut] of 

many in-flight tasks.”” 

Interestingly, this argument only suggests an explanation for the need 

for a broad range of manual control functions on Mercury, while the Soviet 

preference for complete automation is assumed as a natural solution. Those 

who used this argument clearly took it for granted that automatic systems 

were inherently more reliable than human control. Indeed, most Vostok 

designers viewed the cosmonaut on board as a weak link, a source of potential 

errors. The leading integration designer Konstantin Feoktistov openly told 

the cosmonauts, for example, that “in principle, all the work will be done by 

automatic systems in order to avoid any accidental human errors.”12 

In fact, it is by no means obvious why should one use weight reserves to 

install redundant sets of equipment instead of building a more flexible and 

sophisticated manual control system. Soviet space designers admitted that the 

on-board equipment that they were supplied with was so unreliable that 

installing extra sets was the only way to ensure an acceptable risk of failure. Boris 

Chertok acknowledged that the Americans were able to make a much better 

use of their weight reserves than the Soviets. He wrote: “The weight of Gemini 

was only 3.8 tons.Vostok weighed almost a ton more, andvoskhod 2 almost 2 

tons more than Gemini.Yet Gemini surpassed the Vostoks and the Voskhods in 

all respect^."'^ Gemini had a rendezvous radar, an inertial guidance system with 

a digital computer, a set of fuel cells with a water regenerator, and many other 

types of on-board equipment that the first Soviet spacecraft lacked. 

The second, “disciplinary” explanation is often put forward by cosmonauts, who tend to blame the “overautomation” of Soviet spacecraft on the 

professional background of rocket engineers. According to the space historian 

and former cosmonaut candidate Valentina Ponomareva, “In the United 

States space technology developed on the basis of aviation, and its traditional 

attitude toward the pilot was transferred to space technology. In the Soviet 

Union the base for the space enterprise was artillery and rocketry. Rocketry 

specialists never dealt with a ‘human on board’; they were more familiar with 

the concept of automatic control.”14 This argument assumes that the Soviet 

space program was a culturally homogeneous assembly of rocket engineers. 

In fact, Chief Designer Sergei Korolev, under whose leadership Vostok was 

11. Golovanov, Korolev, p. 604. A similar argument is presented in Ponomareva, “Osobennosti 

razvitiia,” p. 144. 

12. Quoted in Vladimir Komarov, Workbook No. 39, 1961, Gagarin Memorial Museum, Town 

of Gagarin, Russia, http://hrst.mit.edu/hrs/apollo/soviet/documents/doc-komarov39.pdf (accessed 21 

April 2005). 

13. Chertok, Rakety i liudi, vol. 3, pp. 256-257. 

14. Ponomareva, “Osobennosti razvitiia,” p. 161. 
HUMAN-MACHINE ISSUES IN THE SOVIET MANNED SPACE PROGRAM 113 

constructed, had come into rocketry from aeronautics; in the 1920s and 1930s, 

he had designed and tested glider^.'^ His deputies, leading spacecraft designers 

Pavel Tsybin and Sergei Okhapkin, had previously been prominent aircraft 

designers. Heated debates over the division of function between human and 

machine often broke out within the space engineering community, and the 

opponents in those disputes were not necessarily divided along the lines of 

their disciplinary background. For example, in July 1963, when the leadership 

of Korolev’s design bureau discussed various options for lunar exploration, it 

was the aviation designer Pavel Tsybin who advocated the use of automatic 

spacecraft, and it was the rocket designer Mikhail Tikhonravov who insisted 

on the development of piloted spaceships.16 Tikhonravov also argued in favor 

of making Vostok controls completely manual.” 

Soviet cosmonauts with aircraft piloting background in private tended 

to blame rocket engineers, nicknamed “artillerymen,” for any design flaws. 

For example, during her training as a cosmonaut, Valentina Ponomareva 

noticed that yaw and roll in the hand controller on the Vostok spacecraft were 

rearranged as compared to a typical aircraft hand controller. Fellow cosmonauts 

told her that it was “because artillerymen had built it.”18 As it turned out, the 

controller was developed by specialists from the Air Force Flight Research 

Institute, which specialized in aviation control equipment. Yaw and roll were 

rearranged because the controller itself was positioned differently (which, in 

turn, was the result of a different position of the cosmonaut as compared to 

the aircraft pilot). Moreover, since spacecraft could rotate in all directions, 

yaw and roll in some cases simply changed places. There was no conspiracy of 

“artillerymen” here; it was aviation specialists who designed manual control 

and information display equipment for Soviet spacecraft.” 

The third, “medical” explanation often cited Soviet doctors’ concern 

that the cosmonaut’s mental and physical capacities might be impaired during 

the flight.20 In fact, although doctors did study the issue of the cosmonaut’s 

health and working capacity in orbit, they were not pushing for automation. 

On the contrary, the leading physician, Vladimir Yazdovskii, was in favor of 

expanding the range of Yuri Gagarin’s tasks on the first human flight, while 

15. See Golovanov, Korolev. 

16. Vasilii Mishin, diary, 22 July 1963, NASA Historical Reference Collection, Washington, 

17. Ponomareva, “Osobennosti razvitiia,” p. 147. 

18. Valentina Ponomareva interview, Moscow, 17 May 2002, http://hrst.mit.edu/hrs/apollo/soviet/ 

interviewhterview-ponomareva. htm (accessed 21 April 2005). 

19. Yurii Tiapchenko, “Information Display Systems for Russian Spacecraft: An Overview,” 

trans. Slava Gerovitch, http://hrst.mit.edu/hrs/apollo/soviet/essays/essay-tiapchenkol. htm (accessed 21 

April 2005). 

DC. 

20. Ponomareva, “Osobennosti razvitiia,” p. 145. 
114 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

A pensive Yuri Gagarin is in the bus on the way to the launchpad on the morning of 12 

April 1961. Behind him, seated, is his backup, German Titov. Standing are cosmonauts 

Grigoriy Nelyubov and Andrian Nikolayev. Gagarin began his cosmonaut training 

in 1960, along with 19 other candidates. On 12 April 1961, Gagarin lifted off in the 

automated Vostok 1 spacecraft, and after a 108-minute flight, he parachuted safely to 

the ground in the Saratov region of the USSR. As the first human to fly in space, he 

successfully completed one orbit around Earth. After his historic flight, Gagarin became 

an international symbol for the Soviet space program, and in 1963, he was appointed 

Deputy Director of the Cosmonaut Training Center. In 1966, he served as a backup 

crew member for Soyuz 1, and on 17 February 1968, he completed a graduate degree 

in technical sciences. Tragically, during flight training in a UTI-MiG-I5 aircraft on 27 

March 1968, Gagarin was killed when his plane crashed. (NASA photo no. GagarinOll 
HUMAN-MACHINE ISSUES IN THE SOVIET MANNED SPACE PROGRAM 115 

Chief Designer Sergei Korolev insisted that Gagarin should limit his actions 

to visual inspection of on-board equipment and should not touch any controls. 

Korolev’s cautious approach may have been prompted by the responsibility 

placed on him by the political authorities. It was Nikita Khrushchev himself 

who on 3 April 1961, just a few days before Gagarin’s flight, at a meeting of 

the Presidium of the Party Central Committee, raised the question about the 

cosmonaut’s working capacity and psychological stability in orbit. Korolev 

had to give his personal assurances.21 Not relying entirely on the disciplining 

force of cosmonaut’s written instructions, spacecraft designers took some 

technological measures to prevent any accidental damage from the cosmonaut’s 

actions in case he did lose his psychological stability. They blocked the manual 

orientation system for reentry with a digital lock. There was some debate 

whether to give the combination to the cosmonaut or to transmit it over the 

radio in case of emergency, and eventually they decided to put the combination 

in a sealed envelope and to place it on board so that the cosmonaut could open 

it in an emergency.22 

In the end, Soviet officials decided to give Gagarin a “broader” set of 

functions, such as checking equipment before launch, writing down his 

observations and instrument readings in the on-board journal, and reporting 

those over the radio. As doctors explained, keeping the cosmonaut busy would 

help deflect his attention from possible negative emotions during g-loads and 

weightles~ness.~~ 

None of the three popular explanations-the reliability of redundant 

automatics, the disciplinary bias of rocket engineers, and the uncertainty about 

human performance in orbit-provides an unequivocal argument in favor of 

automation. All three aspects of the problem of automation-technological, 

disciplinary, and medical-involved debates and negotiations, whose outcome 

was not predetermined from the very beginning. 

21. Nikolai Kamanin, Skrytyi kosmos, vol. 1, 1960-1963 (Moscow: Infortekst, 1995), pp. 23 

(diary entry of 2 March 1961), 43 (diary entry of 4 April 1961). 

22. As it turned out, two people independently told Yuri Gagarin the combination before 

the launch so that he would not have to waste time on opening the envelope in case of real 

emergency. See Boris E. Chertok, Rakety i liudi, vol. 2, Fili-Podlipki-Tiuratam, 3rd ed. (Moscow: 

Mashinostroenie, 2002), pp. 428-429. r 

23. Siddiqi, Challenge to Apollo, p. 264. 
116 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

VOSTOK DUAL USE: 

MILITARYICIVILIAN AND AUTOMATIUMANUAL 

Recently published materials suggest another explanation for the Soviet 

reliance on automation in the design ofVostok, an explanation that emphasizes 

the social shaping of technology. It suggests that the military context played a 

decisive role in defining civilian technologies in the Soviet space program. 

Vostok was designed at the Experimental Design Bureau No. 1, led by 

Chief Designer Sergei Korolev, as an add-on to its main specialty, ballistic 

missiles. In November 1958, the Council of Chief Designers discussed three 

alternative proposals for a new spacecraft: an automatic reconnaissance satellite, 

a piloted spacecraft for a ballistic flight, and a piloted spacecraft for an orbital 

flight. The reconnaissance satellite designers pushed their proposal, stressing 

its primary importance for defense. This clearly had an appeal to the military, 

the Design Bureau’s main customers. A rival group, led by the integration 

designer Konstantin Feoktistov, decided to support their proposal for a piloted 

spacecraft for an orbital flight with what he called a “tactical maneuver”: they 

claimed that their piloted spaceship could be converted into a fully automatic 

spacecraft and used as a reconnaissance satellite, which would be able to return 

to Earth not just a small container with film, but a large capsule with the entire 

camera set. This promised to kill two birds with one stone! Feoktistov drafted 

a proposal for a piloted spacecraft in the guise of an automatic reconnaissance 

satellite and submitted it to the Military-Industrial Commission of the Soviet 

Council of Ministers. Some officials became suspicious when they noticed, 

for example, that the presumably automatic satellite was equipped with a set 

of communication devices, and they inquired, “Who is going to talk over 

this radio? The photo cameras?”24 But Feoktistov was able to fend off such 

suspicions, and his proposal was approved. 

At this early stage, the competition between automatic satellites and 

piloted spaceships was resolved by making piloted ships also fully automatic 

so that they could be flown in both piloted and unpiloted modes. Since the 

first Soviet piloted spacecraft had to serve a dual purpose-both military and 

civilian-its controls also had to be dual, both automatic and manual. 

Only having a fully automatic spacecraft at hand, spacecraft designers began 

carving out a role for the cosmonaut to play. By early 1960, Boris Raushenbakh’s 

department at the Experimental Design Bureau No. 1 completed its design of 

the automatic control system, and after that, they began working on manual 

control.That is, the issue here was not the automation of certain functions of 

a human pilot, but the transfer of certain functions from an existing automatic 

system to a human pilot. What really needs an explanation is not why Vostok 

24. Konstantin Feoktistov, Traektoriia zhizni (Moscow: Vagrius, ZOOO), p. 62. 
HUMAN-MACHINESSUES IN THE SOVIET MANNED SPACE PROGRAM 117 

was automated, but why it had a manual control system at all. Its purposes w-ere 

to back up the automatic system in case of malfunction, to expand the window 

for controlled descent, and, most importantly, to provide psychological support 

to the cosmonaut. As Raushenbakh put it,“The cosmonaut must be convinced 

that even if ground control equipment and the on-board automatic system fail, 

he would be able to ensure his safety himself.”25 

While Gagarin had to limit his in-flight activity to monitoring and reporting, during subsequent Vostok flights, the cosmonauts successfully tested the 

manual attitude-control system and performed other duties and experiments. 

In particular, they tested the human ability to carry out military tasks. 

Korolev had previously suggested that the piloted version of Vostok could be 

used “to exterminate [enemy] satellite^."^^ Tests performed by the cosmonauts 

Nikolaev and Popovich on Vostok 3 and Vostok 4 demonstrated that the 

human was “capable of performing in space all the military tasks analogous 

to aviation tasks (reconnaissance, intercept, strike). Vostok could be used for 

reconnaissance, but intercept and strike would require the construction of 

new, more advanced spacecraft.” From this information, Kamanin concluded 

that “man can maintain good working capacity in a prolonged spaceflight. 

The ‘central character’ in space is man, not an automat~n.”~’ 

THE VOSKHOD 2 MISSION: 

THE COSMONAUT TAKES CONTROL 

While the cosmonauts believed that the first spaceflights had demonstrated 

the human ability to perform in orbit, the engineers largely interpreted the same 

events as confirming the high reliability of automatic systems. Soviet engineers 

initially viewed the automatics and the cosmonaut not as a single, integrated 

system, but as two separate, alternative ways to control a spacecraft.They sought 

ways to make the automatic control system independently reliable, rather than 

trying to optimize interaction between human and machine.The probabhty of a 

system malfunction that would require resorting to manual control seemed 

remote, and the manual control system did not seem to have primary importance 

for spacecraft designers. So when they redesignedvostok for a three-men crew 

(thevoskhod mission) and later for a spacewalk (thevoskhod 2 mission), it was the 

manual control system that got short shrift.To fit in all the new equipment, the 

designers had to move the main instrument panel and the optical sight from the 

25. Aleksei Eliseev, Zhizn-kaplia v more (Moscow: Aviatsiia i kosmonavtika, 1998), p. 15. 

26. Sergei Korolev, “Tezisy doklada PO kosmosu,” June 1960, Russian State Archive of the 

27. Kamanin, Skrytyi kosmos, vol. 1, pp. 174 (diary entry of 13 September 1962), 149 (diary entry 

Economy (RGAE), f. 298, op. 1, d. 1483,l. 246. 

of 16 August 1962). 
118 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

front to the left side, and the hand controller was also moved.28Additional technical 

measures were taken to ensure the reliability of the automatic control system, and 

yet when a life-threatening emergency occurred during the Voskhod 2 flight in 

March 1965, only the cosmonauts’ ingenuity and skill saved their lives. 

When the Voskhod 2 crew-the commander, Pave1 Beliaev, and the 

first “spacewalker,” Alexei Leonov-were preparing for descent, the automatic 

attitude-correction system failed. Because of an error in the mathematical 

model, the automatics decided that the orientation engines were malfunctioning 

and shut them down. Without proper orientation, the firing of the retrorocket 

was automatically blocked, threatening to leave the crew stranded in the orbit. 

After some deliberation, the ground control ordered the cosmonauts to perform 

manual orientation, which was the only option available at that point. 

To use the manual system, however, was no easy task. Because of a peculiar 

cabin layout, the optical sight and the hand controller were located to the left of 

the commander’s seat, rather than in front of it.The cosmonauts could not look 

through the sight or operate the controller while remaining in their seats. Both 

cosmonauts had to unbuckle their seatbelts and leave their seats. Beliaev also had 

to take off his space helmet because he could not bend his neck in it. He had to 

lie down across both seats, since only while lying down could he use both hands 

to operate the manual controls. In the meantime, Leonov crawled under his seat 

and was holding Beliaev by his torso, since in zero gravity, Beliaev tended to float 

away and block the optical sight.After the orientation, the cosmonauts needed to 

fire the retrorocket. But before firing it, they had to return to their seats to balance 

the spacecraft, and they lost 30 or 40 seconds.They spent a few more seconds 

doublechecking the orientation and then fired the retrorocket. As a result of these 

delays, the spacecraft overshot its destination.The crew landed in the middle of a 

thick forest, and before a rescue team was able to reach them, they had to spend 

two nights on the snow, hiding in their space capsule from hungry wolves.29 

The Voskhod 2 story also provided an interesting test case for assigning 

responsibility for various errors to human or machine. The investigating 

commission noted that the flawed spacecraft design made it impossible for the 

crew to control the ship manually without leaving their seats, and at the same 

time, it criticized the crew for violating the rules. In the final report, however, 

the criticism of spacecraft design was dropped in exchange for removing the 

criticism of the crew.3o 

28. Eliseev, Zhizn’, p. 46. 

29. Boris E. Chertok, Rakety r Iiudr, vol. 4, Lunnara gonka (Moscow: Mashinostroenie, 2002), 

p. 418; Eliseev, Zhrm’, p. 58; Nikolai Kamanin, Skrytyi kowtos, vol. 2, 1964-1966 (Moscow: 

Infortekst, 1997), p. 190 (diary entry of 22 April 1965); Ponomareva, “Osobennosti razvitiia,” pp. 

157-158; Siddiqi, Challenge to Apollo, p. 458. 

30. Kamanin, Skrytyi kosrnos, vol. 2, pp. 197 (diary entry of 8 May 1965), 199 (diary entry of 13 

May 1965). 
HUMAN-MACHINE ISSUES IN THE SOVIET MANNED SPACE PROGRAM 1 19 

DESIGNING A COSMONAUT FOR SOYUZ 

The second-generation Soviet spacecraft, Soyuz, was designed for a much 

wider range of missions than Vostok, including Earth-orbit rendezvous and 

docking. The problem of an efficient division of function between human and 

machine on Soyuz became the subject of a heated, if closely contained, debate 

within the Soviet space community. Two groups-the spacecraft designers 

and the cosmonauts-had very different perspectives on this issue. Briefly put, 

their positions were as follows. 

The spacecraft designers argued that on-board automation had clear advantages. It allowed 1) to test piloted spacecraft in the unpiloted mode, thereby 

reducing time and expense on ground tests and increasing flight safety; 2) to 

lower eligibility criteria and reduce training time for cosmonauts; 3) to correct 

errors in flight.31 The engineers were willing to assign the cosmonauts a 

backup function but preferred to keep the automatic mode as nominal. 

The cosmonaut corps, on the other hand, tended to view the automation 

of control functions as excessive and hampering the “progress” of human 

spaceflight. They argued that a human operator would increase the reliability 

and effectiveness of a space mission. They especially stressed the human ability 

to act in unexpected situations, to cope with equipment failures, and to 

perform in-flight repairs. They argued that full automation alienated the pilot 

from his craft. They insisted that instead of fitting the human into an existing 

technological system, one must design human activity first and then determine 

specifications for the technological components of the system.32 

The Soviet space program’s organizational structure (or lack thereof) 

gave the spacecraft designers a decided advantage over the cosmonauts in such 

internal disputes. The Soviet space program was not supervised by a central 

government agency like NASA, but was scattered over a large number ofdefense 

industry, military, and academic institutions. The chief contractor for SoyuzKorolev’s Experimental Design Bureau No. 1-exercised unprecedented control over the course of the space program. Korolev himself, in particular, 

played a central role in decision-making on a whole range of issues going 

far beyond engineering, such as spacecraft procurement, cosmonaut training, 

crew selection, programming of missions, and ground flight control.33 It was 

31. Vladimir S. Syromiatnikov, 100 rasskazov o stykovke i o drugikh prikliucheniiakh v kosmose i na 

Zemle, vol. 1, 20 let nazad (Moscow: Logos, 2003), p. 83. 

32. See Beregovoi et al., Eksperimentalno-psikhologicheskie issledovaniia, pp. 192, 270; Ponomareva, 

“Nachalo vtorogo etapa”; Ponomareva, “Osobennosti razvitiia.” 

33. On Korolev, see Golovanov, Korolev; Harford, Korolev; Boris V. Raushenbakh, ed., S.P. 

Korolev i ego delo: suet i teni v istorii kosmonavtiki (Moscow: Nauka, 1998). In the eyes of Korolev’s 

continued on page 50 
120 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

the engineers’ vision of the proper division of function between human and 

machine that was largely implemented in the Soviet space program. 

Soyuz designers recognized that manual control would “make it possible 

to get rid of a number of complex pieces of equipment and to simplify automatic 

control systems.”34 Compared to Vostok, they significantly broadened the 

range of manual control functions, but these new functions involved not so 

much piloting as monitoring numerous on-board systems and dealing with 

equipment malfunctions. A Soyuz cosmonaut was a different type of cosmonaut, an engineer more than a pilot. 

On the Soyuz program, requirements for the skills of the crew, selection criteria for the cosmonaut corps, and the very professional identity of 

cosmonauts began to change. The first group of Soviet cosmonauts that flew 

on Vostoks was selected from among young fighter pilots, who had little 

engineering background and modest flight experience compared to the 

more educated and experienced test pilots selected for the Mercury astronaut 

Sergei Korolev chose fighter pilots because of their universal skills 

as pilots, navigators, radio operators, and gunners.36 On a two- or three-seat 

Soyuz, these functions could now be divided among the crew members, and 

narrow specialists, more skilled in one task than another, could be brought 

on board. 

But there was also another, more important factor that precipitated a shift 

in the cosmonaut professional identity. In the decentralized organizational 

structure ofthe Soviet space program, spacecraft design and cosmonaut training 

were institutionally separated: the design and production of spacecraft was 

conducted under the Ministry of General Machine-Building, and cosmonaut 

training was the responsibility of the Air Force. As a result, the cosmonauts 

had very little input in spacecraft design. They pointed out that in the aviation 

industry, experienced pilots were regularly consulted during the design phase, 

while the cosmonaut pilots were entirely left out of spacecraft design.37 The 

engineers recognized the problem but came up with a different solution for 

it. Vasilii Mishin, who replaced Korolev as Chief Designer after his death, 

argued that “design solutions can only be checked [in flight] by highly qualcontinuedjom page 49 

subordinates, he was truly omnipotent. For example, Feoktistov claimed that crucial decisions 

concerning the Soviet space program were made “not by the Party Central Committee or the 

Soviet government, but by Korolev and [the defense industry leader Dmitrii] Ustinov (and often by 

Korolev alone), and later they managed, one way or another, to obtain a retroactive endorsement 

through an official decree” (Feoktistov, Traektoriia zhizni, pp. 36-37). 

34. Vasilii Mishin, quoted in Kamanin, Skryfyi kosrnos, vol. 2, p. 368 (diary entry of 17 August 

1966). 

35. Siddiqi, Challenge to Apollo, p. 246. 

36. Gherman S. Titov, “30 let spustia,” Aviafsiia i kosmonavtika, no. 8 (1991): 26. 

37. Chertok, Rakefy i liudi, vol. 4, p. 149. 
HUMAN-MACHINE ISSUES IN THE SOVIET MANNED SPACE PROGRAM 121 

ified specialists directly involved in designing and ground testing of the spacecraft.”38 Thus, instead of involving cosmonaut pilots in spacecraft design, he 

proposed to train space engineers as cosmonauts and to let them test new 

systems in flight. 

Soon, Mishin took practical steps toward changing the composition of the 

cosmonaut corps. In May 1966, the Experimental Design Bureau No. 1 set up 

a flight-methods department for the training of a civilian group of “cosmonaut 

testers.”39 This rapidly led to an open confrontation with Air Force officials, 

who defended their monopoly on cosmonaut selection and training. Wielding 

his influence with the Soviet leadership, Mishin threatened that only engineers 

and scientists would fly and that training at the Air Force Cosmonaut Training 

Center would be simplified or dispensed with alt~gether.~’ Eventually, a 

compromise was worked out by which a typical Soyuz crew would include 

one military pilot as mission commander, one civilian engineer, and one flight 

researcher, in whose seat military and civilians would alternate.41 

As spacecraft designers began to enter the cosmonaut corps, they introduced elements of engineering design into the planning of cosmonaut activity. 

The control system engineer and cosmonaut Alexei Eliseev, who took part in a 

spacewalk during the Soyuz 4-Soyuz 5 mission, applied a genuine engineering 

skill in designing a step-by-step procedure for the spacewalk, specifying the 

actions and code words for every crew member. This procedure was recorded 

on a 4-meter-long scroll of paper.42 The Experimental Design Bureau No. 

1 set up a special department, which designed cosmonaut activity so that it 

conformed to the logic ofon-board automatics. Control system designers worked 

in close contact with human engineering specialists, who conceptualized the 

spacecraft control system as a “cybernetic ‘human-machine’ system.”43 Adapting 

the cybernetic conceptual framework, they viewed control as a system function 

that could be performed by both human and machine. Human engineering 

specialists described the cosmonaut as a “living link’”4 in a human-machine 

system and analyzed this “link” in terms borrowed from control theory and 

information theory-the same terms that applied to the other, technical links 

38. Quoted in Kamanin, Skrytyi kosmos, vol. 2,p. 368 (diary entry of 17 August 1966). 

39. Siddiqi, Challenge to Apollo, p. 566. 

40. Chertok, Rakety i liudi, vol. 3, p. 242. 

41. Eliseev, Zhizn’, p. 165. 

42. Ibid., p. 91. 

43. V. G. Denisov, “Nekotorye aspekty problemy sochetaniia cheloveka i mashiny v slozhnykh 

sistemakh upravleniia,” in Problemy kosrnicheskoi biologii, ed. N. M. Sisakian and V. I. Iazdovskii, vol. 

2 (Moscow: Nauka, 1962), p. 54. 

44. V. G. Denisov, A. P. Kuz’mmov, and V. I. Iazdovskii, “Osnovnye problemy inzhenernoi 

psikhologii kosmicheskogo poleta,” in Problerny kosmicheskoi biologii, ed. N. M. Sisakian and V. I. 

Iazdovskii, vol. 3 (Moscow: Nauka, 1964), p. 77. 
122 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

in that system: delay time, perception speed, reaction speed, bandwidth, and 

so They discussed how efficiently a human operator could perform the 

functions of a logical switchboard, an amplifier, an integrator, a differentiator, 

and a computer.46 Spacecraft designers avoided using the word “pilot” and 

preferred the term “spacecraft guidance operator.’”’ The cosmonaut had to fit 

into an existing technological system, and human performance was effectively 

evaluated in machine terms. 

One of the main criteria for cosmonaut selection was the ability to carry 

out precisely programmed actions.48 Subsequent training was geared toward 

turning the human into a perfect machine. Spacecraft designers took to the 

heart a piece of advice given by Igor’ Poletaev, a leading Soviet cybernetics 

specialist. He argued that the way to avoid human error was to train the 

human to operate like a machine. He wrote: “The less his various human 

abilities are displayed, the more his work resembles the work of an automaton, 

the less [the human operator] debates and digresses, the better he carries out 

his task.”49 The cosmonaut training manual explicitly stated that “the main 

method of training is repetiti~n.”~’ Yuri Gagarin recalled how the cosmonauts 

were “getting used to every button and every tumbler switch, learned all 

the movements necessary during the flight, making them auto ma ti^."^' The 

Vostok 5 pilot Valerii Bykovskii was praised in his character evaluation for 

“the high stability of automation of 

The cosmonauts began to resent what they perceived as “excessive 

algorithmization” of their activity. They argued that the strict regulation of 

cosmonauts’ activity on board forced them “to work like an automaton” and 

stripped them of the possibility to plan their actions on their 

45. Denisov, “Nekotorye aspekty,” p. 55. 

46. P. K. Isakov, V. A. Popov, and M. M. Sil’vestrov, “Problemy nadezhnosti cheloveka v 

sistemakh upravleniia kosmicheskim korablem,” in Problemy kosmicheskoi biologii, ed. N. M. Sisakian, 

vol. 7 (Moscow: Nauka, 1967), p. 6. 

47. V. N. Kubasov, V. A. Taran, and S. N. Maksimov, Professional’naia podgotovka kosmonavtov 

(Moscow: Mashinostroenie, 1985), p. 278. 

48. Siddiqi, Challenge to Apollo, p. 244. 

49. Igor’ A. Poletaev, Signal: 0 nekotorykhponiatiiakh kzbernetiki (Moscow: Sovetskoe radio, 1958), 

50. Kubasov, Taran, and Maksimov, Professional’naia podgotovka, p. 138. 

51. Yuri Gagarin, Doroga v kosmos (Moscow: Pravda, 1961). 

52. Quoted in A. N. Babiichuk, Chelovek, nebo, kosmos (Moscow: Voenizdat, 1979), p. 209. 

53. Beregovoi et al., Eksperimentalno-psikhologrrheskie issledovanria, p. 31. 

p. 281. 
HUMAN-MACHINE ISSUES IN THE SOVIET MANNED SPACE PROGRAM 123 

SOYUZ FLIGHTS: DIVIDINGLORY AND RESPONSIBILITY 

BETWEEN HUMAN AND MACHINE 

Several emergency situations that occurred during Soyuz missions 

underscored the crucial importance of human-machine issues for spacecraft 

control. As the boundary between human and machine functions was often 

blurred, so was the responsibility for error. While accident investigators tended 

to assign the responsibility for error to either human or machine, failures 

were often systemic. In an emergency, rigid control schemes often had to be 

reconsidered and human and machine functions had to be redefined. Ground 

flight controllers frequently stepped in, further complicating the division of 

responsibility between human and machine. Ultimately, what often decided 

the success of the mission was not how much or how little the cosmonauts did, 

but how well they were integrated into the control system, which included 

both the on-board automatics and mission control. 

In April 1967, the Soyuz 1 mission had to be aborted after multiple equipment failures, and the cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov successfully performed 

manual attitude correction with an ad hoc method invented during the flight. 

Yuri Gagarin, who served as a CAPCOM on that mission, told the leading 

control system designer, “What could have we done without a human? Your 

ion system proved unreliable, a sensor failed, and you still don’t trust cosmonauts! ”54 In the end, yet another automatic system-the parachute releasefailed, and this time, the cosmonaut had no manual means to override it. The 

spacecraft hit the ground at full speed, and Komarov died. 

In October 1968, the cosmonaut Georgii Beregovoi on Soyuz 3 attempted 

a manual rendezvous, but he misread the target vehicle indicators and failed to 

approach the target. Engineers regarded this as a clear human error, yet Nikolai 

Kamanin, responsible for cosmonaut training, pointed out that the actual manual 

control system on board in certain respects differed from the version installed on 

a ground simulator and that the cosmonaut did not have adequate time to adjust 

to zero gravity. “I did not find my place within a human-machine structure,” 

admitted Beregovoi. He complained that the hand controllers were too sensitive, 

sending the spacecraft into motion at the slightest touch: “This is good for an 

automaton, but it creates extra tension for a human.”55 Kamanin interpreted 

this incident as a systemic failure, rather than simply a human operator error: “If 

even such an experienced test pilot [as Beregovoi] could not manually perform 

the docking of two spaceships, this means that the [manual] docking system is 

too complex to work with in zero gravity.’”‘ 

54. Chertok, Rakety i liudi, vol. 3, p. 450. 

55. Chertok, Rakety i liudi, vol. 4, p. 419. 

56. Kamanin, Skrytyi kosmos, vol. 3, p. 303 (diary entry of 29 October 1968). 
124 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

Now engineers had to prove that their manual control system was actually 

operable. Chief Designer Vasilii Mishin insisted on trying manual docking 

on the Soyuz 4-Soyuz 5 mission in January 1969, even though his boss, the 

Minister of General Machine-Building, Sergei Afanas’ev, pressured him to 

resort to the proven automatic docking system.57 This time the engineers 

made sure that the cosmonauts received more than sufficient training on the 

ground. The cosmonaut Vladimir Shatalov had performed 800 simulated 

dockings in various regimes on a ground simulator before he successfully 

carried out manual docking of Soyuz 4 and Soyuz 5.58 Later, for other trainees, 

the requisite number of simulated dockings was reduced to 150.59 

In August 1974, the Soyuz 15 crew attempted an automatic rendezvous 

with the Salyut 3 station, but the automatic system malfunctioned, misjudging 

the distance to the target and producing an acceleration thrust instead of 

retrofire. This led to a near collision of the spaceship with the station. Another 

attempt at automatic approach resulted in another dangerous flyby. The crew 

suggested to make a third attempt at docking in the manual regime, but ground 

control did not give permission, due to the low level of remaining propellant. 

The crew had to return to Earth without completing their mission.60 

After the flight, heated debates erupted over the question whether the 

main responsibility for the failed mission should be assigned to human or 

machine. Engineers argued that the cosmonauts should have recognized the 

malfunction immediately and should have resorted to manual control. Officials 

responsible for cosmonaut training replied that this particular type of 

emergency had not been included in the list and that the cosmonauts had not 

been trained for it. The investigation was further complicated by the fact that 

this failure occurred just a year before the scheduled docking of Soyuz with 

Apollo. The American side, worried about the reliability of the Soviet rendezvous system, requested an explanation of the Soyuz 15 incident.61 Thus, despite 

an obvious failure of the automatic docking system, the Soviets preferred to 

put the blame squarely on the cosmonauts-for not shutting down the 

malfunctioning system after the first failure.62 Both cosmonauts were officially 

reprimanded and never flew into space again. 

57. Nikolai Kamanin, Skrytyi kosmos, vol. 4, 1969-1978 (Moscow: Novosti kosmonavtiki, 2001), 

58. Vladimir A. Shatalov, Trudnye dorogi kosmosa, 2nd ed. (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 1981), 

59. Kubasov, Taran, and Maksimov, Profeessional’naia podgotooka, p. 138. 

60. Chertok, Rakety i liudi, vol. 4, p. 434; Asif A. Siddiqi, “The Almaz Space Station Complex: A 

61. Dave Shayler, “Soyuz 15 Mission Report,” http: //www. asfroinfoservice. co. uk/html/soyuz- 15- 

62. Rex Hall and David J. Shayler, Soyuz: A Universal Spacecraft (Chichester, U.K.: Springer/ 

p. 11 (diary entry of 10 January 1969), 12 (diary entry of 11 January 1969). 

p. 129. 

History, 1964-1992: Part I,”]ourtzal ofthe British Interplanetary Society 54 (2001): 411-414. 

report.htm1 (accessed 21 April 2005). 

Praxis, 2003), pp. 186-187; Ponomareva, “Nachalo vtorogo etapa,” pp. 169-170. 
HUMAN-MACHINE ISSUES IN THE SOVIET MANNED SPACE PROGRAM 125 

Rather than being an exclusively human or machine failure, the Soyuz 15 

mission illustrated another system failure: a failure to integrate the crew in the 

control loop in a human-machine system.The crew was kept in “cold reserve,” 

passively monitoring the operations of the automatic docking system. When this 

system failed, the crew was not ready to take over control operations quickly. 

Although the engineers switched the blame to the crew, it was the engineers’ 

design of the control system that placed the crew in the role of passive observers. 

Engineers tacitly admitted that the failure of the Soyuz 15 mission had roots 

in the overall organization of rendezvous control, including the role of ground 

control. A special operational group was created as part of Mission Control to 

develop procedures for automatic and manual rendezvous in various emergency 

situations and to provide real-time recommendations for the flight director.63 

After that incident, cosmonaut pilots were assigned responsibility for manual 

approach from the distance of 200 to 300 meters. In a few years, however, this 

rule was subjected to a severe test. In October 1977, the Soyuz 25 crew made 

an attempt at manual docking with the Salyut 6 station, and when the spacecraft 

almost touched the station, they suddenly realized that they were facing the 

“bottom” of the station, instead of the docking port. They quickly turned away 

from Salyut 6 and made several more docking attempts, all ofwhich failed. Having 

spent much propellant, Soyuz 25, in the end, did not even have enough fuel to 

back up from the station and remained in close proximity to it for several 0rbits.6~ 

As it turned out, what the cosmonauts perceived as the “bottom” of the station 

was in fact the docking port. Soyuz 25 approached the station from a slightly 

different angle than was expected, but the cosmonauts were never trained on a 

ground simulator to recognize the station from that angle. A “conditional reflex” 

they acquired during incessant training on the simulator prevented them from 

recognizing the correct position of the station.65 Although the error was rooted 

in the inadequate simulator design, the cosmonauts bore their part of the blame. 

For the first time, the cosmonauts did not receive the honor of the Hero of the 

Soviet Union, but were awarded “only” the Order of Lenin.66 Mission planners 

decided never again to send all-rookie crews into space. Most importantly, it was 

decided to make the nominal docking regime automatic, and the cosmonauts 

were allowed to take over manual control only in case of failure of the automatic 

sy~tem.~’ The prolonged struggle for the right to control docking between 

human and machine began to shift in favor of the latter. 

63. Chertok, Rakety i liudi, vol. 4, p. 435. 

64. Eliseev, Zhizn’, pp. 200-204. 

65. Chertok, Rakety i liudi, vol. 4, p. 439. 

66. Iurii M. Baturin, ed., Mirovaia pilotiruemaia kosmonavtika. Istoriia. Tekhnika. Liudi (Moscow: 

67. Eliseev, Zhizn’, p. 209. 

RTSoft, 2005), pp. 273-274. 
126 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

THE ROLE OF GROUND CONTROL 

The norms of cosmonaut activity included not only following the technical protocol of interaction with on-board equipment, but also following 

the social protocol of subordination to their superiors on the ground. Framing 

the whole issue as human versus machine is somewhat misleading. The real 

issue here was not so much the division of function between human and 

machine, but the division of power between the human on the ground and the 

human on board. 

Boris Chertok acknowledged that the growing complexity of space technology warranted a greater role for the human operator, but his idea of human 

participation was to involve “not just an individual, but an entire colle~tive,”~~ 

meaning the flight controllers and specialists on the ground. As a result, Soviet 

designers adopted the principle that they have followed to this day: all critical 

systems had three independent lines of control: automatic, remote (from the 

ground), and manual.69 Control during the three main stages of the flightreaching the orbit, orbital flight, and reentry-was automatic; instructions to 

switch programs between the stages were given either from the ground or 

manually by the cosmonaut. The cosmonaut, however, had to obtain permission from the ground for any critical action. The cosmonaut training manual 

clearly stipulated that “all most important decisions are made by Mission 

Contr01.”~’ The real control of the mission remained in the hands of engineers: 

either through the automatic systems they designed or through their design 

and management of cosmonaut activity. 

The need to obtain clearance from Mission Control sometimes delayed 

critical actions until it was too late. For example, in October 1969, the Soviets 

planned a complicated orbital maneuver with three spacecraft: Soyuz 7 and 

Soyuz 8 attempted a rendezvous, while Soyuz 6 was to capture the event on 

camera. Unfortunately, the automatic approach system on Soyuz 8 failed. At 

that moment, the two ships were about 1,000 meters from each other, and the 

cosmonauts asked permission to attempt manual approach. While the crew 

awaited permission from the ground, the ships drifted apart to the distance of 

about 3,000 meters, and manual approach was no longer an option. The next 

day, through orbital maneuvers, the ships were brought within 55 feet from each 

other, but without any means to determine their relative velocities, all attempts 

at manual approach also failed.7l The crews had to return to Earth without 

68. B. Evseev (Boris Chertok), “Chelovek 111 avtomat?” in Shagi k zvezdam, ed. M. Vasil’ev 

69. Syromiatnikov, 100 rasskazov, p. 145. 

70. Kubasov, Taran, and Maksimov, Profeessional’naia podgotovka, p. 190. 

71. Chertok, Rakety c liudi, vol. 4, pp. 214-215; Hall and Shayler, Soyuz, p. 159. 

(Vasilii Mishin) (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 1972), p. 282. 
HUMAN-MACHINESSUES IN THE SOVIET MANNED SPACE PROGRAM 127 

completing their mission. Nikolai Kamanin subsequently bitterly remarked in 

his private diary: “Everything [on the Soyuz] is based on the assumption of a 

flawless operation of automatics, and when it fails, cosmonauts are left without 

reliable means of And yet the responsibility for the failed mission 

was placed on the c0smonauts.7~ Boris Chertok later admitted, however, that 

the designers were to blame for overestimating human capabilities and for not 

providing adequate training on simulators for the situation of failure of the 

automatic approach ~ystem.7~ 

On more than one occasion, cosmonauts faced the dilemma: to follow the 

rules and fail the mission or to take risks and break the rules. Some preferred to 

break the rules and save the mission. Another emergency that occurred during 

the Voskhod 2 flight in March 1965 is a case in point. After completing his 

historic spacewalk, the cosmonaut Alexei Leonov reahzed that his spacesuit 

ballooned, his arms and legs did not even touch the inside, and he was unable 

to reenter the airlock. He was supposed to report all emergencies to the ground 

and wait for instructions. He later recalled: “At first I thought of reporting what 

I planned to do to Mission Control, but I decided against it. I did not want to 

create nervousness on the ground.And anyway I was the only one who could 

bring the situation under control.”75 Perhaps, he calculated that instructions from 

the ground could be delayed because of various bureaucratic procedures and the 

possible reluctance of some decision-makers to take responsibility, and it would 

be unwise for him to spend his limited oxygen supply waiting for them. Leonov 

turned a switch on his spacesuit, drastically reducing the internal air pressure, 

which allowed him to regain control of his movements. Once he broke one rule, 

he decided that he would not make things worse by breaking another, and he 

climbed into the airlock headfirst, in violation of an established procedure. 

The Voskhod 2 crew-Alexei Leonov and Pave1 Beliaev, both military 

pilots-were trained to follow the rules and to obey orders from the ground. 

After more than 150 training sessions on a spacewalk simulator, Leonov was 

said to have brought his skills “to the point of automatic perf~rmance.”~~ Yet 

in a real emergency, Leonov had to perform actions for which he was not 

trained, to violate explicit rules concerning entry into the airlock, and to make 

decisions without consulting Mission Control. In other words, his mission 

was successful precisely because he did not act like a perfect machine. 

72. Kamanin, Skrytyi kosmos, vol. 4, p. 95. 

73. Ponomareva, “Nachalo vtorogo etapa,” p. 169. 

74. Chertok, Rakety i liudi, vol. 4, p. 422. 

75. David R. Scott and Alexei A. Leonov, Two Sides ofthe Moon: Our Story oftlze Cold War Space 

Race (London/New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), p. 109. 

76. N. N. Gurovskii et al., “Trenazhery dlia podgotovki kosmonavtov k professional’noi 

deiatel’nosti PO upravleniiu korablem i ego sistemami,” in Problemy kosrnicheskoi biologii, ed. N. M. 

Sisakian, vol. 4 (Moscow: Nauka, 1965), p. 6; Siddiqi, Challenge to Apollo, p. 451. 
128 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

THE PARADOX OF DISCIPLINED INITIATIVE 

Space engineers believed that flight safety would be best guaranteed by 

comprehensive automation and by strict following of instructions by the crew, 

but the cosmonauts pointed out that it was often necessary to break the rules 

in case of emergency. The engineers often viewed any departure from the 

standard procedure as a “human error,” while it was precisely this ability to 

deviate from the standard path that made human presence on board so valuable 

in an emergency situation. Perhaps the main difference between human and 

machine in a human-machine system is that the machine fails when it does 

not follow preset rules and the humans fail when they do not recognize that 

it is time to break the rules. 

Valentina Ponomareva, a member of the first women’s cosmonaut group, 

summed up the cosmonauts’ vision of the unique human role on board as 

follows: 

In addition, the cosmonaut must possess such qualities as curiosity and the ability to break rules . . . . Regulations work well 

only when everything goes as planned . . . . The ability to act 

in extraordinary situations is a special quality. In order to do 

that, one has to have inner freedom . . . the ability to make 

non-trivial decisions and to take non-standard actions. In an 

extreme situation the very life of the cosmonaut depends on 

these q~alities.7~ 

Despite her high qualifications as an engineer and a pilot and her excellent 

test marks, Ponomareva was not selected for the first woman’s flight, and she 

never got a chance to fly. Her independent-mindedness most likely played a 

role here. 

Sonja Schmid, in her study of Soviet nuclear power station operators, 

observed a similar contradiction in the way the operators were viewed by 

nuclear reactor designers: both as a “weak link” and as a “reliable cog in the 

Both spacecraft designers and nuclear engineers viewed the human 

operator as part of technology, which must always function according to 

the rules, and at the same time, they expected the operators to show human 

qualities such as initiative and inventiveness. 

77. Valentina Ponomareva, Zhenskoe litso kosmosa (Moscow: Gelios, 2002), p. 285. 

78. Sonja Schmid, “Reliable Cogs in the Nuclear Wheel: Assigning Risk, Expertise and 

Responsibility to Nuclear Power Plant Operators in the Soviet Union” (paper presznted at Society 

for the History of Technology [SHOT]-2004, Amsterdam, Netherlands, 7-10 October 2004). 
HUMAN-MACHINESSUES IN THE SOVIET MANNED SPACE PROGRAM 129 

This need for the cosmonauts to be both obedient and creative, to follow 

the rules and to break them, one might call “a paradox of disciplined initiative.” 

In my view, this paradox reflects one of the fundamental contradictions of 

the Soviet approach to spacecraft control (and perhaps to social control and 

government in general). 

THE LUNAR PROGRAM: 

A TURN TOWARD MANUAL CONTROL 

The lunar race further complicated the debates over the human role on 

board. Lunar mission profiles did not allow ground stations to effectively 

control the entire flight, and the division of control functions between human, 

on-board automation, and ground control had to be reevaluated. Initially, 

it was decided to give the cosmonauts an unusually high degree of control 

over their spacecraft. Alexei Leonov, who initially trained for a circumlunar 

mission, recalled that “we had to be able to perform every aspect of the flight 

manually in case the automatic system failed.”79 Later on, the internal politics 

of the Soviet lunar program began to erode this principle. 

From the very beginning, the Soviet lunar program suffered from the lack of 

coordination, internal rivalries, duplication of effort, and fracturing of resources. 

Initially, the heads of two rival design bureaus-Sergei Korolev and Vladimir 

Chelomey-divided the lunar pie more or less equally: Korolev worked on 

a lunar landing project, while Chelomey developed a rocket and a spacecraft 

for a circumlunar fhght. After Khrushchev’s ouster in October 1964 and the 

subsequent shakeup in the upper echelons of Soviet power Chelomey lost some 

of his political support, and Korolev eventually wrestled the circumlunar flight 

project away from him. In October 1965, a government decree assigned Korolev 

the responsibility for the development of the 7K-L1, a new spacecraft designed 

specifically for a circumlunar flight, later publicly named Zond. 

One major hurdle in the Soviet lunar program was eliminated: all work 

on lunar spacecraft was now concentrated in one organization, Korolev’s 

- design bureau. Yet the circumlunar flight and the lunar landing remained two 

separate projects with different goals, independent work schedules, different 

booster rockets, separate ground infrastructures, and two different types of 

spacecraft, the Ll and the L3. The addition of the circumlunar project to 

Korolev’s tasks stretched the resources of his design bureau and messed up the 

lunar landing project schedule. The circumlunar project was given immediate 

priority in order to complete it by the 50th anniversary of the Great October 

Revolution in November 1967. 

79. Scott and Leonov, Two Sides of the Moon, p. 189. 
130 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

Social and political factors influenced the lunar program down to the very 

technical level. Korolev had to split the responsibility for the development of the 

control system for the L1 spacecraft with the organization led by his old friend 

Nikolai Pilyugin.As a result, Pilyugin developed the automatic control system for 

course corrections and reentry, while Korolev assumed responsibility for manual 

rendezvous control.80 The cosmonaut functions on board were thus limited by 

the division of spheres of responsibdity of different design organizations. 

The L1 crew consisted of two cosmonauts, whose duties included checking 

all on-board systems in Earth orbit and then orienting the spacecraft toward the 

Moon. For the first time in the Soviet piloted space program, the L1 control 

system included a digital computer, the Argon-1 1. This computer was part of 

the automatic control system designed by Pilyugin, and cosmonauts had no 

access to it.” The manual control system included a digital computing device 

called Salyut 3, which was not reprogrammable; it gave the cosmonauts fixed 

options for selecting one of the preset programs. According to the control panel 

designer,YuriTiapchenko, the L1 panel was a step backward in comparison with 

Soyuz: “The functions of cosmonauts were reduced to the simplest operations 

of entering commands and controlling their execution in accordance with flight 

instructions and the orders issued by ground control.”82 

In 1967-1968, the Soviets made eight attempts to launch L1 on a circumlunar 

mission in the unpiloted mode. Only one mission performed a circumlunar flight; 

all missions were fraught with numerous failures which might have been fatal to 

a human crew. After the successful Apollo 8 mission in December 1968, the L1 

program lost its political rationale, and after another failed L1 mission in January 

1969, the plans for a piloted flight were suspended. Eventually the program 

was canceled without a single attempt for a piloted flight. The cosmonauts 

unsuccessfully petitioned the Soviet political leadership for continuation of the 

piloted circumlunar program.83 The only completely successful L1 mission that 

would have returned the crew safely to Earth took place on 8 August 1969.The 

passengers on the spacecraft were four male tortoises. Two cosmonauts, Alexei 

Leonov and Oleg Makarov, participated in the mission as ground operators.84 

80. Siddiqi, Challenge to Apollo, pp. 504-505. 

81. V. V. Chesnokov, “Argon-11C computer,” http. //www.computer-museum.ru/enghsh/argonl lc. htm 

(accessed 21 April 2005); Georgii Priss interview, Moscow, 23 May 2002, http. //hrst mrt.edu/hrs/ 

upollo /soviet/interview/interview-priss htm (accessed 2 1 April 2005); Viktor Przhiyalkovsky interview, 

Moscow, 24 May 2002, http://hrst.mit.edu/hrs/upollo/soviet/interview/interview-prrhryalkovsky.htm 

(accessed 21 April 2005). 

82. Iurii A. Tiapchenko, “Sistemy otobrazheniia informatsii pilotiruemykh KA L1 i Nl-L3,” 

http://www.cosmoworld.ru/spuceencyclopedia/publicutions/index shtml?tg_moon. html (accessed 21 April 

2005). 

83. Scott and Leonov, Two Sides of the Moon, p. 252. 

84. Siddiqi, Challenge to Apollo, pp 699-700. 
HUMAN-MACHINE ISSUES IN THE SOVIET MANNED SPACE PROGRAM 131 

That flight took place already after Apollo 11. The Soviet lunar landing 

project, known as Nl-L3, lost its political rationale too, but Chief Designer 

Mishin continued lobbying for it, given the amount of funding and effort 

already invested in it, and the project was kept afloat for a few more years. 

The Soviet lunar landing project was based on a lunar orbit rendezvous 

scheme similar to Apollo. Because of the limits on the rocket lifting power, 

however, the weight of the Soviet lunar lander had to be roughly one-third 

of the weight of the Apollo lander. For this reason, the Soviets planned to 

send only two cosmonauts on the lunar mission: one cosmonaut landing 

on the Moon and the other staying on the lunar orbital ship. Severe weight 

limitations forced Soviet designers to give the cosmonauts a much wider range 

of functions. In particular, to reduce the bulk of docking equipment and to 

eliminate extra dockings, the engineers proposed to transfer the cosmonaut 

from the orbital ship to the lander and back via spacewalk.*’ 

Lunar landing was planned to be fully automatic with partial manual 

backup.86 Using an on-board computer, a cosmonaut could process information 

from various sensors, evaluate the condition of the lander according to preprogrammed algorithms, and choose specific actions. Most importantly, the 

cosmonaut could manually select a landing site on the’lunar surface and give 

instructions to the computer to produce required landing maneuvers.*’ Lunar 

landing required extraordinary performance from the cosmonaut: on the 

Apollo lunar landing module, two astronauts had 2 minutes to make a landing 

decision, while on the Soviet lander, a single cosmonaut would have only 15 

to 20 seconds.88 

Cosmonauts underwent intensive training, both on simulators and on 

helicopters, simulating lunar landing. They performed helicopter landings 

with the engines cut off, a very difficult and dangerous operati~n.~~ Gradually, 

however, Chief Designer Vasilii Mishin began to limit the responsibilities 

of the pilot, placing greater emphasis on automatic systems. This may have 

had something to do with Mishin’s plans to assign a greater role to civilian 

cosmonauts, engineers from his own design bureau. Cutting on manual control 

functions made it possible to reduce cosmonaut training time, and civilian 

cosmonauts, who generally had less training than military pilots, could now 

compete with the pilots for the lunar landing mis~ion.’~ 

85. Ibid., pp. 495-497. 

86. Chertok, Rakety i lindi, vol. 4, pp. 92, 109. 

87. Siddiqi, Challenge to Apollo, p. 491. 

88. Chertok, Rakety 1 lrndi, vol. 4, p. 225. 

89. Siddiqi, Challenge to Apollo, pp. 684-685. 

90. Kamamn, Skrytyi kosmos,vol. 3,pp. 123-124 (chary entry of 15 October 1967),312 (chary entry of 

13 November 1968), 341 (diary entry of 23 December 1968); Sidchqi, Challenge to Apollo, p. 650. 
132 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

The growing degree ofautomation on the L3 alarmed the cosmonaut pilots. 

Alexei Leonov, who trained for lunar landing, commented that “according to 

the fight plan the automatic system took precedence”; the cosmonauts were 

allowed to resort to manual control only in case of failure of the automatic 

system. “I had argued,” continued Leonov, “that, as commander ofa spacecraft, 

what I needed once a flight was in progress was as little communication as 

possible from the ground-since it served mainly to distract me from what I 

already knew was necessary-and only manual, not automatic, control.”g1 

The lunar landing program suffered from a series of setbacks during the 

failed launches of the giant N1 booster. The last attempt was made in 1972, 

and soon the program was terminated. The cosmonauts had hoped that they 

might have a chance to fly the lunar spacecraft during a series of Earth-orbit 

test flights in 1970-71. The financial difficulties that besieged the Soviet lunar 

program, however, forced Mishin to eliminate lunar orbiter test flights and 

to test only the lunar lander, and just in the unpiloted mode. During three 

tests in Earth orbit, the lunar lander successfully simulated a lunar landing, 

two liftoff operations with the primary and backup engines, and an entry 

into lunar orbit. The automatic control system worked perfectly?’ Whether 

manual controls would have worked remains unknown. The Soviets kept 

the existence of their piloted lunar program secret for 25 years. Instead, they 

cultivated the myth that exploring the Moon with automatic probes was their 

one and only goal. 

DEFINING THE COSMONAUT PROFESSION 

The seemingly technical issue of on-board automation raised a larger 

question of the nature and purpose of human spaceflight. The debates over 

automation reflected three competing visions ofspaceflight: a piloting mission, 

an engineering task, and a research enterprise. 

The first cosmonaut group was composed of military pilots, and they used 

their growing prestige and political influence to maintain their monopoly on 

spaceflight. In May 1961, shortly after his historical first flight, Yuri Gagarin 

sent a letter to the Chief Marshal ofAviation, A. A. Novikov, arguing that “only 

pilots are capable of carrying out spaceflights. If others want to fly into space, 

they must learn to fly aircraft first. Aviation is the first step to pace flight."^^ 

91. Scott and Leonov, Two Sides ofthe Moon, p. 189. 

92. Siddiqi, Challenge to Apollo, pp. 734-736. 

93. Quoted in Kamamn, Skrytyi kosmos, vol. 1, p. 57 (diary entry of 25 May 1961). Later on, Gagarin 

seemed to have changed hs opimon and supported the first civhan engineers who joined the cosmonaut 

corps; see Georgu Grechko,“Iz-za hubvi k kmo ia chut’ ne prozeval polet v kosmos!” Vechernri Omsk, no. 

11 (1 1 February 2004), http://epizodsspace.testpilot.~/bibl/intervy/grechko3.html (accessed 21 Aprd 2005). 
HUMAN-MACHINE ISSUES IN THE SOVIET MANNED SPACE PROGRAM 133 

Two N1 Moon rockets appear on the pads at Tyura-Tam in early July 1969. Highly 

automated, the N1 was designed for the Soviet space program’s human lunar missions. 

In the foreground is booster number 5L with a functional payload for a lunar-orbiting 

mission. In the background is the IMI ground-test mock-up of the N1 for rehearsing 

parallel launch operations. After takeoff, the rocket collapsed back onto the pad, 

destroying the entire pad area in a massive explosion. (NASA photo no. nljulyl969) 
134 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

When, in 1962, Korolev for the first time raised the question of including 

engineers in space crews, Kamanin called this “a wild idea.”94 The military 

pilots strongly objected to the waiver of “harsh physical tests” for engineers, 

insisting that the pilots were “the real veterans in the [cosmonaut] corps.”95 

A Deputy Minister of Defense said bluntly that “we will select cosmonauts 

only from among robust young fellows from the military. We don’t need those 

ninnies from civilian science.”96 Kamanin eventually realized the need for a 

compromise and began lobbying for the inclusion of civilian specialists. 

Space engineers, for their part, insisted that they had a legitimate claim 

for a spacecraft seat. Boris Chertok explained: “We, engineers who designed 

the control system, believed that controlling a spacecraft is much easier that 

controlling an aircraft. All processes are extended in time; there is always 

time to think things over . . . . A good engineer can control a spaceship as 

well as a pilot, if there are no obvious medical ~bjections.”~~ Theengineercosmonaut Konstantin Feoktistov compiled a chart comparing the professions 

of the cosmonaut and the pilot and tried to show that piloting skills were 

unnecessary aboard a spacecraft, but Kamanin interpreted the same chart in 

the opposite way.98 

Engineers argued that their presence on board would have dual benefit: a 

better handling of emergency situations during the flight and a better design 

of spacecraft resulting from their flight experience. The engineer-cosmonaut 

Alexei Eliseev reasoned that, as space technology was becoming more and more 

complex, it would be impossible to write down instructions for all conceivable 

emergencies. A situation may arise in which only spacecraft designers on 

board would be able to find the right solution. He also suggested that “one 

could design on-board equipment for the cosmonauts only with their own 

participation. Only people who carry out spaceflights can give competent 

assessments and recommendations with regard to the convenience of use of 

various types of on-board eq~ipment.”~~ Instead of involving cosmonaut pilots 

in the design process, however, the engineers believed that they themselves 

should be included in space crews. In April 1967, the engineer-cosmonaut 

Oleg Makarov met with Chief Designer Vasilii Mishin and proposed a list of 

measures aimed at changing the role of humans on board. Makarov argued 

that an engineer must be included in every space crew; that crews must study 

on-board equipment at the design and production sites, not just on simulators; 

94. Kamanin, Skrytyi kosnzos, vol. 1, p. 105 (diary entry of 19 April 1962). 

95. Scott and Leonov, Two Sides of the Moon, p. 146. 

96. Kamanin, Skrytyi kosnzos, vol. 1, p. 210 (diary entry of 17 January 1963). 

97. Chertok, Rakety i Ziudi, vol. 3, pp. 237, 242. 

98. Kamanin, Skrytyi kosntos, vol. 3, p. 210 (diary entry of 8 April 1968). 

99. Eliseev, Zhirn’, pp. 28, 164. 
HUMAN-MACHINESSUES IN THE SOVIET MANNED SPACE PROGRAM 135 

and that cosmonauts must be given the right to take over control in case of 

malfunction of automatic systems.’OO 

Kamanin realized that engineers-turned-cosmonauts might soon replace 

the military pilots whose training he oversaw. In February 1965, he ordered 

to organize eight research groups at the Cosmonaut Training Center focused 

on the following problems: military use of spacecraft; space navigation, lifesupport and rescue systems; telemetry equipment; scientific orbital stations; 

circumlunar flight; lunar landing; and weightlessness. Each group would 

study the assigned problem, formulate the Center’s positions on specific issues, 

and defend those positions before scientists and designers.”’ While spacecraft 

designers were claiming a seat on board, the cosmonauts began to claim a seat 

at the designer’s workstation. 

In the 1970s, with the introduction of orbital stations, mission engineers 

began playing an ever-growing role in spaceflight. Long-duration missions 

required such skills as equipment maintenance and repair, observation, and 

research much more than piloting, which was limited to docking, undocking, 

and keeping the station in the correct attitude. Although pilots were traditionally appointed mission commanders, flight engineers began to demand more 

authority in decision-making. The engineer-cosmonaut Georgii Grechko 

summed up the engineers’ sentiment as follows: “The time of pilots among 

cosmonauts is passing. In any case, they are no longer the main agents of the 

exploration of the Universe. ‘Our’ era, the era of mission engineers is 

dawning.”lo2 Grechko’s discussion of these controversial issues with his commander, the pilot Yurii Romanenko, during their mission on the Salyut 6 

station quickly turned into a heated argument. Eventually, Grechko had to 

flee into another compartment of the station to avoid violent confrontation. 

Maintaining a complex orbital station with its long-term life-support 

systems devoured most of the cosmonauts’ time on board, raising questions 

about the relative costs and benefits of human flight. The engineer-cosmonaut 

Valentin Lebedev calculated that during a five-day work week, two cosmonauts 

spent 111 hours on supporting themselves. Only 9 hours were left for scientific 

research. “The station is crewed just for the sake of those nine hour^.''^^^ In an 

interview given after his retirement, Vasilii Mishin similarly estimated that 

in space, most of a cosmonaut’s time on board was spent on preparations for 

takeoff and landing, on physical exercise, and on sleep: “Only 20 percent of 

100. Mishm, diary, 30Apnl 1967. 

101. Kamanin, Skrytyi kosmos, vol. 2, p. 134 (diary entry of 2 February 1965). 

102. Georgii Grechko, Start v neizvestnost’ (Moscow: Pravda, 1989), chap. 2. 

103. Valentin Lebedev, “U nas velikaia strana. Reshat’ ee problemy predstoit novomu pokoleniiu,” 

Osnova (Naro-Fominsk), no. 26 (28 May 2004), http://eprrodsspace.testpilot.ru/brbl/intervy/lebedevl. 

html (accessed 21 April 2005). 
136 CRITICAL ISSUES INTHE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

a cosmonaut’s time was spent on really productive work.” He concluded that 

the cosmonaut profession as such did not exist and that, at present, piloted 

flights were “entirely ~nnecessary.”~~~ 

Konstantin Feoktistov proposed to solve the problem of inefficiency of 

human spaceflight though automation. “A man assigned to cope only with 

control functions is an unjustifiable luxury,” he argued. “No craft is designed to 

carry dead weight. It must have a payload that performs a kmd of useful work. 

This can be, for example, research.” He proposed to make spacecraft control 

“simple and executable without high skills and during a minimum time” to 

allow scientists and engineers to fly space missions. “Every operation that can be 

automated on board a spaceship should be automated,” concluded Feokti~tov.”~ 

Boris Chertok simdarly viewed automation as the way to 6-ee up the crew from 

routine functions: “Taken the high degree of automation on Vostok, an even 

higher degree on Zenit, and totally marvelous automation on future generations 

of spacecraft, the human on board must engage in research, reconnaissance, 

and experiment^."'^^ Feoktistov argued that valuable scientific data could be 

obtained only if scientists were included in space crews. “Scientists can develop 

their own experimental agenda, prepare their own instruments and equipment 

. . . . Cosmonauts [who lack scientific training] do not have this expertise.They 

are trained for specific mechanical operations: to turn something on, to switch 

something off, to monitor equipment, etc. If scientists come to space, scientific 

research would be more prod~ctive.”’~~ Long debates over the question whether 

scientists should be allowed on board were resolved in favor of a “professional 

cosmonaut,” an engineer or a pilot, who would receive some scientific training 

and conduct experiments on board in consultation with scientists on the 

ground. The most the scientists were able to achieve was the privilege of drect 

communication with the cosmonauts in orbit.’O* 

The problem ofprofessional identity of the cosmonaut-a pilot, an engineer, 

or a scientist-proved inextricably connected with the question of on-board 

automation. If the first cosmonaut pilots tried to wrestle control functions from 

the machine, later on, cosmonaut researchers preferred to delegate equipment 

service functions to automatic systems to f?ee up their own time for experiments 

and observations. As Valentin Lebedev put it, “Man is not an appendix to a 

machine. Man is not made for the flight, but the flight is made for man.”’09 

104. Vasilii Mishin, “I Contend That There Is No Cosmonaut Profession” (English title), 

105. Quoted inViktor D. Pekehs, Cybernetic Medley, trans. Oleg Sapunov (Moscow: Mir, 1986), p. 287. 

106. Chertok, Rakety i liudi, vol. 3, p. 242. 

107. Konstantin Feoktistov, “‘Aliaska’ v kosmose,” Voronezhskie vesti, no. 27 (2 July 2003), http:// 

108. Eliseev, Zhizn’, pp. 172-173. 

109. Lebedev, “U nas velikaia strana.” 

Nezavisimayagazeta (13 April 1993), p. 6 (translation, JPRS-USP-93-002, 18 May 1993, p. 28). 

epizodsspace. testpilot. ru/bibl/intervy/feoktistov3. html (accessed 2 1 April 2005). 
HUMAN-MACHINESSUES IN THE SOVIET MANNED SPACE PROGRAM 137 

AUTOMATION IN CONTEXT 

This brief overview of human-machine issues in the Soviet space program 

indicates that instead of the binary opposition of manual versus automatic 

control, we encounter complex human-machine systems, in which both 

humans and machines depend on one another; manual and automatic functions 

are not necessarily fixed, but may be redefined during the flight, and humanmachine interaction on board becomes part of a vast remote-control network. 

“Automatic” control operations have some degree of human input, and 

“manual” control is always mediated by technology. Determining how these 

lines are negotiated in specific instances provides a glimpse into the internal 

politics and professional cultures within the space program. 

On-board automation appeared as both an instrument and a product of 

local politics in the Soviet space program. The debates over the proper degree 

of automation were tied to the definition of cosmonauts’ skills as either pilots 

or engineers. Here, technology, professional identity, and social status were 

closely intertwined. Soviet cosmonauts were “designed” as part of a larger 

technological system; their height and weight were strictly regulated, and 

their actions were thoroughly programmed. Soviet space politics, one might 

say, was inscribed on the cosmonauts’ bodies and minds, as they had to fit, 

both physically and mentally, into their spaceships. 

The existing historiography largely interprets the Soviet approach to 

human-machine issues as complete reliance on automation. I believe this view 

misses several important aspects of the story. First, it downplays the intensity 

of internal debates over the role of the cosmonaut on board. Engineers 

with their technical notions of reliability, cosmonauts with their piloting 

aspirations, human engineering specialists with their formulas for optimal 

division of function between human and machine, industry executives with 

their aversion to risk-taking, political leaders with their sober calculations of 

political gains and risks-all these groups had their input in these disputes. 

The Soviet approach to on-board automation did not appear to have been 

predetermined; it was developed, refined, and often reshaped in the course of 

these debates. 

The Soviet approach to automation was never fixed; it evolved over 

time, from the fully automated equipment of Vostok to the semiautomatic 

analogue control loops of Soyuz to the digital systems of later generations of 

Soyuz. The role of the cosmonaut also changed, from the equipment monitor 

and backup on Vostok to the versatile technician on Soyuz to a systems 

integrator on later missions. 

The Soviet approach also changed across various space projects running 

in parallel. In the late 1960s, while Soyuz was still largely controlled by 

on-board automatics or by ground operators, the Soviet lunar ships were 
138 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

designed to give the crews a much higher level of autonomy and control 

over their missions. 

The Soviet approach was also flexible in another sense: the division 

of function between human and machine was not fixed, but was often 

renegotiated during the flight. Ground flight controllers played a crucial role 

in deciding whether the crew would be allowed to assume manual control. It 

is important, therefore, to examine not just the division of technical functions, 

but also the division of authority between the human on the ground and the 

human on board. 

This analysis suggests that a human-machine system is not a simple dot on 

a straight line between total automation and complete manual control. This 

system is not defined by a simple numerical subdivision of function between 

human and machine. The efficiency of a human-machine system depends 

on the degree of integration of the human into the technological system, 

including its social infrastructure. Some space missions failed not because the 

range of manual functions was too narrow, but because the cosmonauts did 

not have the authority to use specific functions or because they were not 

“in the l00p” for a timely receipt of crucial information. The efficiency of 

a human-machine system depends on whether the human in the system can 

play a truly human role, to have both the authority and the responsibility for 

decision-making. If a cosmonaut is trained to be a perfect automaton, his 

nominal role may increase, but this would be achieved at the cost of losing his 

unique human quality-not to act like a machine. 

DIRECTIONS FOR FURTHER RESEARCH 

Human-machine issues in the Soviet space program touch upon three 

large areas of historiography: 1) social history of automation, 2) sociopolitical 

and cultural history of the Soviet Union, and 3) comparative studies of the 

American and Soviet space programs. 

In the history of technology, automation has traditionally been viewed as 

a technological implementation of management control resulting in workers’ 

de-skilling and disempowerment.l10 A study of automation in the Soviet space 

program reveals a more complex story, in which cosmonauts do not simply lose 

their piloting skills, but adapt to the evolving technological system, making 

themselves indispensable in emergency situations. A third element-the 

ground controllers-also enters the equation, reframing the automation issue: 

110. See David Noble, “Social Choice in Machine Design: The Case ofAutomatically Controlled 

Machine Tools,” in The Social Shaping of Technology, ed. Donald MacKenzie and Judy Wajcman 

(Buckingham, U.K.; Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1985), pp. 161-176. 
HUMAN-MACHINE ~SSUES IN THE SOVIET MANNED SPACE PROGRAM 139 

instead of a simple binary choice of automatic versus human control, one faces 

a complex organization in a network of multiple remote-control interactions, 

mediated by both humans and machines. A study of human-machine issues 

may provide a new framework for analyzing the social aspects of automation 

in complex technological systems. 

Political historians of the Soviet Union have placed the space program in 

a larger political context, stressing the growing role of technocracy during 

the Cold War on both sides of the Iron Curtain.”’ Cultural historians have 

recently focused on the formation of cultural norms and Bolshevik identity 

in various periods of Soviet history.”’ The debates over human-machine 

issues provide a window into the cultural norms and identity of Soviet engineers and cosmonauts during the Cold War. Further studies could identifl 

different political and cultural trends within the broad category of “technical 

intelligentsia,” the backbone of Soviet technocracy; examine the interplay of 

engineers’ and pilots’ cultures in the cosmonaut profession; and also explore 

the tensions between the popular cultural image of the cosmonaut and the 

cosmonauts’ own professional id en tit^."^ 

Comparing the American and Soviet space programs through the prism 

of automation would help challenge the stereotype of fixed “national styles” 

in engineering. David Mindell’s study of human-machine issues in the U.S. 

space program provides a thorough analysis of the internal debates between 

American pilots and space engineer^."^ In both the American and the Soviet 

cases, different approaches to automation are not predetermined, but emerge 

out of local negotiations, contingent on the range of available technological 

alternatives, space policy priorities, and specific configurations ofpower. What 

is often perceived as a “natural” technological choice emerges as a historically 

contingent product of political, socioeconomic, and cultural forces. 

After the successful circumlunar mission of Apollo 8, Nikolai Kamanin 

wrote in his private diary that this flight had confirmed “the primary role of 

11 1. See Andrew JohnAldrin,“Innovahon, the Scientists and the State: Programmatic Innovation and 

the Creahon of the Soviet Space Program” (Ph.D. diss., University of Cahfornia, Los Angeles, 1996); 

Barry, “The Misslle Design Bureaux”; Walter A. McDougall, The Heavens and the Earth: A Political 

History ofthe Space Age (NewYork. Basic Books, 1985). 

112. David Hoffmann, Stalinist Values: The Cultural Norms ofSoviet Modernity, 1927-2942 (Ithaca: 

Cornel1 University Press, 2003); Oleg Kharkhordin, The Collective and the Individual in Russia: A 

Study ofPractices, Studies on the History of Society and Culture, no. 32 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: 

University of California Press, 1999); Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain. Stalinism as a Civilization 

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). 

113. Two recent studies have adopted a cultural approach: Cathleen Lewis has explored the 

interplay between the ceremonial openness of Soviet space-related public rituals and the technical 

secrecy surrounding the investigation of space accidents; Andrew Jenks has examined the 

connections between the “myth” or “cult” of Yuri Gagarin and the Soviet visions of modernity. 

114. See Mindell’s article in this volume. 
140 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

the spacecraft crew in such experiments. Automata can be a hundred times 

more perfect than man, but they can never replace him”-particularly, stressed 

Kamanin, in the human space race. “From a larger perspective, our designers are 

probably right in their intention to create fully automated piloted spaceships,” 

he admitted. “Perhaps in the future, when communism triumphs over the 

entire planet, people will fly into space on such ships. But in our time one 

must not forget about the severe struggle between two opposing ideologie~.””~ 

For Kamanin, the human role on board was the central issue of the space race, 

and the space race a central issue of the Cold War. A challenge for historians 

is to use analysis of human-machine issues in spaceflight as an entry point into 

larger questions of modern automation, Cold War, and space history. 

115. Kamanin, Skrytyi kosmos, vol. 3, p. 348 (diary entry of 28 December 1968). 
CHAPTER 5 

HUMAN AND MACHINE IN

THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

David A. Mindell 

stronaut Michael Collins,who orbited the Moon onApollo 11, remembered 

Ab. eing inspired as a young man by the dashing figure of the barnstormer 

pilot Roscoe Turner. “Roscoe had flown with a waxed mustache and a pet 

lion named Gilmore,” Collins remembered wistfully; “we flew with a rule 

book, a slide rule, and a computer.” Before being selected for the project that 

would change his life and the world, Collins remembered feeling caught 

between “the colorful past I knew I had missed and the complex future I did 

not know was coming.”’ Collins captures an aspect of the history of spaceflight 

little attended to by historians: the relationship between human and machine. 

In two sentences, he helps us understand spaceflight and place it within 20thcentury American history and the history of technology. 

Roscoe Turner’s career peaked just a few decades before Collins’s, but the 

two seemed worlds apart.Turner, dubbed “Aviation’s Master Showman,” stunted 

and barnstormed his way from rural America into Hollywood in the 1920s and 

1930s. He had little training and even less formal education.Yet he self-fashioned 

himself as a colorful character,sporting a waxed mustache and a made-up uniform 

from a nonexistent military in wlch he never served. He was married in the 

cockpit of his Curtiss Jenny and flew his giant Sikorsky S-29 airplane, dressed up 

as a German bomber, in Howard Hughes’s film Hell’s Angels. As Collins noted, 

Turner, under the sponsorship of the Gilmore oil company, flew with his pet lion 

of the same name.Turner embodied the showy, excited world of aviation in its 

“golden age” of transition from dangerous curiosity to commercial service.2 

This was the world that inspired Collins to enter aviation, but by the time 

he had arrived professionally, a great deal had changed. Nearly all astronauts 

had college degrees in engineering, some had graduate degrees, and they had 

served as test pilots. The technology had changed as well, from simple biplanes 

1. Michael Collins, Carrying the Fire: an Astronaut’sJourneys (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 

2. Carroll V. Glines, Roscoe Turner: Aviation’s Master Showman (Washington, DC: Smithsonian 

1974), pp. 16-17. 

Institution Press, 1995). 
142 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

to the complex, high-performance jets Collins had flown. Collins contrasts 

Turner’s pet lion with his “rule book, a slide rule, and a computer.” No longer 

was aviation a world of display and reckless adventure. No longer was the 

pilot the only master of his craft. Now he shared his authority with flight 

rules, calculations, and, increasingly in the 1950s, automatic flight controls 

and computers (not to mention controllers on the ground). At the start of the 

space program, it seemed to Collins that the world was becoming bureaucratic, 

technical, and quantitative, with some loss of the pilot’s “white scarf” image. 

Collins’s comments serve as a starting point for examining this critical issue 

in the history of spaceflight: the relationship between humans and machines. 

BETWEEN HUMAN AND MACHINE 

Human versus machine-it is not a new story. Indeed, it is one of the 

great narratives of the industrial world. American history and culture are 

replete with human-machine conflicts and comparisons. In the Civil War, 

the crew of the ironclad warship Monitor thought themselves well protected 

by iron armor, but that mechanical contrivances diminished the glory and 

heroism of their performance in ~ombat.~ The mythical John Henry won 

a race with a steam drill at the cost of his life. Factory workers complained 

that mechanical assembly lines and Frederick Winslow Taylor’s “Scientific 

Management” turned them into unthinking automatons. New combinations 

of human and machine appeared in the 20th century, from the robots of Fritz 

Lang’s silent film classic, Metropolis, to the gas masks and artificial limbs of 

World War 1. Aviation, the technology born with the new century, celebrated 

the human-machine relationship as never before. Perhaps the most significant 

of the Wright brothers’ innovations was their recognition that an airplane was 

not a stately ship to be guided by a detached human hand, but an active beast, 

controlled by an intensely focused, skilled human pilot.4 

From these diverse histories and technologies, we can distill a few fundamental threads. A good place to begin is the idea of skill. Skill is a common 

enough notion in everyday life, but also a key to understanding the humanmachine relationship. On one hand, skill is highly personal-it is practical 

knowledge; it implies a certain amount of cleverness, perhaps expertise, and 

we often think about it as residing in our bodies, particularly our hands (e.g., 

3. David A. Mindell, War, Technology, and Experience aboard the USS Monitor (Baltimore, MD: 

Johns Hopkins, 2000). 

4. David A. Mindell, Between Human and Machine: Feedback, Control, and Computing Before 

Cybernetics (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 2002); Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, 

and The Origins ofModernity (New York: Basic Books, 1990); Thomas Crouch, The Bishop’s Boys: A 

Lije of Wilbur and Orville Wright (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989). 
HUMAN AND MACHINE IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 143 

The epitome of human and machine interfaces, this device was formally known as the 

MASTIF, or Multiple Axis Space Test Inertia Facility, and was located in the Altitude 

Wind Tunnel in 1959. It was built at Lewis Research Center, now John H. Glenn 

Research Center, in Cleveland, Ohio, and was designed to train astronauts to regain 

control of a tumbling spacecraft. (NASA photo no. C1959-52233) 

“manual skills”). On the other hand, skill is also deeply social-it is not 

inborn, but acquired, as distinct from an innate quality like talent. Skill implies 

training-the time and effort to learn and master a skill, often with the help of 

another person. Skill has a social dimension: it garners respect, and the more 

skill you are perceived to have, the more prestige you seem to earn. 

Skilled workers include surgeons, carpenters, and waiters. Obviously, not 

all skills are equal. Some are more respected than others, and hence there tend 

to be social and economic differences between their practitioners. Skill also 

sets people apart. The word itself comes from an Old Norse word meaning 

distinction or dgeevence, ideas that remain integral to today’s meaning.5 For any 

5. Oxford English Dictionary, etymology for skill. 
144 CRITICAL ISSUES INTHE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

skill, some people have it and some people don’t. The very notion of skill 

implies a social group, possibly even an elite. When people with common 

skills come together, they often form societies, set standards, create and uphold 

traditions. They also police the boundaries of who is in and who is out, and for 

high-status skills, this makes them professions.6 Most would agree that surgeons 

are professionals, but are carpenters, or waiters? 

Skills often develop in relation to particular technologies: a blacksmith’s 

skills, for example, are only valuable within a particular mode of production. 

As technologies change, the skills change as well, sometimes generating 

social conflicts. For example, as numerically controlled machine tools were 

developed in the 1950s, some saw them as eliminating the need for skilled 

machinists. Indeed, the skills required of a machinist did change-and began 

to require intimacy with numbers and computers as much as with metals and 

cutting speeds, which favored certain people, or groups of people, over others. 

The important thing to realize is that technology does not just “change” of 

its own accord-it is changed by particular people for particular reasons at 

particular times. In the 20th century, those people were increasingly engineers, 

who sought to build more “skill” into machines and hence to reduce the 

requirements on the people who ran the machines, the operators. When those 

changes derived form computers, they became known as “automation,” and 

they went hand in hand with social changes. Historians of technology, by and 

large, have focused on ideas of de-skilling without attending to the contingent 

nature of the skills themselves.’ 

In an earlier book, Between Human and Machine, I examined humanmachine relationships surrounding technologies of control in the first half of 

the 20th century.* During that time, engineers began to understand the idea 

of thefeedback loop and began to study the skills of human operators according 

to new principles of control theory. They saw that humans operated machines 

much like automatic regulators or thermostats-sensing an “error” between 

the “actual” state of the machine and its “desired” state and directing the 

machine to close the gap between the two. In the course of that work, it 

became clear that aviation had always been a rich site of human-machine 

interaction, and the Apollo landings were in some sense the culmination of 

the mid-20th-century history of feedback, control, and computing. 

Consider the history of instrument flying. When pilots were flying in 

clouds, they lost the cues from the outside world that allowed them to keep 

6. Andrew D. Abbott, The System of Professions: An Essay on the Division $Expert Labor (Chicago: 

7. David F. Noble, Forces ofProduction: A Social History oflndustrial Automation (New York: Alfred 

8. Mindell, Between Human and Machine. 

University of Chicago Press, 1988). 

A. Knopf, 1984). 
HUMAN AND MACHINE INTHE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 145 

an airplane level, hence their feedback loops broke down (they went unstable). 

New instruments like directional gyros and artificial horizons replaced the 

natural cues with technological substitutes, and with some training, the pilots 

could use their indications as feedback and “fly blind.” Of course, a machine 

could also close this feedback loop, and by no coincidence, the advent of 

automatic pilots and instrument flying occurred in the same period. Some pilots 

initially objected to the decline of pilots’ “seat of the pants” or “intuitive” 

flying skills, and instrument flying remains today a compromise between pilot 

control and ground control. The new technology did change the nature of 

piloting, but it also allowed pilots new professional prestige and the ability to fly 

through bad weather on long-range commercial routes. Skill, prestige, training, 

professionalism, and new technologies are tightly coupled; change one element, 

and the others evolve as well, though not necessarily in predicable ways. 

During World War 11, the engineering of feedback control systems led 

to the emergence of digital computing and its associated sciences. The idea 

of a “computer” as a general-purpose information system emerged from a 

number of applications (like radar and gunfire control) which considered 

human operators and control systems as mathematical calculation. The postWorld War I1 rise of Norbert Wiener’s “cybernetics” captured the sense that 

control and communications were intimately linked with the characteristics 

of human operators and emphasized the blurring boundaries between human 

and ma~hine.~ Wiener’s conception, however, elaborated on developments in 

a variety of engineering fields, particularly aviation. 

From its origins, aviation was centrally concerned with the relationship of 

human and machine. The Wright brothers, by emphasizing the importance of 

control, created not simply a flying machine, but its human counterpart-the 

skilled pilot. From the moment Wilbur first flew, this new professional was 

born.” But what kind of person would a pilot be? A variety of models were 

proposed: soldier, athlete, adventurer, explorer, factory worker, engineer, 

ship’s captain.” Which dominated at any given time depended on how the 

machines were designed, who piloted them, and their social position. 

Under a project sponsored by the Sloan Foundation and the Dibner 

Institute in the late 1990s, a group ofstudents and I began collecting documents, 

conducting interviews, and defining the boundaries of these issues in manned 

spaceflight. That project also brought on Slava Gerovitch and supported his 

early work on the Soviet program that he presents so ably in this volume. 

9. Norbert Wiener Cybernetics; or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, 2nd 

10. Crouch, The Bishop’s Boys. 

11. Robert Wohl, A Passion for Wings: Aviation and the Western Imagination, 1908-1918 (New 

ed. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1961). 

Haven: Yale University Press, 1994). 
146 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

Building on the history in Between Human and Machine, I began by asking a 

series of questions about professional identity and its relationship to machinery 

in human spaceflight: 

Who is in control (human in the cockpit, machine in the cockpit, 

human on the ground)? 

Who is the pilot/astronaut (i.e., social background and status)? 

Who or what else is in the loop (eg., copilots, ground controllers, 

instruments, computers)? 

What is his (or her) training/education (military, university, vocational, etc.)? 

* What skills are required (e.g., manual skills, mathematics, design, 

physical strength)? 

How are they trained (e.g., classrooms, flight training, simulators, 

experience) ? 

How are tradeoffs made between manual and automated tasks? 

Who is responsible for a successful flight, the astronauts or the engineers 

and controllers on the ground? 

Who is blamed for failure? 

What is the role of computers and automation aboard the spacecraft 

(automatic pilot, monitoring for failure, primary flight controls)? 

Who is at risk? 

* What level of prestige do the astronauts enjoy (e.g., national heroes 

versus faceless operatives)? 

Some of these questions repeatedly arise in discussions and debates about 

human spaceflight. Others reappear throughout the history but are rarely 

addressed explicitly. Together, they allow us to make connections in the history 

of human spaceflight that have not previously been made, to understand 

historical dynamics, and to open up new research areas and ask new questions. 

Examining the human-machine relationship in human spaceflight enables us 

to move beyond the dichotomies of “robotic versus human” to better understand 

the nature of the human role when it is present, and its interaction with, rather 

than replacement by, machinery. It also allows us to integrate a variety of historical 

perspectives into narratives of spacefight: risk, safety, automation, social relationships, project politics, public perception, gender roles, and cultural iconography. 
HUMAN AND MACHINE INTHE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 147 

THE CASE OF APOLLO 

A fd exploration of human-machine relationships in spaceflight is outside 

the scope of this paper. Rather, I look at the example of Apollo tc support my 

claim for the larger historical importance of the theme. As defining technological 

moments of the 20th century, the Moon landings embodied the cooperation 

of human and machine and the tensions that cooperation embodies. As 

Michael Collins articulated, the individuals involved had experienced radically 

different eras in the history of aviation and spaceflight in close proximity (a 

mere four decades kom Lindbergh’s flight to Apollo 11). The project spanned 

the transition from analogue to digital computers, from crude simulators to 

full virtual environments, from analogue cockpits to digital fly-by-wire. Apollo 

also provides a unique case, because it combines technical complexity and 

accomplishment with political and cultural significance--hence we can trace 

the importance of the human operator from the White House into the machine 

code, from the public’s TV screens to the astronaut’s &splays. While Apollo 

exemplifies these issues, human-machine relationships resonate throughout the 

history of spaceflight, from early science fiction to the new Mars rovers. 

Ironically, the human-machine relationship in Apollo has been largely 

ignored by historians, although much ofthe existing literature offers tantalizing 

clues for a larger picture. Existing histories of Apollo are nearly all projectoriented-they begin at Apollo’s beginning and end at its end. Other than in 

memoirs as personal background, little is said about Apollo’s connection to 

larger currents in the history of technology in the 20th century. Such narratives 

reinforce the project’s self-image as something coherent in itself and apart 

from, outside of, contrary to, other forces in American culture. The histories 

that do provide context tend to be politically or culturally oriented and don’t 

delve into the machines themselves, the people who built and operated them, 

or what they meant. Additionally, these histories, certainly the more recent 

ones, tend to be based on the familiar, public accounts of the Apollo program, 

or interviews with participants conducted many years afterward. Hence they 

tend to solidify the canonical narrative of the project around key themes and 

events: Kennedy’s visionary decision, the frenetic engineering efforts, the 

heroism and skill of the astronauts, the tragic fire, the triumph of Apollo 11, 

the drama of Apollo 13, etc.12 

Yet the human-machine relationship, even when synthesized from the 

existing literature, reveals a different view. From the beginning of Apollo, the 

12. Two examples are Charles Murray and Catherine BIy Cox, Apollo: The Race to the Moon (New 

York: Simon & Schuster, 1989) and Andrew Chaikin, Man on the Moon: The Voyages ofthe Apollo 

Astronauts (New York: Viking, 1994). 
148 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

relative importance of humans and machines was under debate. James Webb 

argued that the decision to go to the Moon “can and should not be made 

purely on the basis of technical matters,” but rather on “social objectives” of 

putting people into space. He and Robert McNamara argued that “it is man, 

not merely machines, in space that captures the imagination of the world.”13 

Presidential science adviser Jerome Wiesner famously opposed a manned lunar 

program because its scientific goals did not justify the cost. In a close reading 

of the debates leading up to Kennedy’s decision, we see an implicit distinction 

between “exploration,” which is manned, and “science,” which has a higher 

prestige value among intellectuals but is best conducted rem~tely.‘~ 

Nevertheless, when the decision was made to go to the Moon, there would 

clearly be a significant human role. Kennedy’s 1961 mission statement, “to send 

a man to the moon and return him safely to earth,”15 was simple, focused, and 

included its own schedule. It was also impossible, by definition, to accomplish 

with a fully automated system. But what role would the astronauts play? 

1 .The Test Pilots 

Apollo came after a decade when the human role in flight had been both 

celebrated and questioned. The Air Force had struggled with the advent of 

unmanned missiles to complement its beloved fighters and bombers. As a new 

elite profession emerged, that of the test pilot, airmen were questioning their 

own role in flight in general, and in spaceflight in particular. Even in the late 

1950s, it was not clear who the new spacefarers would be, what skills they 

would require, and what social prestige (or derision) they might enjoy. 

Tom Wolfe, of course, captured some of this anxiety in The Right Stu~ 

While not scholarly history, the book and subsequent film made sufficient 

impact in the public imagination that we should consider it here. Focusing 

on the Mercury program, Wolfe correctly identifies the roots of the astronaut 

culture in the flight-testing world centered on Edwards Air Force Base. He 

portrays test pilots as reckless risk-takers, cowboys who could not fit into the 

traditional professional molds for pilots and who made a living pushing aircraft 

to their limits, often at the cost of their lives. Perhaps some of them were, and 

they did place themselves at risk, but Wolfe’s image misses the essential feature 

of the profession: although skilled craftsmen, intimate with the feel of their 

13. Webb, quoted in John Logsdon, The Decision to Go to the MOON: Project Apollo and the Natiorzal 

Interest (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1970), pp. 90, 125. 

14. Wiesner Committee, “Report to the President-Elect of the Ad Hoc Committee on Space,” 

10 January 1961, NASA Historical Reference Collection, Washington, DC. 

15. John F. Kennedy, “Urgent National Needs,” Congressional Record-House (25 May 1961), 

p. 8276 (text of speech can be found in the speech files, NASA Historical Reference Collection, 

Washington, DC). 
HUMAN AND MACHINE INTHE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 149 

aircraft, test pilots worked in a scientific mode. Their goal was to collect data. 

As the historian Richard Hallion has written, “A research airplane essentially 

uses the sky itself as a laboratory.”’6 Increasingly over the course of the 20th 

century, what it meant to be a test pilot was not only one trained in flying 

airplanes, but also one trained in engineering. 

Test pilots were always in close touch with controllers on the ground (a 

feature of flight testing carried to extremes in Apollo).Test pilots understood not 

only how an airplane flew, but also why it flew.Again to quote Michael Collins, 

A test pilot, more than any other type of aviator, must be 

objective. It is all right for a squadron pilot to fall in love with 

his airplane; it is all he has to fly, and he might just as well 

enjoy it because it has already been designed . . . . The test 

pilot cannot fall into this trap . . . he must carefully analyze 

the possible uses to which an airplane might be put and judge 

it a~cordingly.’~ 

Note that in this passage, Collins emphasizes the judgment of the test 

pilot-the “pilot opinion,” which he must provide as part of the research data. 

In addition to their cockpit skills, test pilots were also professional storytellers, 

experts at narrating and recounting their experiences in precise, formal 

language. Yet the hero of Wolfe’s account is Chuck Yeager-an older breed, 

not college-educated, and without a career-long interest in flight engineering. 

Nevertheless, despite its limitations, The Right Stuff does draw attention to 

the relationships between machine control and professional identity that were 

woven throughout the Mercury program. 

Looking more seriously at the test pilots’ profession reveals even greater 

historical coherence within Apollo. Much of the time the test pilots flew new 

aircraft was spent evaluating “stability and control” and “flying qualities,” two 

engineering areas that focused on the match between human and machine. 

Indeed, this area was pioneered by Robert Gilruth and his group at Langley, 

which subsequently formed the Space Task Group and the Manned Spacecraft 

Center (MSC).18 The Society for Experimental Test Pilots (SETP) formed 

in 1955, and for the rest of the decade, the group concerned itself with the 

appropriate role of the pilot-at first in high-performance aircraft with 

computerized control systems, and then in the space program. One founding 

member of the SETP would go on to become an astronaut: Neil Armstrong. 

16. Richard Hallion, Test Pilots: The Frontiersmen ofFlight, rev. ed. (Washington, DC: Smithsonian 

17. Ibid., p. 238. 

18. Renamed Johnson Space Center (JSC) in 1973. 

Institution Press, 1991), pp, 101, 143. 
150 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

2. Systems Thinking and the Role of the Human 

The SETP crystallized the anxiety of pilots in general, especially as they 

faced the development of unmanned aircraft and ballistic missiles. These 

technologies not only emerged outside the culture of piloting, they sprang 

from a new group of engineers: the systems men. Several authors have written 

of the conflict of cultures that occurred in Apollo between the aeronauticsoriented culture of Langley and Edwards and the systems-oriented culture of 

the West Coast contractors, embodied in managers like Joe Shea.19 Looking 

more deeply at the roots of systems thinking, however, helps connect the 

project to broader currents and clarifies the alternate view to the tight humanmachine coupling advocated by the pilots. 

World War I1 coalesced systems thinking in several arenas. In response 

to technical problems of radar and automatic gunfire control, engineers began 

to see that all components of a system needed to be understood together, 

rather than as glued-together components. Engineers now conceptualized 

their machines as integrated systems with feedbacks and dynamics, where the 

behavior of each part helped determine the behavior of the whole. 

By 1950, these ideas and techniques began the self-conscious era of 

systems thinking. The Oxfoyd English Dictionary shows that uses of the term 

system exploded after 1950, including systems engineering, systems analysis, systems 

dynamics, general systems theory, and a host of others. Each field had its own 

innovators, its own emphasis, and its own home institutions and professions, 

but they shared common concerns with feedback, dynamics, flows, block 

diagrams, human-machine interaction, signals, simulation, and the exciting 

new possibilities of computers.20 

The management aspects of systems engineering formalized in the mid1950s, when the Air Force stretched its resources to quickly build an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). In the Atlas missile project, management began 

to move beyond the model that had dominated the aviation industry for decades. 

Aircraft had always been composed of large numbers of components from a 

variety of subcontractors, coordinated by the prime contractor, who built the 

airframe. With a project like Atlas, dynamics, interconnection, and coordination 

became the dominant aspects of the project, so airframe companies, with their 

emphasis on structures and manufacturing, lost their central role. Rather, 

engineers with management experience, comfort with mathematical abstraction, 

19. Murray and Cox, Apollo: The Race to the Moon; Stephen Johnson, The Secret of Apollo: Systems 

Management in American and European Space Progr ims (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 2002); Howard 

E. McCurdy, Inside NASA: High Technology and Organizational Change in the U.S. Space Program 

(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1993). 

20. Louis B. Ridenour, Radar System Engineering, vol. 1 of Radiation Laboratory Series (New York: 

McGraw Hill, 1948); Harry Goode and Robert Machol, Systems Engineering: An Introduction to the 

Design $Large-scale Systems (New York: McGraw Hill, 1947). 
HUMAN AND MACHINE IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 151 

and insight into dynamics and control coordinated the project. The technical 

change entailed a social shift; as historian Thomas F? Hughes has written, “the 

airfi-ame was [now] merely a platform to carry complex, electronic guidance 

and fire control sy~tems.”~’ 

Innovators in Cold War systems engineering had their roots at General 

Electric and AT&T, via the aviation industry. Simon Ram0 had cut his teeth 

at GE and Hughes Aircraft and earned a Ph.D. at Caltech. His friend Dean 

Wooldridge came out of Bell Labs. In 1953, the two left Hughes Aircraft 

Corporation to found a systems engineering contractor, Ramo-Wooldridge, 

that soon became the TRW Corporation and did systems engineering for 

the Atlas project. Together with the Air Force’s Western Development Division, 

they coordinated contractors and scheduling and oversaw the project’s integration.The Navy had a similar project to build a ballistic-missile-firing submarine 

named Polaris. Here the Navy’s “Special Projects Office” performed the 

systems engineering function.22 

Ram0 became a promoter of systems engineering, which he defined as 

“the design of the whole from the design of the parts.” As Ram0 wrote, 

Systems engineering is inherently interdisciplinary because its function is 

to integrate the specialized separate pieces of a complex of apparatus and 

people-the system-into a harmonious ensemble that optimally achieves the 

desired end.”23 Atlas included a system of materials, logistics, computers, and 

ground support, and the missile itself was a system. 

In Atlas, Polaris, and other large projects of the 1950s, systems engineering 

meant coordinating and controlling a variety of technical and organizational 

elements, from contract specifications to control systems, from computer 

simulations to deployment logistics. The approaches were diverse, but they 

shared a common set of assumptions about how the world might be understood 

in abstract, quantitative terms, and modeled with a series of feedbacks, flows, 

and dynamics. 

Computers, both analogue and digital, figured prominently in the image 

and the practice of these systems sciences.They could simulate systems and make 

predictions about the system’s behavior in an uncertain environment. Social 

systems could be modeled with similar techniques as technical systems. Both 

the computer and the analysts themselves carried the prestige and authority of 

science: providing dispassionate, expert advice free of political influence. For the 

“ 

21. Thomas P. Hughes, Rescuing Prometheus (New York: Pantheon Books, 1998). 

22. Harvey Sapolsky, The Polaris System Development: Bureaucratic and Programmatic Success in 

Government (Cambridge, MA. Harvard University Press, 1972); Benjamin Pinney, “Projects, 

Management, and Protean Times: Engineering Enterprise in the United States, 1870-1960” 

(Ph.D. diss., MIT, 2001). 

23. For a history of systems thinking in the Atlas project, see Hughes, Rescuing Prometheus, chap. 

3. Simon Ramo is quoted on p. 67. 
152 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

strategy to work, the system engineer required a certain amount of authority, a 

fact that was not lost on the participants-They sold systems engineering as an 

authoritative, scientific way to transcend “politics” (whether public or militaryindustrial) with the outside neutrality of the expert. Systems engineering thus 

elevated the “systems men” to a new level of prestige, creating a new niche for 

engineers as educated managers of large projects and budgets. 

3. X-15 Human and Machine 

The successes ofAtlas and Polaris gave the systems experts, their companies, 

and their worldview credibility with the armed services. Furthermore, the 

expertise they built up in rocketry meant they would be intimately involved 

in any efforts to send humans into space. For the pilots, however, the systems 

men could represent a threat-they had engineered a fleet of Air Force weapons 

that had no pilots at all, and their abstract, analytical approach to engineering 

could seem to crowd out the “human factor.” These issues came to the fore as 

the test pilots began to contemplate spaceflight. 

When the pilots of the SETP reacted to the rise of unmanned missiles, 

they also reacted to the rise of the social group that built them. In 1960, an 

author in the SETP Proceedings derided 

the great millennium of concentrated effort to design man 

out of the cockpit to make room for bigger and better “black 

boxes.” There was much gnashing of teeth and waving of 

arms but alas, the day of the “icy B.M.” was upon us. No one 

wanted the pilot around.24 

The “icy B.M.” is a wonderful triple entendre, referring to an ICBM, the 

computers of IBM, and a scatological reference to a missile. 

One SETP test pilot actually argued that the ICBM was a transitional 

technology, soon to be replaced when technology allowed humans to pilot 

the rockets: “The era of the large intercontinental ballistic missile is merely 

a phase the duration of which is a matter of speculation but the demise of 

which is nonetheless certain.”25 Indeed, the Air Force had initiated the X-20 

“Dyna-Soar” program, a kind of manned orbital space bomber to orbit the 

Earth. Air Force publicity for the X-20 repeatedly emphasized the man in the 

loop and that reentry could only be accomplished as a product of human skill. 

Despite the presence of numerous new technologies, the Air Force declared, 

“In the end, it takes the cool hand of a skilled pilot to bring his glider in for a 

24. W. T. Armstrong, “Where do we go from here?” Cockpit 4 (May 1965): 7. 

25. A. W. Blackburn, “Flight Testing in the Space Age,” SETP Quarterly Review 7, no. 3 (fall 

1957): 17, 10-11. 
HUMAN AND MACHINE INTHE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 153 

conventional landing. . . this Dyna Soar project puts an emphasis on the pilot, 

on the mun”26 (emphasis original). 

While Dyna-Soar was eventually canceled, another program emerged that 

sought to demonstrate the importance of human skill for manned spaceflight. 

The X-15 is of course the best-known of the famous X-planes, but when viewed 

through the lens of the human-machine relationship, the X-15 takes on great 

importance for Apollo. In addition to hypersonics, much of the purpose of the X15 was to evaluate the human role in spaceflight, particularly for reentry, which 

was considered so dynamic and difficult that it required a human controller. A 

detailed exploration of these issues is outside the scope of this paper, but roughly 

half of the publications arising out of the X-15 related to control systems, the 

role of the pilot, or human-machine interface~.~’When an X-15 was donated 

to the Smithsonian, for example, the press release for the donation read, “One 

of the major goals of the program which has been most richly achieved was 

to explore the capabilities and limitations of the human pilot in an aerospace 

vehicle.” And of course, the conclusion was that “the broad positive finding 

of the program is clear; the capability of the human pilot for sensing, judging, 

coping with the unexpected, and employing a fantastic variety of acquired skills 

remains undiminished in all of the key problem areas of aerospace flight.”28 For 

all of its contributions to hypersonics and related sciences, a major legacy of the 

X-15 is that of putting human pilots in space and ensuring them a place in the 

cockpit in future space missions. As it turned out, the skill of reentry was easily 

mastered, with the help of redundant automated systems. The pilot’s primary 

function evolved to be a monitor, a systems manager, coordinating a variety of 

controls as much as directly controlling himself. 

As a result of his work on the X-15, Neil Armstrong and colleagues 

conducted a series of simulations which showed that a human pilot could stabilize 

a multistage vehicle under manual control straight off the launchpad. The pilots 

saw the tests, and the data they produced, as critical support for the role of the 

human pilots in orbital operations. Armstrong concluded that the pilots should 

be allowed to fly the Saturn rocket off the launchpad. He and the simulation 

26. U.S.Air Force, This is Dyna-Soar, film included in CD-ROM published with Dyna-Soar: Hypersonic 

Strategic Weapons System, ed. Robert Godwin (Burlington, Ontario: Apogee Books, 2003). 

27.W H. Stillwell, ed., X-15 Research Results (Washington, DC: NASA, 1965). The most complete 

and prominent example of these is Robert G. Nagel and Richard E. Smith,“An Evaluation of the Role 

of the Pilot and Redundant Emergency Systems in the X-15 Research Airplane,” SETP Newsletter 6 

(September-October 1962): 12.The SETP publication is a summary ofthe full study by the same author, 

“X-15 Pilot-in-the-loop and redundant/emergency systems evaluation,” Technical Documentary 

Report No. 62-20, Air Force Flight Test Center, Edwards AIK Force Base, CA, October 1962, NASA 

Dryden Archives L2-5-1D-3. For a personal account, see Mdton O.Thompson, At the Edge 4Space:The 

X- 15 Flight Program (Washmgton, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992). 

28. X-15 news release, Edwards Flight Research Center (FRC), 27 April 1969. Reprinted in 

Goodwin, X-15 Mission Reports, pp. 393-394. 
154 CRITICAL ISSUES INTHE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

engineers argued that pilots could adequately operate the simulation under high 

g forces-as long as they were provided with adequate information displays to 

guide their control. “As a passenger, he [the pilot] can be very expensive cargo; 

but as an integral part of the control loop of the vehicle, he might add materially 

to the reliability and flexibility of the launch maneuver.” Citing the earlier work 

on flying qualities and aircraft stability, they acknowledged that “the piloting task 

for these vehicles is certainly more exacting than that of operational aircraft.” The 

simulated rocket was inherently unstable, though just how unstable depended on 

the amount of fuel it contained and on the external environment. “There is no 

reason to assume that the pilot cannot control the launch of multistage vehicles 

. . . it appears to be highly desirable to initiate investigations of the use of the pilot 

in the control loop of the launch of Saturn boosters.”29 

Armstrong had done other similar tests as well-he flew an aircraft in 

such a way as to simulate the trajectory of an aborted launch in the DynaSoar. Milt Thompson participated in a similar series of trials designed to show 

that pilots could manually fly the Titan booster into orbit with the Dyna-Soar 

vehicle on top. “This was a very controversial issue,” Thompson recalled; 

“the booster designers had been using automatic control and guidance systems 

from day one. In their minds it was the way to 

The role of the pilot in complex space missions was on the table: the pilots 

had already lost a battle with the advent of the ballistic missile, in their view 

little better than a dangerous, unpiloted drone. Would the giant space rockets 

then under construction be like ballistic missiles, taking a mere “payload” up 

for a ride, or human-guided machines, directed by keen eyes and hands that 

could aim it into orbit? Would the X-15 be the way of the future or a forgotten 

sidelight on a ballistic future? 

In the end, they would not fly the rockets off the pad. They would not 

put the spacecraft into orbit. They would not point toward the Moon and fly 

there. They would not manually enter lunar orbit, and they would not fly 

the return to Earth or fly the reentry. These things were all accomplished by 

computers. What, then, would the astronauts do? They would, in conjunction 

with a computer, control docking in space, and the lunar landing, and they 

would monitor and engage various systems throughout the flight. These would 

be the tasks to showcase human performance and skill and make Apollo a 

human endeavor. 

29. E. C. Holleman, N. A. Armstrong, and W. H. Andrews, “Utilization of the Pilot in the 

Launch and Injection of a Multistage Orbital Vehicle” (presented at the 28th annual meeting of the 

Institute for Aeronautical Sciences, NewYork, NY, January 1960); N.A.Armstrong and E. C. Holleman, 

“A Review of In-Flight Simulation Pertinent to Piloted Space Vehicles,” North Atlantic Treaty 

Organization (NATO), Advisory Group for Aerospace Research and Development (AGARD) 

Report #403, July 1962. 

30. Thompson, At the Edge of Space, p. 119. 
HUMAN AND MACHINE IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 155 

The Apollo spacecraft would not be built by the people who built the 

capsules for Mercury and Gemini, but by North American Aviation and the 

engineering team that built the X-l5.The first contract of the Apollo program, 

however, would not be for a giant rocket, nor for an exotic space vekicle, but for a 

guidance system and a digital computer.The contract went to the Instrumentation 

Laboratory at MIT, under the direction of aviation pioneer Charles Stark Draper. 

Draper’s men and women spent the 1950s building guidance systems for nuclear 

missiles. They had built computers before, but only for automatic systems.They 

had never built a computer with an interface for a human user. 

RETHINKING APOLLO 

Using the lens of human-machine relationships, and their prior and 

subsequent histories, allows us to rethink Apollo and investigate new aspects 

of the famous project. Now we can consider Apollo through the lens of 

computing, through training, and through simulation. Each of these topics 

reveals a project different from the one in the traditional accounts, but one 

contiguous with larger historical phenomena and with the evolving humanmachine relationships of subsequent decades. 

In the end, it was not heroic astronauts alone who made the flights to the 

Moon.They shared their decisions with ground controllers, as well as a small 

group of software engineers who accompanied them in the form of computer 

programs that complemented the astronauts’ every move. The computer design 

and the software then emerged to reflect a philosophy of automating the flights 

and aiding the pilots in critical functions and at critical moments, while not 

actually replacing them. In the end, the astronauts “flew” a very small part of 

the mission by hand, but that included the critical lunar landing. Even there, the 

astronauts flew the lander indirectly-their joystick actually controlled a software 

program, which then controlled the vehcle, what today we call fly-by-wire. 

While the flight technology was being developed, NASA faced a problem: 

How do you teach astronauts to land on the Moon? How do you train people 

to do something that has never been done before? Training can be understood 

as developing the match between human and machine. Again, the humanmachine relationship points us toward a much-neglected aspect of the history 

of spaceflight: simulation. Flight simulators had been built since the 1930s, but 

to teach pilots how to fly airplanes that already existed, under conditions that 

were well understood. For the X-15, engineers began building simulators for 

an airplane before it flew, before it was built, before it was even designed.31 

Apollo took those lessons to heart. 

31. G. L. Waltman, Black Magic and Gremlins: Analog Flight Simulations at NASA’s Flight Research 

Center (Washington, DC: NASA SP-2@@@-452@,2@@@). 
156 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

All of the human spaceflight missions of the United States require close human 

support from outside the spacecraft. Here is an overall view of the Mission Control 

Center (MCC) in Houston, Texas, during the Gemini 5 flight in 1965. Note the screen 

at the front of the MCC that is used to track the progress of the Gemini spacecraft. 

(NASA photo no. S65-286601 

Apollo simulated everything. There was a simulator for Moon walking, for 

picking up rocks, for escaping a fire on the launchpad. The critical simulators, 

however, replicated the spacecraft themselves, simulating not only the physics 

of their flight, but their internal workings as well. For months before the fhght, 

the astronauts virtually lived inside these strange machines, flying to the Moon 

under a great variety of conditions, simulating every conceivable kind of failure. 

Of course, the simulators were built around computers, at first analogue and 

later dgital. But the machines of the time could not replicate the subtle visual 

cues required for a perfect landing. Instead, NASA engineers built elaborate, 

finely painted replicas of the Moon and “flew” tiny cameras above the surface 

to provide accurate images of the Lunar Module’s final approach (techniques 

to be replicated just a few years later in the making of George Lucas’s Stur 

Wars). Inside the simulated spacecraft, the astronauts used the real guidance 

computer, programmed with real programs, and became acclimated to their new 

environment. In the actual lunar landings, the astronauts frequently commented 

on the simulation, comparing their real experiences to those fabricated in 

the laboratory. A history of the use of simulation in the space program and its 

significance for hture technology has yet to be written. 
HUMAN AND MACHINE INTHE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 157 

Not all simulators were equally virtual. One actually flew, using real 

gravity and flight dynamics to mimic the lunar lander. Early in the program, a 

group of NASA engineers who had worked on the X-15 thought up a vehicle 

that would use a special jet engine to cancel out five-sixths of the Earth’s 

gravity, and would thus fly as though it were on the Moon, which had one-sixth 

g. The result was the Lunar Landing Research Vehicle, or LLRV, nicknamed 

“the flying bedstead” because of its extraordinarily strange appearance (later 

renamed the LLTV, with “training” replacing “research”). In addition to its jet 

engine, it used a variety of steam jets to control attitude and position, so when 

it flew, it hissed white jets of steam and whistled like a calliope. The vehicle 

was complex, unruly, and dangerous. Three of the six built had spectacular 

crashes; one almost killed Neil Armstrong before his famous flight. NASA 

wanted to cancel the program, thinking it too risky to the precious astronauts. 

But when Armstrong returned from the Moon, he insisted that the vehicles 

remain in use, for they provided the closest approximation of the actual Moon 

landing. The “flying simulator” further blurred the boundary between real 

and virtual flight and proved a valuable rehearsal for the human-machine 

system that would land on the 

Simulation is but one arena where focusing on the human-machine 

relationship sheds new light on the history. Numerous decisions in Apollo 

concerned the human-machine relationship in some degree. The famous LOR 

decision placed great emphasis on human skill in docking and rendezvous. The 

decision to include three astronauts had to do with how human roles would be 

allocated. The three were originally dubbed “Pilot,” “Co-pilot,” and “Systems 

Engineer” but were later changed to “Commander,” “Command Module 

Pilot,” and “Lunar Module Pilot,” ensuring that all would be “pilots” even 

though the “Lunar Module Pilot” would only fly the craft as a backup (and 

did not train in the LLRV). Decisions about in-flight maintenance and repair 

traded off human repair skills against mechanical and electronic reliability. 

Critical functions like navigation could be handled entirely within the capsule 

but ended up being provided largely by ground stations. 

During the actual missions, several key events brought the humanmachine issues to the forefront. The “program alarm” in the final minutes 

of the Apollo landing required human intervention, and the landing ended 

under manual control, with great success. The incident set off a behind-thescenes debate about who was to blame. The press reported it as a bug in the 

32. Christian Gelzer, ed., “LLRV History” (unpublished manuscript, NASA Dryden History 

Office, 2004). See also “Minutes of Meeting, Flight Review Board, Lunar Landing Training 

Vehicle,” University of Houston, Clear Lake, 12 January 1970, Apollo Chronological File, NASA 

Historical Reference Collection, for a detailed discussion of why the astronauts found the LLTV 

valuable. 
158 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

program (a concept soon to enter popular discourse). MIT engineers pointed 

out that the astronauts had forgotten to turn off a piece of equipment that was 

feeding extraneous data to the computer and causing it to overload. Others 

could point to a problem with procedures that did not correctly direct the 

astronauts. NASA, by contrast, narrated the landing as the victory of a skilled 

human operator over fallible automation-a result that highlighted the heroic 

goals of the program. Who was at fault is less important than the terms of the 

debate, as the tensions between humans and automated systems refused to go 

away, even in the triumphant moments of the program. 

Other events in the remaining Apollo flights continued to highlight the 

tensions between the computer, its software, and its human operators. During 

Apollo 8, astronaut Jim Love11 mistakenly pushed a button that erased the 

computer’s memory-committing an error that NASA swore would never 

happen. In Apollo 12, the spacecraft was struck by lightning soon after liftoff, 

causing the system to reboot (imagine if they were running Microsoft!). 

During Apollo 14, the computer was reprogrammed in flight to help save 

the astronauts from a sticky abort button. Overall, the computers performed 

extremely well, and the astronauts spent as much (or more) time on the 

missions monitoring and managing the computer as they did actually “flying” 

the spacecraft. Yet on every single landing, for one reason or another, the 

pilots overrode the automatic systems and landed with their hands on the 

stick. Manual control of the landings allowed NASA and the public to see the 

flights as a human accomplishment rather than an automated one. 

AN AGENDA FOR RESEARCH 

This essay, of course, cannot provide an exhaustive history of the humanmachine issues that came to play in Apollo. It merely makes the case that a series 

of questions about human-machine interaction in the history of spaceflight 

can open up new research avenues into what some might think is a well-worn 

historical topic, and indeed these are the kinds of questions I’m currently 

exploring for a book on Apollo. Research directions include a close reading of 

the astronaut memoirs, building on Michael Collins’s revealing comments, to 

see how they narrated their own relationships to the computers and how they 

recalled the human-machine issues in retrospect. I’m also looking carefully at 

the decisions about how much to automate the landings, how that automation 

was actually implemented, and at the various parties (engineers, astronauts, 

managers, etc.) who engaged in the process. Analyzing the actual operations 

of the flights sheds light on how the human operators performed and what 

they actually did during the flights. 

Of course, these issues extend well beyond Apollo. One can ask about the 

early planning and decisions on the Space Shuttle and what role pilots played 
HUMAN AND MACHINE INTHE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 159 

The Space Shuttle cannot be flown without a human pilot; it is the first piloted 

spacecraft of the United States that has no capability for automated flight. This fisheye 

view of the Space Shuttle Atlantis is seen from the Russian Mir space station during 

the STS-71 mission. (NASA photo no. STSO71-741-004) 

in developing a spacecraft with a “piloted” reentry. In light of their lost bid 

to manually fly the Saturn rocket off the pad, the Shuttle decision appears as 

a victory where pilots again assert their authority and express their love for 

winged aircraft. Despite the X-15’s initial emphasis on the skill required for 

reentry, only one Shuttle flight has been flown manually from reentry: flight 

number 2 of Columbia, flown by former X-15 pilot Joe Engle from Mach 25 to 

the ground. Despite the presence of automated landing systems, every single 

Shuttle flight has ended with a manual landing. 

The human-machine relationship, as a meeting point for the social and 

technical aspects of a system, provides access to a variety of other aspects 

of space history that are otherwise difficult to integrate. The iconic role of 
160 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

astronauts as American heroes was critically dependent on their roles (real and 

perceived) in actual piloting ofthe missions. We can study how such public and 

political imperatives were incorporated, along with technical considerations, 

into the actual design of control systems and, conversely, hew the technical 

characteristics of those systems shaped and constrained the public imagery 

(there was a good technical argument for not allowing the astronauts to fly 

the Saturn off the pad). 

As Slava Gerovitch has explored in his essay in this volume, social and 

power relationships between different groups involved in the projectsastronauts and ground controllers, engineers versus managers, different groups 

within a program-manifest themselves in the design of the control systems. 

Training, as a method of matching of human to machine, is a place where 

these relationships begin to form, and simulation-as the artificial creation of a 

human experience or technical system-points to the increasingly blurred line 

between “real” and “virtual” in our own world. Such a discussion naturally 

leads into gender history because the issue of the astronaut’s control is also an 

issue of masculinity. Pay attention to how often ‘‘manliness” and “sissyness” 

(especially in jest) arise in conversations about technology and spaceflight, 

and one realizes that (consciously or unconsciously) gender is never far from 

operators and designers of control systems. One Apollo guidance engineer still 

professes his aversion to the use of the term “software” as unmanly. 

Beginning with Apollo, and continuing during the 1970s (and certainly 

into the future), the professional identity of astronauts began to expand-from 

the exclusive focus on test pilots to scientists and engineers (and even teachers 

and politicians), with new job titles like “mission specialist” and “payload 

specialist,” coupled with social expansions beyond White men. I recently asked 

an astronomer-astronaut how much he used his scientific judgment while in 

orbit-“Not at all,” he quickly replied. Most of his time had been spent 

following well-established procedures to deploy and operate other people’s 

experiments. Under such conditions, what is the necessity for scientific 

training, or for human presence at all? Still, that same astronaut acknowledged that being able to “speak the same language” as the scientists on the 

ground proved an important part of his job. Clearly, some level of tacit 

knowledge, social interaction, and common vocabulary played an important 

role in space operations (as it did for the CAPCOMs talking to their fellow 

pilots in Apollo). 

It should be possible to do an ethnographic study of space operations 

examining skill, training, professional identity, automation, divisions of power, 

and other aspects of human-machine relationships. Where, exactly, are 

humans in space exercising judgment, tacit knowledge, and creativity? How 

would the results differ for scientific versus technical operations? Mission 

transcripts, combined with interviews and a deep analysis of operations, 
HUMAN AND MACHINE IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 161 

would provide a solid basis for answering these and related questions. Even a 

cursory look at the Apollo lunar science operations presents rich material, as 

the astronauts conducted a variety of activities from deploying instruments 

to collecting samples (where, precisely, did “exploration” occur?). Such an 

ethnographic analysis, if rigorously done, would have important implications 

for engineering design, training, mission planning, and safety. It would also 

likely generate insights into the operation of other complex technical systems 

whose operations are rarely as well documented or as accessible as those of 

human spaceflight. 

Such research into the human-machine aspects ofspaceflight will also help 

clarify the tensions in human spaceflight between ‘‘science” and “exploration.” 

George Bush’s January 2004 speech used the word “exploration” more than 

25 times, while mentioning “science” only once or twice. In the documents 

and debates leading up to Kennedy’s Apollo decision, the assumption is that 

“exploration” is manned and “science” is remote or unmanned, and these 

debates have continued until the present day. What are the critical differences 

between science and exploration? Exploration, of course, has a long history, 

although when it has been brought to bear on spaceflight it has tended to take 

the form of hagiography more than critical analysis. As Steven Pyne’s essay in 

this volume wonderfully demonstrates, however, the large literature in history 

and the history of science has a great deal to offer current debates. Exploration 

often includes science, but usually as one component of a broader agenda, 

and not usually the most important one. For the sake of argument, we might 

make this oversimplified distinction: science is about collecting data to learn 

about the natural world, whereas exploration expands the realm of human 

experience. Sometimes the two overlap, but not always. Exploration has 

always had significant components of state interest, international competition, 

technical demonstration, public presentation, national and professional identity, 

and personal risk. Seen in this light, the prominence of these elements in 

Apollo seems less an anomaly than sensible in an historical context. 

Again, the science versus exploration dichotomy bears on human-machine 

relationships. McCurdy and Launius provide excellent examples in this volume: 

Admiral Byrd’s use of mechanical aids (i.e., aircraft) in exploring Antarctica 

raised questions of heroism, manliness, and professional identity. Similar issues 

arise in ocean exploration today, especially as the role of manned submersibles 

is questioned in the face of remote-and autonomous-vehicles. Again, the 

debates over technology often refer to professional identity: are you a real 

oceanographer if you don’t descend to the seafloor? Are you a real explorer if 

you never actually set foot in a new world? Must one physically “be there” to 

be an explorer? How do professional identities adapt to technological change? 

My goal here is not to advocate for either side in the debates about 

whether we should be sending people into space. Rather, I’m arguing that a 
162 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

scholarly, historical understanding of the human-machine relationship will 

help to clarify the terms of the public debate. And precise, informed public 

debate is critical if we are to commit significant resources to future projects. 

I’ll close with a recent anecdote that captures the richness, interest, and 

relevance of human-machine relationships in spaceflight. In the spring of 2004, 

the Explorer’s Club of New York City held its 100th annual dinner. At this 

glitzy, black-tie affair, a few thousand people stuffed into the grand ballroom 

of the Waldorf Astoria. The club has always included scientists, but also a 

panoply of mountain climbers, Navy captains, pilots, sailors, divers, trekkers, 

photographers, not a few astronauts, and a host of wannabe adventurers. 

At this event, on the stage, were some of the “greatest of the great” who 

rose in turn to give inspiring speeches about their own experiences and the 

importance of exploration. Bertrand Piccard, heir of the great Swiss exploring 

family, recounted his balloon circumnavigation of the world. Buzz Aldrin 

spoke about his journey to the Moon and advocated for a return to the Moon 

and a venture to Mars. Sir Edmund Hilary recounted the feeling of his first 

steps on the top of Everest. 

The evening’s last speaker was Dr. Steven Squyres of Cornell, the chief 

scientist of the project that had recently landed two robotic rovers on the 

surface of Mars. I leaned over to my friend and whispered, “This ought to be 

interesting, because the rest of those guys have actually gone places, where 

Squyres has done all of his work remotely, from a darkened room.” A moment 

later, Squyres got up there, on the heels of these great explorers, in front of 

thousands ofpeople, and said (I paraphrase), “I must say I’m a little intimidated, 

because all of these people have actually gone somewhere, whereas I’ve done 

my work from darkened rooms in Ithaca and Pasadena.” But he then gave an 

account of his and his group’s remote, robotic exploration of Mars that easily 

matched the others in excitement and inspiration. He explained how they 

“live” on Mars, for months at a time, through technologies of remote, virtual 

presence. He also made a plea for the importance of sending people to Mars, 

based on the scientific insight a field geologist would generate by actually 

“being there.” Here, as in so many other instances, science, exploration, 

technology, and professional identity were intertwined, and understanding 

those relationships is critical not only for the history and future of human 

spaceflight, but is key to the essence of human-machine relationships, the 

coupling of the social and technological, at the core of our modern world. 
SECTION I11 

NASA AND EXTERNAL RELATIONS 

INTRODUCTION 

n achieving its mission over the last 50 years and in pursuit of a variety of I goals, NASA has had complex interactions with a large number of external 

groups.This section discusses three of the most important: the aerospace industry, 

the Department of Defense, and the international space community. With a few 

notable exceptions, historians have often submerged these relationships as they 

concentrated on the internal problems, acbevements, and themes of the Agency 

itself. NASA’s relations with any one of these entities would be an enormous 

topic in its own right; each author in this section has adopted particular case 

studies that duminate key issues. 

In the first paper, Philip Scranton aims to enhance our understanding of 

the often contentious interaction between NASA and industry, which has been 

crucial in designing, testing, and building the hardware necessary to achieve 

the Agency’s mission.’ This essay gives a vivid accounting of the complexity 

of the space enterprise at a level that few people outside the space community 

contemplate. This complexity involves not only the operational relationsbps 

between NASA and its prime contractors, but also those among the primes and 

their thousands of subcontractors, among the subcontractors and the “sub-subs,” 

and so on down the line, all part of the aerospace industry at increasingly diffuse, 

but real, levels. Scranton points out that while there was (and is) much contention 

among those in the contracting community, historically all stood together against 

what they perceived as excessive NASA meddling and oversight.Yet somehow, 

it all worked (usually) in the end. Drawing on his own work on the fabrication 

of the Mercury spacecraft; on Bart Hacker and James Grimwood’s history of the 

Gemini program, On the Shoulders .f Titans;2 and on Joan Bromberg’s NASA and 

the Space Industry, Scranton shows the astonishing array of questions that arise 

when one considers concrete hstorical cases. 

Beyond his analysis of the problems, Scranton suggests five frameworks for 

research that might increase our understanding of the relations between NASA 

and industry, technology and organization, practice and process, and design and 

production.Two existing frameworks are Stephen Johnson’s study of the systems 

management approach in The Secret oJApoZlo and Howard McCurdy’s sociological 

approach to organizational culture exemplified in Inside NASA.3 Scranton also 

1. NASA has sponsored one study of the Agency’s relationship with the aerospace industry, but there 

is considerably more work to be done on the subject. See Joan L. Bromberg, NASA and the Space 

Industry (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins, 1999). 

2. Barton 6. Hacker and James M. Grimwood, On the Shoulders ofTitans:A History ofProject Gemini 

(1977; reprmt,Washmgton, DC: NASA SP-4203,2002). 

3. See Howard E. McCurdy, Inside NASA: High Technology and Organizational Change in the US. 

Space Program (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins, 1993); Stephen B. Johnson, The Secret ofApollo: Systems 

Management in American and European Space Programs (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins, 2002). 
166 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

proposes that analytical tools be used fiom the fields of social construction of 

technology, management theory, and anthropology to attack these problems. 

Scranton hopes for a shift in the writing of NASA history in what he 

sees as a long-overdue direction: the little-understood world of production 

for NASA. “Retelling NASA stories from the drafting room and shop floor 

outwards, from the bottom up,” he concludes, “has the potential to reorient a 

universe of NASA-centric histories.” He formulates a large number of questions 

that constitute a research program to this end. 

Scranton’s essay does not address the Department of Defense, but since 

the 1980s, DOD has funneled even more money into the space industry than 

NASA (their respective space budgets were on the order of $19 bdl’ ion versus 

$14 bdlion in 2003). Even before NASA was formed in 1958, DOD, with its 

growing stock of ballistic missiles, realized the importance of space for military 

reconnaissance. In the interservice competition to create a scientific satellite 

for the International Geophysical Year (IGY, 1957-58), the Navy’s Vanguard 

program was given the go-ahead, but it was the Army, with a modified Jupiter C 

ballistic missile, that launched Explorer 1 on 31 January 1958, the first successful 

American satellite in the wake of Sputnik. The opening of the Space Age was 

accompanied by intense discussion as to whether the nation’s space program 

should be military or civilian. NASA’s birth signaled the decision for a civilian 

agency, but the proper role for military and civilian space programs has been 

debated ever since. 

Peter Hays, a policy analyst with 25 years of service in the Air Force, 

focuses on three key issues and time periods to illuminate NASA-DOD 

relations. In the first issue, organizing to implement the American space vision 

in the 1950s, he finds three major activities with bureaucratic interests that 

endure today: moving the Army Ballistic Missile Agency (ABMA) into NASA, 

consolidating DOD space activities under the Alr Force, and establishing the 

National Reconnaissance Office (NRO). Once the ABMA was transferred to 

Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, in September 1960, after 

a protracted struggle, the Army was officially out of the space business; DOD 

space activities were concentrated in the Air Force. Not trusting reconnaissance 

satellites to the Au Force, however, President Eisenhower formed what is now 

known as the NRO in late 1960. DOD and NRO activities became increasingly 

classified under President Kennedy, a situation that led to widely divergent public 

and congressional perceptions of the NASA and military space programs and 

also made the writing of mditary space history dependent on declassification. 

Hays’s second issue is the rationale for human spaceflight in the early space 

program, in particular the competition between NASA and the Air Force for 

human spaceflight missions. In this competition, NASA was decidedly the winner; 

the Air Force was rebuffed on its Dyna-Soar effort by the end of 1963 and its 

Manned Orbiting Laboratory by 1969 (after $1.4 billion in expenditures). 
INTRODUCTION - SECTION 111 167 

These early interactions among NASA, DOD, and NRO provide deep 

background for Hays’s third issue, the development of the Space Shuttle, 

which provided “the most focused, longest running, and most intense interplay 

among these organizations . . . the single most important factor in shaping their 

interrelationships.” As Hays shows and others have suggested before him, in 

selling the Shuttle project to Congress and the President, and especially once 

the decision was made that the Shuttle was to be the nation’s primary launch 

vehicle, NASA needed DOD support and DOD needed NASA to launch its large 

spy satellites4 The Air Force component of DOD was essential in determining 

Shuttle payload and performance criteria and is credited with saving the program 

during the Carter administration when Vice President Mondale and the Office 

of Management and Budget tried to cut it. It was the Air Force that successhlly 

argued that four Shuttles were needed.The price exacted from NASA was mission 

priority for DOD. Yet, because it did not control the Space Shuttle program, the 

Air Force was never very enthusiastic about it.And in the aftermath of Challenger, 

the Space Transportation Policy underwent a seismic shift, with the Air Force and 

NRO once again returning largely to expendable launch vehicles. For historians 

and policy analysts, the Space Shuttle program provides an unparalleled window 

on the relations among NASA, DOD, and NRO. Hays concludes that it is “an 

excellent illustration of the general Ir Force ambivalence over the military 

potential of space and military man-in-space as well as evidence of the lack of 

clear and accepted doctrinal guidance on these issues.” 

In the third chapter in this section,John Krige asks an intriguing question: 

why does the most powerful nation on Earth for the last 50 years want or need 

international space cooperation? As he points out, some have argued that space 

cooperation was used in the Cold War era and should continue to be used now, 

under changed circumstances, as an instrument of foreign policy in which to 

foster and gain allies. But, he notes, blind international cooperation exacts a price: 

there is a tension among sharing technology, not compromising national security, 

and remaining industrially competitive. He argues that sharing technology in the 

interests of international cooperation makes no sense, historically or practically, 

unless one opens the “black box” of the interaction of technology and foreign 

policy: “It is crucial to focus on what specific technologies might be available 

for sharing in the pursuit of specific foreign policy objectives, rather thanas so often happens-to simply lump technology and foreign policy into an 

undifferentiated whole.” Historians must study international collaboration at 

this fine-grained level, he insists, if the analysis is to be robust. 

4. See Dwayne A. Day, “Invitation to Strugg1e:The History of Civd-Mditary Relations in Space,” ~fl 

John M. Logsdon, gen. ed., Exploring the Unknown: Selected Documents in the History ofthe US. Civil Space 

Program, vol. 2, External Relationships (Washington, DC: NASA SP-4407,1996), esp. pp. 263-270. 
168 CRITICAL ISSUES INTHE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

In his essay, Krige takes his own advice by analyzing a particular case of 

attempted technology transfer: themid-1960s desire by the Johnson administration 

to collaborate with Western Europe, particularly with the European Launcher 

Development Organisation (ELDO), on a civilian satellite launcher. This desire 

was based on the belief that such cooperation would strengthen European 

unity, close the technology gap between the United States and Europe, and 

divert ELDO resources from the technology of nuclear weapons delivery by 

using them in space instead. NASA and the State Department particularly 

argued the last point: that by sharing launch technology with ELDO, including 

documentation on the Atlas-Centaur upper stage that would allow European 

satellites to reach geosynchronous orbit, they would discourage other nations 

from applying resources to national military programs. In opposition to this 

desire for cooperation were American national security and business interests. 

In particular, some felt that American technology transfer might actually benefit 

the French nuclear weapons program in terms of its delivery system. Others 

pointed out that the technology transfer might confer commercial advantage 

to certain countries in terms of competition with INTELSAT, the worldwide 

communications satellite consortium under U.S. control via COMSAT. Although 

NASA and the State Department argued for a finer analysis and a case-by-case 

study rather than the blunt instrument of national security memoranda, in the 

end, the argument for relaxing constraints on technology transfer lost. Krige 

explains the reasons, which are deeply rooted in historical events. 

Krige suggests that historically, the protection of national security and 

national industry interests always prevails over foreign policy considerations. His 

insights into the connections between space and foreign policy open up a new 

direction in space history and the history of this component of foreign policy. 

By no means do the aerospace industry, the Department of Defense, 

and international relations exhaust even the general categories of NASA's 

external activities. Other interagency activities, such as interactions with the 

State Department and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration 

(NOM); university relations, as championed by former NASA Administrator 

James Webb and some of his successors; public and community relations, always 

important to NASA's image; and congressional relations, so essential to hnding, 

raise their own unique questions as subjects of historical analysis. Nevertheless, 

taken together, this section highlights how multifaceted NASA history is, as well 

as how very much remains to be done in a large number of areas and from a 

variety of new perspectives. 
CHAPTER 6 

NASA AND THE AEROSPACE INDUSTRY 

CRITICAL ISSUES AND RESEARCH PROSPECTS 

Philip Scranton 

The X-15 was [Harrison] Storms’ airplane as much as it was anybody 

else’s airylane. A lot of other people could lay claim to it. The theorists 

at NACA [National Advisory Committeefor Aeronautics] had actually 

laid out the basic lines and drawn up the specijcations. Some of these 

people thought oftNorth American’s] Storms and his ilk as “tin benders,” 

lowly contractors who simply hammered out the hardware to match the 

vision of the scientists. But this wasn’t hardware. This was jewelry. 

-Mike Gray, Angle cfAttack 

As costs rose, schedules slipped. One source of delay was attempted 

improvements . . . . The Gemini Program Office was less than happy 

with the course of events . . . . Not only was GPO being bypassed in the 

process that approved changes Lockheed wanted to make, but the project 

ofjce was not always even told what those changes were. 

-Bart Hacker and James Grimwood, On the Shoulders of Titans 

[Reassignment to] Spacecraft Assembly and Test brought me totally down 

to reality-down and dirty with the thousands ofphysical details that had 

to be pevfectly crafted, installed, verified, and documented, and face toface 

with the earnest, hard-working men and women who strove to do their 

very best to build a spacecraft that would land men on the Moon and bring 

them back safely . . . . I had seen the effort and concentration by hundreds 

ofskilled craftsmen that was needed to make engineering orders or program 

decisions take shape in fact, not just on paper. 

-Thomas J. Kelly, Moon Lander 
170 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

n concluding his 1999 essay review of recent works in NASA history, I Northeastern University’s W. D. Kay noted that however thorough these studies, 

they “wind up saying very little about the behavior of the private contractors who 

actually built the rockets, probes, and satellites. With rare exceptions that almost 

always involve catastrophes . . . the internal worlungs of the nation’s aerospace 

contractors never receive anywhere near the level of scrutiny routinely accorded 

to NASA.” Tipping his hat to Roger Bilstein’s Stages to Suturn as a “happy exception” to this pattern, he added his concern that silences on the industrial front 

obstructed assessment of credit, blame, and “accountabil~ty..” In this regard, Kay 

hoped that aerospace companies would disclose the sources that would document their “role(s) in shaping the U.S. space program,”’ but at least for Mercury, 

Gemini, and Apollo, mountains of industry documents have been preserved in 

NASA files and NARA archives, awaiting our attention. Perhaps this essay will 

encourage scholars to plunge into them bearing questions and agendas that will 

enrich our appreciation for the business of building space technologies. 

During its first years, NASA reluctantly discarded the NACA’s “we build 

it here” philosophy, abandoning its predecessor’s approach for an emphasis on 

design and supervision, project management, and performance review.’ Rapidly, 

then durably, the Agency paid out 90 percent of its budget allocations to contractors, chiefly private-sector firms, for engineering, fabrication, testing, redesign, 

certification, and ~hipment.~ These industrial enterprises and their hundreds, 

perhaps thousands, of subcontractors, constituted the aerospace industry, which 

commenced in the 1950s chiefly as a series of projects, then divisions, within 

well-known aircraft companies: North American, Martin, Lockheed, Boeing, 

Douglas, and McDonnell, supplemented by specialists in electrical or chemical 

technologies and products (GE, Thi~kol).~ Given the NASA History Office’s 

charge to research Agency plans, programs, and performance, it is understand1. W. D. Kay, “NASA and Space History,” Technology and Cultnre 40 (1999). 120-127. A number of 

titles partly addressing Kay’s concerns appeared later than his January 1999 pubhcation; some of them 

wlll be discussed below. 

2. George Mueller, NASA’s Apollo director, indicated that in the 1950s, NACA depended on the 

An- Force to do fabrication contracting for them, thus beginning the shift to externahzation (NASM 

Oral History Project, Mueller Interview No. 4,15 February 1988, p 13, avadable at http //www.nasm. 

si edu/research /dsh/TRANSCPT/MUELLER4 HTM). 

3. Howard McCurdy, Inside NASA: Hgh Technology and Organizational Change in the US. Space Program 

(l3altimore. Johns Hopkins, 1993), p. 39. Some of this was interagency transfer, I presume, as ABMA 

budt some launch vehicles and assembled others, but the bulk of it was fundmg to private enterprises. 

4. Over hme, the number of prime contractors shrank decisively through a series of mergers and 

acquisitions, notably the creahon of McDonnell Douglas (1967) and its amdgamahon with North 

American Rockwell’s Aerospace Division in a Boeing-led merger during the 1990s. Marnn acquired 

American Marietta in the 1960s, then merged a generanon later wth Lockheed, yieldmg Lockheed 

Martin in 1994. The rising cost of aerospace projects (and of mlitary aircraft development) and the 

uncertainty of profitabhty made fadure on a multidon-dollar bid extremely painful and made 

continued on the next page 
NASA AND THE AEROSPACE INDUSTRY. . . 171 

able that histories to date have fostered far greater appreciation for NASA’s 

managerial, political, and mission-related achievements and conflicts than for its 

contractors’ struggles to fabricate and qualify spaceflight technologies. Hence 

the epigraphs aim to evoke multiple dimensions of manufacturing for NASAthe tensions between Agency managers/designers and onsite corporate program 

directors; the extravagant demands spaceware placed on engineering and production capabilities (“jewelry”); the perennial need for improvements and fixes; 

that work‘s impact on costs, schedules, and communication; and the substantive 

gap between management/engineering plans and the grinding detail work on 

shop floors and in clean rooms across Ameri~a.~ 

To rephrase this somewhat, an enhanced understanding of industrial 

practice in relation to NASA projects could benefit from sustained attention 

to four core but interrelated themes: 1) initial designing and building of technological artifacts; 2) testing, redesigning, and reworkinglrefabricating such 

artifacts; 3) alliances among and contests between contractors, as well as contractors’ collaboration with or challenges to NASA units; and 4) approaches to 

conceptualizing complex contracting and managerial relationships in the production of “edge” technologies. Exploring these will help expose their layers 

and nested problem sets as this discussion moves toward sketching examples 

which illuminate recurrent situations, some elements of change over time, and 

key persistent features of the environment for fabricating aerospace innovations. In addition, this essay will briefly review aspects of the literature concerning aerospace production for NASA, will mention preliminary findings 

from my work with Mercury spacecraft fabrication records, and will close by 

offering a set of potential research questions in this area. 

NASA AND INDUSTRY FOUR CORE ISSUES 

1) Initially designing and building aerospace artifacts. 

The iconic NASA artifacts werelaunch vehicles and their payloads (manned 

capsules, satellites, observatories, etc.), yet a significant class of artifacts never 

experienced the rigors of the extraterrestrial environment (launch apparatus, 

testing and simulation devices, ground support and tracking/communications 

equipment, and much more). LVhile being integral to NASA’s ability to reach 

continued3om the previous page 

consohdations gradually more attractive. See Joan Bromberg, NASA and the Space Industry (Baltimore: 

Johns Hopluns, 1999), pp. 12-13. 

5. The epigraphs reference what Howard McCurdy terms the “first generation” of NASA, the 

era through 1970.That’s the only era about which I can profess anything like detailed knowledge, 

principally as a result of serving as the Lindbergh Char at NASM (2003-04) and doing archival 

research at NARA’s Fort Worth branch and at NASA Headquarters on the design and fabrication of 

the Mercury spacecraft. 
172 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

space and, not infrequently, reusable,6 they stood earthbound. Ground equipment, whatever its complexity, arguably faced fewer “unknowns” than that 

which was launched, suggesting two distinct lines of design and production 

dynamics. Moreover, as will be indicated below, some aerospace technologies 

were “merely” complex, whereas others severely “stretched” technological 

capabilities, another line of differentiation which could profitably be crosscompared with the launched and the grounded artifacts’ development. 

Nonetheless, virtually all these technological artifacts were customdesigned and purpose-built, although NASA leaders at times urged contractors 

to use “off-the-shelf” components or items proven in use during earlier projects. 

The design process was intricate and NASA-led in the early years, at times 

contentious, and staggeringly demanding in engineering effort and precision. 

Building was likewise intricate but was contractor-led (with the exception ofthe 

Army Ballistic Missile Agency rockets and a few others) and NASA-supervisedl 

-critiqued, while being staggeringly complex in project management, quality 

control, and shop-floor detail-and yes, often contentious as well. 

Moreover, beneath the level of large-object systems (rockets, capsules, 

launch sites, etc.), complexities in design and building animated the production 

of components, the parts for components, and the spatial/operational strategies 

for assembly and integration of components into functional systems (electrical 

power, fuel delivery, instrumentation) before the further integration of those 

systems into the large objects. Occasions for error abounded, as all historians of 

NASA know well, and the challenges of detecting errors’ causes varied dramatically--from simply identif+g a faulty fuse to reassembling the shattered parts 

of an exploded Redstone. 

The engineering implications of failures were plain: “whenever something 

broke, we redesigned it.”7 The managerial implications were more ambiguous, for 

NASA officials, contractors’ personnel, subcontractors, veteran Air Force project 

managers (much involved in NASA efforts), as well as for advocates and critics of 

the space program, in and out of government. Parts, component, and large-object 

failures were expected, yet they could (and did) derange budgets, stall schedules, initiate blame games, and hazard careers. Tom Kelly’s transfer to Spacecraft Assembly, 

noted in the third epigraph, was a stark demotion triggered by a dismaying array of 

leaks in the first Moon lander Grumman had proudly delivered to Cape Kennedy, 

a shock that led him to a fresh learning curve’ and leads us to theme two. 

6. Unlike everything launched before the Shuttle era. On the Shuttle as the first reusable space 

vehicle, see Diane Vaughan, “The Role of the Orgarmation in the Production of Techno-Scientific 

Knowledge,” Social Studies of Science 29 (1999): 919. 

7. Inside NASA, p. 32. 

8. Thomas J. Kelly, Moon Lander: How We Developed the Apollo Lunar Module (Washington, DC: 

Smithsonian, 2001), pp. 165-171.Thn demorakahon is noted by Stephen Johnson in The Secret of 

Apollo (Baltunore: Johns Hophns, 2002), pp. 145-146. 
NASA AND THE AEROSPACE INDUSTRY. . 173 

2) Redesigning, testing, and reworking aerospace artifacts. 

In aerospace design and fabrication, three “rules” might be regarded as 

near universals: a) “the distance between paper and product is greater than you 

think,” b) “nobody gets it right the first time,” and c) “learn that fiilure is your 

Cciend.” These are applicable in part because space manufacturing has to meet 

more demanding environmental tests than any other category of production.’ 

Zero gravity, temperatures verging on absolute zero, the vacuum of space, launch 

vibrations and postlaunch rocket oscdlations (pogo-ing), combustion instability, 

the complex interdependencies of functional systems, and the impossibility of 

most in-mission fixes combined with other hazards to render manufacturing for 

NASA launches a high-risk, high-stress task. Testing, particularly of components 

and subsystems, routinely revealed shortcomings in materials, workmanship, 

capability, or durability, mandating redesign, indeed often multiple redesigns.” 

“Fixes” themselves could create new problems-e.g., a redesigned part impinging 

more on a nearby component than the prior version, now radiating vibrations 

that unsettle its neighbors’ instrumentation. Recognized insufficiencies in a system 

could trigger a higher-order redesign (classically, realization that fuel cell reliabdity 

was uncertain, yielding a shift to batteries),” which then entailed rethinking system 

integration. Occasionally, interprogram redesigns affected the large objects, which 

tended to present a stable exterior appearance. For example, the Mercury capsule’s 

system components were largely located in the interior space of the “tin can,” 

crowding one another and the astronaut.They were maddening to adjust or repair 

(getting at a failed part in one system usually involved removing elements of 

another, adding possibihties for error and failure). However, in the larger Gemini 

capsules, designers modularized functional systems (all key parts located together, 

insofar as was possible) and removed them outside the astronauts’ operating space, 

mahng them accessible from the exterior of the capsule for maintenance.” 

9.The “ru1es”are ofmy devising, derived &om (not quoted &om) primary sources. Likewise, the “more 

demanding” claim is arguable, though not pursued here. Comparable, but somewhat less demanding, 

envlronments for production, in my view, involve nanotechnologies, biotechnologies, deep underwater 

artifacts (nuclear submarines), and cryogemc or ArctdAntarchc processes/places. At the press conference observing the Mercury Project’s closure, McDonnellS Walter Burke asserted: “The problem 

of designing and making work this complex group of systems is one whch [required] and did get a 

degree of attention to detad far surpassing [any] that has ever been evident in any mdustrial effort up to 

date.”A newsman thoughdully countered that Adrmral kckover might challenge that claim (transcript, 

Mercury Project Summary Conference, box 1 ,“Mercury Final Conference,”September-October 1963, 

entry 196-Subject Files, NASA, Johnson Space Center Fdes, NARA RG255). 

10. As Mission Control’s Gene Kranz summarized, “If you were successful, the concept was labeled 

brdliant, and you could focus your energies on the next step, the next set of unknowns. If you had 

problems, you found them early and somehow made time to fix them whde keeping on schedule. If 

you faded, a lot of expensive hardware was reduced to junk and the schedule shattered” (Gene Kranz, 

Failure Is Not an Option, NewYork: Simon & Schuster, 2000, p. 210). 

11. Kelly, Moon Lander, pp. 83-84. 

12. Barton Hacker and James Grimwood, On the Shoulders of Titans: A History of Project Gemini 

(Washington, DC: NASA SP-4203,1977), pp. 33-34. 
174 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

In this context, experienced contractors understood that NASA’s or their 

own engineers’ blueprint designs represented a preliminary set of parameters 

for manufacturing, given the multiple uncertainties of testing and use and 

the unknown unknowns (unk-unks) that could wreak havoc. at any point.13 

Thousands of engineering design changes would flow through every largeobject project, ripping holes in budgets, but ironically reinforcing the confidence of NASA staff and contractors’ engineering and production teams. 

“As a part of their culture, NASA employees came to believe that risk and 

failure were normal” and that the anticipation of failure led to its a~oidance.’~ 

Hence the salience of acknowledging the long road from sketch to artifact, the 

necessity of iterative design and testing, and the value of welcoming failures 

(though obviously not fatalities). 

3) Contests and alliances betweedamong contractors and NASA units. 

One could hardly do better for a starting point in thinking about managerial 

relationships in high-performance technological production and operation than 

to revisit W. R. Scott’s classic formulation of three central issues: 

We expect technical complexity to be associated with structural 

complexity or performer complexity (professionalization); technical uncertainty with lower formalization and decentralization of 

decision making; and intevdependence with higher levels of coordination. Complexity, uncertainty, and interdependence are alike in 

at least one respect: each increases the amount of information that 

must be processed during the course of a task performance.Thus 

as complexity, uncertainty, and interdependence increase, structural modifications need to be made that will either 1) reduce 

the need for information processing, for example by lowering 

the level of interdependence or lowering performance standards; 

or 2) increase the capacity of information processing systems, by 

13. A concise evocation of the “unk-unks” (famously referenced in a 12 February 2002 press 

conference by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld) can be found inTom Kelly’s analysis of the Apollo 

Lunar Excursion Module’s (LEN) history. Having completed a prelimnary design study for Grumman, 

Kelly’s partner Tom Samal opined “‘I’ll bet the real Apollo won’t look hke any of the vehicles we’ve 

studied.’. . .‘Why do you say that? Don’t you think we’ve done a good job,’ I challenged. [Samal replied,] 

‘Our study was okay as far as it went, but I’m sure we’vejust probed the obwous.There’s stdl so much 

we don’t know about how to fly to the Moon.’ I had to agree wth that. ‘You’re right. We don’t even 

know yet what we don’t know”’ (Kellx Moon Lander, p. 16). 

14. McCurdy, Imide NASA, pp. 62-65. For me, at least, it is not clear, in practice, with what rehabhty 

anticipation of failure does lead to its avoidance, or indeed how one would know/measure/analyze this. 

Ths may be one of those rarely voiced articles of faith that I have elsewhere referred to as”fabr1cations.” 

See Phhp Scranton, “Cold War Technological Complexltles: Budding American Jet Engines, 1942-60” 

(unpublished paper presented at SHOT Annual Meenng, Amsterdam, October 2004). 
NASA AND THE AEROSPACE INDUSTRY.. . 175 

increasing the [flow and carrying] capacity of the hierarchy or by 

legitimating lateral connection among participants. l5 

Todd La Porte and Paula Consolini appropriated this conceptualizing statement 

as foundational for their studies of “hugh-reliability organizations,” working a 

counterpoint to the normalization of complex technology/system failures evident in Charles Perrow’s analyses.16 Having done workplace studies, they argued 

that with enough attention to detail, procedure, and training, complex organizations can and do manage to handle high-risk situations without catastrophic 

consequences. Yet the situations their air traEc controllers and aircraft carrier 

landmg technicians mastered were characterized by long-term stable technologies, high-volume repetitions, and thus a restricted, known set of risk-enhancing 

conditions and emergency-inducing variables (chiefly technical failures and cascading climate problems). Though they partook of Scott’s three core features, 

NASA production and operations did not fit thu high-reliability stabilization 

framework, for these were nearly unique phenomena, lacked technological stability, lacked mastery-inducing repetitions, and thus confronted hazard conditions and variables that could not be fully comprehended, much less defended 

against by backups and redundancies.” 

One implication of this difference was that for technological, economic, 

organizational, and cultural reasons, contracts proved blunt instruments 

for regulating the production and operational relationships between NASA 

and its contractors, much less among NASA and primes on one hand and 

thousands of subcontractors (and sub-subs) on another.’* Technically, the 

15. W. R. Scott, Organrzationr: Rational, Natural, and Open Systems, 2nd ed. (Englewood Ch&, NJ: 

Prentice Hall, 1987), quoted in Todd La Porte and Paula Consohni, “Worlung in Prachce But Not 

in Theory: Theoretical Challenges of “High-Rehabhty Organizations,”Journal of Pubhc Admrnistration 

Research and Theory 1 (1991): 30. 

16. Charles Perrow, Normal Accidents, rev. ed. (Princeton: Princeton Unwersity Press, 1999). 

17.Vaughan points out that although the Shuttles were reusable, thus superficially identical among 

exishng craft and from mssion to mssion, in actuality,“no two shuttles were alike; after each mission, 

the several NASA/contractor work groups made hundreds of changes, so the techcal artifact was 

different for each launch” (Vaughan, “Role,” p. 919). 

18. In a heroic but doomed effort to “prehct changes in NASA satellite contracts,” two management 

analysts secured a NASA grant in the early 1970s and profiled the contract changes for 21 satelhte 

projects. Seeking a prechctive formula, they ignored engineering changes below the contract change 

level (Engineering Change Requests, or ECRs, versus Contract Change Proposals, or CCPs [CCPs 

were often large-scale shifts in design, whereas ECRs usually were changes in indwidual components]), 

identified mean change costs as $100 K-$300 K, and struggled to find somethmg to regress.Yet they 

&d offer an empirical table that suggests the econormc foundation for contests and alliances. Focused 

on 21 contracts between 1959 and 1968,it showed that in the course ofthe first 10 contracts (195942), 

final costs were 5.1 times imtlal contract figures on average, though in the final 10 contracts (1964-68), 

this multiplier fell to 2.1. However, final costs were eshmated in half the latter 10, as perhaps cost data 

continued on the next page 
176 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

endless Engineering Change Requests that testing and use generated meant 

routine contests both over the need for and design ofreconfigured components, 

checkout routines, etc., and over who would bear the costs. Economically, as 

well, changes (due to incapacities or aimed at improving capabilities) escalated 

program expenses and generated NASA-corporate alliances between firms 

when both faced congressional appropriations hurdles. Primes and subs fought 

over late deliveries and defective products yet stood shoulder to shoulder 

against persistent NASA “meddling,” “intrusive oversight,” or “p~licing.”~~ 

Varied patterns of clashing cultures stretched back to the space program’s 

earliest days, when, in the course of new and massive contracting for Mercury 

spacecraft, the inheritance by the Army Ballistic Missile Agency (ABMA) and 

NASA of “management by detail” from NACA/Peenemiinde ran head-on 

into McDonnell’s pride in engineering creativity and independence. Long a 

principal Air Force aircraft supplier, McDonnell expected a continuation ofthe 

arm’s-length, consultative style of contract relations crafted over two decades. 

Instead, NASA designers and managers, who had never held responsibility for 

a major technologically novel project, locked horns repeatedly with industry 

specialists who had done so.’’ Later, when NASA Administrator James Webb 

geared up for Apollo in 1963 by reorganizing the Agency’s top management, 

those he brought in had substantial experience in Air Force ballistic missile 

program management and industrial military contracting (George Mueller, 

Air Force Generals Samuel Phillips and Edmund O’Connor, and the legendary 

Joseph Shea).’l Webb evidently recognized that at NASA, “nobody knew 

how to do program management or work with industry on large programs.”” 

continuedfrom the previous page 

remaned incomplete at the time of their article’s composiQon.The declme in the overrun due to contract changes does suggest better specificatlons in the latter period. See Wdham Stephenson and Bruce 

Berra,”Predichng Changes in NASA Satellite Contracts,” Management Science 21 (1975): 626-637, table 

on p. 629. Regarding Apollo, “what began as a $400 don contract would top out at $4.4 bdhon a 

decade later. But everybody knew th~s going in.All of the Apollo bids were smoke and mrrors, because 

[in 19621 nobody knew what they were tallung about” (Gray, Angle $Attack, p. 120). 

19. Regarding the Shuttle booster,Vaughan observes that NASA saw ‘‘Marshall engmeermg’s role” as 

“pohcingThioko1; to find fault, to idenhfy mstakes, to make sure the contractor abided by the contract” 

(Vaughn,“Role,” p. 920).The issue is not that this was not appropriate, but that it was inadequate and 

ineffectual. 

20. Joan Bromberg inhcated that NASA core leaders feared loss of design control and shoddy work 

by companies given too much authority. See Bromberg, NASA and the Space Industry, pp. 40, 43. See 

also McCurdy, Inside NASA, pp. 38-42, which includes th gem on p. 41:“In one celebrated instance, 

contract workers at what became the Kennedy Space Center went out on strike because the von Braun 

team would not let them alone.The workers were accustomed to Air Force practice, wlch involved 

httle direct supervision.” 

21. Shea took personal responsibdity for the Apollo fire chaster and resigned from NASA in July 

1967 (Kelly, Moon Lander,p. 161). 

22. McCurdy, Inside NASA, p. 92. 
NASA AND THE AEROSPACE INDUSTRY.. . 177 

McCurdy’s judgment on the results of this reorientation is clear: “NASA’s 

success in achieving the goals of the Apollo program was due in large measure 

to the tension between the Air Force approach to program management and 

NASA’s traditional technical 

Organizational structures did create platforms for alliances, however 

fraught with tension, as well as for clashes. Industry and Agency engineers with 

similar specialties and backgrounds worked through problem sets in spaces far 

distant from policy-making and budget authorizdtions. For example, Space 

Task Group and McDonnell collaborated in depth to create Project Orbit, the 

huge vacuum chamber in which an entire Mercury capsule could be tested in 

as close to space conditions as was then feasible. Later, on the Lunar Lander 

project, NASA and Grumman co-staffed the Change Control Board to assess 

modifications and manage configuration (modeled on Air Force practice) .24 

4) Conceptualizing contracting relations and production on technology’s edges. 

Although these first three items hardly exhaust the potential list of 

themes linking NASA and industry, technology and organization, practice 

and process, design and production, it is worth pausing here for a moment 

to consider the possible conceptual tools and theoretical frameworks with 

which scholars can map this terrain in ways that increase our understanding. 

Two existing frameworks stand out, at least in my view: Stephen Johnson’s 

close analysis of systems management’s rise to dominion in NASA programs, drawing on Weber, Drucker, and the literature of “knowledge management,” and Howard McCurdy’s sociological approaches to organizational 

culture at NASA and its transformations. Johnson’s work focuses closely on 

the struggle to achieve rational control over projects and heighten reliability 

through devising and enforcing rigorous procedures. McCurdy reaches into 

the extrarational world of the beliefs and assumptions that underlie (and at 

23. Ibid. See also Mike Gray,Angle ofAttack: Harrison Storms and the Race to the Moon (NewYork: Norton, 

1992), pp. 50-52. On p. 50, for example: “Most of [NASA’s] key people were creative iconoclasts hke 

Maxime Faget, conceptual thinkers used to a hands-on approach in wluch they personally supervised 

every detail . . . . Now they were being asked to create the largest technical orgarmation of all time.” 

24. Johnson, Secret, p. 128; Kelly, Moon Lander, p. 102. By contrast, the Apollo program’s “powerhl 

Change Control Board,” created in 1967 after the astronauts’ deaths, seems to have been entirely 

NASA-staffed, wth George Low making final decisions on “changes proposed by NASA or the prime 

contractors” (Kelly, Moon Lander, p. 163). Johnson discusses the collaborative style of early NASAindustry management more fully in Secret, pp. 116-120. Superficially, that is, without specific research 

into the issue, it appears to me that collaborative NASA-industry design and engineering waned and 

NASA surveillancdpolicing increased over time, perhaps a shft triggered by the January 1967 deaths of 

White, Grissom, and Chaffee, as might be inferred flom Johnson’s review of the postaccident managerial 

shifts and conflicts (Secret, pp. 146-150). Ifthere was such a shift, was it confined to manned space issues, 

or did it generahe across all NASA projects? 
178 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

times undermine) practices, offering a dramatically different perspective. Both 

focus primarily on the Agency, as would be expected, leaving ample room for 

pursuing questions about the industry and production side of the spacefaring 

equation.25 

Three other perspectives, which grapple with practice at the “local” 

level, strike me as potentially valuable, particularly in thinking about industrial matters: 

1) Adapting the social construction of technology (SCOT) framework to 

encompass ways in which emergent organizations, much like “unruly” 

technologies, can become “uncertainty multipliers,” a notion Diane 

Vaughan has applied convincingly to “the NASA/contractor organization” for the Shuttle.26 

2) Exploring management theorists’ conceptualization of the interplay 

between rationality and irrationality within organizations, and its 

relation to collateral inquiries into organizational disorder and its 

implications. 27 

3) Developing research questions in relation to work and technology, 

based on anthropologists’ concern for “situated practice” and “communities of practice.”28 

The provocative potential of Vaughan’s perspective can be quickly sensed 

in her opening remarks to a recent discussion paper on organizations and 

techno-scientific knowledge: 

25. Johnson, Secret, pp. 1-3; McCurdy, Inside NASA, pp. 163-164. Johnson also includes an instructive 

comparison wth the European space agencies (European Space Research Orgamsatlon [ESRO]/ELDO, 

Secret, chaps. 6 and 7) but does not appear to have dehvered on one sipficant point. He ends chap. 5 

(speaking of the period around 1970) with “The dsadvantages of systems management would become 

apparent later . . .” (pp. 152-153), but so far as I can tell, no dscussion of disadvantages appears in the 

remaimng sections of his study. There may be other theoretlcal frameworks well exemplified in NASA 

literature, but I’m not yet fdar with them. Both McCurdy and Johnson undertake the explanation 

of NASA’s “decline” and the resurgence of mssion failures/disasters two decades after Apollo. 

26.Vaughan,“Role,” pp. 916-919.Vaughn’s inspirations flowed from Clifford Geertz, Charles Perrow, 

and the “situated action” group (n. 27), as well as from the STS and science studm hteratures (see 

“Role,” pp. 935-936, nn. 2-5, 17). 

27. Nils Brunsson, The Irrational Organization: Irrationality as a Basis for Otganizational Action and 

Change (New York: Wdey, 1985); Massimo Warglien and lMtchael Masuch, The Logic of Otganizational 

Disorder (Berhn: deGruyter, 1996), esp. the ehtors’ introductlon and chapters by Bruno Bernard, Erhard 

Friedberg, and Nils Brunsson. 

28. Lucy Suchman, Plans and Situated Actions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), John 

Seely Brown and Paul Duguid, The Social Llfe of Information (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 

2000); Julian Orr, Talking About Machines (Ithaca: Cornell Umversity Press, 1996); Christlan Heath and 

Paul Luff, e&., Technology in Action (Cambridge: Cambridge Umversity Press, 2000); Enenne Wenger, 

Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning and Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge Umversity Press, 1998). 
NASA AND THE AEROSPACE INDUSTRY.. . 179 

I begin by drawing on organization theory to illustrate the 

central paradox oforganizations: namely, that the characteristics 

usually associated with the bright side of organizationsthe structures and processes designed to assure certainty, 

order knowledge, and stabilize operations, thereby making 

coordinated activity possible-also have their dark sidethe capacity to generate uncertainty, disordered knowledge, 

instability and unanticipated outcomes . . . . [Tlhis paper 

targets the conjunction of organization and technology that 

affected the production of knowledge and knowledge claims 

on a routine basis [at NASA]. The paradox is illustrated by 

showing the variable effect of the NASA organization on the 

production of techno-scientific knowledge: 1) the production 

of disordered and uncertain knowledge on a daily basis; and 2) 

the fact-hardening mechanisms in place to convert disorder to 

order when a collective decision was necessary.29 

Where Johnson sees systems management as generating reliability and certainty, 

by tracing Challenger and other failures to a relaxation of detail di~cipline,~’ 

Vaughan sees the ghost as inherent in the great machine and penetrates deeply 

enough into the everyday life of techno-science to establish that “disordered 

knowledge is a byproduct of the very organizational mechanisms designed to 

control it.” “Structure creates pockets of meaning systems-distinctive local 

knowledges . . . -that are by definition contradictory . . . . Structure [also] 

obscures, so that actions occurring in one part of an organization cannot, for the 

most part, be observed by people in other parts.” Her work echoes in organizational/knowledge terms Perrow’s critique of technical complexity, urging that 

scholars acknowledge that everyday practices and relations have dangerously 

ambivalent implications for organizational and technical outcomes.31 

If so, recognizing that nonrational dimensions to organizational and technical practice are routinely yet unevenly present in all action situations can be 

a valuable step. Nils Brunsson has memorably underscored the presence and 

significance of nonrational dimensions of organizational practice, especially in 

regard to innovation. From his perspective, planning creativity is as fruitless as 

creating a random search for a technical fault, precisely because different 

modalities of thought and practice inform decision-making versus action29.Vaughan, “Role,” pp. 914-915. 

30. Johnson, Secret, pp. 228-229, and n. 9, pp. 275-276. McCurdy debits such disasters in fair measure 

to the attrihon of NASA’s classic high-performance “techmcal culture,” rising risk aversion, and a 

politicized intolerance for fdure (Insrde NASA, chaps. 5 and 6). 

31 .Vaughan, “Role,” p. 916, both quotations; Perrow, Normal Accidents. 
180 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

taking. Agents need perennially to be aware that overreliance on rationality 

can generate stalemates, just as overreliance on intuition and enthusiasm can 

yield chaos. One central insight Brunsson’s exploration of the “irrational organization” offers is that agreement on goals makes conflict difficult to understand in complex environments, whereas failed conflict resolution (organization 

change) can generate “social deadlock,” the outcome when “a group of people 

have arrived at a situation which satisfies none of them but which they are 

unable to change.”32 The relevance of these conceptualizations to analyzing 

patterns of and changes in NASA-contractor relations is hard to miss.33 

Third, in their anthropology of work and practice, Julian Orr, Lucy 

Suchman, and their colleagues undertake to reemphasize the importance of 

informal structures and relations, and of the knowledge and routines they 

generate, to organizational activity. As Scott noted, even conceptualizations 

of organization-technology relations that stress contingency, hence situation/ 

place and history “overlook the importance ofinformal structures as a response 

to uncertainty and complexity.” These are bottom-up processes or, perhaps 

better, integrative linkages: 

Rather than augmenting hierarchies, they minimize vertical distinctions, and rather than creating new, specialized 

lateral roles and relations, they encourage more direct, face-toface communications among any or all participants as required. 

Decision making and the exercise of control become more 

decentralized, and organizational roles less f~rmalized.~~ 

32. Brunsson, Irrational Otganrzation, pp. 27,97, 111. By bringing the irrational into the picture of 

“normal action,” Brunsson generates an array of striking (and testable) insights, namely, “efficiency 

seldom goes hand in hand with flexibdity” (p. 4); it is “important to recognize that decisions can emst 

without actions and actions mthout decisions” (p. 21); and that in high-risk situations, those undertaking to reduce uncertainty are “speculators in success’’ and those trying to lower the stakes at risk 

are “speculators in fadure” (p. 52). The psychological dimensions of organizational action are key for 

Brunsson, and these cannot be reduced to rational propositions. 

33. Here’s one minor story that shows the power of the nonrational in NASA-business relationships. In early 1963, NASA and North American representatives met 15 hours a day, six 

days a week in Houston to “hammer out a specific agreement on what North American was 

going to build and what NASA was going to pay for” in the Apollo program. Yet the NASA 

team was woefully underexperienced in negotiating contracts. As a NASA designer reflected, 

“We ought to have known better at the very outset . . . . Not any one of [our] technical guys 

knew a damn thing about costing. They had no basis to negotiate anything. We locked them 

up in these rooms [with North American managers and lawyers] and most ofthem came out mortal 

enemies. That set a feeling that lasted a long time” (Gray, Angle of Attack, p. 144, emphasis added). 

34. W. R. Scott, Organizations: Rational, Natural and Open Systems, 3rd ed. (Englewood Ch6, NJ: 

Prentice Hall, 1992), pp. 248-249, both quotations. An excellent ethnography based on this approach is 

Julian Orr’s TalkingAbout Machines. For a broader perspechve, see Robert J.Thomas, What Machines Can’t 

Do: Politics and Technology in the Industrial Enterprise (Berkeley: Unwersity of Cahforrua Press, 1994), and 

Thomas Davenport, Susan Cantrell, and Robert Thomas, “The Art of Work,” Outlook journal, January 

2002, http. //w. accenture.com/xd/xd. asp?it=enwebGxd=ideas%5Coutlook%5C 1.2002%5Cart.xml. 
NASA AND THE AEROSPACE INDUSTRY.. . 181 

In American corporations and state agencies, uncertainty generates managerial hunger for top-down control, but few managers can master the massive knowledge requirements for its exercise, especially in situations where 

knowledge is emergent and distributed widely, as in complex contracting/ 

subcontracting environments. Moreover, as Vaughan emphasized, the compressiodreduction of vast bodies of information and the structural inability of 

capturing situated practice can readily transform control over uncertainty into 

a generator of illusion and disorder.35 

NASA AND INDUSTRY Two KEY STUDIES 

In identifying the themes and conceptual packages just outlined, both the 

insights and the silences of previous research bearing on production for NASA 

proved crucial. Thus far, works by Johnson, Kelly, McCurdy, and Vaughan 

have been emphasized; here, I’d like to consider the legacy of studies by Bart 

Hacker and Jim Grimwood (Gemini) and Joan Bromberg (NASA and space 

industries). First, however, a visit to the shop floor from Mike Gray’s and 

Roger Bilstein’s Saturn booster studies will set the stage for underscoring 

the extravagant technical demands and necessities for innovation that infused 

production for NASA. 

The Apollo program’s Saturn artifacts were the largest rockets fabricated 

in the U.S. in the 1960s (perhaps ever). Yet creating their components was 

enormously difficult; consider, for example, the propellant tanks for the rocket’s 

lightweight S-2 first stage. Huge (reportedly three railway freight cars could 

be placed inside them) yet fragile (they couldn’t be fabricated horizontally, but 

had to be built upright), they presented unprecedented challenges in welding. 

“At a time when a flawless weld of a few feet was considered miraculous, the 

S-2 called for a half mile of flawless welds.” Moreover, the components for the 

tank’s dome-“immense pie-shaped wedges of aluminum eight feet wide at 

the bottom and twenty feet from there to the apex”-were elaborate spatial 

forms, “a spherical curve from side to side and a complex double ellipsoid 

from the base to the apex.” Given that no techniques existed for accurately 

machining such shapes, called gores, North American used explosive forming. 

Technicians placed the alloy blank on a forming die at the bottom of a 60,000- 

35. Vaughan, “Role,” pp. 926-934. This involves what Vaughan terms “fact-hardening,’’ and the 

procedures for acheving it here rely substantially on the exclusion of qualitauve information. As she 

notes,“Indeterminacy creates a closure problem.” This is resolved by generating quantitatively structured 

documents and pubhc consensus. “The documents . . . assert consensus through the matter-of-fact tone 

of the formal mode of discourse, afTirming the reality they assert to both the auhence and the author. 

An addiuonal factor that binds people to their actions is ‘going public.’ When a person participates in 

and is identified publicly with a decision, that person WIII resolve inconsistencies to produce attitudes 

consistent with that choice.” Quotations are &om pp. 929 and 930. 
182 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

gallon water tank, then set off a cluster of carefully placed charges on the 

surface. In an instant the force carried through/by the water pressed the blank 

into the die-form (trimming followed) .36 These segments in turn were welded 

by “a new kind of a machine”: 

[Tlhe assemblers . . . were looking at a seam that followed a 

constantly changing curve over a twenty foot run, and the 

junction between the [gores] would have to match precisely 

to within a hundredth of an inch . . . . [Tlhe ultimate solution 

looked a little like a Japanese footbridge-a heavily reinforced 

bow-shaped truss that spanned the width of the dome and 

carried beneath it a precision track on which the welding 

machine traveled. The gear-driven welding head, its speed 

controlled by mathematical formulae, rolled ever so slowly up 

these rails carrying a tungsten electrode that precisely melted 

the metal on either side of the joint.37 [See photo opposite; the 

footbridge welder is visible at the upper left.] 

Thus were intricate demands addressed. Routinely for builders, no obvious 

means lay available to satisfy the interactive realities of technical complexity, 

technical uncertainty, and component interdependencies in production for 

NASA, thus propelling organizational frustration and technological creativity. 

This pattern is evident in each of the two other studies noted above, to which 

we now turn. 

Industry-NASA relationships are especially prominent in the first 10 

chapters of On the Shoulders of Titans, the segment authored by Bart Hacker. 

Like a number ofjet engine projects a decade earlier, Gemini was the result of 

an effort to redesign an existing complex technological artifact, the Mercury 

capsule. By early 1961, James Chamberlain, Space Task Group’s head of 

Engineering and Contract Administration, determined largely on his own 

initiative that the Mercury spacecraft needed a redesign “from the bottom 

up,” and thus spent part of February in St. Louis going over possible revisions 

with McDonnell engineers. Modularizing systems that in Mercury “had been 

stacked like a layer cake” such that “components of [any] one system had to be 

36. Gray, Angle $Attack, pp. 154155. 

37. Ibid., p. 156.This sequence is also carefully reported by Bdstein in considerably greater detad. See 

Roger Bdstein, Stage3 to Saturn (Washington, DC: NASA SP-4206,1980; reprint, Gainesvdle: University 

Press of Florida, 2003), pp. 212-222 (page citations are to the reprint edioon). For several of the hardcore technological issues, see W. J. Reichenecker and J. Heuschkel, NASA Contributions toJoinrng Metal 

(Washtngton, DC: NASA Technology Utilizahon Division, NASA SP-5064, 1967). This pubhcation 

includes references to a number of North American reports, as well as reports from Marshall, Pratt & 

Whitney, Kaiser Alununum, and others.The figure is drawn from Bdstein, Stages, p. 221. 
NASA AND THE AEROSPACE INDUSTRY.. . 183 

Gores being welded to bulkheads for the S-ll stage of the Saturn V. (Source: Roger 

Bilstein, Stages to Saturn [Washington, DC: NASA SP-4206, 1980; reprint, Gainesville: 

University Press of Florida, 20031, p. 2271 

scattered about the craft” would “reduce manufacturing and checkout time,” 

Chamberlain argued. Yet as Hacker summarized, “making it better meant 

making it over.” Once Chamberlain and McDonnell’s William Blatz collated 

the redesign elements, they went before the Capsule Review Board, which 

“seemed staggered by the scope of the changes presented to them” in June.38 

As in jets, what started as a fix, or more accurately, a vector for refining the 

artifact, morphed into a largely new device, yet here still a one-man capsule. 

McDonnell engineers, led by Walter Burke, were the agents who outlined 

and pushed for the two-man spacecraft, however, as it was the builders 

who “were pressing for a more radical effort.” Indeed, in undertaking the 

preliminary design work, “McDonnell had not felt obliged to wait until its 

contract had been amended to provide the extra funds. The company spent 

its own money,” which generated “a good deal of respect in NASA circles.” 

As major spacecraft contract changes arose in order to expand its size, handle 

38. Hacker, Titans, p. 33-45 
184 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

modularization, and create a docking system and (initially) ejections seats, 

expectations for reusing Mercury technologies in the new developmental 

trajectory faded as steadily as the project drove forward. This momentum and 

focus on industry relations were aided by an organizational arrangement which 

provided the Gemini Project Office and Chamberlain “a degree of autonomy,” 

enabling them “to deal directly with McDonnell and Air Force Space Systems 

Division” for capsules and boosters respectively. Chamberlain reported only 

to Marshall Space Flight Center Director Gilruth, chiefly providing him work 

in process reviews and discussions from coordination meetings, “Gemini’s 

central management device.”39 Thus far, an organizational device giving 

Chamberlain singular authority (how unusual? with what exact options? 

how evaluated by Headquarters and by McDonnell?) and decisive redesign 

innovations from industry engineers and engineering managers facilitated 

Gemini’s emergence.40 

However, a series of technological disappointments, cost escalations, and 

budget controversies soon caused massive headaches. In some measure, these 

derived from the fact that McDonnell “developed and built only the spacecraft 

structural shell and electrical system”; all else had been subcontracted. 

Thousands of components made by hundreds of firms flowed into St. Louis; 

if Gemini mirrored Mercury in this respect, an unknown, sizable subset 

of those devices would fail on test, fail to meet specifications, or fail to 

integrate effectively, and thus would need to be redesigned or repla~ed.~’ In

a retrospective overview, Hacker reflected, “Although the precise nature of 

39. Ibid., pp. 49-82,95. Even as expectations faded that technical apparatus from Mercury could be 

duphcated in Germm, major continuiues in personnel between the two programs proved a strength, 

from Faget, Gilruth, Chamberlain, and McDonnell’s Walter Burke down to the shop level, where, for 

example, NASA plant representative Wilbur Gray shifted gradually from Mercury to Gemmi. Gray’s 

memos and reports are a marvelous source for reconstituting, in part, the informal relations and 

emergent communities of prachce mentioned earher in the essay. Chamberlain’s autonomy may have 

been modeled on the &rect relationship NASA’s Max Faget and McDonnell’s John Yardley had in 

makmg “thousands of detailed design decisions” on the Mercury capsules. See Loyd Swenson, “The 

‘Megamachme’ Behind the Mercury Spacecraft,” American Quarterly 21 (1969): 210-227, quotahon 

from p. 222. 

40.Ths approach in no way intends to overlook issues and pressures external to the Gemixu project, 

such as the uncertainties about Apollo’s developmental trajectory, funding, and schedule, or the cultural/ 

pohtical pressure to keep perforrmng launches as Mercury was beginning to wnd down. 

41.Archivists at NARA-Fort Worth inchcated that the boxes on techcal testing and subcontractor 

relations I was using in my NASM/Lindbergh-supported research had not prevlously been pulled. 

Swenson’s This New Ocean understandably did not penetrate to thls level of source material, some 

of which, it appears, had not yet been archved or declassified at the time of its writing. NASMs 

Michael Neufeld suggested to me that the view among space historians is that Gemini was a much less 

troublesome project than Mercury, due to technological and orgamzahonal 1earmng.Ths 1s a position 

that rmght merit hrther probing, although Hacker chd drive more deeply into industry/produchon 

documents than &d Swenson (Hacker cites telexes, letters to contractors, and achvity, status, and “tiger 

team” reports, for example). 
NASA AND THE AEROSPACE INDUSTRY.. . 185 

Gemini’s problems could not have been predicted, they did arise where they 

were expected-in those systems that demanded the greatest advances beyond 

current te~hnology.’”~ This is such a basic point that it is worth reinforcinginnovation generates disorder, and dramatic innovation entails error. failure, and 

conzict across a broad front. In some technological environments, a stabilization 

follows, both of knowledge and technology. When additional requirements 

are promulgated, extensions of capability are feasible on the basis of retained 

learning and scalable technique, though the achievements usually are hardwon. In other situations, workable innovations do not provide a foundation 

for enhancing capabilities, which is to say that stabilization proves illusory 

and learning less than readily applicable to upgrading. These often involve 

nonscalable technologies, which are the home for hordes of unk-unks and the 

sources of persistent frustration and failure in large technological projects. 

Two Gemini examples merit recounting: the fuel cell innovation and 

the recurrent issues surrounding thrusters-both involving subcontractors, 

here General Electric and Rocketdyne. Fuel cells had the potential to replace 

batteries as the source of on-board electricity, at a major savings in weight. 

However, in Gemini, the array of problems cropping up “seemed to suggest 

that theory had outrun practice.” GE researchers knew scientifically that the 

reaction of hydrogen and oxygen could generate power, and they had devised 

a clever “solid, ion-exchanging membrane” that dramatically simplified both 

the device and its operation. Unfortunately, this science-led technology did not 

operate successfully-the membrane leaked, weakening output, and once this 

fault was corrected, the cell exhibited “degraded performance” once activated. 

Technicians traced this to the shortcomings of a fiberglass component and 

replaced it with a Dacron substitute, which triggered new troubles. Other test 

failures derived from the cracking of the cell’s titanium tubing; these were 

replaced with a titanium-palladium alloy. Further problems appeared, but 

they “were never conceptual . . . . The rub came in trying to convert [the] 

concept into hardware to meet the Gemini specifications.” After two years’ 

work, NASA canceled the effort in January 1964, resumed work on battery 

development, and spent $600,000 to retrofit two capsules outfitted with fuel 

cells. The same pattern recurred soon after, with the Apollo Moon lander’s fuel 

cell program (this time handled by Pratt & Whitney) canceled early in 1965 

following two years of trials and failures, with reversion again to batterie~.~~ 

Thrusters presented an enduring difficulty. Twice in the Mercury program, their fragility and unreliability caused serious concern. In January 1962, 

McDonnell was testing Capsule No. 2’s Reaction Control System when the 

42. Hacker, Titans, p. 162. 

43. Ibid., pp. 103-104,148-152. For the LEM story, see Kelly, Moon Lander, pp. 82-84. 
186 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

base of the spacecraft caught fire due to leaking thruster propellant, which, 

when it combusted, caused further leaks, more combustion, and quite a bit of 

damage to the artifact and to the designers’ ~onfidence.~~ Just a month later, 

during John Glenn’s orbital flight, the Automatic Stability Control System, 

which coordinated the thrusters to maintain proper attitude, went for a walk 

over Mexico. Glenn explained: 

The capsule started drifting to the right in yaw and it would 

drift over to about 20 degrees, instead of the normal 30 degree 

limit, and then the high thruster would kick on and bat it back 

over to the left. It would overshoot and then it would hunt 

and settle down again somewhere around zero. The spacecraft 

would then drift again to the right and do the same thing 

re~eatedly.~~ 

Glenn put the system into manual control (then into fly-by-wire), which 

saved fuel, but the capsule began to yaw to the left, and it was soon apparent 

that “there was no left low Glenn discussed how he dealt with the 

inoperability problem: 

When the fly-by-wire one-pound thruster was not actuating in yaw, I was using a real fast flip of the high thruster in 

the mode that the one-pound thruster was not operating to 

control. I couldn’t control this as accurately as you can with 

the one-pound thruster, . . . so what I did several times was, 

when I would overshoot in rate with the 24-pounder, I would 

use my one pounder on the other side to bring it back to zero 

. . . I wouldn’t call this desirable.47 

Unsurprisingly, attention to thruster testing and possible design flaws increased 

sharply. 

With the more ambitious Gemini program’s development, thruster problems became more acute and challenging. The smaller of the two propulsion 

units on Gemini was roughly the size of Mercury’s larger unit (25 pounds of 

thrust), whereas Gemini’s big pusher was to yield three times that power (85 

44. R. H. Lhenkamp, Senior Engineer, McDonnell, “Investigation of the Capsule No. 2 Incident, 

9 January 1962,” 16 January 1962, MAC Technical Reports, box 27, entry 198C, NASA-JSC, NAFU 

RG 255. 

45. R. B.Voas, “Memorandum for Those Concerned, MA-6 Pilots Debriefing,” pp. 13-14, Contract 

Administration Files, box 31, entry 198E, NASA-JSC, RG255. 

46. Ibid. 

47. Ibid., p. 61. 
NASA AND THE AEROSPACE INDUSTRY.. . 187 

pounds). The Mercury components had simply managed attitude control; in 

Gemini, they had to handle spacecraft maneuvering and in-orbit rendezvous. 

Third, the Gemini fuel was different-monomethylhydrazine and nitrogen 

tetroxide, which combusted on contact, versus Mercury’s simple hydrogen 

peroxide, which expanded radically on release under pressure. Last, and most 

troublesome, whereas the Mercury thrusters operated for a few seconds at a 

time, Gemini’s would need to burn steadily for 5 minutes or more, as well as 

to pulse repeatedly. 

The bad news came in waves. Tests early in 1963 showed that the 25- 

pound Geminis tended to “char through their casings” when run continuously. 

A redesign at first seemed to remedy this, but pulse testing proved half again 

more destructive to the casings, and a series of “expedients . . . could only 

alleviate, not solve, the problem.” Most troubling, the nonscalability gremlin 

soon surfaced, as “new tests revealed that the larger maneuvering thrusters 

could not be simply enlarged versions” of the 25-pound engines. Therefore, a 

separate design and testing program for them had to be devised. In October, 

the hammer dropped-mission simulations showed that astronauts used their 

thrusters far more than had been anticipated-thus, “thruster life would have 

to be doubled or tri~led.’”~ 

Rework lasted well into 1964, with the result that Rocketdyne fell far 

behind schedule and had spent more than double its allotted $30 million. 

NASA soon demanded a “full scale” audit, which revealed a “badly managed 

program,” for the company had “grossly underestimated the magnitude and 

complexity” of its engine subcontract. Fewer than half the engines slated for 

delivery by November 1964 had been received, and McDonnell was far from 

confident in the thrusters’ reliability. Still, by mid-1965, Rocketdyne had 

reorganized the engine division, recovered its momentum, and begun to meet 

or exceed schedule expectations.j9 The facts that different-sized and differently 

purposed engines could not be scaled up or down from existing, workable 

models and that elaborate fueling and combustion systems were inadequately 

understood meant that propulsion surprises would continue to arise.50 

Technological problems solved for a mission having certain requirements 

did not necessarily spill over to later missions with more demanding require48. Hacker, Tttum, pp. 83-84,154-157.The upgraded demands settled at over 9 minutes for the small 

thrusters and over 13 mutes for the large. 

49. Ibid., pp. 210-21 1 .Ths happy outcome &d not prevent thruster problems from arismg on three 

nussions-GenuniV,VII, andVIII. See ibid., pp. 259-260,292,314-315, 

50. One of the key cldemmas here was combustion instability, whch arose when flows of fuels (and 

oxldizers) fded to generate a steady, focused flame thrust, whether due to cawtation, component 

pedormance problems, or other factors. Correcting such instabkty once it occurred seemed impossible, 

for the effects were dramatic and instantaneous on mssde attitude and trajectory, nor was the science of 

fluid dynamcs sufficiently developed to model these flows mathematically and continuously. 
188 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

ments. The organizational approaches effective for solving first-generation 

dilemmas would not assuredly suffice for next-generation challenges. As well, the 

insufficiencies of science regarding critical, complex phenomena (combustion 

and fluid dynamics, materials performance under zero gravity, etc.) meant that 

workable engineering outcomes could not be stripped of their anxiety dimensions, for, as with Mercury, components that worked 10 times could (and did) fail 

on the llth, without warning and without obvious (or remediable) cau~e.~’ In 

this light, it would perhaps be worthwhile for researchers to explore those 

domains in which basic science guided NASA technical practice, those where 

NASA practice extended scientific knowledge and theory, and those where the 

two remained disconnected in specific situations or for longer periods. 

Moving to the industry-NASA relationships depicted in Joan Bromberg’s 

pioneering overview entails a shift in focus, for her work undertakes a longterm analysis. This essay is anchored in thinking through technology and 

production issues, whereas after its opening sections, NASA and the Space 

Industry (NSI) moves toward the second of its two themes-space and the 

marketplace, for satellites, Shuttle usage, et a1.-if you will, the consumption 

side of NASA. Nonetheless, NSI’s first theme, “the innovation process,” is 

clearly germane. Here, Bromberg delineates production for NASA’s crucial 

background conditions, identifies core tensions, and offers two detailed case 

studies of innovation-satellites at Hughes and Apollo at North Ameri~an.~’ 

Four background items Bromberg highlights are particularly rich with 

implications: 

1) Lockheed’s science crisis in the mid-’50s “over whether scientists on 

a project should have control over advanced development.” The firm 

said no; 15 top scientists left, frustrated that their demand to direct 

work for which “the skill and technical knowledge [was] beyond the 

state of the art” had been rejected. Science-engineering and scientistmanager relations are a subplot in NASA-industry relations, though, as 

a novice, it’s not clear to me how much these have been investigated. 

51. As Hugh Dryden stated in the closing Project Mercury Conference, “We learn how to build 

things to last longer by trying to build them, by operating them in space, finding out what goes wrong, 

correcting, learning more about the environment These are things that we learn by going into 

space and working there, not fiom some theory in the laboratory” (“Mercury Final Conference,” pp. 

52. At the outset, Bromberg refers to technical professionals’ “community of practice” but does not 

seem to be aware of the communities of prachce in literature and research approaches noted here in the 

sechon on conceptual fiameworks. In a mscussion with NASM’s Martin Cokns (13 January 2005), I came 

to appreciate that oral history interviewing below the executive level (planned but never completed)- 

interviewing of design, test, and production engineers, for example-would, in hng novel questions, 

profit substantively from familiarity with the work of Orr, Suchman, and Lave, and also from thinlung 

closely about Karl Weick‘s challenging Sensemaking in Organizations (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1995), 

especially in relation to puzzles, fdures, and conflicts over knowledge, interpretation, and practice. 

1-2, box 1, E196, RG255). 
NASA AND THE AEROSPACE INDUSTRY. . . 189 

Here, did those resigning create their own firm; move to universities; seek research unit jobs at Mellon, Battelle, or RAND; hire on 

to other industrial firms; or what? Did such confrontations appear on 

aerospace’s technological edge with some frequency, or vas this a rare 

moment?53 After all, the role of science and scientists in NASA work 

is not so obvious at it might seem, given the huge holes in scientific 

understanding of space environments in this era. 

2) The Air Force’s creation of Ramo-Wooldridge as a systems engineering and technical management firm (1954). To be sure, this laid the 

foundation for “weapons system” development and for TRW, but to 

what extent did valorizing this cluster of sophisticated experts create a 

template helpful for defining NASA’s differences from NACA? Clearly 

the Air Force was already a contested model in terms of innovation 

management, so was NASA, in a slightly twisted organizational-lineage 

sense, Ramo-Wooldridge’s unacknowledged or ungrateful offspring?j4 

3)The mid-’50s conflict between the Naval Research Lab and Martin, 

which prefigured scores of subsequent contretemps. In ProjectVanguard, 

Martin argued that it should be provided “full [technical/managerial?] 

responsibility,” while the NU demanded the inverse. Martin claimed 

that the Lab was full of busy fault-finders, “always promoting the ‘better’ 

at the expense of the ‘good enough,”’ whereas the NRL asserted that 

Martin didn’t “grasp how much they were dealing with unknowns, nor 

the importance of reliability . . . .” This contest, arrayed in just about 

these exact terms, would be replayed for several decades in NASAindustry relations, so what are we to learn from this early incidence? Was 

it thut early, that is, was this just an extension of Navy “control-freakish’’ 

patterns, inverse to Air Force (and Army Air Force) delegation of project 

responsibilities to contractors? Was this ‘‘&vide” a structural fault in postwar military/space programming, and was it ever resolved? If so, how? If 

not, with what implications? Or is this whole scenario just an outsider’s 

confused view of the unfolding game?j5 

4) The Army’s arsenal system (after its separation from the new Air Force) 

could not run all its ballistic missile projects inside von Braun’s shop, 

simply because “it did not have the manpower.” So was the arsenal system chiefly a managerial/operations framework and, in fair measure, 

53. Bromberg, NSI, p. 25. 

54.These relationships are sketched in Mueller Interview No. 4. See also Bromberg, NSI, pp. 26-28. 

55. Bromberg, NSI, pp. 26-28. 
190 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

a hollow production system? Did shortcomings in securing adequate 

manpower (engineering, production, testing?) preview the complexities of producing for NASA? Did contractors learn from ABMA that 

they needed to resist control moves from their funders in order to 

protect opportunities for enhancing their own engineers’ capabilities? 

Did “the enmity between the Army and the aircraft industry” bleed 

through to the space industry-NASA relationship, and if so, to what 

extent and with what conseq~ences?~~ 

Bromberg also details key drawbacks and advantages for companies 

undertaking production for NASA. On the downside were the small numbers 

of artifacts ordered, the necessity for expensive experimental development and 

research (some of which would be self-funded), demands for higher precision 

than usual in aeronautical engineering and fabrication, and the need to find 

and hire ever more engineers (and high-skill shop workers). Still, the pluses 

were substantial, if somewhat more vague: the “chance to learn technologies, 

develop skills and install production tooling that they could use for other 

projects,” possible spillovers into commercial products, and the excitement of 

joining the space-race ~ulture.~’ 

She also shows that the bases for strain were quite concrete. If industry representatives in the 1950s saw “NACA engineers . . . as researchers, people whose 

aim was the production of papers and books,” the incoming NASA leadership 

was equally critical. Given the necessity of contracting, Headquarters feared 

the loss of design control, shoddy work by contractors given too much leeway, 

and the loss of collective memory (and identity) as project teams formed and 

disbanded. Specifically in the Mercury capsule case, “Langley engineers mistrusted industry’s ability to design something as novel as a spacecraft,” whereas 

“industry and the military were convinced they knew more about space flight 

than NASA did.”58 This last item, the industry-military connection, reinforced 

NASA’s uncomfortable position as the national novice in major project development and operations. Max Faget may well have had an advantage in being 

able to conceptualize a blunt-body spacecraft, but McDonnell’s Walter Burke 

and his Air Force Material Command colleagues had learned firsthand how to 

fabricate complex aerospace technologies, as had von Braun and ABMA. Last, 

NASA might have considered industry folks immature and arrogant, but, as 

Bromberg so neatly puts it, “arrogance in proposals is also one of the channels 

by which creative ideas flow from industry to g~vernment.”~~ 

56. Ibid., p. 29. 

57. Ibid., pp. 38-39. 

58. fbid., pp. 32,43. 

59. Ibid., p. 43. 
NASA AND THE AEROSPACE INDUSTRY.. . 191 

When introducing the first of her two case studies (Hughes and satellites), Bromberg poses seven questions which articulate the chief concerns and 

boundaries of the study, “the relation between US. industry and the federal 

government.”60 Except by inference, none of these questions spotlight the technologies themselves, their design, prototyping, testing, redesign, fabrication, plus 

the consequent interfirm and contractor-government linkages. One technological-process moment appears when the failure of the first Syncom satellite was 

traced to a ruptured “gas tank,” a problem “corrected” after a “search for a stronger material.” The second Syncom “functioned brilliantly,” but further questions 

that might have probed this failure and correction fell outside the study’s scope.6! 

This set-aside resonates with W. D. Kay’s concern about the literature’s silences 

on “the internal workings of the nation’s aerospace contractors.”62 It remains for 

future scholars to address how Hughes designed and built its first three satellites; what the firm learned thereby and through what process; what innovations 

it embedded in the following four INTELSAT 11s; what machinery, materials, 

engineers, workers, consultations, conflicts, and compromises were involved.63 

Similarly with North American, Bromberg’s analysis works at the level 

of policy and program, though the secondary sources drawn on (especially 

Bilstein) yield a greater frequency of references to technical competencies and 

fabrication challenges. Thus the confrontation between Air Force General Sam 

Phillips (working for NASA) and North American leaders over “inadequate 

engineering, poor fabrication quality, faulty inspections, and cost escalations,” 

all leading to delays and rework, is concisely reviewed, yet the underlying 

reasons for these multiple failures are not divined. As Bilstein, Kelly, and, to 

a degree, Mike Gray (Angle OfAttuck) demonstrate, in-depth technical review, 

appropriately contextualized, generates complex, contingent, and real-time 

analyses of innovation, critical insights and errors, integration, and technological and organizational learning.64 This is, however, very difficult without 

60. The questions are, “How much of the research for the commercial cornmumcations satehtes 

would be financed, dlrected or done by government, and how much by the private sector? Would a 

private industry arise to launch the satehtes or would they be launched by government?Would industry 

or government own and operate the systems? . . .What private firms would enter into the manufacture 

and the operation of commercial satellites (comsats)? What strategies would they use to gam market 

share? How would government policies and actions affect the market poslhons of private compames? 

How would these policies and achons affect the technology that was chosen?” (ibid., p. 46). 

61. Ibid.,p. 53. 

62. Kay,“NASA,”p.127. 

63. Five years ago, I dld an onhne database search for articles in scholarly and techmcdjournds on the 

design and fabrication of satehtes, which then ylelded fewer than a dozen hts. I expect a repeat these 

days would do much better, although the sdences on buddlng aerospace technologies may continue to 

mclude these devices. 

64.h excepuonal source in ths regard is Martin Collins’s series of intennews mth North American 

Aviahon’s Lee Atwood, whch document the critical role of NASA’s detaded oversight in generahng 

continued on the next page 
192 CRITICAL ISSUES INTHE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

archival research, which, given its parameters and resources, was not plausible 

for this study. 

Nonetheless, Bromberg skillfully reviews the fabrication and engineering practice changes that followed the Apollo fire deaths: scparate managers 

for each spacecraft, heightened attention to quality control, frequent shopfloor visits (including during night shifts), tightened change controls, along 

with some of the dilemmas their introduction created. “All changes now had 

to be funneled first through the program officer at Houston, and then through 

the manager of that particular spacecraft at NA Rockville. North American 

engineers were made to adhere rigorously to agreed-on procedures, without 

any creative flourishes.” Moreover, NASA’s increased surveillance and micromanagement necessitated hiring hundreds of inexperienced technical managers who knew far less about their programs than those they were overseeing, 

which in turn led to mechanical rule-following and conflicts, very much on 

the pattern that Vaughn’s conceptualizations outline. Pursuing these issues 

deeply into archival materials, especially those surrounding the astronauts’ 

deaths and their aftermath, could provide valuable understandings of a critical 

transition in America’s space program.65 

INDUSTRY AND NASA: 

MERCURY MOMENTS AND CLOSING QUESTIONS 

Scattered about earlier pages are some items derived from my archival 

work with NASA Mercury sources. I’ll mention just two others here focusing 

on a single matter, engineering changes, and will end by offering questions on 

other issues which may take on a fresh significance when researched from the 

contractors’ technology and organization viewpoint. These items and issues 

may have more significance to historians of technology and enterprise (who 

continued on the next page 

masses of change orders and consequent delays and estabhshes the distinction between projects that 

were just complex (such as the Apollo Command Module) and those that involved “technological 

stretching,” which ventured into the unknown. (See NASM Oral History Project, Atwood Interviews, 

no. 4, pp. 3, 10-11; no. 5, pp. 12, 14; no. 6, p. 3; available at http://www.nasm.si.edu/research/dsh/ 

TRANSCPT/AT WOOD4. HTM, http: //www.nasm.si. edn /research/dsh /TRANSCPT/AT WOODS. 

HTM, and http://www.nasm.si.edu/research/dsh /TRANSCPT/ATWOOD6.HTM.) It appears that this 

is the only interview with a contractor official. It would be valuable were someone or some inshtution 

to take up Collins’s plan for interviews with contractor engineers (and perhaps shop workers) before it 

is too late to target these sources of work and technology information. 

65. Bromberg, NSI, pp. 70-73, quotation fkom 71. NASMs Alan Blinder is currently researchmg 

the Apollo 204 fire. For the industry perspective here, Bromberg cites a pamphlet by John L. “Lee” 

Atwood, NAA president, Eom NASMs Oral History Working Flle. Deeply interesting is the extensive 

oral history interview itself, done by NASMS Martin Collins, noted above. (The first segment is at 

http://www.nasm.si.edu/research/dsh/TRANSCPT/ATWOODl. HTM; links at each section’s end take 

the reader to the next segment.) 
NASA AND THE AEROSPACE INDUSTRY. . . 193 

Engineering drawing release for the Mercury capsule, March 1960. (Source: NASA 

Contract Administration Files, Procurement Division, box 22, entry 100, RG 255, 

NA RA-Southwest) 

very much need to integrate public-sector innovations and organizations into 

their private-sector worlds) than for NASA history purposes, unless/until the 

scope and conceptualization of NASA history shifts in the years ahead. 

The figure on this page is a simple graph documenting the engineering 

drawing releases for the Mercury spacecraft project, from inception through 

15 March 1960. Lines A and C indicate that based on component counts, 

McDonnell had estimated that roughly 1,200 drawings would be needed 

through early 1961,500 for the basic configuration and another 700 to include 

different capsules’ mission-specific requirements (e.g., an orbital spacecraft 

versus one for a ballistic flight). Yet in response to the flow of engineering 

changes inside the project’s first year, the actual number of drawings released 

reached 5,000 (line D). What significance this volume of redesigns had for 

project development is evident in Lee Atwood’s reflections on Apollo: 

Once your engineering output of drawings and specifications 

gets ragged as far as the schedule is concerned, everything else 
194 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

gets ragged . . . . An engineering change is really a recall of 

something that’s been released. You stop it, recall your drawing, you get an instruction to change it, bring it back, and 

the shop is full of that . . . . The things that are most apparent 

are usually picked up [in] a couple of weeks’ surveys, because 

everybody has some kind of a schedule. Are you on it? Are you 

not? Well, of course you’re not, and the whole place looked 

like a wreck. It was stop orders, hold orders, missing parts, 

material procurement had to be modified in many cases.66 

Change orders were also lightning rods for NASA-industry arm wrestling, 

as was plainly the case with the Apollo Command Module: 

[The CSM] commanded the attention of so many astronauts 

and so many other people, engineers from Houston and all 

that. They all had their ideas of how things should be arranged, 

how controls should be set up, and an awful lot of brouhaha over the actual arrangement [resulted] . . . . One of the 

astronauts said, in connection with that, “YOU know, we 

have a pretty strong union.” And they really did. They really 

did. And Dale [Myers] had to face the problem of arrangement [changes,] plus electrical changes, which came from 

other parts of the stack and from the ground equipment itself 

. . . . So there were just infinite refinements and changes, 

more than the S-11, which was fundamentally structural, a 

weight problem, . . . whereas the impact on the command 

module was almost screw by screw, and estimate by estimate 

and switch by swit~h.~’ 

Researching the dynamics, thepolitics, thelanguage, and the practices regarding 

engineering changes, which had pervasive implications for scheduling, cost, 

and program/artifact reliability and success, demands moving deep within 

both NASA and contractor organizations, following plant representatives like 

Wilbur Gray from Mercury to Gemini, chasing the origins and resolutions of 

66. Atwood Interviews, no. 5, pp. 10-1 1. 

67. Ibid., p. 12. Elsewhere, Atwood added “Your ideal is to engineer somethmg, put it in the shop, 

get it built efficiently, and then inspect it carefully and get it out the door and operate. We had an 

environment that required us to do all those things at once, with much backtrachng to make changes. 

The changes were almost overwhehng. So this was part of the problem of the organization, and it 

was far &om normal. In fact, as Sam Phillips noted, it was to a considerable degree out of control. 

Parts had to go back for re-engineering, redesign, again and again, re-release, new material, supply and 

manufacturing and tooling. Yes, it was a struggle” (Atwood Interviews, no. 7, p. 3). 
NASA AND THE AEROSPACE INDUSTRY.. . 195 

issues that surfaced briefly in configuration control committee minutes, and 

reconstituting the scale and significance of conflicts over payment for extra 

work, rework, redesign, supplementary testing and such. Only in this way will 

historians begin to understand the sadness behind Atwood’s crisp aphorism: 

“If things are done well, NASA succeeded; if things are done poorly, the 

contractor failed.’”j8 

A chart issued on the same date as the drawings release graph accounted 

for the sources of engineering changes through mid-March 1960. I have not 

yet tallied the total of engineering changes with any precision, as there evidently were several levels of and procedures for requesting and reporting 

these. However, there were approximately 340 major “contract change 

orders” in roughly 30 months and at least 6,000 changes to the capsule components and configurations. Key dilemmas included communicating change 

implementations, authorizing changes, testing implications of changes on 

other components, identifying failure sources, and updating specifications to 

reflect changes. 

The figure shows that nearly half the ECRs (Engineering Change 

Requests) emerged from deficiencies detected in testing, here components. 

A different class of failures, “interferences,” was noted under “Manufacturing 

Coordination,” and at that date, my sense is that these were still physical 

impingements due to the “spaghetti” style of packing in capsule system components. When full capsule testing commenced, a third sort of testing deficiency appeared-system integration and interface problems. These took on 

yet further ramifications when capsules connected to boosters and to launchrelated ground equipment displayed higher-order integration deficiencies. 

Together, tests and coordination problems represented nearly two-thirds of 

the ECRs, with improvements, including the famous astronauts’ demand for 

a window, another one-fifth. Engineering studies, the work closest to scientific research, were handled both by NASA Centers and by McDonnell. 

What significance and impact these studies had on the project is not yet 

clear, nor do summary documents provide cost figures for the four classes. 

Still, this simple chart suggests that, from the beginning, waves of engineering changes flowed through manned space projects from multiple directions, 

generating specialized knowledge, urgent workarounds and overtime labor, 

unpredictable cost and schedule implications, and fluctuating currents of disorder.69 In sum, retelling NASA stories from the drafting room and shop 

floor outwards, from the bottom up, has the potential to reorient a universe 

of NASA-centric histories. 

68. Atwood Interviews, no. 4, p. 11. 

69. Originals of these two figures may be found in CCP Status Reports, box 20, NAS 5-59, Contract 

Adrmnlstration Files, entry 100, NASA-Mercury, RG255. 
196 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

Ifsuch a scheme were to be activated, questions and issues like these, some 

of which reiterate points sounded earlier, would be tabled, all considering 

change over time, 1950~-1970s, at least: 

1) How were relationships between design revisions and manufacturing 

practice articulated, in the dual-pressure contexts for extensive changes 

on one count and design freezes and standardization on another? 

2) What implications did NASA contracts have for manufacturers’ recruitment, training, and retention of highly skilled workers-engineers, 

shop-floor workers, and managers-for manufacturers’ procurement 

of machinery and facilities? 

3) Considering relationships between primes and subcontractors, what 

patterns and variations in knowledge exchange, mentoring and monitoring, financial management, etc., emerged in NASA contracts? How 

were these different from such patterns in military contracts? In commercial contracts? How did they differ when technological stretching 

was at issue, beyond “routine” complexity? 

4) What spatial patterning eventuated in early NASA prime and subcontracts, and did this change? If so, how/when/why? What factors 

conditioned these outcomes (labor supply, proximities and networks, 

politics)? How did technological change in communications, creating 

virtual proximities, affect the spatiality of producing for NASA? 

5) How did NASA’s fabricators frame practices for identifying/processing/ 

testing new materials, including a) uses in prototyping, b) developing 

supply lines (titanium being a classic case), and c) adapting existing 

or creating novel manufacturing procedures? What prior experiences 

with materials substitution (alloy metals, synthetics) conditioned this 

process versus what new trajectories of technical knowledge-seeking 

did the devising of aerospace materials articulate? 

6) What historically tested production skills and practices were installed/ 

modified/rejected as shop-floor experience in producing for NASA 

developed? What occasions for technological learning proved crucial 

to overcoming obstacles to fabrication, precision, or quality? (Consider 

candidates like chemical milling, explosive forming, numerically controlled tooling, et al.) What implications for further manufacturing practice did these adaptations/adoptions have, and to what degree were they 

realized? What conflicts between contractor managers and engineers 

resulted, between managers/engineers and workers, with what outcomes, including strikes? (N.B.: aircrafi/aerospace manufacturing had 

one of the highest union densities in U.S. manufacturing, 1950-1990.) 
NASA AND THE AEROSPACE INDUSTRY. . . 197 

7) What would be the breakdown of sources for delays and cost overruns; 

how would these differ among projects, and why? What links and 

learning trajectories can be established among projects from the 

contractors’ side-evidence for and significance of knowledgesharing among aerospace rivals-in terms of materials, electronics, or 

fabrication shifts? What internal and networked transfers of knowhow among projects took place, and how significant were they?70 

8) What arrays of managerial techniques did contractors deploy in efforts 

to comprehend and influence fabrication projects that, as Atwood 

testified, threatened to spin out of control? How did firms assess 

internally the competence of their production efforts, and to what 

degree did these evaluations correspond with those authored by NASA 

overseers? How did such Venn diagrams differ among projects, both 

over time and across artifact classes? 

9) How did primes and subcontractors integrate producing for NASA 

into their enterprises’ overall operations, and how was this integration 

(or lack of it) evidenced by corporate planning processes, capital funds 

allocations, career tracks, etc.? 

10) That informal practices did contractors’ employees devise, at each 

locus and level of institutional activity, to deal with (make sense of) 

the persistence of insufficient knowledge, the nonlinearity of testing and performance outcomes, the ubiquity of uncertainty, the 

stresses of complexity, and the nonrational character of creativity? To 

what degree were such practices formalized in training procedures 

or, alternatively, concretized, either spontaneously or in a planned 

way? Most broadly in this arena, how can we assess the human cost 

of aerospace innovation to individuals, families, and communities 

(both of practice and of residence)? How do these practices, trainings, outbursts, quits, and implications compare and contrast with 

those which materialized in commercial-market enterprises and 

institutions? Ultimately, how (and to what extent) can producing for 

NASA be integrated into the experience of American business in the 

70.Weick makes a provocative comment regardingwestrum’s “fallacy of centrality” (the phenomenon 

of discounting new information because if it were important the indiwdual/orgamzation would already 

have heard about it): “It is conceivable that heavily networked orgamzations rmght find their dense 

connechons an unexpected liability, if this density encourages the fallacy of centrality. ‘News’ might 

be discounted if people hear it late and conclude that it is not credible because, if it were, they would 

have heard it sooner.This dynamc bears watching because it suggests a means by which perceptions 

of information technology might undermine the abdity of that technology to facilitate sensemaking. 

The more advanced the technology is thought to be, the more likely are people to discredit anything 

that does not come through it. [Thus] the better the information system, the less sensitive it is to novel 

events” (Sensemaking, p. 3, emphasis in original). 
198 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

Cold War decades, the social life of organizations, the construction 

of knowledge, and the history of technologies? 

These, and surely other, open questions flow from this very partial review 

of literature and documents concerning NASA-industry relations. Along with 

the foregoing thoughts on key issues, plausible conceptual frameworks, and 

implications drawn from that literature, they are offered for reflection and 

reaction. Perhaps they will encourage what seems a long-overdue vector for 

research into the distinctive, little-understood world of production for NASA, 

which exemplifies the intensities, urgencies, joys, and miseries of high-tech, 

high-pressure, state-sponsored innovation. 
CHAPTER 7 

NASA AND THE DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE: 

ENDURING THEMES IN THREE KEY AREAS 

Peter Hays 

s with any large government bureaucracies with imprecisely delineated areas A of responsibility and potentially overlapping missions, the quality and productivity of the relationship between the National Aeronautics and Space 

Administration (NASA) and the Department of Defense (DOD) have waxed and 

waned over the years.The NASA-DOD relationship has been shaped by a series 

of fundamental issues and questions that accompanied the opening of the Space 

Age, as well as by subsequent organizational structures, domestic and international 

politics, technology, and the personalities of key leaders. It is also helpful to 

consider these relations in terms of the three government space sectors and the 

bureaucratic roots and culture of the organizations created or empowered to 

perform these missions: the civil space sector for science and exploration missions 

performed by NASA, the intelligence space sector for intelligence collection 

from space by systems procured and operated by the National Reconnaissance 

Office (NRO), and the defense space sector for military missions enhanced or 

enabled by space systems procured and operated primarily by the Air Force.’ 

Although relations between these predominant space organizations have 

usually been quite harmonious and served the United States well, this analysis 

focuses more attention on periods of uncertainty or tension among these 

organizations in order to highlight enduring themes that were, and sometimes 

remain, at stake. Three key issue areas and time periods are examined: 

organizing to implement America’s vision for space in the 1950s, wrestling 

with the rationale for human spaceflight in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and 

finding the logical next steps in space transportation and missions in the 1980s. 

The state of relations between the three predominant space organizations is 

also an important factor in shaping current issues such as how best to organize 

and manage national security space activities or implement the President’s 

Vision for Space Exploration. 

1. The fourth space sector, commercial activities for profit, is regulated by but not performed by 

government. See the comprehensive dmussion of the activities included in each sector in Report ofthe 

Commission tohsess National Security Space Management and Organization (Washington, DC: Commission 

to Assess National Security Space Management and Organization, 11 January ZOOl), pp. 10-14. 
200 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

DEVELOPING, ORGANIZING, AND IMPLEMENTING 

AMERICA’S SPACE AGE VISION IN THE 1950s 

Following a long and difficult path, the United States Air Force was 

created as a separate service as a part of the National Security Act of 1947. 

Its raison d’Gtre was strategic bombing, a mission that had enchanted airmen 

almost from the inception of flight, provided the foundation for the doctrine 

that guided America’s use of airpower during World War 11, and was of even 

greater concern following the advent of nuclear weapons. The Air Force was 

organized, trained, and equipped to provide a full range of airpower missions, 

but strategic bombing, the Strategic Air Command, and bomber pilots formed 

the institutional core of the new service. The development of long-range 

ballistic missiles and space systems presented difficult cultural challenges for 

the Air Force. These new systems held the potential to perform or support 

the Air Force’s core strategic bombing mission, and the service was eager 

to develop and operate them rather than have them come under the control 

of the Army or Navy. At the same time, however, the new systems clearly 

threatened the bombers and bomber pilots at the Air Force’s institutional core. 

The Air Force attempted to walk a difficult organizational tightrope through 

this situation by pursuing missiles and space strongly enough to keep them 

out of the grasp of the other services, but not so strongly as to undercut the 

bomber pilots who ran the service. This Air Force balancing act helps to 

explain much of its behavior at the opening of the Space Age and continues 

to be a useful illustration of its ongoing struggles to incorporate space most 

appropriately in its current and future missions.2 

Space issues were not primary concerns in the wake of World War 11, but 

America quietly struggled with many questions associated with why it should 

attempt to go to space and what it might do there. By the mid-l950s, a number 

of groups and individuals had advanced various reasons for going to space,3 

2. On the evolution of air- and space-power doctrine and their role in Air Force institutional culture 

see, in particular, Phdip S. Meilinger, ed., Paths ofHeaven:The Evolution ofAirpower Theory (Maxwell Air 

Force Base [AFB], AL: Air University Press, 1997); Bruce M. DeBlois, ed., Beyond the Paths offfeaven: 

The Emergence ofspace Power Thought (Maxwell AFB, AL: Air University Press, 1999); Carl H. Builder, 

The Icarus Syndrome: The Role of Air Power Theory in the Evolution and Fate of the US. Air Force (New 

Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1994); James M. Smith, USAF Culture and Cohesion: Building an 

Air and Space Forcefor the 21st Century, Occasional Paper 19 (U.S.Air Force [USAF] Academy: USAF 

Institute for National Security Studies, June 1998); Mike Worden, Rise ofthe Fighter Generals:The Problem 

of Air Force Leadership, 1945-1 982 (Maxwell AFB, AL. Air University Press, 1998). 

3. In addition to the space-for-strategic-reconnamance rationale advocated by RAND, other 

promnent rationales for space included the scienhfic imperative that found early expression in the 

International Geophysical Year (IGY) efTort and the exploraQon imperative perhaps best captured by 

Wernher von Braun in a series of articles on future space stations published in Collier’s magazine in the 

continued on the next page 
NASA AND THE DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE. . . 201 

but the Eisenhower administration had secretly determined that its primary 

rationale for going to space was to attempt to open up the closed Soviet state 

via secret reconnaissance satellites. The RAND Corporation, a think tank 

sponsored by Army Air Force Commander General Henry H. “Hap” Arnold 

as a joint project with the Douglas Aircraft Company, was the first to study 

these issues systematically. RAND’s very first report, “Preliminary Design 

of an Experimental World-Circling Spaceship,” was delivered to the Army 

Air Force in April 1946 and not only detailed the technical design for and 

the physics involved in launching such a spaceship (the word satellite had not 

yet come into common usage), but also identified possible military missions 

for satellites, including communications, attack assessment, navigation, weather 

reconnaissance, and strategic reconnaissance! 

In October 1950, Paul Kecskemeti at RAND produced another comprehensive report on space that Walter A. McDougall believes should “be considered the birth certificate of American space p01icy.”~ This report highlighted 

the psychological impact the first satellite would likely have on the public and 

raised the issue of how the Soviet Union might respond to overflight of their 

territory and space-based reconnaissance. It even suggested that one way to test 

the issue of freedom of space would be first to launch an experimental U.S. satellite in an equatorial orbit that would not cross Soviet territory before attempting any satellite reconnaissance overhead the Soviet Union. 

The Technological Capabilities Panel and NSC-5520 

In March 1954, President Dwight Eisenhower commissioned a secret study 

and named Dr. James R. Killian, President of the Massachusetts Institute of 

Technology, as chairman of this Technological Capabilities Panel (TCP) . With 

a thermonuclear standoff looming between the United States and the Soviet 

Union, Eisenhower wanted the best minds in the country to examine how 

technology might help to prevent another Pearl Harbor. The TCP report was 

delivered to the National Security Council (NSC) in February 1955. The report 

stands out as one of the most important and influential examinations of U.S. 

national security ever undertaken; it formed the foundation for US. national 

security planning for at least the next two years, made remarkably prescient 

continued from the previous page 

early 1950s. Several of these articles are reprinted in John M. Logsdon, ed., Exploring the Unknown, vol. 1, 

Ovganizingfor Exploration (Washington, DC NASA SP-4407,1995), pp. 176-200. 

4. Merton E. Davies and William R. Harris, RAND’S Role in the Evolution of Balloon and Satellite 

Observation Systems and Related Space Technology (Santa Monica: RAND Corporation, 1988), pp. 

6-9. Portions of RAND’s first report are reprinted in Logsdon, Exploring the Unknown, vol. 1, pp. 

5. Walter A. McDougall, . . .The Heavens and the Earth:A Political History of the Space Age (NewYork: 

236-244. 

Basic Books, 1985), p. 108. 
202 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

predictions about the evolution of the superpowers’ strategic nuclear arsenals, 

and called for crash programs to develop early-warning radars and ballistic 

missiles, as well as to improve the survivability of Strategic Air Command assets 

in the face of potential nuclear attack.6 

The TCP also called for a vigorous program to improve U.S. technological 

intelligence collection capabilities. Killian and Edwin H. “Din” Land, founder 

of the Polaroid Corporation and chairman of the intelligence subcommittee 

of the TCP, were briefed on a wide range of potential collection methods and 

systems, including satellites, but became most enthused about attempting highaltitude reconnaissance overflights of the Soviet Union via a jet-powered glider 

that was then on the drawing boards at Clarence “Kelly” Johnson’s Lockheed 

skunk works in Burbank, California. They recommended production of this new 

aircraft during a series ofbriefings that culminated in an Oval Office meeting on 

24 November 1954, attended by the President, Secretaries of State and Defense, 

as well as top DOD and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officials? The initial 

programs and structure for a national strategic reconnaissance program were 

discussed at this meeting; the President verbally authorized the CIA to begin 

development of the CL-282 (U-2) aircraft program with Air Force support.8 

6. For the text of theTCP report, see John l? Glennon, ed., Foreign Relations ofthe United States, 1955- 

1957, vol. 19, National Security Polq (Washngon: Deparhnent of State, 1990), pp. 42-55. James R. Killian, 

Jr., provldes details on the worlangs of the TCP in Sputnik, Scientists, and E1senhower:A Memoir of the First 

Special Assistant to the Presidentfor Science and Technology (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1977), pp. 67-93. On the 

relaaonshp between the TCP report and subsequent U.S. nuclear stmtegy, see Lawrence Freedman, The 

Evolution ofNuclear Strategy (NewYork St. Martlns Press, 1983), pp. 76-90. 

7. Stephen M. Rothstein, Dead on Arrival? The Development of the Aerospace Concept, 1944-58 (Maxwell 

AFB, AL: hr University Press, November 2000), p. 43; Clarence E. Smth, “CIA’S Analysis of Soviet 

Science and Technology,” in Watching the Bear: Essays on CIA’S Analysis of the Soviet Union, ed. Gerald 

K. Haines and Robert E. Leggett (LangleyVA Center for the Study of Intelligence, 2003); Gregory \JC! 

Pedlow and Donald E.Welzenbach, The CUI and the U-2 Program, 1954-1974 (Langley,VA: Center for 

the Study of Intelligence, 1998). Land wrote a 5 November 1954 letter to CIA Director Allen W. Dulles 

outhmng “A Unique Opportumty for Comprehensive Intelligence” via a specialized high-altitude 

aircraft; the letter is avadable electronically &om the Natlonal Security Archive at http://www2.gwn. 

edu /-nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB74/U2-03.pdf: 

8. It is not clear from unclassified sources how much RAND reports or the An Force’s nascent WS117L reconnaissance satellite system was dscussed during these meetmgs. Satelhte reconnaissance was 

strongly advocated by a series of RAND reports during the early 1950s (particularly the 1954 “Project 

Feed Back Report”; see Logsdon, Exploring the Unknown, vol. 1, pp. 269-274). In late 1953, the hr 

Research and Development Command (ARDC) had pubhshed a management “Satellite Component 

Study” and designated it Weapons System (WS) 117L. On 1 July 1954, the Western Development 

Division (WDD) of ARDC was estabhshed in Inglewood, CA, under the command of Colonel 

Bernard Schriever (who had participated in Project Feed Back), primardy to speed development of 

balhstic mssdes. WDD formally imtiated a program to develop reconnaissance satelhtes in Weapons 

System Requirements Number 5 (WS-l17L), “System Requirement for an Advanced Reconnaissance 

System,” secretly issued on 27 November 1954. Accordmg to Spires, “Focused on Project Aquatone, 

continued on the next page 
NASA AND THE DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE 203 

Following the start of these new technical intelligence collection initiatives, 

in early 1955 the National Academy of Sciences proposal for DOD to support 

the launch of a scientific satellite for research during the July 1957-December 

1958 International Geophysical Year (IGY) landed on the desk of Donald 

Quarles, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Research and Development. 

Quarles used this opportunity to tie together various strands of the administration’s embryonic policies on satellites, intelligence collection, and ballistic missiles by drafting a space policy for review by the National Security Council. His 

draft formed the basis for NSC-5520, the most important space policy of the 

Eisenhower administration. Portions of this document remain classified almost 

50 years after it was written, but the basic themes are quite clear: the Space Age 

would soon open; the TCP “recommended that intelligence applications warrant 

an immediate program leading to a very small satehte in orbit around the earth” 

and a reexamination “of the principles or practices of international law with 

regard to ‘Freedom of Space”’; DOD should provide support for launching the 

IGY satehte so long as such support would not delay or otherwise impede 

DOD programs; and all U.S. space efforts should be arranged to emphasize 

peacefbl purposes and fieedom of space.’ NRO historian Cargill Hall succinctly 

summarized how Eisenhower’s space policy was put into practice: “The IGY scientific satellite program was clearly identified as a stalking horse to establish 

the precedent of overflight in space for the eventual operation of dtary reconnaissance satehtes.”’O The final piece of the policy, satellite, and booster 

puzzle fell into place when Quarles established an advisory committee to decide 

continued from the previous page 

the U-2 project that promsed immelate results, the ditary satellite program received little interest or 

support from K~llian and his experts. At that hme, he considered the hr Force’s reconnamance 

satellite a ‘peripheral project.’ Ths attitude from one so influenual helps explain the less than 

enthusiashc admnistration support of the Au Force’s Advanced Reconnaissance Satekte in the two 

years precelng Sputnik. Despite the growing need for strategic intelligence and awareness that the 

U-2 represented a temporary solution, Wan declined to acnvely support the ditary satellite untd 

after the launch of the first Sputnik. He beheved an American scientlfic satellite had to precede the 

launch of a military vehcle to provide the overfhght precedent for dtary satellites to operate with 

mnimum international criucism” (David N. Spires, Beyond HOYEOVIS:A Half Century ofAir Force Space 

Leadership [Colorado Springs: hr Force Space Command, 19981, p. 39) See Robert L. Perry, Orgins 

ofthe USAF Space Program, 2945-2956 (Los Angeles Space Systems Division, 1961), p. viii, microfiche 

document 00313 in US Military Uses of Space 1945-1991. Index and Guide (Washngton, DC:The 

National Security Archive, and Alexandria,VA Chadwyck-Healey, Inc , 1991); Spires, Beyond Horizons. 

9. NSC-5520 was approved at the NSC meeting on 26 May 1955, and Eisenhower signed it the 

following day. Quotations are from the declassified portions reprinted in Dwayne A. Day, “Invitation 

to StruggkThe History of Civd-Mditary Relanons in Space,” m Explortng the Unknown, ed. John M. 

Logsdon, vol. 2, External Relationships (Washngton, DC: NASA SP-4407,1996), p. 241. 

10. R. Cargd Hall, “Origins of U.S. Space Policy. Eisenhower, Open Slues, and Freedom of Space,” 

in Explonng the Unknown, ed. Logsdon, vol. 1, p. 222. 
204 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

which military booster should be used, and it recommended the Navy’sViking 

(Vanguard) booster rather than the Army or Air Force proposals.” 

This most important but secret process to legitimize overflight spelled 

out by NSC-5520 was not at all clear at the time, even to many of the senior 

participants in the development of early U.S. space and missile programs. 

Indeed, it remained politically expedient to continue obscuring the origins and 

operation of space-based intelligence collection, America’s first and arguably 

most important space program, for decades into the Space Age?2 This subtext 

is, however, critical to understanding the nature of the relationships between 

NASA, the NRO, and the Air Force. 

Responding to the Sputniks and Creating NASA 

The Eisenhower administration carefully planned to use the opening of 

the Space Age to create a new legal regime that would legitimize the operation 

of reconnaissance satellites, but, despite repeated warnings, it did not prepare 

well for the psychological implications of this milestone. The worldwide public 

reaction to the Soviet successes with Sputniks I and I1 on 4 October and 3 

November 1957 precipitated a crisis in confidence in Eisenhower’s leadership 

that was seized upon by opponents of his New Look defense policies and shaped 

the remainder of his second term. In an attempt to limit the growing crisis, 

one of Eisenhower’s first responses was to appoint Killian to a new position as 

science adviser to the President. A second major administration response was the 

establishment of the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) within DOD 

on 7 February 1958. ARPA was authorized to direct or perform virtually all 

United States space research and development efforts but was viewed by many 

as a stopgap measure and proved insufficient to derail the mounting pressure to 

create a comprehensive, independent, and civilian space agency.13 

11. The Army Bastic Miss& Agency’s Project Orbiter proposal was the most advanced of the 

proposals presented to the Stewart Committee. On 20 September 1956, a Jupiter-C rose to an altitude of 

600 des whde traveling 3,000 miles downrange despite having an inert fourth stage (it was filled wth 

sand) to preclude this vehicle &om accidentally launching the first satellite and thereby circumventing 

the IGY stahng-horse strategy laid out in NSC-5520. See Major General John B. Medaris, U.S. Army 

(USA) (ret.), Countdownfor Decision (NewYork G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1960), pp. 119-20,147. 

12. The existence of the NRO was first ofticially acknowledged in September 1992. The importance and uses of United States overhead photoreconnaissance (IMINT), as well as the fact that 

the United States conducts overhead signals intelligence (SIGINT) and measurement and signature 

intelligence (MASINT) collection, were first acknowledged in the 19 September 1996 National Space 

Pohcy Fact Sheet. 

13. Other major responses included authorization for the ABMA to prepare to launch a satellite on 

the modifiedv-2 booster known as the Jupiter-C or Juno (this system boosted Explorer I, America’s 

first satelhe, into orbit on 31 January 1958), as well as the congressional hearings on satellite and mssile 

programs that were called by Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson and held between 25 November 1957 

and 23 January 1958. 
NASA AND THE DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE. . . 205 

Killian was the most important actor in creating NASA as the centerpiece 

of the organizational structure America developed in response to the Sputniks 

shock, but he worked very closely with other key actors and organizations such as 

the President, Senator Lyndon B. Johnson (D-Texas), and the military services. 

By the end of 1957, the President's Science Advisory Committee (PSAC), under 

Killian, had decided that a scientifically oriented civil space program, rather 

than a military program, ought to be the nation's top space priority and that 

the new civilian space agency ought to be built out of and modeled after the 

National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA). This approach was the 

primary recommendation of the PSAC headed by Edward Purcell; Killian used 

the Purcell Committee findings to help persuade Eisenhower of the need for a 

civilian agency and sent proposed legislation to Congress on 2 April 1958. 

Both houses held extensive hearings on the civilian space agency proposal 

during April and May; soon, however, they drifted into positions that differed 

from one another and from the administration. The most contentious issues 

revolved around three areas: the relative priority of civil and military space efforts, 

the appropriate relationship between civilian and military space organizations, 

and the organizational structure for creating national space policy. Office of 

the Secretary of Defense (OSD) witnesses included Deputy Secretary Quarles, 

ARPA Director Roy Johnson, and ARPA Chief Scientist Herbert York. They 

emphasized that DOD must retain the power to define and control military space 

programs. Service witnesses generally took the same positions they had over the 

creation of ARPA. The Navy opposed a strong civilian agency and preferred an 

organization similar to NACA that would support but not shape military space 

efforts. The Air Force was confident of its position as the lead service for military 

space and supported a strong civilian agency as a means to undercut Navy and 

Army space efforts. By contrast, the Army opposed the creation of a civilian 

agency or the division of scientific and military space missions; the Army also 

urged if a civilian space agency were created that it, rather than DOD or the Air 

Force, should control the national space effort,'4 

Compromises were ironed out following a meeting between Eisenhower 

and Senator Johnson on 7 July and during Conference Committee meetings 

later that month. The major compromises included a modified version of 

the House's Civilian-Military Liaison Committee (CMLC), creation of the 

National Aeronautics and Space Council (NASC) at the White House, and 

carefully brokered language in Section 102 (b) that was designed to delineate 

between NASA and DOD space missions. The latter issue was perhaps the most 

controversial aspect of the entire process. The final language called for NASA to 

exercise control over all U.S. space activities 

14. Enid Curas Bok Schoettle, "The Establishment of NASA," in Knowledge and Power: Essays on 

Science and Government, ed. Sanford A. Lakoff (NewYork: Free Press, 1966), pp. 162-270. 
206 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

except that activities peculiar to or primarily associated with 

the development of weapons systems, military operations, or 

the defense of the U.S. (including Research and Development 

necessary to make effective provision for the defense of the 

U.S.) shall be the responsibility of and shall be directed by 

the DOD.15 

Eisenhower signed the National Aeronautics and Space Act into law on 29 July, 

and NASA was created on 1 October 1958. 

Frictions over manned spaceflight, budgets, and organizational structure 

between NACA and ARPA were evident before NASA was established. Both 

NACA and ARPA strongly desired to control manned spaceflight, and both 

organizations fought hard for this mission during a series of meetings with the 

Bureau of the Budget during the summer of 1958. Once again, Killian was an 

important player behind the scenes; he helped broker a compromise whereby 

NASA would design and build the capsules for manned spaceflight and DOD 

would concentrate on the boosters required for this mission.16 Killian also pushed 

to reprogram $117 million from ARPA and the Air Force to NASA, helped 

ARPA retain $108 million for space programs outside of the WS-117L (see note 

8), and steadfastly refused to entertain any suggestions to change the organization 

or reduce the $186-million budget for the WS-117L.” Organizational changes 

were also looming. The Army’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory wished to transition 

immediately to NASA, and the Army was close to granting this request, but it 

wanted to use the transfer of JPL as a bargaining chip in its efforts to retain its 

space crown jewel, the von Braun rocket team at ABMA. 

Completing the Organizational Structure 

Following the creation of NASA, there were three major tracks ofactivity 

that shaped NASA-DOD relations during the remainder of Eisenhower’s 

term and into John Kennedy’s administration: moving ABMA into NASA, 

consolidating DOD space activities under the Air Force, and establishing the 

NRO. Each of these tracks helped establish the basic organizational structures 

and bureaucratic interests that endure today. 

Army Secretary William Brucker and ABMA Commander Major General 

John Medaris understood very well how hard the Army had worked to capture 

and maintain the von Braun group as one of the key spoils of World War I1 

and just how important von Braun’s expertise would be to any major U.S. 

15. Ibid., pp. 260-261. 

16. Robert A. Divine, The Sputnik Challenge (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 150. 

17. Ibid., pp. 151-152. 

Divine notes that Killian had quickly emerged as Eisenhower’s “key post-Sputnik advisor.” 
NASA AND THE DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE.. . 207 

space effort-they were not about to give up ABMA without a fight. They had 

strongly opposed creation ofa powerful civilian space agency, and after NASA 

was established, they redoubled their efforts to retain control ofABMA. NASA 

had inherited NACKs infrastructure but initiallylacked expertise in many space 

areas such as the development of large boosters. By contrast, ABMA contained 

arguably the world's best booster development team, but it lacked a specific 

military rationale for developing large boosters.18 In October 1958, T. Keith 

Glennan, NASA's first Administrator, and Deputy Secretary Quarles worked 

out a deal to resolve this anomalous situation by transferring JPL and ABMA 

to NASA. Brucker and Medaris successfully blocked transfer of ABMA at this 

time. But in December, the NASC brokered a second compromise that moved 

JPL to NASA and left the von Braun team under ABMA while directing that 

their work on Saturn would be under contract to NASA. 

Significant military space organizational restructuring was also under 

way within DOD. Following creation of NASA and pressure on ABMA, 

the Navy and the Army, in particular, became increasingly concerned with 

retaining their military space capabilities, shoring up ARPA, and formulating 

the proper bureaucratic structure for military space. The Air Force, by 

contrast, was growing increasingly confident of its inside track for gaining 

control over military space missions, supported a strong NASA, and continued 

to oppose ARPA's direction of military space efforts. Another key player that 

entered the mix at this time was Herbert York, the first Director of Defense 

Research and Engineering (DDR&E), a position created by the 1958 Defense 

Reorganization Act. 

Debates over DOD's space organizational structure became increasingly 

heated during 1959 and came to a head in September. In April, Chief of Naval 

Operations Admiral Arleigh Burke highlighted the indivisibility of space and 

proposed to the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) creation of a unified (multiservice) 

command for space. Burke's proposal was supported by the Army but was 

strongly opposed by the Air Force. Arguing that space systems represented a 

better way of performing existing missions, the Air Force advocated treating 

space systems on a functional basis under ARPA or, preferably, under the 

Air Force. DDR&E York weighed in on this debate and sided strongly with 

the Air Force, largely because he was eager to consolidate military space 

efforts under the Air Force as a way to rein in what he considered to be 

overreaching space proposals on the part of all the services. A memorandum 

18. ABMA had been tasked by ARPA to study and design a 1.5-million-pound-thrust booster that 

came to be known as the Saturn B.The Saturn B was, in turn, a primary driver behmd the ABMA 

Project Horizon proposal to use 149 Saturn launches to build a 12-person lunar outpost by 1966. See 

John M. Logsdon, The Decision to Go to the Moon: Project Apollo and the National Interest (Cambridge: 

MIT Press, 1970), pp. 51-52. 
208 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

from Secretary Neil McElroy to JCS Chairman General Nathan Twining on 

18 September attempted to resolve these disputes and represented a significant 

bureaucratic victory for the Air Force. McElroy assigned responsibility for 

most satellite systems, payload integration, and “the development, production, 

and launching of space boosters” to the Air Force.” The memo also found that 

“establishment of a joint military organization with control over operational 

space systems does not appear desirable at this time.”’’ 

For the remainder of the Eisenhower administration and the beginning 

of the Kennedy administration, the space prospects of the Army continued to 

decline while those of the Air Force usually continued to rise. Following the 

transfer of the Redstone program in December 1958 and the Saturn program in 

November 1959, between March and July 1960 the Army moved the von Braun 

team and 6,400 other ABMA personnel under NASA control.” Eisenhower 

presided over the 8 September 1960 ceremony in Huntsville, Alabama, that 

dedicated the Marshall Space Flight Center and officially moved the Army 

out of the space business. It took decades for the Army to recover from this 

loss and regain its enthusiasm towards space, but today the Army is the largest 

user of military space data among the services, and it is eagerly considering a 

range of significant future enhancements such as Global Positioning System 

(GPS) I11 satellites and Blue Force Tracking. 

Despite Air Force support for NASA’s creation, NASA’s role in absorbing 

the Air Force’s most serious competition for developing military space 

systems, and generally good early relations between America’s two largest 

space organizations, NASA-Air Force relations hit a snag after an internal 

letter from Air Force Chief of Staff General Thomas White to his staff was 

leaked to Congressman Overton Brooks (D-Louisiana), Chairman of the 

House Committee on Science and Astronautics. The bulk of White’s 14 April 

1960 letter urged the Air Force “to cooperate to the maximum extent with 

NASA, to include the furnishing of key personnel even at the expense of 

some Air Force dilution of technical talent.”” The opening two sentences of 

White’s letter, however, raised questions about the strength and longevity of 

Air Force support for NASA independence: 

19. Spires, Beyond Horizons, p. 77. ARPA returned responsibility for thews-1 17L to the Air Force. By 

this time, the program consisted of three separate developmental satellite systems: Corona, a recoverable 

film photoreconnaissance system; Samos, an electro-optical system designed to downlmk imagery 

electronically; and Midas, an infrared satellite sensor system designed to detect ballistic mssile launches. 

The Navy acquired the Transit satellite navigation systems, and the Army gained responsibdity for 

Notus communicahons satellites.This approach overturned AELPA’s monopoly on control over dtary 

satellite systems. 

20. Ibid. 

21. Day, “Invitation to Struggle,” p. 253. 

22. Ibid., p. 256. 
NASA AND THE DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE. . . 209 

President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Mrs. George C. Marshall unveil the bronze bust 

of General George C. Marshall during the dedication ceremony of the George C. 

Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) in Huntsville, Alabama, on 8 September 1960. 

On 21 October 1959, President Eisenhower directed the transfer of personnel from the 

Redstone Arsenal's Army Ballistic Missile Agency Development Operations Division 

to NASA. The complex of the new NASA Center was formed within the boundaries 

of Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville. MSFC began its operations on 1 July 1960 after 

the transfer ceremony, with Dr. Wernher von Braun as Center Director. (NASA MSFC 

photo no. 9131490) 

I am convinced that one of the major long term elements of 

the Air Force future lies in space. It is also obvious that NASA 

will play a large part in the national effort in this direction 

and, moreover, inevitably will be closely associated, if not 

eventually combined with the military.23 

In March 1961, Brooks held hearings to lscuss White's letter, the proper balance 

between military and civil space, and the general direction of U.S. space efforts. 

Brooks sought and even received clarification &om President Kennedy. On 23 

March, Kennedy wrote a letter to Brooks that emphasized several key points: 

23. Ibid 
210 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

It is not now, nor has it ever been, my intention to subordinate the activities in space of the National Aeronautics and 

Space Administration to those of the Department of Defense. I 

believe, as you do, that there are legitimate missions in space for 

which the military services should assume responsibility, but 

that there are major missions, such as the scientific unmanned 

and manned exploration of space and the application of space 

technologies to the conduct of peaceful activities, which should 

be carried forward by our civilian space agency.24 

Kennedy’s letter helped to delineate space missions between NASA and the 

Air Force and indicated Kennedy’s growing emphasis on civil missions, an 

emphasis that would grow significantly stronger after Yuri Gagarin’s orbital 

flight some three weeks later. 

During the same month as the Brooks hearings, Air Force control over 

military space programs was solidified when Secretary Robert McNamara 

issued Defense Directive 5160.32, “Development of Space Systems.” This directive built on Secretary McElroy’s September 1959 memo and the January 1961 

recommendations of incoming science adviser Jerome Wiesner. It gave the 

Air Force operational control over almost every military space program from 

research and development through launch and operations and stopped just short 

of naming the Air Force as DOD’s executive agent for space. This was, of 

course, a welcome development for the Air Force, but McNamara’s motivation, 

like York’s before him, was to consolidate and prune rather than to encourage 

Air Force leadership in developing more robust military space activities. 

The creation of NRO was the final major organizational response to 

the opening of the Space Age and was, like the IGY stalking-horse strategy 

in NSC-5520, an official state secret hidden from the public and even many 

of the leaders of U.S. civil and military space efforts. Following Sputnik, in 

January 1958 the NSC granted highest national priority to development of 

an operational reconnaissance satellite, but Eisenhower had doubts about Air 

Force management of the WS-117L program and was particularly troubled by 

press leaks about the program. Decisions made at meetings on 6-7 February 

1958 between the President, Killian, Land, Director of Central Intelligence 

Allen Dulles, Secretary of Defense Neil McElroy, and Eisenhower’s staff 

secretary, Colonel Andrew Goodpaster, created ARPA and publicly gave this 

new agency all open military space programs. In secret, these decisions also 

gave ARPA direction over the highest priority WS-117L and moved control 

of the Corona recoverable film photoreconnaissance system from the Air 

24. Logsdon, Exploring the Unknown, vol. 2, p. 317. 
NASA AND THE DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE.. . 21 1 

Force to the CIA in an organizational structure that initially mirrored that 

of the U-2.25 

U.S. efforts to develop operational spysat systems faced very daunting 

technological challenges during the late 1950s and early 1960s. Corona was 

the most mature technology, yet between February 1959 and June 1960, it 

still suffered a string of 12 consecutive failures of various types that prevented 

recovery offilm imagery from space before achieving its first success in August 

1960. These problems with Corona, along with even more serious difficulties 

with Samos and Midas, prompted Eisenhower, in May 1960, to direct his 

new science adviser, George Kistiakowsky, to put together a committee to 

recommend changes to improve these programs. Kistiakowsky and Defense 

Secretary Thomas Gates decided on the structure and charter of what became 

known as the Samos Panel and selected members including Under Secretary 

of the Air Force Joseph Charyk, Deputy DDR&E John Rubel, Killian, Land, 

York, and Purcell. The Samos Panel reported its recommendations at an NSC 

meeting on 24 August. Eisenhower and the NSC strongly supported the 

primary recommendation, immediate creation of an organization to provide 

a direct chain of command from the Secretary of the Air Force to the officers 

in charge of each spysat project; this decision was the genesis of the NR0.26 

It represented another vote of no confidence in the Air Force to manage 

spysat programs through military channels, moved this highest priority space 

mission and its products out of the military chain of command, and completed 

America’s three-legged organizational structure for space. 

In addition to the organizational changes discussed above, beginning in 

1961 there was a major change in the way information was released about U.S. 

military space programs that had a significant effect both on contemporary 

analyses and the historiography of space. A security clampdown was slowly 

implemented, first on spy satellite programs and then on all military space 

efforts. The Samos 2 launch on 31 January 1961 was the first to be affected 

by the Kennedy administration’s new publicity guidelines. Assistant Secretary 

of Defense for Public Affairs Arthur Sylvester and NRO Director Charyk 

worked out a very terse statement provided to the press following this launch 

25. R. Cargdl Hall, “Clandestme Victory: Dwight D. Eisenhower and Overhead Reconnaissance 

in the Cold War” @aper presented at the “Eisenhower and National Security for the 21st Century 

Symposium,” Industrial College of the Armed Forces, Washington, DC, 26-28 January 2005); Day, 

“Invitahon to Struggle,” p. 250; Kenneth E. Greer, “Corona,” in Corona:Amerrca’s Fcrst Satellite Program, 

ed. Kevm C. Rufier (L.angley,VA Center for the Study of Intelligence, 1995). 

26. George Gstiakowsky, A Scientist at the White House: The Private Diary of President Eisenhower’s 

SpecialAssistantfor Science andzchnology (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976); Hall,“Clandeshne 

Victory”; Gerald M. Steinberg, Satellrte Reconnaissance:The Role ofInfoorrna1 Bargaining (NewYork: Praeger 

Pubhshers, 1983); Jef??eyT. Rxhelson, America’s Secret Eyes in Space:The U. S. Keyhole Spy Satellite Program 

(NewYork: Harper & Row, 1990). 
212 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

that contrasted significantly with the large prelaunch publicity packages which 

had been given out previou~ly.~~ The remainder of 1961 saw a gradual tightening 

of the security classifications with less and less information provided with each 

successive launch.28 

The Air Force chafed at these restrictions, and many officers, including 

General Schriever, continued publicly to press the case for an increased military 

space program. This ongoing public discussion ofmilitary space programs by the 

Air Force greatly irritated President Kennedy, and on more than one occasion, 

he called Sylvester directly, demanding to know why he had “let those bastards 

talk.”29 Following these calls, Sylvester’s office greatly intensified the screening 

process required for all public releases on space. As a result of this widespread 

clampdown, planned speeches by Air Force general officers were very carefully 

screened by civilians in Sylvester’s office for any references to the Samos program, 

and the winter-spring 1960-1961 Air University Quarterly Review issue devoted to 

“Aerospace Force in the Sixties” was heavily censored, including the removal of 

an article entitled “Strategic Reconnaissance” in its entirety.30 

The final step in this security-intensification process was the classified 

DOD directive issued on 23 March 1962 known as the “blackout” directive. 

According to Stares, this directive 

prohibited advance announcement and press coverage of all 

military space launchings at Cape Canaveral and Vandenberg 

AFB. It also forbade the use of the names of such space projects 

as Discoverer, MIDAS and SAMOS. Military payloads on space 

vehicles would no longer be identified, while the programme 

names would be replaced by numbers.31 

While this directive may have made it somewhat more difficult for the Soviets 

to distinguish between different types of US. military space programs and 

launches, it certainly made it much more difficult for the Air Force to sell its 

preferred space program to the public or Congress and helped to establish and 

perpetuate a wide divergence between public knowledge and perceptions of the 

NASA and DOD space programs. 

27. Paul B. Stares, The Militarization ofspace: US. Poky, 1945-1984 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 

1985), p. 64. Sylvester and Charyk were mindfd of the volume of information promded in the past and 

deliberately opted for a slow blackout process in the hopes that ths would arouse less attenhon than 

an abrupt blackout. 

28. Rxhelson, Secret Eyes, p. 53. By the time of the Samos 5 launch on 22 December 1961, DOD 

officials would no longer confirm that the Samos program even existed. 

29. Stares, Militarization of Space, p. 64. 

30. Steinberg, Satellite Reconnaissance, p. 43. 

31. Stares, Militarization ofspace, p. 65, emphasis m original. 
NASA AND THE DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE. . . 213 

WRESTLING WITH THE RATIONALE 

FOR HUMAN SPACEFLIGHT IN THE EARLY SPACE PROGRAM 

With the organizational structure for space completed, the majority of 

issues concerning the relationships and cooperation between NASA, the 

Air Force, and the NRO revolved around the rationale for human spaceflight, the organizations empowered to perform these missions, and developing and operating space launch vehicles. These issues were, of course, also 

instrumental in initially shaping and continuing to mold America’s space 

bureaucratic structure. 

Jockeying for Human Spaceflight Missions 

The period from the opening ofthe Space Age until completion of NASA’s 

Apollo Moon race was a time of both cooperation and intense competition 

between NASA and the Air Force. Both organizations were very interested 

in and believed they would be directed to develop major human spaceflight 

programs; their intricate dance fundamentally shaped these programs. The 

Air Force had emerged as the most powerful military space actor, advanced a 

variety of rationales for manned military spaceflight, and strongly believedespecially at the beginning of the Kennedy administration-that it would be 

given approval for a major manned spaceflight program. NASA, meanwhile, 

drew heavily on Army and Air Force expertise to develop its spaceflight 

programs and struggled to transition from science to prestige as the most 

important rationale for its manned spaceflight programs. During the 1960s, the 

Air Force was repeatedly rebuffed in its attempts to gain a foothold in military 

manned space missions; following the failure of Dyna-Soar, Blue Gemini, 

and the Manned Orbiting Laboratory (MOL), the Air Force was sufficiently 

chastened that it remains highly skeptical of manned military missions. 

The Air Force had displayed a significant amount of interest in military 

manned spaceflight well before Sputnik, but, like almost all other space activities, 

this interest was energized following the Soviet triumph. The Air Force’s 

earliest support was for the dynamic soaring (Dyna-Soar) concept for skipping 

off the Earth’s atmosphere to extend the range of a spaceplane that might be 

used for a variety of missions including strategic bombing, reconnaissance, 

and antisatellite attacks.32 By 1955, the Bell Aircraft Company had received 

32.The idea of an antipodal bomber that would shp off Earth’s atmosphere to acheve intercontinental 

range was developed by an Austrian, Dr. Eugen Sanger, and was considered in 1943 by von Braun and 

General Walter Dornberger at Peenemunde. Dornberger worked for Bell hrcraft after the war and was a 

tireless advocate for Dyna-Soar.The idea of flying to and from space held special appeal to the test pilots 

who derided the capsule approach to manned spaceflight as “Spam in a can.” See Tom Wolfe, The Right 

Stufl(NewYork: Bantam Press, 1980).The definitive work on Dyna-Soar is Roy E Houchin, US Hypersonic 

Research and Development, 194+1963:The Rise and Fall ofDyna-Soar (London: Frank Cas, 2005). 
214 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

over $1 million in Air Force funding and had raised an additional $2.3 million 

from six other aerospace firms willing to ante up company funds to support 

the prospect of a major Air Force manned military space mission.33 

Following Sputnik, Air Force leaders were among the first to adopt a 

space-race attitude toward manned spaceflight and supported using either 

spaceplanes or capsules to achieve rapid results. In a 31 January 1958 letter 

from Deputy Chief of Staff for Research and Development Lieutenant General 

Donald Putt to the Air Research and Development Command, Putt advocated 

rapid development of manned spaceflight and indicated it was “vital to the 

prestige of the nation that such a feat be accomplished at the earliest technically 

practicable date-if at all possible before the Russians.”34 Recognizing that 

congressional deliberations on creating a civilian space agency were under 

way, the Air Force mounted a full court press to gain approval of its Manned 

Military Space System Development Plan (MISS) before the civilian agency 

was e~tablished.~~ TheMISS plan received support from the highest levels of 

the Air Force and throughout many DOD offices but was shot down, first by 

ARPA Director Johnson on 25 July and then by the President a few weeks 

later, when he formally assigned the role of human spaceflight to NASA.36 

The Rise and Fall of Dyna-Soar 

After its failure to advance its MISS plans and Eisenhower’s decision 

to make NASA primarily responsible for manned spaceflight, the Air Force 

refocused on the Dyna-Soar program, and it became the service’s top space 

priority. The official start of the program came in November 1957, when Air 

Research and Development Command issued System Development Directive 

464.37 In May 1958, the Air Force and NACA signed a Memorandum of 

Understanding (MOU) indicating that Dyna-Soar would be a joint Air ForceNACA project managed and funded along the lines of the X-15 effort.38 The 

program took more definite shape during 1959 and 1960, when the Air Force 

laid out a four-step development program that was designed to achieve full 

operational capability by 1966. The zenith for the program came early in the 

Kennedy administration, when the plans were finalized for a small, single33. McDougall, Heavens and Earth, p. 339. 

34. “Early AF MIS Activity,” mcrofiche document 00446 in U. S. Military Uses of Space. 

35. Ibid. The MISS plan had four phases. The first, “Man-In-Space-Soonest,” called for the first 

orbital flight by April 1960, and the 1ast:“Manned Lunar Landing and Return,” was to be accomplished 

by December 1965.The entire program was projected to cost only $1.5 bd!ion. 

36. Day,“Invitation to Struggle,” p. 252. 

37. “Review and Summary of X-20 Mllitary Application Studies,” mcrofiche document 00450 in 

38. “Memorandum of Understanding,” document 11-7 in Exploring the Unknown, ed. Logsdon, vol. 

U. S. Military Uses of Space. 

2, pp. 284-285. 
NASA AND THE DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE.. . 215 

seat, delta-winged space glider (designated as the X-20 in 1962) that would be 

launched atop a Titan I11 and land like an airplane. 

Soon, however, the X-20 ran afoul of McNamara's systems analysis 

approach and his fears of provoking an action-reaction arms race in space. 

After McNamara refused to accelerate the program, even after receiving an 

unrequested extra $85.8 million from the House Appropriations Committee 

for fiscal year (FY) 1962, funding was cut to only $130 million for FY 1963 and 

1964, and the first scheduled flight was slipped to 1966.39 Next, McNamara's 

systems analysts "showed that a modified Gemini might perform military 

functions better and more cheaply than the X-20.'"0 This finding prompted 

McNamara to attempt to gain a large role for the Air Force in Project Gemini, 

a move NASA Administrator James Webb successfully parried by citing the 

impact of such a restructuring on the nation's highest priority Apollo Program. 

Instead, on 23 January 1963, Webb and McNamara signed an agreement to 

allow DOD experiments on Gemini missions. During this time, the Air Force 

also proposed a plan to procure some of NASA's Gemini spacecraft under a 

program referred to as Blue Gemini.41 

The creation of the DOD Gemini Experiments Program and studies on 

the military usefulness of a space station that would evolve into the Manned 

Orbiting Laboratory (MOL) program weakened the rationale for the X-20 and 

placed additional pressures on the troubled program."' In October 1963, the 

39. McDougall, Heavens and Earth, p. 340; Stares, Militarization $Space, p. 130. 

40. McDougall, Heavens and Earth, p. 340. 

41. Stares, Militarization of Space, p. 79. DOD eliminated the Blue Gemini and Military Orbital 

Development System (MODS) programs fiom the Air Force budget in January 1963.The NASA-DOD 

experiment program was officially titled Program 631A,"DOD Gemini Experlments Program,"and called 

for 18 experiments to be run on Gemim fights between October 1964 and Aprll1967 for a cost of$16 

million.The experiments were programmed for areas such as satellite inspection, reconnaissance, satellite 

defense, and asmnaut extravehicular activity. See Colonel Damel D. McKee, "The Gemini Program," 

Air University Review 16 (May-June 1965): 6-15; GeraldT. Cantwell,"A€ m Space, FY 64," pp. 31-36, 

microfiche document 00330 in US. Military Uses $Space. 

42. NASA and DOD interactions during 1963 over the issue of hture manned space stations greatly 

affected the X-20 and other Air Force man-in-space p1ans.h November 1962, the Air Force had completed 

a study on a hted military space station known as the MODS. Based upon the MODS concept,Webb 

and McNamara dwussed the possibility of a joint Stahon project, and on 27 April 1963, they agreed that 

neither organization would initiate station development without the approval of the other. McNamara 

pressedwebb for a commitment to a joint program, but Webb did not want to make any pledge that might 

sidetrack Apollo. Finally, after intervention by Vice President Johnson and the NASC, NASA and DOD 

agreed in September that, Ifpossible, stations larger and more sophsticated than Gemni and Apollo would 

be encompassed in a single project. After DDR&E Harold Brown recommended to McNamara on 14 

November that the X-20 be canceled and replaced by studies on what would become the MOL program, 

Brown next attempted, unsuccessfdly, to coordinate a joint NASA-DOD station. NASA, wary that the 

fairly large and sophsticated station Brown favored might threaten its space turf, suggested that DOD 

pursue a smaller and less sophisticated space laboratory rather than a space station.DOD accepted at least the 

semantic unportance of this distinction in initiating MOL studies for an independent military station. See 

Cantwell,"AF in Space, FY 64,"pp. 16-23, microfiche document 00330 in US. Military Uses ofspace. 
216 CRITICAL ISSUES INTHE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

PSAC compared the relative military utility of the Gemini, X-20, and MOL 

programs and judged that the X-20 held the least p0tential.4~ By this time, 

according to the editor of Missiles and Rockets, the X-20 had been “reviewed, 

revised, reoriented, restudied, and reorganized to a greater extent than any other 

Air Force pr~gram.’”~ On 10 December 1963, Secretary McNamara publicly 

announced cancellation of the X-20 program and, at the same time, assigned 

primary responsibility for developing MOL to the Air Force!’ 

The MOL Program and the Demise of Military Spaceflight Dreams 

Announced at the same time as the cancellation of the X-20, MOL quickly 

took the place of the X-20 and became the cornerstone of Air Force efforts to 

build a significant manned military presence in space. The Air Force put a great 

deal of energy, effort, and funding into MOL, and this project soon emerged as 

DOD’s only manned military space program. Numerous technical and especially 

political problems beset the program, and MOL was repeatedly cut back and 

stretched out in the late 1960s. The Nixon administration officially canceled 

MOL on 10 June 1969. Having been repeatedly thwarted and left without any 

military man-in-space programs, for many years the Air Force became more 

resigned to the sanctuary school of thought on space and came to view plans and 

doctrines calling for the military to help control space or to exploit the highground potential of space as increasingly irrelevant. 

The roots of the MOL program can be traced back at least to the “Global 

Surveillance System” proposed by Air Force Systems Command in November 

1960.46 As described above, the more direct inspiration for the MOL came 

from the MODS space station first proposed by the Air Force in June 1962, 

the 1963 DOD-NASA deliberations over the possibility of building a joint 

space station, and the cancellation of the X-20. In his Posture Statement for 

FY 1965, Secretary McNamara generally remained unconvinced of a specific 

need for military spaceflight but indicated that the time had come for U.S. 

military man-in-space efforts to “be more sharply focused on those areas 

which hold the greatest promise of military ~tility.”~’ Accordingly, he had 

canceled the X-20, expanded the small-scale testing of the Mach 5-25 flight 

regime through the unmanned ASSET vehicle, initiated the DOD Gemini 

Experiments Program, and proposed MOL as a “much more important step” 

for investigating the possible military utility of man-in-~pace.~~ 

43. McDougall, Heavens and Earth, p. 340. 

44. Ibid., p. 341. 

45. Between 1957 and 1963, the X-20 program consumed $400 million, or almost the same amount 

46. Fbchelson, Secret Eys in Space, p. 83. 

47. House Committee on Armed Services, FiscalYears 1965-1969 Defme Program and Fiscalyear 1965 

48. Ibid., pp. 104-106, quotation from page 106. 

spent on Project Mercury. 

Defense Budget, Hearlng before the Committee on Armed Semces, 88th Cong., 1st sess., 1964, p. 104. 
NASA AND THE DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE 217 

During 1964 and the first half of 1965, the MOL program was subjected to 

intense scrutiny by OSD and underwent several design and program application 

changes. By mid-1965, specific missions and station designs were firmed up. Most 

importantly, MOL applications added in 1965 were designed to turn MOL into 

a formidable reconnaissance platform with a large 90-inch telescope and huge 

signals intelligence (SIGINT) antennas to be assembled on orbit alongside the 

stati0n.4~ At a press conference on 25 August 1965, President Johnson formally 

A 1960 concept image of the United States Air Force‘s proposed Manned Orbiting 

Laboratory (MOL), intended to test the military usefulness of having humans in orbit. 

The station‘s baseline configuration was that of a two-person Gemini B spacecraft 

that could be attached to a laboratory vehicle. The structure was planned to launch on 

a Titan lllC rocket. The station would be used for a month, and the astronauts could 

return to the Gemini capsule for transport back to Earth. The first launch of the MOL 

was scheduled for 15 December 1969, but the program was canceled by Defense 

Secretary Melvin R. Laird in 1969. (NASA HQ image no. 2B24070-Fig3) 

49. Stares, Militarization $Space, p. 98; Xchelson, Secret Eyer, p. 85. Richelson indicates that the MOL 

telescope camera system would have had a resolution of approximately 9 inches and was designated as 

the KH-10.A depiction of construction of a 100-foot-diameter SIGINT antenna as a proposed MOL 

experiment is found in J. S. Butz, Jr., “MOL The Technical Promise and Prospects,” Air Force/Space 

Digest (October 1965): 44-45. 
218 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

approved the development of MOL. The MOL design at this time called for a 

configuration approximately 54 feet long and 10 feet in diameter consisting of 

a Gemini B capsule attached to the 41-foot-long laboratory. The station was to 

be launched into polar orbit from Vandenberg AFB atop a Titan 111-C boo~ter.~’ 

The entire program was originally scheduled to include five manned flights of 

MOL beginning in 1968 at a cost of $1.5 billion.51 The overall objectives of the 

program as approved in August 1965 were to 

a) learn more about what man is able to do in space and how that 

ability can be used for military purposes, 

b) develop technology and equipment which will help advance 

manned and unmanned space flight, and 

c) experiment with this technology and eq~iprnent.~~ 

The Air Force directed the MOL program, and the Navy was a minor 

partner in the effort.53 The initial Air Force support for this program was 

unmistakable. In congressional testimony in early 1965, Deputy Chief of Staff 

for R&D Lieutenant General James Ferguson indicated that “MOL would 

provide the space testing and evaluation facility which we have long sought. 

We consider it to be the keystone of our future space program.”54 Earlier, 

Ferguson had simply identified the MOL as the Air Force’s “most important 

space program.”55 More generally, Ferguson highlighted the need for MOL 

due to the Air Force belief “that man is the key to the future in space, and 

50. Richelson, Secret Eyes, p. 85; Execuhve Office of the President, National Aeronautics and Space 

Council, Report to Congress on Aeronautics and Space Activities, 2965 (Washington: GPO, 31 January 1966), 

pp. 49-50. MOL astronauts would transfer into the shirtsleeve environment of the laboratory via a 

hatch through the heatshield of the Germni B capsule. MOL was designed for 30-day rmssions.At the 

completion of the mission, the astronauts would transfer back into the capsule and reenter; the station 

itself would eventually also reenter and burn up. The Titan 111-C had originally been developed to 

launch the canceled X-20. 

51. Executive Ofice of the President, Aeronautics and Space Activities, 2965, p. 50. 

52. Ibid., p. 49. These three objectives in Aeronautics and Space Activifies, 2965 were considerably less 

detaded and ambitious than the six MOL objectives that Secretary McNamara and DDR&E Harold 

Brown had outlined m congressional testimony in early 1965. See, for example, the statement of Brown m 

U.S. Congress, Senate Committee on Armed Services and Subcommittee on Department of Defense of 

the Committee on Appropriations, Military Procurement Authorirationr, FiscalYear 2966, Hearings before the 

Committee on Armed Services and the Subcommittee on Department of Defense of the Committee on 

Appropriations, 89th Cong., 1st sess., 1965, pp. 413-414. 

53. Richelson, Secret Eyes, pp. 91-92.The original MOL schedule called for Navy MOL astronauts to 

conduct extensive ocean surveillance and submarme tracking experiments during the fourth mssion. 

54. U.S. Congress, House Committee on Armed Services, Hearings on Military Posture, Fiscal Year 2966, 

Hearings before the Committee on Armed Services, 89th Cong., 1st sess., 1965, p. 1229. 

55. Ibid., p. 1219. 
NASA AND THE DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE.. . 219 

that certain military tasks and systems will become feasible only through the 

discriminatory intelligence of man.”56 

Soon, however, MOL ran into substantial technical and very difficult political problems. An unmanned Gemini B capsule was successfully tested and 

recovered from space on 3 November 1966, but design changes and technical difficulties with the laboratory portion of MOL caused delays and weight increases 

in this portion of the hardware. Due to the greater weight of the laboratory, the 

booster configuration for MOL was redesigned for more thrust and designated 

as the Titan III-M.57 More significantly, the political support for MOL began to 

erode from all quarters. The Johnson administration was attempting to deal with 

the effect of the buildup of the war in Vietnam on its Great Society programs and 

had little time or inclination to focus on MOL. The program also suffered from 

a lack of strong support within Congress, where space attention was focused on 

the growing Apollo costs and the upcoming Moon landing. Even within the 

Air Force, MOL began to face serious questioning as the war in Vietnam heated 

up and resources were required for this conflict and for more traditional development programs such as the C-5A transport aircraft. With declining political 

support, funding for MOL began to be cut well below the levels required to 

keep the program on its original schedule. By early 1969, the first manned MOL 

mission had been slipped to 1972, while the total projected cost of the program 

had risen from $1.5 billion to $3 billion.58 Despite these difficulties, in February 

1969 incoming Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird endorsed a comprehensive 

review of the program that “concluded that the continuance of the program 

is fully justified by the benefits to our defense posture anticipated from MOL; 

and that all MOL objectives established by the President in 1965 can now be 

met with a six- rather than a seven-launch program.7759 Additionally, the Nixon 

administration initially requested $525 million for MOL in FY 1970.60 

The Nixon administration quickly and completely reversed its initial support for MOL. President Nixon was eager to limit the budget, and MOL soon 

emerged as “an ideal target for OMB.”61 The actual decision to terminate MOL 

was apparently made at a White House meeting of OMB representative Robert 

Mayo, National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, and President Nixon.6’ As 

56. Ibid., p. 1228. 

57. Richelson, Secret Eyes, p. 90. 

58. Ibld., pp. 101-102. 

59. Quoted from prepared statement of Air Force Chief of StaE General John McConnell in US. 

Congress, Senate Committee on Armed Services, Authorization for Military Procurement, Research and 

Development, Fiscal Year 1970, Hearings before the Committee on Armed Services, 91st Cong., 1st sess., 

1969, p. 956.This cutback meant that MOL would now include only four manned missions rather than 

the five originally planned. 

60. Ibid., p. 957. 

61. Quoted from an unnamed “senior Air Force o&cer”in Stares, Militarization ofSpace, p. 159. 

62. Richelson, Secret Eyes, p. 102. 
220 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

they made clear in subsequent congressional testimony, Secretary Laird and the 

JCS were not consulted prior to this decision.63 The public announcement of the 

cancellation of the MOL program came on 10 June 1969. A total of $1.4 billion 

was spent on the MOL program, making it one of the most expensive military 

programs ever prematurely terminated as of that date.64 

The cancellation of MOL must also be viewed within a broader context 

than just the budgetary concerns of the Nixon administration. Shortly after 

entering office, Nixon had established a Space Task Group (STG) comprised 

of Vice President Spiro Agnew, Acting NASA Administrator Thomas Paine, 

Secretary Laird, and science adviser Lee D~Bridge.~~ Nixon tasked the STG to 

complete a comprehensive review of the future plans of the U.S. space program. 

The STG national-level review was supported by reports from working groups at 

the departmental 1evel.The DOD working groups in support of the STG studied 

future ditary space plans and budgets and again raised the issue of the military 

utility of MOL in an era of constrained budgets. More specifically, a report for the 

STG prepared by Walter Morrow of MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory “declared that no 

significant increase in space spending was necessary to meet DOD requirements 

and that an annual military space investment of about $2 billion would suffice 

through the 1970~”~~ In competition for scarce space program funds, MOL did 

not necessarily do well even in DOD-sponsored analyses. 

The most significant factor in the demise of the program, however, was the 

growing beliefthat unmanned spy satellites could perform the primary mission of 

MOL as well as or better than MOL and at a lower cost. According to Richelson, 

the NRO and CIA had been leery of the idea of a manned reconnaissance system 

from the outset. They reasoned that a manned system might present more of a 

provocation to the Soviets, that the contributions of manned operators in space 

would not be all that significant when balanced against the costs and requirements 

of life-support systems, and that any accident involving MOL astronauts might 

set back the whole space-based intelligence-gathering process ~nacceptably.~~ 

Moreover, beginning in 1965, NRO had begun development of the United 

63. Ibid. 

64. Ibid. 

65. AK Force Secretary Robert Seamans represented Secretary hrd at STG meetings. Seamans had 

previously been NASA’s Associate Ahrustrator. 

66. Jacob Neufeld, “The AK Force in Space. 1969-1970,” Secret History, Office of hr Force History, 

July 1972, p. 4, mcrofiche document 00338 in Military Uses .fSpace. The overall mil~tary input to the STG, 

“DOD Programs, Options, Recommendations,” was largely shaped by the AK Force and ouhed four 

prmary dtary space objechves: “(1) iformahon gathering; (2) deterrence; (3) hmthng enemy damage 

to the nation; and (4) support ofAUled forces.”Ths report also grouped possible hture space efforts mto 

three categories: 1) improvements on emtmg and planned mnstream space systems, primardy for force 

enhancement; 2) systems responsive to “sigmficant technological or engmeering advances, changes in 

national policy, or the emergence of new threats” such as a deep space command post; and 3) “undefined” 

systems such as Earth illurmnation systems or weather-mod&cation systems (ibid., pp. 2-4). 

67. kchelson, Secret Eyex, p. 103. 
NASA AND THE DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE.. . 221 

States’ fourth-generation photoreconnaissance satellite known as the KH-9 or 

“Big Bird”-a system originally planned to serve as a backup to MOL.68 In 

the late 1960s, with MOL already in jeopardy, the NRO now argued that the 

projected capabilities of the KH-9 system would make the MOL mnecessary. 

It is not possible in open sources to trace the exact impact of this argument 

on the decision to cancel MOL, but it may have been the clincher, given the 

development paths of both programs and subsequent events. The first KH-9 was 

launched from Vandenberg AFB atop a Titan 111-D on 15 June 1971.69 

The saga of the demise of the MOL program served as another painful lesson 

to the Air Force and the military that their preferred military space doctrines and 

programs would not come to fiuition. The loss of MOL hit the Air Force very 

hard because 1) it was the Air Force’s only attempt to establish a major manned 

dtary space program during this period, 2) the Air Force had planned to use 

MOL as the basis to build a larger manned military space presence, and 3) the 

program had been specifically tailored primarily to support the space-as-sanctuary 

school but had still been rejected.Mter the Air Force’s plan to use men in space to 

support the nation’s highest priority military space mission was not approved, it was 

very unlikely that any other dtary man-in-space program would be approved. 

For a number of years after the cancellation of the MOL, the An Force largely 

lost interest in high-ground and space-control doctrines and basically considered 

the development of a sipficant manned military space presence a lost cause. 

Stares summarizes the organizational impact of the loss of the X-20 and the MOL 

programs upon the Ar Force during this period very well: 

With the cancellation of the Dynasoar and MOL, many believed 

in the Air Force that they had made their “pitch” and failed. This 

in turn reduced the incentives to try again and reinforced the bias 

towards the traditional mission of the Air Force, namely flying. As 

a result, the Air Force’s space activities remained a poor relation to 

tactical and strategic airpower in its organizational hierarchy and 

inevitably in its hnding priorities. This undoubtedly influenced 

the Air Force’s negative attitude towards the various ASAT modernization proposals put forward by Air Defense Command and 

others in the early 1970s. The provision of satellite survivability 

measures also suffered because the Air Force was reluctant to propose initiatives that would require the use of its own budget to 

defend the space assets of other services and agencies?’ 

68. Ibid., p. 105; Stares, Militarization offpace, p. 160; William E. Burrows, Deep Black: Space 

69.“Launch Listing,”in US. Military Uses ofspace, p. 100.TheTitan 111-D launch vehcle for the KE-9 

70. Stares, Militarization ofspace, p. 242. 

Espionage and National Security (New York: Berkley Books, 1986), pp. 228-229. 

was very similar to theTitan 111-M designed to launch the MOL. 
222 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

DOD AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE SPACE SHUTTLE 

Interactions between NASA, the NRO, and the Air Force were among the 

most important inputs in structuring the development and operation of the Space 

Transportation System (STS) or Shuttle program. STS interactions deserve special 

attention because they were the most focused, longest running, and most intense 

interplay among these organizations and became the single most important factor 

in shaping their interrelationships. NASA’s decision to pursue a large shuttle vehicle 

program to serve as the national launch vehicle was the Agency’s primary postApollo space program goal. This decision necessitated that the Shuttle design be 

able to accommodate the most important potential users and satisfy the military 

in particular. Accordingly, DOD was instrumental in setting Shuttle payload 

and performance criteria. Even more importantly, when the STS ran into great 

political and budgetary problems during the Carter administration, DOD stepped 

in to help save the program-largely due to the Shuttle’s projected capability 

to launch huge spy satellites. Thus, the rationale behind the STS development 

became increasingly militarized and related to spy satellites. Additionally, STS 

operations up to the Chullenger disaster allowed the military to again entertain 

plans to develop a manned military presence in space. 

The question of what the U.S. should focus on in space following its 

triumph in the Moon race was the overriding issue for U.S. space policy in the 

late 1960s and early 1970s. President Nixon created the Space Task Group (STG) 

in February 1969 to examine this issue. On 15 September, the STG presented 

Nixon with three options for post-Apollo U.S. civil space plans. Option one 

called for a manned mission to Mars by 1985 supported by a 50-man space 

station in orbit around Earth, a smaller space station in orbit around the Moon, 

a lunar base, a space shuttle to service the Earth space station, and a space tug to 

service the lunar stations. Option two consisted of all of the above except for the 

lunar projects and delayed the Mars landing until 1986. Option three included 

only the space station and the space shuttle, deferring the decision on a Mars 

mission but keeping it as a goal to be realized before the end of the century?l The 

report estimated that option one would cost approximately $10 billion annually, 

option two would run about $8 billion per year, and option three would be $5 

billion annually?’ Considering that NASA’s budget had peaked at the height of 

the Moon race in 1965 at a little more than $5 billion and that political support 

for space spectaculars was rapidly eroding, the STG recommendations seemed 

fiscally irresponsible and politically nai~e.7~ 

71. Colonel Cass Schchtle,USAe The National Space Program From the Flfties to the Eighties (Washington: 

72. McDougall, Heavens and Earth, p. 421. 

73. Schchtle, National Space Program, p. 69. 

National Defense University Press, 1983), pp. 72-73; McDougall, Heavens and Earth, p. 421. 
NASA AND THE DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE.. . 223 

Meanwhile, the Air Force and NASA had begun coordinating with one 

another concerning the need for, design criteria, and performance capabilities 

of a shuttle vehicle. In March 1969, STG Chairman Agnew had directed that a 

joint DOD-NASA study on a shuttle system be completed to support the overall 

STG eff0rt.7~ During the spring of 1969, Air Force Chief of Staff General John 

McConnell was very impressed with the military potential of a shuttle vehicle 

and even “proposed the Air Force assume responsibility for STS de~elopment.”~~ 

Air Force Secretary Robert Seamans was also impressed with the potential of a 

shuttle but “he vetoed the proposal that the Air Force take charge of STS development, preferring to await additional study In June, DOD and NASA 

submitted to the STG their coordinated report that strongly backed development of a ~huttle.7~ Bycontrast, the Morrow report, which was also prepared for 

the STG, questioned the technical feasibility of a shuttle and specifically refuted 

the projected STS launch rates and cost estimates. The Morrow report recommended “the DOD postpone its participation in the system’s development pending technical and economic analysis.”78 

DOD and the Air Force acknowledged some of the potential STS difficulties raised by the Morrow report but remained supportive ofshuttle development. 

The military specifications for the shuttle at this time included a 50,000-pound 

payload capability for launches into a 100-nautical-de (NM) due-east orbit, a 

payload compartment measuring 15 by 60 feet, and a cross-range maneuvering 

capabdity of 1,500 NM.79 Some NASA shuttle designs did not meet all of these 

criteria, but NASA quickly recognized the political necessity for strong Air Force 

support in attempting to sell the shuttle within the administration and agreed specifically to include the Air Force in future STS design and policy decision-making. 

74. Neufeld,“Air Force in Space. 1969-1970,”~. 5,microfiche document 00338 in US. Military Uses 

75. Ibid., p. 6. 

76. Ibid. 

77. Ibid., pp. 6-7. Specifically, “the report concluded that STS development (1) would require no 

si&icant ‘breakthrough‘ in technology, (2) could achieve ‘a major reduction in the recurring costs of 

space operations,’ and (3) could meet the requlrements of both agencies without ‘major technical penal% 

development risk, hitahon on mission flexibihty, or cost increase.”’ Neufeld’s interior quotations are 

fbm the report itself.The report recommended a $52-m&on allocation in FY 1970 for design studies. 

Moreover, the report also found that the STS could be operational by 1976 for $4-6 billion; projected a 

launch rate of 30 to 70 flights per year; and estimated that with 100 uses, the STS would lower launch costs 

per pound mto low-Earth orbit to $50-100 and into geostationary transfer orbit to $500. 

of Space. 

78. Ibid., p. 7.The Morrow report is also discussed in relation to the MOL in the MOL section above. 

79. Ibid., p. 8.The Air Force’s weight and volume requirements for the STS seemed to be driven by 

projected spysat designs, whereas the cross-range maneuverability requirement was apparently a general 

military requlrement relating to safety, survivability, and flexibility considerahom. Some critics within 

NASA and other analysts have charged that these requirements (especially the cross-range criteria) were 

arbitrarily set too high, caused very significant design changes, and later contributed to STS program 

delays. See, for example, the positions raised in John M. Logsdon, “The Decision to Develop the Space 

Shuttle,” Space Poolicy 2 (May 1986): 103-119. 
224 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

To formalize this arrangement, on 17 February 1970 the Air Force signed an agreement with NASA that established the joint USAF/NASA STS Committee.80 

On the basis of the STG report and the recommendations from other space 

studies during this period, President Nixon moved to formalize U.S. post-Apollo 

space policy goals in March 1970.81 Nixon only endorsed the development of a 

shuttle and left a space station or a Mars mission contingent upon the successful 

completion of a shuttle program. Of course, this was far less than NASA had 

hoped for, and the agency that had conquered the Moon was initially less than 

enthused about the prospect of building a nonglamorous space truck as its 

primary post-Apollo mission." Soon, however, NASA came to realize that a 

space shuttle was the only major program that stood a chance of being approved 

at this time and the only possible way to preserve at least a part of NASA's 

integrity in the face of radical cuts in civil space programs and budgets.83 

Faced with this situation, NASA continued its attempts to design a space 

shuttle during 1970 and 1971. In late 1970 and early 1971, acting Administrator 

George M. Low continued Paine's emphasis on the shuttle as a national vehicle by 

moving NASA &om concept towards design of a larger and more capable shuttle. 

Thus, by 1971, NASA was hard at work on what has been described as a"Cadillac" 

shuttle system-very large,very capable,and completely reusable, but very expensive 

to develop.84 These very capable designs proved to be too expensive, especially 

after the Office of Management and Budget (Om) reiterated that NASA could 

expect no more than $6.5 billion to develop the ~huttle.'~ Meanwhile, the An80. Neufeld,"Air Force in Space. 1969-1970,"~. 9. Creation of this comttee &d not solve all of the 

hr ForceNASA differences over STS design issues. Powerfd elements wthn NASA, such as Associate 

Admnistrator for Manned Spaceflight Dr. George E. Mueller, continued to press for a smaller STS 

design that would not meet all of the hr Force's criteria. 

81.Two of the most mportant other stu&es on US. post-Apollo space goals that were also completed 

durmg ths period but not mentioned above were 1) the overall NASA input into the STG, known 

as the Mueller report after its charman, George Mueller, and 2) the PSAC report, headed by Leurls 

Branscomb. The Mueller report stressed a buddmg-block approach for the next major civd space programs 

and emphasized the general u&ty of a space shuttle for all other projects.The Branscomb report urged 

that the US. place more emphasis on unmanned versus manned exploration and recommended robohc 

exploration of Mars. On these two reports and their impact, see Hans Mark, The Space Sfation:A Pevsonal 

Journey (Durham, NC: Duke Umversity Press, 1987), pp. 31-34. 

82. NASA AhnistratorThomas Paine resigned m September 1970 over &IS issue and over hs general 

percephons ofa lack ofsupport for NASA urlthm the Nyion ad-strahon.See Joseph J.Trento, Prescription 

for Disaster (NewYork Crown Pubhshers, 1987), pp. 84-99. 

83. NASA's budget (m constant dollars) fell to only 36 percent of its 1965 peak by the time of its nadlr 

m 1975.The speed of these reduchons meant that NASA's budget often was reduced by more than 36500 

don, or more than 10 percent, in constant dollars each year. Moreover, the number ofjobs in the cid 

space sector dropped &om a peak of 420,000 m 1966 to only 190,000 by 1970 and conanued down &om 

that pomt. See Schchtle, National Space Program, p. 73; "NASA Budget History," Aviation Week G. Space 

Technology (16 March 1992): 123. 

84.Alex Roland,"Priorihes ~fl Space for the USA," Space Policy 3 (May 1987): 106. Roland is a former 

NASA historian. 

85. Logsdon,"Decision to Develop the Space Shuttle," p. 107. 
NASA AND THE DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE.. 225 

Force remained adamant on its payload and performance criteria and apparently 

even raised its maximum payload weight requirement to 65,000 pounds.86 During 

the remainder of 1971, NASA came up with a revised shuttle design known as the 

Thrust-Assisted Orbiter Shuttle (TAOS) that seemed to meet these demanding 

development cost ceilings and performance criteria better.87 Mer very intense 

scrutiny fiom the OMB during the fd of 1971, the TAOS design went forward 

to President Nixon for final approval.88 Nixon privately decided to approve the 

fU-scale TAOS at the Western White House at San Clemente over the 1971-72 

New Year’s weekend.89 James Fletcher, the new NASA Administrator, went to the 

Western White House to brief the President and to be present when the decision 

to approve the STS was publicly announced on 5 January. 

Other than setting the payload and performance design criteria discussed 

above, the Air Force was not very involved, financially or otherwise, in the STS 

program during most of its development period. In 1971, the Air Force agreed 

that it would not compete against the STS and would forgo the development of 

any new expendable launch vehicles (ELVs)?’ In April 1972, the Kennedy Space 

Center (KSC) and Vandenberg AFB were selected as Shuttle launch and landing 

sites, and the Air Force agreed to reconfigure the planned MOL launch complex 

at Vandenberg, known as space launch complex (SLC)-6, for STS launches into 

polar orbit?’ Interestingly, former NASA Administrator Fletcher claimed in a 

later interview that the Air Force had verbally committed to him during STS 

development that they would buy the planned fifth and sixth orbitersY2 

86. Ibid., pp. 108-110. Here, Logsdon discusses the Air Force’s payload and performance criteria. He 

inmcates that the most important hr Force weight requirement was for the capability to launch 40,000 

pounds into polar orbit and that the 15-foot dimension of the cargo bay was a NASA requirement for 

possible future station construction rather than an Air Force criterion. 

87. The TAOS design moved away &om the original designs, whch called for a vertically stacked 

booster-orbiter configuration staging 111 sequence, as ~fl all previous spacecraft designs, to a horizontally 

stacked booster-orbiter design where the booster and orbiter engmes could be used at the same time. 

Ths design also moved the large main fuel tank outside the booster and made this section expendable 

rather than reusable. The TAOS design lowered the overall size and weight of the vehicle by allomng 

the Space Shuttle Main Engines (SSMEs) to contribute to takeoff thrust, but it also greatly increased the 

technological challenges for designing the SSMEs and introduced the problem of asymmetrical thrust on 

takeoKThis and other design decisions at this time lowered the development costs for the STS but would 

also contribute significantly to the much higher than desired STS operations costs. 

88. Logsdon describes the NASA-OMB exchanges in detail in “Decision to Develop the Space Shuttle,” 

89. Ibid.,p. 118. 

90. Ibid., p. 110. 

91. Major General R. C. Henry and Major Aubrey B. Sloan,“The Space Shuttle andvandenberg Air 

Force Base,” Air University Review 27 (September-October 1976): 19-26.The Aeronautics andhtmnauhcs 

Coordinating Board formally approved SLC-6 reconfiguration for STS launches in January 1975. 

92.Trent0, Presniptionfor Disaster, p. 128. I was unable to find any hard evidence of such a commitment. 

In the wake of the Challmger disaster, many varied theories were advanced to determine culpabfity for the 

woes of the STS program. 

pp. 112-1 16. 
226 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

Throughout the remainder of the 1970s, the STS faced difficult technical 

and political challenges. Three major technical challenges were the most difficult: 

developing the computer software and interfaces for the orbiter’s computercontrolled flight system, designing and especially attaching the ceramic tiles for 

the orbiter’s heat-protection system, and designing and testing the Space Shuttle 

Main Engines (SSMEs). Politically, the STS faced even more difficult challenges 

at the outset of the Carter administration. Several powerful individuals and 

organizations such as Vice President Walter Mondale, the OMB, and the Office 

of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) favored drastically cutting back the 

STS if not canceling the program o~tright.9~ In the summer of 1977, as the 

test vehicle Enterprise was about to begin STS approach and landing tests at 

Edwards AFB, President Carter asked newly appointed NASA Administrator 

Robert Frosch to evaluate comprehensively whether to continue with the STS 

pr0gram.9~ Thus, the stage was set for the most difficult challenge the STS would 

face during its development process. 

At this point, DOD stepped in strongly to defend the STS as a program 

critical to national security and to play an important role in preserving this 

program. In July 1977, Dr. Hans Mark, who had been Director of NASA’s Ames 

Research Center, became Under Secretary of the Air Force (and NRO Director). 

As an avid manned spaceflight enthusiast who believed the STS was an essential 

step towards a future manned space station and future exploration, Mark was 

instrumental in lining up DOD support for the STS in its time of peril. During 

November and December of 1977, OMB called a series of meetings on the 

future of the STS.9’ The OMB had urged that the STS program be converted 

into a three-orbiter test project and that only the KSC launch site be 

According to Mark, Secretary of Defense Harold Brown was persuasive in 

making the DOD’s need for the STS clear at these meetings: 

prown] made the case that at least two launch sites (one on the 

east coast and the other on the west coast) would be required 

and that at least four Orbiters would be necessary to meet the 

requirements of national security. This last argument was based on 

the fact that the first two Orbiters to be built (OV-102, Columbia, 

93. Mondale had helped to make a name for himself in the Senate both with his attacks on the 

“bloated” NASA budgets of the late 1960s and as a leader of congressional opposition to building 

the STS. In 1973, President Nixon had abolished the NASC and moved the science adviser’s office 

out of the Executive Office of the President FOP). In 1976, President Gerald Ford created OSTP 

within EO€! Carter’s OSTP Director, Dr. Frank Press, saw government hnding for all scientific efforts 

as a zero-sum game and was eager to address the deficiencies he perceived in basic scientific research 

funding by reducing quasi-scientific efforts such as manned spaceflight. 

94.Trent0, Presuiptionfor Disaster, p. 149. 

95. Mark, Space Station, pp. 71-73. 

96. Ibid., p. 72. 
NASA AND THE DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE.. . 227 

and OV-099, Chullenger) would be somewhat heavier than the 

following vehicles and would therefore not be capable of carrying 

the very heaviest national security related payloads. It was therefore 

necessary to have at least two Orbiters capable of carrying the very 

heaviest payloads in order to have a backup in case one of these 

vehicles was 1ost.This argument carried the day and the decision 

was reached to build four Orbiters (OV-103, Discovery, and OV104, Atluntis, in addtion to the first two) and to continue with 

construction of the west coast launch site. (The west coast launch 

site was deemed necessary in order to conduct polar orbiting 

f%ghts required for national security related mission^.)^' 

Although Mark does not highlight another aspect of saving the STS, sometime during this period, perhaps at these OMB meetings, the decision was 

also taken to make the STS virtually the only launch vehicle for both NASA 

and DOD. 

The outcome of these meetings marked a definite shift in the rationale for 

the STS program that again illustrates the overriding impact of spysats on all 

other types ofspace policy. NASA was publicly selling the STS program as a way 

to meet U.S. civil space policy goals and on cost-effectiveness grounds, but the 

rationale that saved it during the Carter administration was its ability to launch 

huge spy satellites. Moreover, with the pending debate over the ratification of 

the SALT I1 Treaty, spy satellites as national technical means of verification 

took on added significance. On 1 October 1978, President Carter marked the 

first official break with the blackout policy on spysats promulgated in 1962. 

In a speech at the KSC, Carter noted that “photoreconnaissance satellites have 

become an important stabilizing factor in world affairs in the monitoring of arms 

control agreements. They make an immediate contribution to the security of all 

nations. We shall continue to develop them.”98 Meanwhile, however, the NRO 

was ambivalent about the prospects of using the STS as its sole launch vehicle: on 

97. Ibid. 

98. Cited in Stares, Militarization of Space, p. 186. Accordmg to kchelson, Secret Eyes, pp. 140-143, 

various agencies wthm the adrmnistrahon debated during early September how far to go in declasslfying 

spysats.The primary motivahon behind the desire to loosen the security restrichons on spysats was pubhcly 

to promde ahstrahon officials w~th better evldence of US. abdity to ver6 SALT II adequately. 

Those argumg for greater declassificahon mcluded Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, Arms Control and 

Dlsarmament Agency Dlrector Paul Warnke, Director of Central Intelhgence Stansfield Turner, Natlonal 

Security Agency Dlrector Bobby Inman, and NRO Dlrector Mark. Secretary Brown, backed by the JCS 

and the Defense Intelhgence Agency, strongly opposed wdespread declassificahon. The most powerfd 

argument rased by DOD (which apparently won the day) was that the release of one spysat photo would 

lead to a deluge of Freedom of Informahon Act (FOIA) requests and thereby he up the manpower of the 

intelhgence agencies in nonproduchve achnties. On 13 September, the Pohcy Renew Co-ttee (Space) 

voted for declassification, but only of the fact that the Umted States conducted photoreconnassance fiom 

space-a “truly mmmalist decision,” in kchelson’s opmion. 
228 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

the one hand, it was already planning the large spysats that would take advantage 

of STS capabilities; but on the other hand, it did not want to lose control over 

its launch vehicles, feared the possible disruption of spysat launchings due to 

accidents with astronauts, and also chafed at the prospect of the increased media 

attention that NASA involvement would bring. 

General Air Force attitudes towards STS were also ambivalent during 

this period. While STS was strongly supported by elements within the Space 

and Missiles Systems Organization and by Mark (who became Secretary of the 

Air Force in July 1979), other elements such as the Secretary of the Air Force 

Special Projects Office were less enthusiastic. Mark attempted to push STS and a 

general space emphasis on the Air F0rce.9~ These efforts, along with the military 

potential of the STS, certainly were important in helping to revive Air Force 

interest in space and in possible military man-in-space applications. At the same 

time, however, the Air Force was very much a junior partner on STS in terms 

of funding and effort. Moreover, the Air Force dragged its feet on refurbishing 

SLC-6 at Vandenberg for STS operations and in developing the Inertial Upper 

Stage (IUS) to be used for boosting payloads into higher energy orbits than 

possible with the STS.’” In sum, then, although the STS program did reignite 

some Air Force interest in more ambitious space missions, the level of Air Force 

support for this program by the end of its development did not approach the 

level of enthusiasm the Air Force had displayed for the X-20 or MOL, and this 

ambivalent support undoubtedly reflected the fact that the Air Force did not 

control STS. 

The Military, Space Transportation Policy, and STS Operations 

The 1980s witnessed both the long-awaited arrival of STS operations and 

the wrenching reordering of U.S. space transportation policy following the 

Challenger disaster. DOD interactions with the STS program continued to be 

a very important factor in shaping this program, while DOD’s stance on STS 

provides important insights into the military’s space priorities and actual level 

of commitment to various space programs. Despite the great military potential 

of the STS and the considerable support for the STS within elements of the Air 

99. Mark listed“the development of a doctrine and an organizahon that WIU permt greatly increased 

hr Force actlvities in space in order to take advantage of new technology to enhance commurucations, 

reconnalssance, and other vltal Air Force funchons” as one of the USAF’s top prlorlties. Hans M. Mark, 

“USAF‘s Three Top Priorihes,” Air Force Magazine (September 1979), reprinted as appendm 3 in Mark, 

Space Station, pp. 235-236. 

100. It is &cult to apportlon blame for delays on the STS program; however, STS was origmally 

scheduled to be launched from SLC-6 in December 1982 (after “more than forty launches vd have 

taken place from KSC”!), and SLC-6 would barely have been ready for its rescheduled first launch in 

March 1986 had the Challenger disaster not deded that plan. In prachce, there were only 5 STS fights by 

December 1982 and a total of only 24 fights prior to the Challenger disaster. See Henry and Sloan,“Shuttle 

andvandenberg,” p. 25; Edgar Ulsamer,“Shck 6,” Air Force Magazine (November 1985): 4748. 
NASA AND THE DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE. . . 229 

Force and elsewhere in DOD, several significant points of friction remained 

between the Air Force, NRO, and NASA concerning STS operations and 

plans. Even prior to the Challenger disaster, the NRO had managed to gain 

formal approval to build a backup launcher, the Complementary ELV (CELV), 

for its most important payloads. Following the Challenger disaster, U.S. national 

space transportation policies were completely reordered under the Space Launch 

Recovery Plan, and the Air Force planned to move almost all DOD payloads 

onto ELVs. NASA-DOD interactions over STS during the 1980s led to the 

reversal of several major space transportation policies, abandonment of the 

original STS program goals, and the demise of yet another potential vehicle for 

significant military spaceflight. 

DOD was instrumental in saving STS from cancellation at the outset of the 

Carter administration and was again a key player in defending STS late in the 

Carter administration when the program faced significant political opposition 

due to successive schedule slips and funding shortfalls requiring supplemental 

appropriations.lO’ DOD support for the STS was critical in maintaining political 

support for STS within the administration and culminated in a 14 November 

1979 White House meeting between the President and all key actors on this 

issue, where Carter firmly committed his administration to fully funding and 

rapidly completing STS.lo2 DOD support for the national security mission of the 

STS was also a key factor in pushing the supplemental appropriations through 

Congress following hearings in March 1980.’03 

DOD exacted a price from NASA for its indispensable support: on 25 

February 1980, NASA and DOD signed an extensive MOU on management 

and operation of the STS which was very favorable to DOD.lo4 Specifically, 

the MOU indicated that “DOD will have priority in mission preparation and 

operations consistent with established national space policy.”’o5 Further, the 

101. In 1979, NASA required supplemental appropriations totaling over $1 bdlion (1972 dollars) to 

102. Mark, Space Station, pp. 101-103;Trento, Prescriptionfor Disatter, p. 169. 

103. Representative Edward Boland @-Massachusetts) was mstrumental in gammg approval for these 

supplemental appropriatlons as chman of the NASA appropriatlons subcommittee. His support for 

STS stemmed &om his posinon as Chrman of the House Permanent Select Comttee on Intelhgence, 

where he learned about the STS-spysat hnk in detad. See Mark, Space Station, p. 105;Trento, Presmption for 

Disaster, pp. 156-157. 

104. “NASA/DOD Memorandum of Undeetandmg on Management and Operation of the Space 

Transportation System,” 25 February 1980, microfiche document 00561 in US. Military Uses of Space. 

Thls MOU replaced the 14 January 1977 NASA-DOD MOU on STS and provlded the basis for several 

NASA-DOD subagreements. 

105. Ibid., p. 3. The “estabhhed nahond space policy” referenced is presumably Presidentlal Direchve 

(PD)-37 signed by President Carter on 11 May 1978 (unclasslfied version avdable at http://www.au.af: 

mil/a~/awc/awcgate/nsc-37.htm).Thls DOD mssion pnority on the STS was often referred to as the right 

of DOD to “bump” other payloads 6om the STS madest in favor of top-priority natlond security 

continued on the next page 

keep the STS program on track. See Mark, Space Station, p. 93. 
230 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

MOU established two categories of DOD STS missions: 1) national security 

missions conducted by NASA and 2) “Designated National Security Missions” 

controlled by the Air Force.’06 Overall, this MOU went a long way towards 

giving the Air Force the type of operational control over a manned space vehicle 

it had sought since the late 1950s-an arrangement which was quite remarkable, 

considering that the Air Force had not paid for the development of the STS. 

The initial STS spaceflight took place on 12 April 1981 when Columbia was 

launched from KSC. This marked a bittersweet milestone because it was the 

world’s first reusable spacecraft and signified the return of manned American 

spaceflight. But the STS was also two years behind schedule and cost $2 billion 

more to develop than originally projected. Moreover, it rapidly became apparent that due to very intensive and difficult refurbishing requirements following 

each flight, STS could not come close to meeting its planned flight s~hedule.’~’ 

However, the military potential of the STS was also apparent from the outset. 

The second STS mission in November 1981 conducted radar-imaging experiments from orbit that pinpointed an ancient city buried beneath the sands of the 

Sahara and thereby demonstrated the significant military potential of this type 

of spaceborne sensor.lo8 The first classified military payload was carried into 

continued from the previous page 

payloads. Other sigruficant provlsions of ths MOU indcated that 1) the hr Force was DODS “sole point 

of contact wlth the NASA for all commmnents affechng the STS and its use in matters regardmg nahond 

security space operahons and in mnternahonal defense achvihes covered by Government to Government 

agreements”; 2) the hr Force would “develop, acqulre, and operate a dedcated Shuttle msion plannmg, 

operauons, and control fachty for national security mssions”; and 3) “an STS mssion assignment schedule 

and plan” would be developed to fachtate the “expendable booster transiQon and phaseout plans” of 

NASA and the Arr Force. 

106. Ibid., pp. 3-4,6-9. Specifically, for category one DOD STS fights, NASA would exercise fight 

control from JSC, but “NASA d be responsive to DOD Mission Directors,” who would retain “overall 

responsibhty for achevmg mssion objechves.” For these mssions, Arr Force personnel “d be integrated 

into NASA he hnchons for mmng” in order to “allow the USAF to develop the capabhty to plan, 

control, and operate nahond security mssions.” For category two DOD STS fights, an hr Force Fhght 

Director “d be responsible for overall mssion accomphshment and operahonal control, includmg fight 

vehcle and crew safety, through the Arr Force cham of command.”Although not specified in ths MOU, the 

ImphCahOn is that category two DOD STS mssions would be controlled &om the Shuttle operahons and 

Planrung Complex (SOPC) at the Consohdated Space Operations Center at Falcon (now Schriever) AFB. 

107. NASA’s STS mssion models adopted in the early 1980s were far more rea!sac than the 60 fights 

per year originally projected for the Shuttle m the early 1970, but they shll called for 24 fights per year 

fbm the complete four-orbiter STS fleet. In prachce, orbiter turnaround hme was approxlmately 60 days 

rather than the 7 days origmally projected, and the turnaround operahon required 6,000 people, nearly 

four hmes the expected number. There were only 24 total fights in the nearly five years of STS operahons 

prior to the Challenger chaster. See E. C. “Pete” Aldridge, Jr., “Assured Access: ‘The Bureaucrahc Space 

War,”’Dr. Robert H. Goddard Historical Essay, n.d., p. 5. Offprmt provlded to author by the Office of the 

Secretary of the Au Force. 

108.Trent0, Pracriphonfor Disaster, pp. 20G201; kchelson, Secret Eyes, p. 219.These first radar-imaging 

expernnents were conducted wlth Shuttle Imagmg Radar (SIR)-A. SIR-B experiments were conducted 

wlth updated hardware on mssion 41-G ~fl October 1984. Accorchg to kchelson, the SIR-A radar 

could apparently mge objects 16 feet beneath dry sand. 
NASA AND THE DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE.. . 23 1 

orbit aboard Columbia during the STS-4 mission in June-July 1982, which also 

marked the end of the STS flight-testing phase.”’ 

Meanwhile, elements within the Reagan administration and Congress were 

carefully monitoring early STS developments. On 13 November 1981, President 

Reagan signed National Security Decision Directive (NSDD) -8 that reaffirmed 

the space transportation policies of the Ford and Carter administrations by 

stating, “The STS will be the primary space launch system for both United States 

military and civil government missions. The transition should occur as soon as 

practical.”’“ According to Mark, NSDD-8 also indicated “that the president 

had a strong personal interest in the space shuttle program.”’” Reagan’s first 

comprehensive space policy, NSDD-42, was publicly announced by the President 

himself at a 4 July 1982 ceremony at Edwards AFB marking the beginning of 

the operational phase of STS operations, with Columbia in the background. In 

terms of space transportation policy, NSDD-42 reaffirmed that the STS was 

the nation’s primary launch system, declared that the United States “is fully 

committed to maintaining world leadership in space transportation,” stated that 

the “first priority of the STS program is to make the system fully operational 

and cost-effective in providing routine access to space,” and indicated that U.S. 

“government spacecraft should be designed to take advantage of the unique 

capabilities of the STS.”l12 Additionally, this directive indicated that “for the 

near-term,” the STS would be managed under the terms of the NASA/DOD 

MOUs but as “STS operations mature, options will be considered for possible 

transition to a different institutional str~cture.””~ Finally, NSDD-42 made a 

concession to the NRO : “Unique national security considerations may dictate 

developing special-purpose launch ~apabilities.””~ 

Early STS operations presented a variety of challenges and opportunities for 

the Air Force and NRO. Different elements within the Air Force had particular 

space priorities and viewpoints on the potential of the Shuttle. The space 

enthusiasts former Secretary Mark had reenergized within the Air Force were 

excited about exploring the military potential of STS, especially for military 

109. Melvyn Smth, Space Shuttle (Newbury Park, CA: Haynes Publications, 1989), appendm 7; 

110. NSDD-8, “Space Transportahon System,” 13 November 1981, cited in “Chnology,” in U.S. 

11 1. Mark, Space Station, p. 131. 

112. NSDD-42,“National Space Policy,”4 July 1982, pp. 2-3, NSC box, National Archives,Washington, 

DC.Two complete pages and approximately five additional paragraphs are deleted &om the sanitized 

version of ths direchve. The White House also lssued a five-page fact sheet, “National Space Policy,’’ on 

4 July 1982, reprinted in NASA, Aeronautirs and Space Report 4the President, 1982Activities (Wlashington, 

DC: GPO, 1983), pp. 98-100. 

“Chronology,” in US. Military Uses of Space, p. 52. 

Military Uses 4Space, p. 5 1. 

113. NSDD-42, “National Space Policy” p. 4. 

114. Ibid. 
232 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

man-in-space mission^."^ The NRO was not very happy with being directed to 

abandon ELVs for STS but was in the process of redesigning and reconfiguring its 

future payloads to take full advantage of STS’s substantial payload capabi1ities.ll6 

Other groups within the Air Force were far less excited with space or STS 

and opposed the substantial Air Force expenditures required to prepare for 

DOD STS operations. Major Air Force programs designed to support DOD 

STS operations included the ill-starred Inertial Upper Stage (IUS) program, 

modifications of SLC-6 at Vandenberg AFB for STS launch, construction of the 

Space Operations Planning Complex (SOPC) at Falcon AFB, and modifications 

to the Kennedy, Johnson, and Goddard Space Flight Centers for “controlled 

mode” DOD STS operation~.’’~ 

115. Mditary uses of STS are not often or fully mscussed in open sources. In answering congressional 

questions in March 1983, DOD drew a dishnchon between “payload dehvery” and “fdl exploitation” 

of STS, defining the latter as follows: “In the longer term, when the capabhhes of the Shuttle wd be 

rouhnely avadable, the DOD enmions use of the enhanced capabhhes umque to the Shuttle, such as 

on-orbit assembly of large structures; chechng out payloads prior to deployment; repcuring and servicing 

of satelhtes on-orbit; retrievmg spacecraft for repcurs and refurbishment; and performng man in the loop 

experments.” See House Comrmttee on Appropriahons, Subcomrmttee on the Department of Defense, 

Department ofDefeense Appropriatiorwfor 2984, Hearings before Subco-ttee on Department of Defense, 

98th Cong., 1st sess., pt. 8,1983, p. 508. See also Edward H. Kolcum,“Defense Moving to Exploit Space 

Shuttle,” Aviation Week G. Space Technology (10 May 1982): 40-42. Kolcum notes that DODS space test 

program (STP) experments (e.g.,Teal Ruby) would henceforth use STS rather than ELVs. 

116. One of the most sensitive pomts for NASA regardmg STS Performance is that it never met its origmal 

65,000-pound payload speclficahon as set in conjunchon mth the Air Force in the early 1970s.The NASA 

STS performance data in the President’s Space Report for 1981-87 mdcated that the STS was able to boost 

appromately 65,000 pounds “in full performance configuration.” However, the figure in the Aeronautics 

and Space Report ofthe President for 1988 (after resumphon of STS operahons) mmcated a sigmficant drop 

in STS full-performance configurahon capabhhes to appromately 54,895 pounds. Moreover, during 

congressional teshmony m 1981, Air Force Assistant Secretary and NRO Dlrector Robert J. Hermann 

inmcated that “current projechons of Shuttle performance show it to be about 8000 Ibs lower than the 

original commitment. DOD mssions can profitably use the fdl capabhty of the original performance 

commitment” (Senate Comrmaee on Commerce, Science, and Transportahon, Subcomrmttee on Science, 

Technology, and Space, NASA Authorization for Fscal Year 2982, Hearing before the Subcomrmttee on 

Science, Technology, and Space, 97th Cong., 1st sess., pt. 2, 1981, p. 349). In 1982, Aldridge, Hermann’s 

successor as NRO Director, indcated that the firstvandenberg AFB Shuttle launch scheduled for October 

1985 “d requlre full specificahon Shuttle performanceas called out in our Performance Reference 

hsion 4 requirements. Speclfically, the Shuttle must be capable of dehvenng 32,000 pounds to a 98 degree 

inched, 150 nauhcd de cucular orbit and, then, recover another satehte weighmg 25,000 pounds and 

return it toVandenberg.The Shuttle mth its current performance eshmate cannot acheve ths long standmg 

defense reqwrement” (prepared statement of Under Secretary Aldridge 111 Senate Co-ttee on Commerce, 

Science, andTransportation, Subco-ttee on Science,Technology, and Space, NASA Authorization for Fisral 

Year 2983, Hearing before the Subcomttee on Science,Technology, and Space, 97th Cong., 2nd sess., 1982, 

p. 166). Later, Aldridge simply indicated that the “final Shuttle capabfihes were nearly 20% short” of NASA’s 

orignally promised “65,000 pounds of payload to low earth orbit from Kennedy Space Center and 32,000 

pounds to a polar orbit fromvandenberg AFB, Cal&orma.” See Aldndge, “Assured Access,” p. 3. 

1 17. See Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, NASA Authorization for Fiscul 

Year 2982,pp. 340-341,34&350,444,484.At th~s hme (Aprd 1981),the first STS launch fi-omvandenberg 

continued on the next page 
NASA AND THE DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE.. . 233 

Despite these widespread efforts and considerable expenditures, the Air 

Force and DOD basic positions on how the STS fit into long-range military space 

plans or doctrine remained far from clear, at least in the available unclassified 

material. Undoubtedly, the basic Air Force overall organizational ambivalence 

towards space missions was a factor in structuring the long-term Air Force 

relationship with the STS, especially in light of all the rejected military man-inspace programs the Air Force had previously proposed. 

In the early 1980s, former astronaut, space enthusiast, and Space Subcommittee Chairman Senator Harrison Schmitt (R-New Mexico) was among those 

most clearly upset with the apparent lack of Air Force long-range planning for 

STS use. During exchanges with Air Force and DOD witnesses at congressional 

hearings in 1981, Schmitt charged that “historic inertia” as well as “the lack of 

an organizational focus that has [space] as a primary mission” had made the Air 

Force “relatively slow to grasp the opportunities that the Space Shuttle provides, 

not only as a launch vehicle, but as a test and operational vehicle in space.”118 

Moreover, Schmitt opined that “within a few years, you all are going to come 

back in and say ‘We need a dedicated shuttle fleet.’ And it’s painted blue that 

we could use for our purpose^.""^ Further, he warned that unless the Air Force 

pursued space missions more aggressively, “I can almost predict that there is 

going to be another Department of Something in the Department of Defense. 

And the Air Force will be flying airplanes, and not Shuttles.”lzo 

More widespread congressional concern in 1982 focused on Air ForceNASA relations in regard to the question of whether the U.S. should procure 

a fifth STS orbiter vehicle before the Rockwell orbiter production lines shut 

continued from the previous page 

was scheduled for August 1984. Assistant Secretary Hermann mmcated that the term controlled mode “sigdes that we are protecting the classified lnformahon used m the plmng and execution of a DOD 

mssion by controlling access to it. The momfications include construchon changes to the buddmgs to 

isolate certain areas, the procurement of addhond equipment, and the shieldq of certam equipment to 

preclude electromc eavesdroppmg.” He also stated, “All defense payloads wdl have completed thelr transinon to use of the Space Shuttle as the prlmary launch vehicle by 1987.”The SOPC was to “prowde the 

management and control needed for our nahond security space operations m the post-1985 mefi-ame.” 

Additionally, the SOPC would pmwde a backup to the smgle STS control node at JSC and would “promde a maxlfnum opporturuty to Wy exploit the Shuttle umque capabhes, m parhcular the presence 

of dtary man m space.” At these same hearings, Dr. James Wade, Actmg Under Secretary of Defense for 

Research and Enpeering, estimated that all of the DOD STS-related actimhes would cost appromately 

$3 bdhon through FY 1986. In March 1983,DOD promded figures inmcatmg that“D0D’s pornon ($15.2 

bdhon) of the total STS cost ($51.1 bdlion) 1s 30 percent [these figures are projected through FY 19881.” 

See House Comnuttee on Appropnations, Defense Appropriationrfor 1984, p. 513. On the Au Force’s STSrelated expenditures and kfiasmcture, see also W&am P. Sc&tz, “USAF’s Investment in the Nahond 

SpaceTransportation System,” Air Force Magazine 65 (November 1982): 1061 12. 

118. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportahon, NASA Authorizationfor Fiscal Year 

1982, pp. 458-459. 

119.Ibid.,p.447. 

120. Ibid., p. 460. 
234 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

down. Many believed that it would be wise to procure a fifth orbiter as a backup 

and to provide greater STS capability.’21 The Air Force was very interested 

in producing another of the lighter weight and more capable orbiters but was 

unwilling to use DOD funds to procure this fifth orbiter.’22 Meanwhile, NASA 

was less supportive of the need for a fifth orbiter, largely because Administrator 

James Beggs and Deputy Administrator Mark had privately agreed that NASA 

should push a permanently manned space station as the nation’s new major civil 

space goal and were therefore unwilling to take on other major new projects at 

this time.’23 By the end of 1982, despite considerable congressional support for 

a fifth orbiter, the NASA compromise solution of keeping the Rockwell lines 

partially open to produce spare parts won out, and the decision to build a fifth 

orbiter was deferred.’24 This decision was formalized by NSDD-80, issued on 3 

February 1983.’25 

During 1983 and 1984, NRO Director Aldridge waged a mostly secret and 

very difficult, but eventually successful, campaign against NASA to obtain 

approval to develop a new ELV capable of launching the spy satellites designed 

to fit into the STS.’26 Building upon the opening in NSDD-42 to consider 

building “special-purpose launch capabilities” for “unique national security 

considerations,” on 23 December 1983 Aldridge issued a memorandum, “Assured 

121.Those favoring a decision to build another orbiter at this time also used arguments about the 

economc impact of keeping the Rockwell production hnes open and the lower costs of budding a fifth 

orbiter in sequence. In Prescription for Disaster,Trento speculates that a decision to budd the fifth orbiter 

at ths hme (with the lines open) would have cost approximately $1.2 billion instead of the $2.1 bilhon 

that the fifth orbiter (Endeavour) actually cost; see p. 205. 

122. See, for example, the testimony of Major General James Abrahamson (NASA Associate 

Admnnstrator for Manned Spaceflight) and hr Force Under Secretary Aldridge in House Comttee 

on Science and Technology, Subcomrmttee on Space Science and Applications, The Need For a Fijlh 

Space Shuttle Orbiter, Hearing before the Subcomttee on Space Science and Apphcations, 97th Cong., 

2nd sess., 15 June 1982. 

123. Mark, Space Station, pp. 121-122;Trento, Presdptionfor Disaster, pp. 180-181. Followmg a long 

NASA campign ulthin the ahstration, President Reagan announced in his 1984 State of the Union 

Address the national goal ofbuddmg a permanently manned space Stahon (Freedom) wthm 10 years. 

124.Trent0, fiesniptionfor Disaster, p. 205. On congressional support for a fifth orbiter, see, for example, 

the posihon of many Representahves m House Committee on Science and Technology, Need For a F@h 

Space Shuttle Orbiter, as well as the formal recommendahon for a fifth orbiter in House Committee on 

Science andTechnology, Subcomttee on Space Science and Apphcahons, Trre Need for an Increased Space 

Shuttle Orbrter Fleet, 97th Cong., 2nd sess., 1982, Comttee Prmt Serial HH. 

125. Wdham Clark, NSDD-80, ‘‘Shuttle Orbiter Production Capabhty,” 3 February 1983, NSC box, 

National Archves,Washngton, DC. Specifically, this one-page mrechve indicated that a warm production 

hne would “be acheved through the production of structural and component spares necessary to mure 

that the Nahon can operate the four Orbiter fleet in a robust manner.” 

126. The mtense NRO-NASA struggles of hs period (a “bureaucrahc space war”) are the primary 

focus ofAldridge,“Assured Access,”pp. 3-15. Naturally, this piece covers the positions ofAldridge and the 

Air Force far more sympathehcdy than the posihons of Be= or NASA, but it is by far the most detaded 

descriphon of developments surrounding the CELV decision uncovered during research for ths study. 
NASA AND THE DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE.. . 235 

Access to Space,” to Air Force Space Command and Space Divi~ion.”~ This 

memorandum directed these organizations to plan for the procurement of a 

complementary ELV (CELV) capable of boosting a payload the size of the STS 

cargo bay and weighing 10,000 pounds into geosynchronous transfer orbit.”’ 

According to Aldridge, NASA Administrator Beggs “was furious” with these 

developments and saw them as “only a ploy of the Air Force to abandon the 

Shuttle.”’29 However, in August 1984, Aldridge’s position was formally supported 

by the NSC in NSDD-144 that approved Air Force development of the CELV.130 

Nonetheless, Beggs and NASA continued to oppose the CELV option and 

enlisted considerable congressional support in opposition to the CELV.’31 

Aldridge notes that the NSC staff hosted “the critical meeting” on the 

CELV issue on 14 February 1985.’32 At this meeting, Aldridge and Beggs finally 

reached agreement. This agreement was reflected in NSDD-164, issued on 25 

127.“Chronology,” in US. Milrtavy Uses of Space, p. 55.The primary rationale behind developing such 

a capability was to avoid dependence on a single system for space launch. Additionally, the final Air 

Force ELV buys were being completed at this time, and the production lines were in danger of being 

shut down unless new orders were found. 

128. Ibid. Secretary CasparWeinberger outlined a new DOD space launch strategy relying on a med 

fleet of ELVs and the STS in a letter to the President on 7 February 1984; see Aldridge, “Assured Access,” 

p. 6. 

129.Aldridge, “Assured Access,” p. 6. 

130. “Chronology,” in US. Mditary Uses ofspace, p. 56. Presumably, NSDD-144 was the subject of the 

whlte House fact sheet “Nahond Space Strategy,” issued on 15 August 1984 and reprinted in Aeronalrtirs 

and Space Report ofthe President, Fscal Year 1984, pp. 137-139. According to ths fact sheet, the dlrective 

specified two requirements for “assured launch capabhty”: “the need for a launch system complementary 

to the STS to hedge agrunst udoreseen techcal and operatlonal problems, and the need for a launch 

system suited for operatlons and crisis situahons.” However, there is some confusion about at least the 

number of ths classified hrechve in open sources. Scott Pace, m “US Space Transportahon Pohcy: History 

and Issues for a New Ahnistration,” Space Policy 4 (November 1988): 307,309, indicates that NSDD144, “National Security Launch Strategy,” was not issued by the EOP untd 28 February 1985. Aldridge 

does not dlscuss this drective m “Assured Access.” NSDD-144 was not avdable in the NSC box at the 

Natlonal Archves. 

131. According to Aldridge, NASA had several concerns with and employed several tactics awnst the 

CELV. NASA felt that lfDOD moved away fbm the STS, the costs per launch would increase and NASA 

would need to charge its commercial customers more for each launch.This, NASA officials thought, 

would drive more commercial customers towards the Ariane. In an 18 May 1984 letter fbm Abstrator 

Beggs to Secretary Weiberger, NASA indlcated that an STS backup was not necessary but that lfDOD 

was determned to budd a new launch vehcle, it should be derived &om STS components. Next, NASA 

supporters m Congress specified that a COmpehhOn would be run between NASA deslgns and industry 

designs for a system to meet h Force requirements. Aldridge claims in “Assured Access” that NASA 

put subtle pressure on its suppliers not to compete against its Standardized Launch Vehcle (SLV-X) by 

indlcahng that their behavior would have consequences for future NASA purchases. A modhed Titan 111 

called a Titan 34D7 was the mnner in the mdustrlal competitlon conducted by the Ax Force, while the 

NASA entry was judged by the Ar Force Space Division to be uncontrollable durmg the boost phase 

of flight. Finally, as the ELV produchon lines were begmng to shut down, NASA recommended that 

several mqor and lengthy studies be undertaken on the CELV issue as a delaylng tachc (‘‘Assured Access,” 

pp. 7-13). 

132. Ibid.,p. 13, emphasis m orignal. 
236 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

February 1985.’33 Specifically, NSDD-164 authorized the Air Force to buy 10 

CELVs and to launch approximately 2 CELVs per year in the period 1988-92.’34 

Thus, Aldridge won his victory in the bureaucratic space war less than one year 

prior to the complete reordering of U.S. space transportation policy caused by 

the Challenger disaster. 

In hindsight, given large impact of the Challenger disaster, it is remarkable 

that there was such sustained opposition to acquiring a backup capability for the 

STS. Moreover, while access to space is a prerequisite for any space activity, it is 

unfortunate that Aldridge and the top levels of Air Force space leadership, as well 

as much of NASA’s leadership, were largely consumed with this issue during the 

mid-1980s rather than focusing on broader, more important, or more futureoriented space policy issues. Finally, it is also interesting to note that many groups 

were dissatisfied with STS performance capabilities and especially the mounting 

STS payload backlog of the mid-1980s but that only the NRO had the clout to 

develop a new ELV and move its most important payloads off the STS.’35 

The Challenger disaster completely reordered U.S. space transportation policy and effectively deferred any Air Force plans to use STS as a vehicle to build 

a significant manned military presence in space. During 1986 and 1987, NASA, 

DOD, and the newly formed Office of Commercial Space Transportation 

(OCST) within the Department of Transportation worked together to produce 

a new U.S. space launch strategy and the Space Launch Recovery Plan. NSDD254, “United States Space Launch Strategy,” was completed on 27 December 

1986.’36 This directive specified that the U.S. would henceforth rely upon a 

133. NSDD-164, “National Security Launch Strategy,” 25 February 1985, NSC box, National 

Archives, Washington, DC.This unclassified directive was pubhcly released on 14 November 1985. 

134. Ibid.,p. 1. NSDD-164 also 1) indcated that a “compeuuve decision” on a specific CELV would be 

made by 1 March 1985,2) drected that “DOD d rely on the STS as its primary launch vehcle and wdl 

commt to at least one-thnd of the STS aghts avallable during the next ten years,” 3) mrected NASA and 

DOD to “Jomtly develop a pricing pohcy for DOD fights that provldes a posihve mcenuve for flying on 

the Shuttle,” and 4) authorized a joint NASA-DOD effort to produce a nahond security study &recave 

(NSSD) on the development of“a second-generanon space transportahon system.” 

135. Some of the strongest opposition to STS “forced busing in space” came from within NASA’s 

own space science community. NASA had directed that all its payloads be launched exclusively by the 

STS, but by the mid-l980s, the STS backlog and problems with the STS upper stages were causing 

multiyear delays and significant design changes for key space science projects such as the Galileo 

Jupiter probe and the Hubble Space Telescope. See, for example, Bruce Murray, “‘Born Anew’ Versus 

‘Born Again,’” in “Policy Focus: National Security and the U.S. Space Program After the Challenger 

Tragedy,” International Security 11 (spring 1987): 178-182. Even more significantly, because STS was 

not providing low-cost launch rates (even at its generous pre-Challenger-disaster subsidized rates) or 

reliable service and launch schedules, commercial customers were “voting with their feet” and moving 

in increasing numbers onto the more commercially viable Ariane ELV. 

136. NSDD-254, “Umted States Space Launch Strategy,” 27 December 1986, NSC box, Nahond 

Archves, Washngton, DC. Approxlmately three sentences of thls two-page &recove are deleted in the 

samhzed version.Themte House released a fact sheet on tls hechve on 16 January 1987. NSDD-254 

superseded NSDD-164. 
NASA AND THE DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE.. . 237 

“balanced mix of launchers” consisting of the STS and ELVs defined “to best 

support the mission needs of the national security, civil government and commercial sectors of U.S. space activitie~.”~” Further, “selected critical payloads 

will be designed for dual-compatibility, i.e., capable of being launched by either 

the STS or the ELVS.”’~* In order to accomplish these objectives, the directive indicated that DOD “will procure additional ELVs to maintain a balanced 

launch capability and to provide access to 

The Space Launch Recovery Plan dealt with the means to implement this 

new launch strategy in greater detail. The plan focused on the revitalization 

of the nation’s ELV production base and attempted to use government ELV 

purchases as a means to stimulate the development of a more robust commercial 

ELV industry. The plan also provided $2.1 billion to NASA for the production 

of a fifth orbiter, Endeavour, to be ready for flight by 1992. In addition, under this 

plan, the Air Force completely reoriented its future space support infrastructure 

and plans. The Air Force launched a $12-billion program to initiate or expand 

four ELV programs.’40 These Air Force ELV programs included expansion of the 

original 10 booster CELV program to 41 Titan IVs, two medium launch vehicle 

programs consisting of 20 Delta 2 and 11 Atlas-Centaur 2 ELVs, and refurbishing 

14 decommissioned Titan I1 ICBMs for space la~nch.’~’ Additionally, the Air 

Force took drastic steps to reconfigure the infrastructure it had developed to 

operate DOD STS missions, including placing the unused SLC-6 at Vandenberg 

AFB into “minimum facility caretaker” status in July 1986, eliminating the 

32-member-strong Manned Spaceflight Engineer (MSE) program within the 

Space Division, disbanding the Manned Spaceflight Control Squadron at the 

JSC as of 30 June 1989, and ending development of the SOPC at CSOC in 

February 1987.142 Further, as a result of this plan, the DOD scheduled only seven 

137. Ibid., p. 1. 

138. Ibid. 

139. Ibid. Addtionally, NSDD-254 speclfied that NASA would no longer provide commercial or 

foreign launch services on the STS “unless those spacecraft have umque, speclfic reasons to be launched 

aboard the Shuttle.”The drecdve also set a 1995 “commercial contract mandatory termnatlon date.”Ths 

pohcy meant that of the 44 commercial and foreign launch commitments NASA had in January 1986, 

only 20 of these payloads shll quahfied for STS launch. See Aeronautics and Space Report .f the President, 

FiscalyPar 1986, p. 33. 

140. Pace, “US Space Transportanon Pohcy,” p. 310. 

141. Ibid.;W&am J. Broad,“Mtary Launches First New Rocket for Orbital Loads,” NewYork Times (6 

September 1988): 1; Jomt Statement ofh Force Secretary Aldridge and Chef of StafTGeneral Larry D. 

Welch m Senate Comrmttee on Appropriahons, Subcomrmttee on Department of Defense, Department .f 

Defense Appropriationsfor Fu-cal Year 1988, Hearings before the Subcomrmttee on Department of Defense, 

100th Cong., 1st sess.,pt. 3,1988,~~. 301-303. 

142. W&am J. Broad, “Pentagon Leavlng Shuttle Program,” New York Times (7 August 1989): A13. 

Broad estimated the costs for these programs to be“at least $5 b&on,”the hon’s share ofwhch was the $3.3- 

continued on the next page 
238 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

dedicated STS launches for the period 1991-95 and thereafter planned to rely 

almost exclusively on 

The relationships between the Air Force, DOD, and NASA over STS operations were clearly marked by great difficulties during the 1980s. The development of military space launch policy during this period provides one of the most 

powerful instances of organizational behavior inputs shaping U.S. space policy 

and significantly impacting military space doctrine. Despite building a large and 

expensive infrastructure for launching and controlling DOD STS missions, the 

Air Force never fully exercised this capability prior to the Challenger disaster, 

and, following the disaster, the Air Force and NRO were instrumental in leading DOD’s rush off the STS in favor of ELVs. The bitter fight with NASA over 

the CELV and the general desire to fully control its launch vehicles were important factors in motivating this Air Force space launch policy reversal; however, 

the speed and complete nature of the virtual abandonment of the STS and the 

significant infrastructure designed to support DOD STS missions is remarkable 

and not well explained in open sources. The lack of clear and powerful military 

space doctrine undoubtedly contributed to these false starts, reversals, and lack 

of clear direction for the DOD STS mission. Cumulatively, this episode seems 

to be an excellent illustration of the general Air Force ambivalence over the 

military potential of space and military man-in-space, as well as evidence of its 

lack of clear and accepted doctrinal guidance on these issues. 

continued from the previous page 

billion SLC-6 at Vandenberg AFB. The SOPC building at CSOC was converted into the Nahond Test 

Bed (now the Joint National Integration Center) for the Strategic Defense Initiahve (SDI) program. As 

Broad relates, rmlitary space crihcs such as John Pike of the Federation ofAmerican Scientists charged that 

the Air Force went overboard in developing new ELVs and abandoning the STS. 

143. Pace, “US Space Transportation Policy,” p. 310. The first Titan N launch took place on 14 June 

1989 hm Cape Canaved, see “Chronology,” in US. Military Uses of Space, p. 61. 
CHAPTER 8 

TECHNOLOGY, FOREIGN POLICY, AND 

INTERNATIONAL COOPERATIONN SPACE 

John Krige 

nternational cooperation has always been part of NASA’s mission.’ But I why? Why is it in NASA’s and America’s interest to collaborate with foreign 

partners? The question is not as perverse as it sounds. In 1958, the United 

States was, and probably still remains, the single most important economic 

and military, but also scientific and technological, as well as industrial and 

managerial, power on Earth. Those to whom Eisenhower confided the civilian 

space program drew, though NACA, on a vast and expanding infrastructure of 

scientists, engineers, and managers, along with the facilities and the budget to 

match it, especially once President Kennedy committed the country to putting 

a person on the Moon before 1970. With some important exceptions-like 

the need for a global network of tracking stations, or sounding-rocket studies 

of the properties of the upper atmosphere in equatorial regions-there was 

no overriding scientific or technical (and certainly no financial) reason why 

NASA and the United States needed to collaborate with any other country 

in the conquest of space. Unlike small and medium-sized European states, 

America was rich enough in human and material resources to go it alone, and 

as such was the envy of all aspirant space powers (except perhaps the Soviet 

Union, who had to cripple its domestic economy to maintain its military and 

space capabilities at some sort of parity with those of the U.S.A.). 

One classical argument for international collaboration was that it would 

improve relationships between the United States and the Soviet Union. The 

decision to establish NASA was, of course, just one of a number of measures 

taken by the Eisenhower administration to calm the nation in response to 

the engineered domestic crisis that ensued in the wake of the launch of the 

Sputniks by the Soviet Union in the fall of 1957. Superpower rivalry was at 

its height: by the end of the 1950s, each country knew that it could strike a 

1. For a fine overview of NASA’s international program, wth supporting key documents, see John 

M. Logsdon,“The Development of International Space Cooperation,” chap. 1 in Exploring the Unknown: 

Selected Documents in the History of the U.S. Civil Space Program, ed. John M. Logsdon, with Dwayne A. 

Day and Roger D. Launius, vol. 2, External Relationships (Washington, DC: NASA SP-4407,1996). 
240 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

lethal blow at the other using nuclear-tipped missiles. This balance of terror 

provided one of the most frequent arguments at the time for international 

space cooperation. As Lyndon Baines Johnson, then the Majority Leader of 

the Senate, put it in 1959, “If. . . we proceed along the orderly course of 

full cooperation, we shall by that very fact of cooperation make the most 

substantial contribution yet made towards perfecting peace. Men who have 

worked together to reach the stars are not likely to descend together into the 

depths of war and desolation.”2 This claim, the conviction that international 

space cooperation with the Soviets would remove misunderstanding, project 

a positive image of the U.S. abroad, reduce tension, and advance the cause 

of world peace was a kitmot$ of the early arguments for an international 

component to the space program. It was also used by Richard Nixon, who 

justified the expansion of U.S.-Soviet space collaboration in the early 1970s as 

creating “not just a climate for peace,” but the “building blocks” for “an actual 

structure of peace and c~operation.”~ 

This rhetoric did not carry much weight with some people, notably Arnold 

Frutkin. Frutkin, who was responsible for international affairs inside NASA 

for 20 years, beginning in 1959, was emphatic about this4 “Now, I hope it’s 

come through,” he said towards the end of a long interview conducted a few 

years ago, “that I am not soft-headed about dealing with other people-[like] 

if you knew your neighbor better you’d like him. I never believed that. If you 

knew your neighbor better,” Frutkin went on, “you might conclude that he 

[was] a worse son of a bitch than you [~uspected].”~ Frutkin spoke from bitter 

experience: after many years of achieving little more than “arm’s-length’’ 

cooperation with the Soviets-more may have been possible had Kennedy 

not been assassinated-he had finally been witness to the famous ApolloSoyuz “hand shake in space” in July 1975.6 For him, while international space 

2. Quoted in Don E. Kash, The Polrtrcs $Space Cooperation (n.p.: Purdue University Studies, 1967), 

3.The words are those of Ron Ziegler, the President’s press secretary, during a press conference at the 

mte House on the “Agreement Concermng Cooperation in the Exploranon and Use of Outer Space 

for Peacefd Purposes,” 24 May 1972, record no. 12594, Presidential Fdes, NASA Historical Reference 

Collection, Washington, DC. 

4. Arnold W. Fruthn was deputy director of the US. Nahonal Comttee for the International 

GeophysicalYear in the National Academy of Sciences before he joined NASA in 1959 as hector of 

international programs. His oficial htk changed m 1963 to Assistant Adrmmstrator for International 

Mars. In 1978, Frutkin became Associate Adrmmstrator for External Relanons. He rehred 6om federal 

service in 1979. 

5. Arnold W. Frutkin interview, Washington, DC, by Rebecca Wright, 11 January 2002, NASA 

Historical Reference Collechon,Washlngton, DC. 

6. In the early years of hls presidency, Kennedy made extensive overtures to the Soviets backed by 

behind-the-scenes negonanons that seemed to be malung considerable headway. These were abruptly 

stopped after his deathsee particularly Nahonal Security Action Memorandum 271, dated 12 

November 1963 and reproduced in Logsdon, “International Space Cooperahon,” pp. 166-167. 

p. 10. 
TECHNOLOGY, FOREIGN POLICY, AND INTERNATIONAL COOPERATION.. . 241 

cooperation was a widely endorsed scientific and political objective, it also was 

also victim of a multitude of “abstractions, moral imperatives, and contrived 

prescriptions.”’ 

Contemporary analyses of the U.S.’s motives for collaborating in space 

combine a refreshing spirit of realpolitik when discussing how the U.S. has 

behaved in the past with a tendency to prescriptive injunctions about how 

NASA should behave in the future, which Frutkin would probably deplore. 

We shall treat each of these dimensions of this body of literature in turn. 

There is something of a consensus that, for the first two or three decades 

of its existence, NASA, by virtue of America’s immense scientific and technological advantage vis-i-vis its partners, could use its power to dictate the 

terms of any significant international space effort. American hegemony was 

implicit in the 1958 Space Act which established NASA and which defined the 

organization’s primary objective as being “the preservation of the role of the 

United States as a leader in aeronautical and space science and technology and 

in the application thereof.”’ This concept of leadership, we were reminded in 

1987 by a task force ofthe NASA Advisory Council (NAC), chaired by Herman 

Pollack, meant not simply achieving superior performance in all aspects of 

space. It also meant “the defining of goals and the establishment of direction 

that others w[ould] be willing to make their own orfollow” (emphasis added)? To the 

U.S., according to another group of space activists, for the first two decades 

after Sputnik, “cooperation was a politically driven means of linking the space 

programmes of other countries to US goals and activities, rather than having 

them closely allied with Soviet aspirations in space.”l0 Political scientist Joan 

Johnson-Freese makes a similar point: in the Cold War context of the ’60s and 

 O OS, the U.S. actively sought to collaborate with its Western bloc allies and 

countries that it wanted to attract to the Western alliance. And since it was 

“dominant in space, it could dictate terms of cooperation to other countries, 

which they were more than willing to accept in order to gain entrance to the 

space program.”” 

Scientific research was a privileged site for international collaboration, and 

Frutkin quickly defined a set of five criteria which guided NASA’s policy in 

this domain and which embodied these precepts.I2 His criteria are well known 

7. Arnold W. Frutkin, “International Cooperation in Space,” Science 169 (24 July 1970): 333-339. 

8. National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958 (Unamended), Sec. 102 (c) (5), available online at 

9. Herman Pollack, “International Relatlons m Space. A US View,” Space Policy 4, no. 1 (February 

10. Space Pohcy Institute and Association of Space Explorers,“International Cooperatlon in Space11. Joan Johnson-Freese, Changing Patterns .f International Cooperation in Space (Malabar, FL Orbit, 

12.Arnold W. Frutkin, International Collaboration in Space (Englewood ClifEs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1965). 

http://www. hq.nasa.gov/offe/pao/History/spaceact.html (accessed 27 January 2005). 

1988): 24-30. 

New Opportunihes, New Approaches,” Space Policy 8, no. 3 (August 1992): 195-203. 

1990), p. 5. 
242 CRITICAL hJES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

and need not be rehearsed here. Suffice it to say that Frutkin’s stress on the 

need for clean interfaces and no exchange of funds between the partners was 

inspired by the need to limit technological (and managerial) sharing between 

the U.S. and its partners to a minimum. Even the content of the program 

had to dovetail with U.S. interests. As Logsdon puts it, being the dominant 

partner in space science “often meant that NASA and U.S. scientists would 

define the objectives and content of a scientific mission and only then invite 

non-U.S. scientists to parti~ipate.”’~ Even then, NASA sometimes pulled the 

plug on a well-defined joint international project to meet domestic pressures 

for budget cuts and the redefinition of prioritie~.’~ 

Scientific collaboration was the most readily available and least controversial 

instrument of international collaboration, but it was not enough, particularly 

in dealing with major allies like Western Europe. The U.S. technological lead 

and the dynamism of American industry allowed the administration to think 

beyond the limits of scientific collaboration and to use its technological assets, 

including technological knowledge and skills, as an instrument of foreign 

policy to consolidate the Atlantic alliance. Put differently, if the U.S. pursued 

international collaboration, it was because it “sought the political benefits of 

leadership [while] its partners [sought] the technical and managerial benefits 

that come from working with the leader.”” Here lies the soft underbelly 

of technological collaboration in the space sector. For if the benefit was in 

foreign policy, as the Pollack Task Force stressed, the cost lay in the risk that 

technological sharing would subvert U.S. leadership by helping allies to assert 

themselves, would endanger national security in a sector where almost all 

satellite and booster technology is “dual-use technology,” and would endanger 

U.S. industry in a crucial high-tech sector. 

Once we move beyond scientific collaboration to technological sharing, 

those who promote international cooperation will be on the defensive. They 

will have to overcome the opposition of counterforces that stress the threats 

to the U.S. that such collaboration entails. These critics will point out that 

if America’s allies are willing to be dependent on the U.S. in the short term, 

it is with the long-term aim of being autonomous. That if those allies accept 

the hegemonic regime imposed by the U.S., it is in the hope that they will 

eventually be able to throw off its yoke. And that if they collaborate initially 

on terms which are not of their own choosing, it is in order later to compete 

better with the United States as equal partners, or even to become leaders 

in areas where America was previously supreme. In short, international col13. Logsdon, ‘‘International Space Cooperation,” p. 4. 

14. For an angry account of this by two ESA insiders, see Roger M. Bonnet andvittorio Manno, 

International Cooperation in Space: The Example .f the European Space Agency (Cambridge, MA: Harvard 

Umveeity Press, 1994). 

15. Space Policy Institute and Association of Space Explorers, p. 200. 
TECHNOLOGY, FOREIGN POLICY, AND INTERNATIONAL COOPERATION.. . 243 

laboration in space is always a contested policy objective. It will always have 

to justify itself to critics who will ask, as I did at the start of this paper, “But 

why collaborate?” and who see little reason for risking national security and 

industrial competitiveness, which are essential for the long-term strength of 

the country, in return for the fragile and unpredictable foreign policy benefits 

that international collaboration putatively enshrines. 

This domestic political context informs much of the literature on international cooperation and accounts for the prescriptive dimension alluded to above. 

It is dominated by activists, ahnistrators, and political scientists who combine 

their sense of realpolitik with a wish to influence the way NASA and the United 

States behave in current international collaborative projects, notably the negotiations on foreign participation in the International Space Station. All are sensitive to the changed balance of power in the space sector: the collapse of the 

Soviet Union as a rival superpower (which forced a major reevaluation of one of 

NASA’s original goals) and the technological and managerial maturity achieved 

by space programs in the U.S.5 traditional allies (notably Western Europe and 

Japan). All are also convinced that international collaboration is a worthwhile 

goal and that, to maintain American leadership in at least certain key areas, the 

U.S. will have to change its attitudes to meet the changed environment of the 

late 20th century. Thus Joan Johnson-Freese: “Because the United States began as 

the dominant space power concerning cooperative ventures, it has never had to 

learn to operate in any manner other than‘the U.S. way’. But thngs have changed,” 

she goes on. “There are now an increasing number of space ‘actors’ with varying 

ranges of capabilities,” including the Soviet Union, Japan, and Western Europe, 

and “the United States is no longer ‘the only game in tom’ in space activities, 

although in some cases it is stdl trying to act as though it is.”16 So, too, the Task 

Force chaired by Pollack in 1987: “The USA will have to adopt [sic] its attitude, 

approach and politics on international cooperation and competition to a new set 

of realitie~.”’~ And Ken Pederson, who was responsible for NASA’s International 

Hairs Division in the 1980s and who gave some concrete examples of what that 

meant. “For NASA today,” he wrote, “‘power’ is much more likely to mean the 

power to persuade than the power to prescribe.”This entails 1) that NASA must 

accept that “leadershp does not mean that it must or ought do it all”; 2) that even 

if it is the provider of major hardware, NASA “may sometimes have to accept the 

role of junior partner rather than managing partner” and understand that it can 

still benefit while doing so; and 3) that NASA must “learn to share direct management and operational control in projects where it is the largest hardware and 

financial contributor, especially when manned flight systems are in~olved.”‘~ 

16. Johnson-Freese, p. 113. 

17. Pollack, “International Relations in Space.” 

18. Ken Pedersen, “The Changing Face of International Space Cooperation. OneView of NASA,” 

Space Policy 2, no. 2 (May 1986): 120-137. 
244 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

This stream of modal concepts, this prescriptive discourse is situated at the 

core of the struggle to define the U.S.5 role in space in the 21st century and 

intended to reshape its practices in the international domain. These advocates 

believe that space cooperation is a “good thing” for the United States, and they 

seek to lay down the ground rules, based on past experience, for what the U.S. 

“must do” if it wants to retain credibility and leadership as an international 

partner. And while commendable for their sensitivity to the points of hiction 

which have traditionally irritated America’s partners, their proposals also have an 

air of unreality. It is indeed striking that, while all of these authors stress that the US. 

international space eforf is driven by foreign policy and that technological collaboration is 

a substantive issue which shapes its physiognomy, none of them deal with foreign policy 

or technology except in the most generic way.These are a taken-for-granted backdrop 

against which their prescriptions are made, a context which, precisely, cannot be 

taken for granted, for it is the always-contested framework in which stakeholders 

wlll decide whether to collaborate internationally at all, let alone on the terms, 

and respecting the “musts,” that the advocates promote so skillfully. 

Scientific and technological sharing, and foreign policy concerns, are 

the material substrates of international collaboration in space. Scientific and 

particularly technological sharing, both of hardware and of knowledge and 

skills, are the single most important means that the U.S. has to influence 

the space programs of other countries, so consolidating and legitimating its 

leadership and its hegemonic regime. Technological sharing is also the single 

greatest danger to national security and national industrial competitiveness in a 

crucial high-technology sector. The onus on those who promote international 

collaboration in space is to show how the sharing of specific technologies and 

the knowledge embedded in them will further America’s leadership abroad 

in a particular historical conjuncture and why that objective will not unduly 

jeopardize national industry or undermine national security. To advance this 

debate, one cannot “black-box’’ technology and foreign policy: they are not 

the context in which international collaboration takes place; they are the 

stakes that define what is possible. 

This paper aims to contribute to our understanding of international collaboration by using an illustrative historical case study to open the black 

box of technology and of foreign p01icy.’~ At the risk of oversimplifying an 

extremely complex debate, I will explain briefly why the Johnson administration decided in the mid-1960s that it was imperative to collaborate with 

Western Europe in developing a civilian satellite launcher and discuss the kind 

19.The case study presented here is based on a small subset of a huge number of documents retrieved 

from the archives preserved in the NASA Historical Reference Collection in Washmgton, DC, and 

at the Lyndon Banes Johnson Library in Austin, TX (hereafter LBJ Library). Additional material was 

acquired fiom the National Archives and Records Adrmnistration in College Park, MD. I would like to 

thank the archivists for their invaluable help and support. 
TECHNOLOGY, FOREIGN POLICY, AND INTERNATIONAL COOPERATION.. . 245 

of technological sharing that some people thought might be used to achieve 

the President’s foreign policy objectives.20 What I want to emphasize above 

all is the strong coupling between technology and foreign policy. I also want 

to insist that, to understand the possibilities of international collaboration in 

space, it is crucial to focus on what specijic technologies might be available for 

sharing in the pursuit of specijic foreign policy objectives, rather than-as so 

often happens-to simply lump technology and foreign policy into an undifferentiated whole. Those in the administration who are engaged in working 

out what can be done with a foreign partner fight over the boundary between 

what technologies can be shared and what cannot. The advocates of a more 

open approach are driven by the conviction that the maintenance of American 

“leadership” and its ability to control the form and content of the space programs of other nations are best achieved by relaxing restrictions in particular 

areas. Sometimes they win; sometimes, as in the case to be described here, 

they lose, both because the forces arraigned against them are formidable and 

because the foreign policy context is never stable and calls forth a different 

response to changed circumstances. I am convinced that only if historians 

study international collaboration at this fine-grained level can they help avoid 

what Frutkin bemoaned over 30 years ago, namely, analyses replete with the 

usual quota of abstractions, moral imperatives, and contrived prescriptions.” “ 

THE JOHNSON ADMINISTRATION AND THE ELDO CRISIS 

On 29 July 1966, Walt W. Rostow, one of LBJ’s two national security advisers, signed off on National Security Action Memorandum 354.’l 

NSAM 354 was a response to a request from the Department of State that the 

U.S. “clarify and define” its policy concerning collaboration with the “present and future programs” of ELDO, the European Launcher Development 

Organisation. The document affirmed that it was “in the U.S. interest to 

encourage the continued development of ELDO through U.S. cooperation.” 

It referred to the results of an ad hoc working group, established by the State 

Department and chaired by Herman Pollack, that had prepared a statement 

“defining the nature and extent of U.S. cooperation with ELDO which the 

U.S. government is now prepared to extend.” This statement was to be “continually reviewed by the responsible agencies,” above all, the Department of 

20.The reactlorn m the Umted States to the ELDO crisis in 1966 have received little scholarly 

attention. For the best analysis, see Lorenza Sebesta, Alleuti Compeh‘tivi. Origini e sviluppo dellu cooperuzione 

spaxiulefva Europu e Stuti Uniti (Bologna, Italy: Laterza, 2003), chap. 3.The issue is also described in a 

project Sebesta worked on with John M. Logsdon. I thank John Logsdon for making a copy of their 

unpublished manuscript avadable to me. 

21. NSAM 354, “US Cooperation with the European Launcher Development Organization,” 29 

July 1974, available online at http://www.lbjlib.utexas.edu (accessed on 9 March 2005). 
246 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

Defense and the State Department, along with NASA, “to ensure that it is 

current and responsive in terms of developing strategies.” 

The help that the working group proposed was extensive. It was divided 

into three categories: general, and short-range and long-range assistance.22 

The first contained some standard items-training in technical management, 

facilitating export licenses, use of NASA test facilities-but also suggested 

that a technical office be established within NASA “specifically to serve in an 

expediting and assisting role for ELDO.” Short-range help included “technical 

advice and assistance” in items like vehicle integration, stage separation, and 

synchronous orbit injection techniques, as well as the provision of unclassified 

flight hardware, notably a strapped-down “guidance” package used on the Scout 

launcher which had already been exported to Japan. Long-range assistance was 

focused on helping with a high-energy cryogenic upper stage of the rocket, 

currently being considered in ELDO. It was proposed that Europeans be given 

access to technological documentation and experience available in the AtlasCentaur systems, that ELDO technical personnel “have intimate touch with 

the problems of systems design, integration, and program management of a 

high-energy upper [sic] such as the Centaur,” and even that the U.S. consider 

“joint use of a high-energy upper stage developed in In short, in 

mid-1966, the U.S. was considering making a substantial effort to help ELDO 

develop a powerful launcher with geosynchronous orbit capability by sharing 

state-of-the-art knowledge and experience and by facilitating the export of 

hardware which-it should be added-would not normally be available on a 

bilateral basis to European national launcher programs. 

NSAM 354 was catalyzed by a crisis in ELDO in February 1966 and deep 

concerns in the Johnson administration about the future of the collaborative 

European effort. ELDO, it must be said, had been a fragile organization from 

its very inception in 1960-61.24 It was born of the need by the British government to find a new role for its Blue Streak missile. The liquid-fueled rocket 

was rendered obsolete by the long time required to prepare it for launch and 

22. This paragraph is derived from “Policy Concerning US Cooperation with the European 

Launcher Development Organization (ELDO),” attached to U. Alexis Johnson’s “Memorandum,” 

10 June 1966, folder 15707, International Cooperation and Foreign Countries, NASA Historical 

Reference Collection, Washington, DC. 

23. In summer 1965, ELDO had asked for help from NASA on “desigmng, testing and launching 

liquid hydrogen/liquid oxygen upper stages” (Frutkin to Robert N. Margrave, Director, O6ce of 

Mumtions Control, Department of State, 6 June 1965, record no. 14465, International Cooperation and 

Foreign Countries, International Cooperation, folder International Policy Manual Material &om Code 

I, NASA Historical Reference Collection, Washington, DC). 

24. I describe the launch of ELDO in detall in J. Krige and A. Russo, A History of the European Space 

Agency, 1958-1987, vol. 1, The Story of ESRO and ELDO, 1958-1973 (Noordwijk, Netherlands: ESA 

SP-1235, April 2000), chap. 3. See also Michelangelo De Maria and John Krige, “Early European 

Attempts in Launcher Technology,” in Choosing Big Technologies, ed. John Krige (Chur, Switzerland 

Harwood Academic Publishers, 1993), pp. 109-137. 
TECHNOLOGY, FOREIGN POLICY, AND INTERNATIONAL COOPERATION. . . 247 

by the cost, which spiraled to new heights as the expenditures on reinforced 

concrete silos were factored into the budget. Hence the idea to recycle Blue 

Streak, stripped of its military characteristics, as the first stage of a multistage 

civilian satellite launcher, built together with partners in continental Europe. 

This would save face at home, it would ensure that the money already spent 

on development was not completely wasted, it would preserve the engineering teams and their skills intact, it would please British industry, and-and 

this was crucial-it would serve as a gesture of solidarity and good will to the 

emerging European Common Market, which Britain had previously boycotted, nay, tried to sabotage. Indeed, shortly after the British proposed this 

joint venture to their continental partners, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan 

made an official application for his country to join the European Community. 

Long, drawn-out negotiations ensued before Blue Streak was given a new lease 

on life. The French would build the second stage atop the British rocket, the 

Germans would build the third stage, and the Italians would build a test satellite. Clean interfaces were retained to limit technology transfer between firms 

in different countries to protect competitive advantage and national security 

(especially in Britain and France, which were both developing independent 

nuclear deterrents). The ELDO staff had little authority over the separate 

national authorities and, above all, no power to integrate the three independently built stages of the rocket or to ensure compatibility between the various systems and subsystems built in different countries or in different firms in 

the same country.25 By 1966, as many had predicted, ELDO faced the first of 

many crises that led to its eventual demise in 1972.26 Development costs had 

increased from the initial estimate of about $200 million to over $400 million, 

and no end to the upward spiral was in sight. Blue Streak had been successfully 

commissioned, while the French and German stages were still under development. What is more, in January 1963, French President de Gaulle had vetoed 

Britain’s application to join the Common Market. For Britain, who was paying almost 39 percent of the ELDO budget, the original technological, industrial, and political rationale for launching the organization had evaporated. In 

February 1966, her Minister circulated an aide-mkmoire to his homologues in 

the ELDO member states suggesting that it was unlikely that the organization 

would produce any worthwhile result and that the United Kingdom saw little 

interest to continue in the program and to contribute financially to it. 

This move perturbed the Johnson administration immensely. At the most 

general level, the U.S. saw ELDO as a technological embodiment of European 

25. For a fine description of the failure of management in ELDO, see Stephen B. Johnson, The Secret 

oJApollo: Systems Management irr American and European Space Programs (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 2002), 

chap. 6. 

26. On the crisis, see Krige and Russo, A History, vol. 1, chap. 4, sect. 4.3.2. 
248 CRITICAL ISSUES INTHE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

multilateralism. The withdrawal of the United Kingdom would send a signal 

that Britain was still not enthusiastic about participating in European integration, which the United States had always regretted. It would also strike a 

major blow to the gradual movement towards European unity on the continent. 

This was in a very brittle state at the time.There was a crisis in the European 

Economic Community (EEC), precipitated by the French, who had begun to 

boycott the EEC’s decision-making machinery so as to liberate the country 

from its “subordination” to Community institutions and the dilution of sovereignty that that entailedeZ7 There was a similar crisis in NATO.The French were 

not against the Alliance as such but believed that NATO needed reforming. 

Western European nations were no longer prostrate, as they had been in 1949, 

and they needed to be prepared to meet a Soviet nuclear threat in Europe with 

their own independent deterrents (would Washington be prepared to risk New 

York to defend Paris? it used to be said). “The French have emphasized their 

dissatisfaction by becoming increasingly an obstructionist force in NATO,” one 

task force wrote, “equating” integration with subordination.28 In this inauspicious climate, everything possible had to be done to sustain the momentum 

for European unity. As Under Secretary of State George Ball emphasized, “The 

United States has a direct interest in the continuation of European integration. 

It is the most realistic means of achieving European political unity with all that 

that implies for our relations with Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union . . . and 

is the precondition for a Europe able to carry its proper share of responsibility 

for our common defense.”29 While ELDO was not central to European integration, its collapse would provide additional encouragement for those who were 

increasingly hostile to supranational ventures in Europe. 

Saving a European launcher was justified by a second foreign policy concern pressing on the Johnson administration at the time: it would help close 

the so-called “technological gap” that had opened between the two sides of the 

Atlantic. Beginning in summer 1965, there were increasingly strident complaints 

in France, and to some extent Germany, that American business was invading 

Europe and dominating key sectors of European indu~try.~’ The U.S. could not 

27.TedVan Dyk to thevice President, 7 July 1965, folder Germany ErhardVisit [12/65], 12/19- 

21/65, box 192, National Security Files, Country File Europe and USSR, Germany, LBJ Library. 

28. “France and NATO,” position paper, 25 September 1965, folder Germany ErhardVisit [12/65] 

12/19-21/65, box 192, National Security Fde, Country File Europe and USSR, Germany, LBJ 

Library. 

29. Department of State to Amembassy BOM 1209, outgoing telegram, 18 November 1965, signed 

[George] Ball, folder Germany Erhard Visit [12/65], 12/19-21/65, box 192, National Security File, 

Country File Europe and USSR, Germany, LBJ Library. 

30. SC No. 00666/65B, “US Investments in Europe,” CIA Special Report, 16 April 1965, folder 

Memos [2 of 21,Vol. II,7/64-7/66, box 163, National Security File, Country Fde, Europe, LBJ Library. 

Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber’s The American Challenge (NewYork: Atheneaum, 1968; translahon of Le 

D& amkricain) is, of course, the locus classicus of this argument. 
TECHNOLOGY, FOREIGN POLICY, AND INTERNATIONAL COOPERATION.. . 249 

easily dismiss their concerns. As Frutkin explained, Western Europe’s progress in 

space was “a contribution to the strength of the Free World. An increasing technological gap between us {and them) can only lead to political and economic 

strains and to weakness.”31 Indeed, the President took this matter so seriously 

that in November 1966, Johnson personally signed NSAM 357, instructing his 

science adviser, Donald Hornig, to set up an interdepartmental committee to 

look into “the increasing concern in Western Europe over possible disparities 

in advanced technology between the United States and Europe.”32 In its preliminary report, the committee concluded that “the Technological Gap [was] 

mainly a political and psychological problem” but that it did have “some basis 

in actual disparities.” These included “the demonstrated American superiority 

in sophisticated electronics, military technology and space systems.” Particularly 

important were “the ‘very high technology industries’ (particularly computers, space communications, and aircraft) which provide a much greater military 

capability, are nationally prestigious, and are believed to be far-reaching in their 

economic, political and social implication^."^^ The US, Herman Pollack told 

Sir Solly Zuckerman, Britain’s Chief Scientific Adviser, was “seeking new and 

different ways of expanding cooperation in space because we consider that there 

is a close connection between [xic] technological gap and the development of 

space te~hnology.”~~ 

There was a third, even more fundamental argument for supporting 

the development of a launcher in the ELDO framework. This was, in fact, 

the single most important reason why Pollock’s ad hoc working group of 

the NASC was asked to look again at the possibilities of sharing booster 

technology with foreign nations. It also led directly to the release of NSAM 

354, expressing American interest in helping ELDO. The argument, in the 

words of NASA Administrator James Webb, was that enhanced international 

collaboration in space would be “a means whereby foreign nations might be 

increasingly involved in space technology and diverted from the technology of 

nuclear weapons deli~ery.”~’ More precisely, it was by encouraging multilateral 

31. Quoted in Space Business Daily 25, no. 35 (18 April 1966): 286. 

32. NSAM 357,“The Technological Gap,” 25 November 1966, avahble online at http://www.lbjlib. 

utexas.edu/johnson/archives. hom/NSAMs/nsam357.gjf (accessed on 9 March 2005). Hornig’s official 

title was the Special Assistant to the President for Science andTechnology. 

33. “Preliminary Report on the Technological Gap Between U.S. and Europe,” attached to David 

Hornig’s letter to the President, 31 January 1967, folderTechnological Gap [l of21, box 46, Subject File, 

National Security File, LBJ Library. 

34. “Memorandum for the Files. Cooperation mth ELDO,” 6 May 1966, folder Cooperation in 

Space--Working Group on Expanded International Cooperation in Space ELDO #1 [2 of 21, box 14, 

National Security Files, Charles Johnson File, LBJ Library. 

35. Webb to Robert McNamara, 28 April 1966, record no. 14459, International Cooperation, 

International Cooperation and Foreign Countries, folder Miscellaneous Correspondence &om CODE 

I-International Relations 1958-1967, NASA Historical Reference Collection,Washingon, DC. 
250 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

organizations that the nonproliferation of missile technology at the national 

level could be controlled. A position paper prepared for the very first meeting 

of Pollack’s working group in May 1966 stressed this. Multilateral programs 

should be encouraged, it asserted, since 

[i]n such a framework rocket programs tend to be more open, 

serve peaceful uses and are subject to international control and 

absorb manpower and financial resources that might otherwise be 

diverted to purely national programs. National rocket programs 

tend to concentrate on militarily significant solid and storable 

liquid fueled systems, are less open, and less responsive to international controls.Any break up ofELDO might lead to strengthening national programs tending in the latter dire~tion.~~ 

Put differently, since European nations had limited resources to devote to 

their military and civilian space programs and had to make hard choices 

about priorities, the U.S. could use the carrot of technological sharing with 

ELDO to divert human and material resources away from national programs 

which were more difficult to control and which might see the proliferation of 

weapons delivery systems. 

It was the French national program which particularly bothered the U.S. 

On 26 November 1965, France had become the third space power by launching its own satellite with its own launcher, Diamant-A, from Hammaguir in 

Algeria. The feat was repeated in February 1966. This three-stage launcher 

combined “militarily significant solid and storable liquid fueled systems”-just 

the kind of technologq the U.S. did not want it to develop-in a highly successful vehicle derived from the national missile pr~gram.~’ In the light of 

these achievements and de Gaulle’s growing determination to affirm his independence of the EEC and the Atlantic alliance, “The US is concerned that, if 

ELDO were to be dissolved, France might devote more of its resources to a 

national, military-related program or that it might establish undesirable bilateral relationships for the construction of satellite launch vehi~les”~~-meaning 

that unless Britain and America boosted the organization, “the Soviets would 

36.T. H. E. Nesbitt, “Meeting No. 1, Committee on Expanded International Cooperation in Space 

Activities. Subject: Cooperation Involving Launchers and LaunchingTechnology,” 17 May 1966, folder 

Cooperation in Space--Working Group on Expanded International Cooperation in Space. ELDO #1 

[2 of 21, box 14, National Security Files, Charles Johnson File, LBJ Library. 

37. Diamant-A used a mixture of N,O,/UDMH (storable liquid fuels) in its first stage and solid fuel 

in the second and third stages. 

38. “US Cooperation with ELDO,” position paper, 21 July 1966, folder Cooperation in Space 

Working Group on Expanded International Cooperation in Space. ELDO #1 [2 of 21, box 14, Natlonal 

Security Files, Charles Johnson File, LBJ Library. 
TECHNOLOGY, FOREIGN POLICY, AND INTERNATIONAL COOPERATION. . . 25 1 

move into the vacuum if ELDO collap~ed.”~~ The U.S. had to contain this 

threat and to ensure that European institutions emerged “from the present 

crisis with their prestige, power and potential for building a united Europe 

as little impaired as po~sible.’”~ Developing advanced space technology in 

Europe and assisting ELDO to develop its launcher, in particular, were some 

of the many measures considered by the Johnson administration to achieve 

that objective in 1966. 

THE OBSTACLES TO THE SUPPORT FOR ELDO 

Two major obstacles stood in the way of these initiatives. Both were 

enshrined in National Security Action Memoranda. There was NSAM 294 of 

20 April 1964, which dealt with “U.S. Nuclear and Strategic Delivery System 

Assistance to France.” The second was NSAM 338 of 15 September 1965, 

defining “Policy Concerning U.S. Assistance in the Development of Foreign 

Communications Satellite Capability.’”’ 

NSAM 294 stated that since the administration opposed the development 

of a nuclear force outside the framework of NATO and that since France was 

doing all it could to evade the constraints of the Alliance, nothing should 

be done to help its nuclear weapons system (France first successfully tested 

its A-bomb in the Sahara in February 1960), including the “French national 

strategic nuclear delivery capability.” This included “exchanges of information 

and technology between the governments, sale of equipment, joint research 

and development activities, and exchanges between industrial and commercial 

organizations.” This obviously made collaboration with ELDO difficult since 

how could one be sure that technology that was shared with the organization 

would not leak through to the French military program?42 

NSAM 338 was less specific, referring instead to the policy guidelines 

established by General J. D. O’Connell, the President’s Special Assistant for 

Telecommunications, in a memorandum of 25 August 1965. These guidelines 

effectively extended the military constraints on the transfer of booster technology to cover specific commercial concerns. O’Connell’s memo stipulated 

39. Anonymous, “Memorandum for the Files, Cooperation with ELDO,” meeting with Zuckerman, 

6 May 1966, folder Cooperation in Space-Working Group on Expanded International Cooperation 

in Space. ELDO #1 [2 of 21, box 14, Nahond Security Files, Charles Johnson File, LBJ Library. 

40. Department of State to Amembassy Bonn 1209, outgoing telegram, 18 November 1965, signed 

[George] Ball, folder Germany Erhard Visit f12/65], 12/19-21/65, box 192, National Security File, 

Country File Europe and USSR, Germany, LBJ Library. 

41. NSAM 294, “U.S. Nuclear and Strategic Delivery System Assistance to France,” 20 April 1964, 

and NSAM 338, “Policy Concerning U.S. Assistance in the Development of Foreign Communications 

Satellite Capabihty,” 15 September 1965, both available online at http://www.IbjIib.utexas.edtr (accessed 

9 March 2005). 

42. NSAM 294,“U.S. Nuclear and Strategic Delivery System.” 
252 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

that if the U.S. was to help other countries develop a comsat (communications 

satellite) capability, it had to have guarantees that the foreign program was 

integrated into the single global system enshrined in the INTELSAT agreements of 1964. INTELSAT was the international consortium that owned 

and operated the international comsat system. It had 56 member nations in 

1967 (though neither China nor the Soviet Union were members). American 

interests were represented by COMSAT, a private corporation, 50 percent of 

whose stock was owned by communications carriers (like AT&T). Voting was 

weighted according to use, which made it “an unusually attractive international vehicle for the U.S.”43 since it had veto power inside INTELSAT at the 

time (its voice counted for 54 percent). What is more, the 1964 INTELSAT 

agreements (due to be renegotiated in 1969 to take account of the expected 

expansion in the use of comsat technology by other nations) stipulated that 

the U.S. weight could never drop below 50 percent: “in other words, we contr01.”~~ With this power in its pocket, the “core” of NSAM 338, as McGeorge 

Bundy explained to LBJ, was “to use our technological superiority to & 

courage commercial competition with COMSAT and/or wasteful investment 

in several duplicative Free World defense-related systems” (emphasis in the 

original) .45 To this end, the U.S. should “withhold provision of assistance to 

any foreign nation in the field of communications satellites which could significantly promote, stimulate or encourage proliferation of communications 

satellite systems” outside the INTELSAT framework, including “the provision 

of launching services or launch vehicles for communications satellite^.'"^ 

The significance of NSAM 338 for our story is that it extended the provisions of NSAM 294 beyond national security and foreign policy objectives to 

protect also U.S. busiaess interests4’ By defining launchers as a component of 

the “communications satellite system,” it included delivery systems inside the 

43. Charles Johnson to Walt Rostow, 13 July 1967, folder NSAM 338, box 7, National Security Files, 

LBJ Library. 

44. Ibid. 

45. McGeorge Bundy to the President, “Helping Others to Use Communications Satellites,” 13 

46. “Policy Concerning U.S. Assistance in the Development of Foreign Communications SateUlte 

s,” position paper, unsigned, 23 August 1965, folder NSAM 338, box 7, National Security 

Files, LBJ Library. 

47. It should he stressed that NSAM 338 was not restricted to protecting commercial interests, 

though it included them. As the memo from McGeorge Bundy that I cited earlier makes clear, there 

were also naaonal security concerns involved. The United States, he noted, would set up a separate 

national defense comsat system “where security demands” and would encourage “selected allies” 

(actually Britain and Canada) to “buy time” on this system for their security needs. Otherwise, he 

wanted everyone to use the single global system for all purposes. The United States thus wanted to 

discourage the proliferation of regional comsat systems both to linut international competition for 

a potentially lucrative market and to hmit the spread of parallel regional comsat systems for defense 

(McGeorge Bundy to the President, “Helping Others to Use Communications Satellites”). 

September 1965, folder NSAM 338, box 7, National Security Files, LBJ Library. 
TECHNOLOGY, FOREIGN POLICY, AND INTERNATIONAL COOPERATION.. . 253 

policies being ddended by COMSAT on behalf of the U.S. in INTELSAT. 

The sale of launch vehicles and launch services and technological assistance 

with the development of an indigenous launch capability were now conditional on the foreign clients’ guaranteeing that such launchers would not be 

used to subvert a single worldwide commercial satellite communications system then under U.S. control. As one senior administrator put it, “It is difficult 

to maintain international cooperation on this basis.”48 

FINDING A WAY AROUND THE OBSTACLES 

To overcome these obstacles to technology transfer, NASA and the State 

Department insisted that to promote U.S. foreign policy and business interests, 

one had to distinguish between dgerent types of technology and the spec@ foreign 

policy options that America wanted to promote. They were convinced that 

American leadership, and its ability to restrict the proliferation of weapons 

systems and comsats, was best achieved by treating technology transfer on a 

case-by-case basis and by “building high walls around small fields,” as it is 

sometimes called today, rather than by blanket restrictions which treated both 

technology and foreign policy as seamless wholes. 

To achieve this, a number of crucial distinctions had to be made. Current 

U.S. policy was dominated by the “dual-use” aspect of boosters as both ballistic 

missiles and as stages of satellite launchers. This was too simple, Webb pointed 

out: “If we could focus our controls on the weapons themselves, we might 

even hope to free vehicle technology for maximum stimulus of space activity 

abroad.”49 Consider the constraints on booster technology imposed by NSAM 

294. As Webb pointed out to Defense Secretary McNamara, although highenergy, cryogenic, or nonstorable upper stages might conceivably be employed 

for military purposes, in practice they would probably not be deployed in 

that way. “Even in the case of France,” Webb stressed, “it seems likely that 

encouragement to proceed with upper stage hydrogen/oxygen systems now 

under development might divert money and people from a nuclear delivery 

program rather than contribute to that which is already under way using quite 

dift‘erent technology.”50 Guidance and control technology was another gray area. 

An American company had recently been refused a license to assist France with 

48. Charles Johnson to Walt Rostow, 13 July 1967. 

49. Webb to Johnson, 26 April 1966, record no. 14459, International Cooperation and Foreign 

Countries, folder Miscellaneous Correspondence from CODE I-International Relations 1958-1967, 

International Cooperation, NASA Historical Reference Collection, Washington, DC. 

50. Webb to McNamara, 28 April 1966, and reply, Bob [McNamara] to Jim Webb], 14 May 1966, 

record no. 14459, International Cooperation and Foreign Countries, International Cooperation, folder 

Miscellaneous Correspondence from CODE I-International Relations 1958-1967, NASA Historical 

Reference Collection, Washington, DC. 
254 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

the development of gyro technology. But as Richard Barnes, the Director of 

Frutkin’s Cooperative Projects Division, pointed out to the chair of the NSAM 

294 review group, gyros of comparable weight and performance were already 

available in France.The release of inertial guidance technology to Germany had 

been officially sanctioned in July 1964 on condition that it was not employed 

“for ballistic missile use or de~elopment.”~~ And, as we mentioned earlier, a 

strapped-down “guidance” package used on the Scout launcher had already been 

exported to Japan. Here, and in general, wrote Webb to McNamara, rather than 

a blanket restriction, “we might be better off were we to concentrate on a few 

very essential restrictions, such as advanced guidance and reentry systems” (my 

emphasis). In a supportive reply to Jim, Bob reassured the NASA Administrator 

that he strongly supported international cooperation in space and that he had 

directed his Department of Defense staff “to be as liberal as possible regarding 

the release of space technology for payloads and other support items.”52 

One important consideration shaping the argument for a revision in policy 

was that restrictions on the export of some items were now redundant since 

European booster technology was advancing rapidly without external help. It 

was also counterproductive to deny a nation a technology if it could easily and 

quickly be obtained from a source other than the United States: this would not 

simply be to the detriment of American business, but also to U.S. foreign policy, 

particularly if that source was the Soviet Union. Thus Barnes suggested (and 

Webb concurred) that the interpretation of NSAM 294 on the export of booster 

technology needed to be more specific. The guidelines should deny to a foreign 

power “& those few critical items which are clearly intended for use in a 

national program, would significantly and directly benefit that program in terms 

of time and quality or cost, and are unavdable in comparable substitute form 

elsewhere than the US” (emphasis in the original). The guidelines should also 

explicitly recognize that it was in America’s interest to promote European space 

collaboration, so that technology transfer intended for multinational programs 

like ELDO (and ESRO-the European Space Research Organisation) would 

“normally be approved” so long as the items were “of only marginal benefit to 

the national program” or “were available elsewhere than the US without undue 

difficulty or delay.”53 In short, requests for technology transfer were to be treated 

on a case-by-case basis and should take into account the kind of technology at 

issue, its likely uses in practice, the global state of the market for the technology, 

51. NSAM 312,“Nabonal Poky on Release of Inertial GuidanceTechnology to Germany,” 10 July 

52.Webb to McNamara, 28 April 1966, and reply, Bob [McNamara] to Jim [Webb], 14 May 1966. 

53. Richard Barnes to Scott George, Chairman, NSAM 294 Renew Group, Department of State, 

15 April 1966, record no. 14459, International Cooperahon and Foreign Countries, International 

Cooperation, folder Miscellaneous Correspondence fi-om CODE I-International Relations 1958- 

1967, NASA Historical Reference Collection,Washngton, DC. 

1964, available online at http://www.lbjlib.utexas.edu (accessed 9 March 2005). 
TECHNOLOGY, FOREIGN POLICY, AND INTERNATIONAL COOPERATION.. . 255 

and the importance of collaboration &om a foreign policy perspective. The last, 

along with U.S. business interests, was not to be sacrificed on the altar of an 

overcautious, generalized reluctance to share technology just because it might 

encourage programs which sections of the US. administration disapproved of. 

Frutkin was also keen to relax the constraints on the sharing of comsat 

technology that were embodied in NSAM 338. Europeans, he wrote, were 

persuaded that the United States was “seeking by all means, fair or foul, to 

maintain political and technical control of Intel~at.”~~ He was convinced that, 

to allay their suspicions, the U.S. had to be prepared to provide launch services 

on a reimbursable basis for (experimental) foreign communication satellites. 

This would “extend the market for American vehicles, remove some incentive 

for independent foreign development of boosters, and assure that we could 

continue to exercise critical leverage in foreign comsat activities rather than lose 

such leverage.” Frutkin also favored the removal of restrictions on the export of 

satellite technology as such, including the kick-stage and propulsion technology 

needed to place a communications satellite in geosynchronous orbit. 

An anonymous internal memorandum argued that technological sharing 

was the best way to enroll foreign firms and their governments in American 

comsat policy. By allowing “United States firms to enter cooperative arrangements with the communications and electronics manufacturing industry in 

other countries,” notably in Western Europe, industries in these countries 

would develop the technical know-how needed for them “to compete effectively for contracts for the space segment ofthe global communications system.” 

This would “remove a current irritant, primarily expressed by the French but 

also shared by the British, Italians and Germans, about their inability to supply 

hardware for the INTELSAT space segment.” And even if such technological sharing did not irreversibly lock these European countries into the single 

global system favored by the U.S., one could expect them to have a “greater 

incentive” to collaborate with America in developing that global system. One 

might also expect them to be more cooperative and sympathetic to the U.S. 

position during the renegotiation of the INTELSAT agreements scheduled 

for 1969. Anyway, if the U.S. did nothing to help these nations, they would 

eventually develop the technology on their own, without American help, 

and would be quite capable of establishing separate, regional communications 

satellite systems in due course.55 As Frutkin explained, “(a) We do need to 

54. A. W. Frutkin to Mr. Hilburn, “Memorandum for Mr. Hdburn-AAD, Policies Relevant to ‘69 

Revision of Intelsat Agreement,” 11 April 1966, record no. 14459, International Cooperation and 

Foreign Countries, International Cooperation, folder Miscellaneous Correspondence &om CODE 

I-International Relations 1958-1967, NASA Historical Reference Collection,Washington, DC. 

55. “Communications Satellite Technology,” undated and unsigned memorandum, but obviously 

written around April 1966, folder Cooperation in Space-Working Group on Expanded International 

Cooperation in Space, ELDO #1 [2 of 21, box 14, National Security Files, Charles Johnson Files, LBJ 

Library. 
256 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

improve our situation in Intelsat with specific reference to the 1969 negotiations. (b) We already have a strong technical lead in the comsat field. (c) We 

already have an adequate voting majority in Intelsat. (d) We can rely upon 

our technical, moral and financial strength to assure continuing leadershipwithout seeking to deny technology to our partners in Intel~at.”~~ Rather, 

then, use technological sharing as an instrument to divert foreign firms and 

governments into working with U.S. industry within the framework of a 

single global system where the U.S. was the dominant partner than have them 

defiantly develop an independent national or regional comsat capability over 

which the U.S. had no control and which could be used to bargain for a major 

revision of the INTELSAT agreements against U.S. interests. 

I have stressed the pressure which foreign policy concerns played in arguing for technological sharing with ELDO. Implicit in my account is another 

dimension of the issue: the need to promote and channel the interests of 

American industry. Indeed, NASA officials like Frutkin mediated between 

firms who wanted to export technology abroad and the Office of Munitions 

Control in the State Department, which authorized them to do so. As Frutkin 

explained to Margrave, who directed the Office, American firms were putting NASA, the Department of Defense, and the State Department under 

extreme pressure to export nonmilitary vehicle technology to individual 

national firms in Europe.57 By releasing export controls on the transfer of this 

technology to ELDO, one could at once satisfy their demands and divert them 

from the national to the multilateral level in line with U.S. foreign policy. We 

see, then, that arguments for relaxing constraints on booster technology were 

intended not simply to advance multinationalism in Europe and to help 

ELDO, but also to satisfy pressure for access to the launcher construction market from U.S. business. This stakeholder in international space collaboration is 

almost always ignored; it should not be. 

DENOUEMENT 

Those administrators who were for, and those were against, relaxing constraints on technology transfer to ELDO shared a concern for nonproliferation. 

They differed on how best to achieve this. NASA and the State Department 

argued that by sharing high-energy nonstorable liquid-fuel launcher technology with ELDO, they could divert resources away from national military 

programs for which such fuels were obsolete. Similarly, they argued that by 

letting U.S. firms help European industry to build up its comsat capability, 

56. Frutkin to Hilburn,“Memorandum for Mr. Hilburn.” 

57. Frutkin to Margrave, 1 April 1965, record no. 14465, International Cooperation and Foreign 

Countries, International Cooperation, folder International Policy Manual Material &om Code I, NASA 

Historical Reference Collection, Washington, DC. 
TECHNOLOGY, FOREIGN POLICY, AND INTERNATIONAL COOPERATION.. . 257 

they could more easily engage European governments in the single global 

system promoted and controlled by Washington at the expense of a proliferation of competing regional communications satellite systems which could 

serve independent commercial and military needs. The defenders of NSAM 

338 were adamant, however, that the U.S. should do nothing to help other 

countries develop comsats, or the powerful launchers needed to place them 

in geostationary orbit, without cast-iron guarantees that these would only 

be used in the INTELSAT framework. For them, technological assistance 

in either of these domains could only hasten proliferation, not contain it. By 

summer 1967, it was clear that the latter had won the day. 

The reasons for this are complex and will be dealt with very briefly here. 

Developments in Europe played a role. ELDO (temporarily) survived its crisis 

and, by September 1966, had reoriented its program unambiguously in favor of 

developing a launcher called Europa I1 that achieved geostationary capability by 

adding a fourth, French-built solid-fuel stage to the previous ELDO-A rocket. In 

parallel, France and Germany decided to fuse their national comsat projects in a 

joint experimental telecommunications satellite called Symphonie to be launched 

by Europa I1 from the new French base in Guyana.58 ELDO had moved from an 

artificial political construct to an organization with a well-defined technical 

mission and was far less vulnerable to offers of American help. 

From the American point of view, to channel this “European fixation on 

comsats and launch vehicles,” as Richard Barnes put it, the U.S. had to make 

an unambiguous offer for technological assistance in domains which satisfied 

the interests of both parties.59 With cryogenic fuels no longer being considered 

and with France responsible for the kick-stage into geostationary orbit, this 

was going to be vey difficult. Divisions within the administration on how 

best to interpret the requirements of NSAM 338 made it virtually impossible. 

Frutkin described the state of play in August 1966 to Webb, just before the 

NASA Administrator was to leave on a crucial European tour to discuss possible 

collaborative projects. While the “general atmosphere for space cooperation 

with the United States may have improved slightly,” thanks to the initiatives by 

NASA and the State Department which we have described in this paper, they 

had done little more than “clear the air somewhat.” The Europeans, Frutkin told 

Webb, “know of no progress in easing US restrictions upon communications 

satellite technology,” and “it may be sometime” before the progress that had been 

made in Washington could be divulged to them. Webb was therefore to repeat 

the standard answer to the usual request for comsat launch assistance: “that we 

could certainly give consideration to such a proposition on the assumption that 

58.The official agreement between the two governments was signed on 6 June 1967. 

59.RJHB toAWF,“The‘Webb Commission,’”5 May 1967, recordno. 14459, International Cooperation 

and Foreign Countries, International Cooperation, folder Miscellaneous Correspondence from CODE 

I-International Relations 1958-1967, NASA Historical Reference Collection, Washngton, DC. 
258 CRITICAL ISSUES INTHE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

the European countries take their INTELSAT commitment to a single global 

system as seriously as we do.”60 By virtue of this approach, there was, to quote 

Barnes again, a “deterioration of ‘climate for cooperation’ caused by (1) US 

policies and actions within the Intelsat, and (2) US export policies in support 

of the ‘single global system.”’This led to “European reaction of suspicion and 

distrust to US offer to escalate cooperation.’’61 

As Barnes remarked, the breakdown in trust between the two sides of the 

Atlantic was fueled by a very public, high-level offer to “escalate” space collaboration with West Germany and other European allies, which had gained momentum throughout 1966.62 In an exchange of toasts between President Johnson 

and Chancellor Ludwig Erhard at a state banquet on 20 December 1965, LBJ 

suggested that existing scientific cooperation should be extended to embrace 

“an even more ambitious plan to permit us to do together what we cannot do 

alone.” The President gave two examples of “demanding” and “quite complex” 

collaborative projects which would “contribute vastly to our mutual knowledge 

and to our mutual skills”: a solar probe and a Jupiter probe. He also announced 

that NASA Administrator Webb would be traveling to Europe shortly to &scuss 

these ideas in Germany and with other European government^.^^ 

The target and timing of Johnson’s offer were not coincidental. Erhard was 

a convinced and reliable American ally and was deeply hostile to de Gaulle’s 

attempts to undermine the existing structures of both NATO and the EEC. As 

Secretary of State Dean Rusk stressed to James Webb, with the Chancellor boldly 

resisting this attack on European institutions, “it [was] politically important for 

the United States to cooperate as closely as possible with Germany.” Increasing 

“the vigor and scope of space cooperation” with the country would be tangible, 

“positive evidence of constructive American interest in Germany,” and it would 

encourage Erhard to take the lead in advancing U.S. policies in the region.64 

The fanfare surrounding this offer for expanded scientific cooperation contrasts sharply with the reluctance to disclose publicly the possibility for technological collaboration with ELDO. And it was counterproductive in many 

respects. The American attempt to isolate de Gaulle was evident for all to see; 

indeed, Erhard was forced to relinquish his post in November 1966, accused of 

60. Frutkin to Webb, “Memorandum for Mr. Webb,” 11 August 1966, record no. 14618, folder 

Germany (West), 1956-1990, Foreign Countries, International Cooperation and Foreign Countries, 

NASA Historical Reference Collection,Washington, DC. 

61. RJHB to AWF,“The ‘Webb Commission.”’ 

62.This initiative is worthy of a separate paper; I give only the barest outline here. 

63. “Exchange of Toasts Between President Lyndon B. Johnson and Chancellor Ludwig Erhard of 

the Federal Republic of Germany (In the State Dining Room),” 20 December 1965, folder Germany 

ErhardVisit [12/65], 12/19-21/65, box 192, National Security Files, Country Flle Europe and the 

USSR, Germany, LBJ Library. 

64. Dean Rusk to James Webb, 29 August 1966, record no. 14618, folder Germany (West), Foreign 

Countries, International Cooperation and Foreign Countries, NASA Historical Reference Collection, 

Washington, DC. 
TECHNOLOGY, FOREIGN POLICY, AND INTERNAT~ONAL COOPERATION.. . 259 

mismanaging the economy and of being too pro-American and anti-French. 

The cost of the kind of projects discussed (about $100 million) was deemed to 

be excessive, given the resources available for space science and European priorities (although eventually Germany did embark on a bilateral venture with the 

U.S., the $lOO-million Helios project to send two major spacecraft within 45 

million miles of the Sun).65 Finally, with the U.S. publicly insisting on the need 

to respect the INTELSAT agreements, the American offer was also interpreted 

by some as a strategy to divert scarce European resources into science and away 

from applications, notably telecommunications. “All in all,” wrote Frutkin to 

Webb in August 1966, “we must say the President’s proposal got off to a poor 

start due to misunderstandings which are inevitable when a proposition of this 

sort is made in the headlines without preparation of the ground.”66 Barnes put 

it pithily: because of European “suspicion and distrust,” aggravated by President 

Johnson’s spectacular overtures to Chancellor Erhard, there was “no prospect for 

escalating cooperation with Europe unless (1) US is willing to modi$ its present 

export control policies, and (2) we could offer other possibilities for cooperation 

in areas of interest to them (i.e., comsats and ~ehicles).”~’This was not to be. 

CONCLUSION 

The defeat ofthose inside NASA and the State Department who considered 

sharing communications satellite and booster technology with Europe in mid1960s was simply the first of a series of setbacks for those in the administration 

who believed that technological sharing could be used to unite Europeans 

around projects whch were at once useful to them and compatible with the 

maintenance of U.S. leadership in strategc areas. Indeed, the battle was repeated 

just a few years later with the same result. European hopes to be integrally 

engaged at the technological level in the post-Apollo program, sparked by 

NASA Administrator Tom Paine in the late 1960s, were soon dashed. The 

compromise that ensued left Germany taking the lead in building a shirtsleeveenvironment scientific laboratory that could fit in the Space Shuttle’s cargo 

bay and that, crucially, preserved the basic principles of clean interfaces and no 

exchange of funds more or less intact. Indeed, Europe’s ongoing struggle to be 

a genuine partner at the level of technological and managerial sharing with 

NASA and the US. might suggest that, when the chips are down, the need by 

powerful forces in the U.S. to protect national industry and national security will 

always prevail over foreign policy considerations. For them, American leadership 

is best preserved by denying sensitive technology, not by finding ways to use 

technological sharing to orient a partner’s program in line with U.S. interests. 

65.The project is discussed in Fruthn, “International Cooperation in Space.” 

66. Frutkin, “Memorandum for Mr.Webb.” 

67. RJHB to AWE “The ‘Webb Commission.”’ 
260 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

The negotiations over the ISS, particularly with Russia, show that this is not 

always so.68 Indeed, it is striking that here, NASA has departed from past practice 

in accepting critical-path contributions from Canada and Italy and, more significantly, in accepting that there be a joint U.S.-Russian core and ihastructure as 

the foundation of the program. Sadeh has enumerated the foreign policy motivations for this move. Some were purely symbolic, e.g., to signal an end to the 

Cold War and Russia’s entry into the club of advanced Western industrial states. 

Others were fdy in line with the use of technology as an instrument of foreign 

policy as we have described it here. In particular, in these negotiations, as in the 

debates over the help to ELDO 30 years earlier, technological sharing was an 

instrument to steer Russia’s civilian and military high-tech sectors along paths in 

line with American interests. Thus, integrating Russia into the core of the Space 

Station “enhances U.S. efforts to strengthen Russia’s commitment to adhere to 

guidelines of international non-proliferation standards regardmg ballistic missiles 

and nuclear technology, lends support to U.S. efforts to privatize and dedtarize 

the high-technology sector in Russia . . . and encourages Russian scientists and 

engineers to work on ‘peaceful’ projects rather than selling their talents to other, 

possibly hostile, states.”69 It also, of course, diverts scarce Russian resources away 

from projects of which the U.S. might not approve. In short, be kinds Ofarguments for technological sharing with ELDO in 1966 were still being used when 

dealing with Russia in 1996.The difference is that ELDO had nothing to offer 

at the technical level, while Russia could use its extensive experience in human 

spaceflight as a bargaining chip to win some key concessions.The lesson is clear: 

if we want to make sense of international collaboration in space from a U.S. perspective, we need focus carefully not only on what technology the U.S. has to 

offer, but what its potential partner has to give. In any event, as I have stressed, we 

simply cannot grasp the dynamics of international cooperation in space if we do 

not situate the scientific and technological content of the collaborative venture at 

the core of our analysis and relate it to strategies to maintain American “leadership” and some measure of control over the space programs of her partners. 

I should like to thank Roger Launius for helpful comments on a previous 

draft of this paper. 

68. Two important studies of policy regarding the Space Station are John M. Logsdon’s Together in 

Orbit: The Origins .f International Participation in the Space Station (Washington, DC: Monographs in 

Aerospace History, No. 11, November 1998) and Howard E. McCurdy’s The Space Station Decision: 

Incremental Politics and Technological Choice (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1990). 

69. Eligar Sadeh, “Techmcal, Organizational, and Pohtical Dynamics of the International Space 

Station Program,” Space Policy 20, no. 3 (August 2004): 171-188. Sadeh makes no systematic dminction 

between the dimensions of the collaboration which were, indeed, symbolic and the far more substantive, 

material items that I have quoted here. Indeed, quite mistakenly in my view, he reduces all these policy 

considerations to the symbolic 1evel.This evades the question of how the United States uses technology 

to steer the space and high-tech programs of its partners in particular directions. 
SECTION IV 

ACCESS TO SPACE 

INTRODUCTION 

othing has been more significant for the long-term development of the 

Space Age than the ability to reach Earth orbit. When Columbia was 

lost on Saturday morning, 1 February 2003, one of the issues the accident 

brought to the fore was the long and complex history of the Space Shuttle’s 

origins, evolution, and operation, as well as the continuing challenge of space 

access. Even more, the accident opened the issue of space access from the 

dawn of the Space Age in the 1950s to the present. This is a rich and inviting 

history, requiring serious inquiry, critical thinking, and hard-edged analysis. 

The first-generation launchers were all ballistic-missile-derived vehicles that 

served well; with some upgrades over the years, they are still the backbone of 

the U.S. space launch fleet. Indeed, Redstone, Atlas, Titan, Delta, and Saturn 

were all scaled-up variants of the ICBMs, but with notable improvements. 

The Space Shuttle, the only human-carrying vehicle of the United States 

since the Apollo program of more than 30 years ago, followed those earlier 

space launch systems and has served many space-access needs for more than a 

quarter century.’ 

After more than four decades of effort, access to space remains a difficult challenge. Although space transport services should not be measured by 

terrestrial standards, if the grand plans of space visionaries and entrepreneurs 

are to be carried out, there is a real need to move beyond currently available 

technologies. Unfortunately, the high cost associated with space launch from 

1950 to 2005 has demonstrated the slowest rate of improvement of all space 

technologies. Everyone in space activities shares a responsibility for addressing 

this critical technical problem. The overwhelming influence that space access 

has on all aspects of civil, commercial, and military space efforts indicates that 

it should enjoy a top priority.2 

Of course, a key element in the spacefaring vision long held in the United 

States is the belief that inexpensive, reliable, safe, and easy spaceflight is attainable. Indeed, from virtually the beginning of the 20th century, those interested 

1. For a discussion of the overarchmg space-access history, see Roger D. Launius and D e m s R . 

Jenkins, e&., To Reach the High Frontier:A History ofU.S. Launch Vehicles (Lexington: University Press of 

Kentucky, 2002). 

2. More than 50 space-access studies have reached this conclusion over the last 40 years. See 

Roger D. Launius and Howard E. McCurdy, Imagining Space: Achievements, Projections, Possibilities, 

1950-2050 (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2001), chap. 4; United States Congress, Office of 

Technology Assessment, Launch Optionsfor the Future: Special Report (Washington, DC: Government 

Printing Office, 1984); Vice President’s Space Policy Advisory Board, “The Future of U.S. Space 

Launch Capability,” Task Group Report, November 1992, NASA Historical Reference Collection, 

Washington, DC; NASA Office of Space Systems Development, Access to Space Study: Summary 

Report (Washington, DC: NASA, 1994). 
264 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

in the human exploration of space have viewed as central to that endeavor the 

development of vehicles of flight that travel easily to and from Earth orbit. The 

more technically minded recognized that once humans had achieved Earth orbit 

about 200 miles up, the vast majority of the atmosphere and the gravity well had 

been conquered, and that persons were now about halfway to anywhere they 

might want to 

Although a large number of issues could be explored in the history of 

space access, five central legacies offer tantalizing possibilities for space history 

and represent critical issues in the field. These include the following: 

1. The limitations of chemical rocket technology. 

2. The ICBM legacy of space access. 

3. The costly nature of space access. 

4. Launch vehicle reliability. 

5. The value of reusable launch vehicles (RLVs) versus expendable launch 

vehicles (ELVs). 

The two chapters that follow review each of these legacies, sometimes explicitly but more often indirectly, and raise serious policy issues that must inform 

any debate concerning access to space.4 

In chapter 9, John M. Logsdon asks the poignant question, why is there 

no replacement for the Space Shuttle despite the longevity of the issue on the 

national agenda? From almost the first flight of the Space Shuttle in 1981, 

NASA realized that planning should begin on an eventual replacement. Most 

observers in those early years of the program believed that the current fleet 

could remain operational for about 20 years but that by about the year 2000, 

replacement would probably be necessary. Understanding that it took most of 

a decade, sometimes even more, to carry a major spaceflight program to fruition, they thought it important to begin the process of building a successor 

second-generation reusable space-access vehicle capable of human launch. Yet, 

as of 2005 and despite a plethora of studies, little has been accompli~hed.~ 

Logsdon asserts that there was a fundamental “failure of national space 

policy over the past three plus decades, and that the lack of a replacement for the 

Space Shuttle is just one of the most obvious manifestations of that policy failure.” At sum, he finds that the “lack of a clear ‘mandate’ for human spaceflight 

3. G. Harry Stine, Halfway to Anywhere: Achieving America’s Destiny in Space (New York: M. Evans 

and Co., 1996). 

4. Roger D. Launius, “Between a Rocket and a Hard Place: Legacies and Lessons from 50 

Years of Space Launch” (presentation in Lessons Learned Session of the 36th American Institute 

of Aeronautics and Astronautics [AIAA] Joint Propulsion Conference, sponsored by AIAA Solid 

Rocket Technical Committee [SRTC], Huntsville, AL, July 17, 2000). 

5. See Roger D. Launius, “After Columbia: The Space Shuttle Program and the Crisis in Space 

Access,” Astropolitics 2 (July-September 2004): 277-322. 
INTRODUCTION - SECTION IV 265 

over the past 35 years has meant that the U.S. human spaceflight program, and 

indeed the NASA program overall, has been sustained by a complex coalition 

of interests, not by a clearly articulated national goal and a stable political consensus in support of achieving that goal.”6 This is an important observation, for 

it gets to the heart of the overarching issue of rationales for human space exploration. Those rationales have not proven especially compelling, and NASA and 

its human spaceflight effort have been forced to deal with a lack of motivating 

reasons for the Agency’s activities since the Apollo program. 

Instead of developing a finely honed and convincing rationale for the 

necessity of humans in space, NASA has cobbled together a loose coalition of 

government interests, industry contractors, politicians of all stripes who are 

supportive because of “pork” for districts as well as patriotism, and spaceflight 

enthusiasts who dream of becoming a multiplanetary species. They came 

together to support the Shuttle as a means of achieving reliable, assured, and 

flexible access to space and have continued to support it to the present because 

of the lack of anything better-however “better” might be defined by the 

various interest groups-on the horizon. 

Logsdon offers the bold assertion that the reason for undertaking human 

spaceflight was reconsidered by the nation soon after the United States began 

to fly astronauts in 1961 and that this reflection has led to a less supportive 

public commitment than NASA or the spaceflight community would like. 

“The people of the United States and their government have been willing 

over the past 35 years to continue a human spaceflight program,” he writes, 

“but only at a level of funding that has forced it to constantly operate on the 

edge of viability.” Logsdon concludes, “The lack of a replacement for the 

Space Shuttle is a symptom of this larger reality.” 

Logsdon goes on to ask how badly Americans want to fly humans in space 

and finds that the answer to that is “not very badly.” Accordingly, at least by 

the time of post-Apollo planning, the United States, through the democratic 

process, had reached the conclusion that spaceflight in general, and human 

spaceflight particularly, had to stand behind a long list of other national needs. 

Its funding level would be something less than 1 percent of the federal budget 

per year, and within that budget, NASA should advance a useful space exploration agenda. Logsdon concludes that spaceflight enthusiasts have failed to 

align their vision of the future with the democratically arrived-at decisions 

relative to space policy. In other words, something less than the bold visions of 

the past are necessary in the realities of the present and the future. 

At sum, Logsdon concludes that both the community of spaceflight advocates in the United States and the personnel of NASA have overemphasized 

6. John M. Logsdon, “‘A Failure of National Leadership’: Why No Replacement for the Space 

Shuttle?” chap. 9 in this volume. 
266 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

human spaceflight’s centrality to the modern nation. Instead, he argues for a 

more realistic perspective that reduces the spaceflight agenda to a realm that 

might be successful with the funding available. But a question that must be 

asked is, despite an unwillingness by the public to open the treasury more fully 

to achieve the human spaceflight vision, would the American public accept a 

scaled-back program that is far less grandiose? More important for the policy 

debate concerning a replacement for the Space Shuttle, however, would the 

American public accept an end to the human spaceflight mission that NASA 

has conducted since 1961, since failure to replace the vehicle signals that end? 

Only time will tell if this is how the policy decisions relating to the Shuttle 

replacement effort will turn out. 

In chapter 10, Andrew J. Butrica assesses the historical debate over reusable launch vehicles versus expendable launch vehicles. RLV advocates have 

been convincing in their argument that the only course leading to “efficient 

transportation to and from the earth” would be RLVs and have made the case 

repeatedly since the late 1960s: Their model for a prosperous future in space is 

the airline industry, with its thousands of flights per year and its exceptionally 

safe and reliable operations. Several models exist for future RLVs, however, 

and all compete for the attention-and the development dollars-of the federal government. 

Prior to the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs of the 1960s, virtually everyone involved in space advocacy envisioned a future in which 

humans would venture into space abozrd winged, reusable vehicles. That 

was the vision from Hermann Oberth in the 1920s through Wernher von 

Braun in the 1950s to the U.S. Air Force’s X-20 Dyna-Soar program in the 

early 1960~.~ Because cjf the pressure of the Cold War, NASA chose to abandon that approach to space access in favor of ballistic capsules that could be 

placed atop launchers originally developed to deliver nuclear warheads to the 

Soviet Union. NASA developed its human-rated ballistic launch and recovery technology at enormous expense and used it with a 100-percent success 

rate between 1961 and 1975. As soon as Apollo was completed, NASA chose 

to retire that ballistic technology, despite its genuine serviceability, in favor 

of a return to that earlier winged, reusable vehicle. The Space Shuttle was 

the result? 

7. This was the argument made to obtain approval for the Space Shuttle. See The Post-Apollo 

Space Program: A Report for the Space Task Group (Washington, DC: National Aeronautics and Space 

Adminktrahon, September 1969), pp. 1,6. 

8. This quest has been well documented in Ray A. Williamson and Roger D. Launius, “Rocketry 

and the Origins of Space Flight,” in To Reach the High Frontier, ed. Launius and Jenkins, pp. 33-69. 

9. On this issue, see T. A. Heppenheimer, The Space Shuttle Decision: NASA’s Search for a Reusable 

Space Vehicle (Washington, DC: NASA SP-4221, 1999); Roger D. Launius, “NASA and the Decision 

to Build the Space Shuttle, 1969-72,” The Historian 57 (autumn 1994): 17-34. 
INTRODUCTION - SECTION IV 267 

Then there is an alternative position that suggests that the most appropriate approach to space access is through the use of throwaway “big, dumb 

boosters” that are inexpensive to manufacture and operate. Although reusable rockets may seem to be an attractive cost-saving alternative to expendables because they allow repeated use of critical components such as rocket 

motors and structural elements, ELV advocates claim, they actually offer a 

false promise of savings. ,This is because all RLV savings are predicated on 

maximizing usage of a small number of vehicles over a very long period of 

time for all types of space launch requirements. Accordingly, cost savings are 

realized only when an RLV flies many times over many years. That goal is 

unattainable, they claim, because it assumes that there will be no (or very few) 

accidents in the reusable fleet throughout its lifespan.” 

The reality, ELV advocates warn, is that the probability of all RLV components’ operating without catastrophic failure throughout the lifetime of the 

vehicle cannot be assumed to be 100 percent. Indeed, the launch reliability 

rate of even relatively “simple” ELVs-those without upper stages or spacecraft 

propulsion modules and with significant operational experience-peaks at 98 

percent with the Delta 11, and that took 30 years of operations to achieve. To be 

sure, most ELVs achieve a reliability rate of 90 to 92 percent-again, only after 

a maturing of the system has taken place. The Space Shuttle, a partially reusable 

system, has attained a launch reliability rate of slightly more than 98 percent, 

but only through extensive and costly redundant systems and safety checks. In 

the case of a new RLV, or a new ELV for that matter, a higher failure rate has 

to be assumed because of a lack of experience with the system. Moreover, RLV 

use doubles the time of exposure of the vehicle to failure because the vehicle 

must also be recovered and be reusable after refurbishment. To counter this 

challenge, more and better reliability has to be built into the system, and this 

exponentially increases both R&D and operational costs.” 

Designing for one use only, those arguing for ELV development suggest, simplifies the system enormously. One use of a rocket motor, guidance 

system, and the like means that it needs to function correctly only one time. 

Acceptance of an operational reliability of 90 percent or even less would 

10. Barbara A. Luxenberg, “Space Shuttle Issue Brief #IB73091,” Library of Congress Congressional 

Research Service Major Issues System, 7 July 1981, NASA Historical Reference Collection; Economic 

Analysis of New Space Transportation Systems: Executive Summary (Princeton, NJ: Mathematica, Inc., 1971); 

General Accounting Office, Analysis of Cost Estimates for the Space Shuttle and Two Alternate Programs 

(Washmgon, DC: General Accounting Office, 1973); William G. Holder and Wihm D. Siuru, Jr., 

“Some Thoughts on Reusable LaunchVehicles,” Air University Review 22 (November-December 1970): 

51-58; Office of Technology Assessment, Reducing Launch Operations Costs: New Technologies and Practices 

(Washington, DC: US. Congress, Office of Technology Assessment, 1988). 

11. Stephen A. Book, “Inventory Requirements for Reusable Launch Vehicles” (paper presented 

at the Space Technology & Applications International Forum [STAIF-991, Albuquerque, NM, 

copy in possession of the author). 
268 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

further reduce the costs incurred in designing and developing a new ELV. 

Indeed, many experts believe that reliability rates cannot be advanced more 

than another 1.5 percent above the 90-percent mark without enormous effort, 

effort that would be strikingly cost-inefficient.12 

The debate is far from decided. As Butrica shows in this essay, human 

spaceflight advocates seem driven toward RLVs for space access. This has been 

an enormously costly perspective over time and directly affects the search for a 

replacement for the Space Shuttle. Butrica recounts the depressing story of failed 

attempts to build new vehicles and their eventual cancellation. 

Collectively, Logsdon and Butrica encapsulate a critical issue for both the 

history of NASA and the current policy arena as the space agency struggles to 

deal with an aging Shuttle fleet, a major reorientation of its mission, and prospects for a post-Columbia-accident spacefaring future. 

12. B. Peter Leonard and William A. Kisko, “Predicting Launch Vehicle Failure,” Aerospace 

America (September 1989): 36-38, 46; Robert G. Bramscher, “A Survey of Launch Vehicle 

Failures,” Spaceflight 22 (November-December 1980): 51-58. 
CHAPTER 9 

“A FAILURE OF NATIONAL LEADERSHIP”: 

WHY No REPLACEMENT FOR THE SPACE SHUTTLE? 

John M. Logsdon 

f the policy for the future of U.S. civilian space activity first laid out by I President George W. Bush on 14 January 2004 is pursued, the United States 

will retire the Space Shuttle from service in 2010. Ending Shuttle flights will 

leave the United States without its own capability to carry its astronauts into 

orbit until a replacement crew-carrying vehicle makes its first flight with 

astronauts aboard. According to the Bush “Vision for Space Exploration,” this 

may not happen until 2014.’ As leading space historian Roger D. Launius has 

commented, “The inability to ensure a continued capability for human space 

access has placed the United States in a situation that is unenviable and unfortunate as the twenty-first century begin^."^ 

This essay attempts to set out the reasons why the United States has found 

itself in this “unenviable and unfortunate” situation, with a focus on why the 

country had not, by the time of the Space Shuttle Columbia accident on 1 

February 2003, developed a replacement for the Shuttle as a U.S. means for 

carrying humans into space. That same question was asked by the Columbia 

Accident Investigation Board (CAIB) set up in the immediate aftermath of 

the Columbia tragedy. (I was a member of that 13-person group.) In addition 

to its investigation of the physical and organizational causes of the accident, 

CAIB, in its 26 August 2003 report, offered brief but pointed observations 

on the broader policy context within which the accident took place and on 

“future directions for the U.S. in pace."^ This kind oflook ahead was not part 

of CAIB’s original charter; it became part of the CAIB focus after members of 

Congress asked the Board Chair, retired Admiral Harold Gehman, to have the 

Board’s report “set the stage” for a national debate on the fhure directions of the 

U.S. civilian space program. Including a discussion of national space policy in 

an accident investigation report was unprecedented; neither the internal NASA 

report following the Apollo 1 fire in January 1967 nor the Rogers Commission 

1. White House, “A Renewed Spirit of Discovery,” January 2004. 

2. Roger D. Launius, “After Columbia: The Space Shuttle Program and the Crisis in Space 

3. Columbia Accident Investigation Board, Report, vol. 1 (Washington, DC: NASA and GPO, 

Access,” Asfropolitics 2 (autumn 2004): 279. 

August 2003), p. 209. 
270 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

investigation of the Challenger accident had gone beyond identieing and suggesting remedies for the immediate causes of those tragedies. 

The brief section titled “Long-Term: Future Directions for the U.S. in 

Space” in chapter 9 of the CAEB report has had an impact well beyond the 

Board’s expectations. It is not too grandiose a claim to suggest that it led to a 

fundamental change in national space policy. Staff members in the Executive 

Office of the President have confirmed that the Board’s observation that there 

had been a “lack, over the past three decades, of any national mandate providing NASA a compelling mission requiring human presence in space” was 

the direct catalyst for the White House deliberations in fall 2003 that led to 

the 14 January 2004 announcement by President George W. Bush of the new 

space exploration vision. This “Vision for Space Exploration,” with its call for 

a “sustained and affordable human and robotic program to explore the solar 

system and beyond,” is explicitly intended as the “national mandate” that had 

been missing since Americans landed on the Moon in 1969. 

The Board made a second set of general observations. The CAIB report 

noted that “following from the lack of a clearly-defined long term space mission,” there had been no “sustained national commitment over the past decade 

to improving access to space by developing a second-generation space transportation system.” The Board concluded that “the United States needs improved 

access for humans to low-Earth orbit as a foundation for whatever directions the nation’s 

space program takes in the future.” The CAIB report suggested that it was “in 

the nation’s interest to replace the Shuttle as soon as possible as the primary means for 

transporting humans to andfrom Earth orbit.” Finally, it contained the following 

indictment: ‘>revious [unsuccessful] attempts to develop a replacement vehicle for the 

aging Shuttle represent afdilure of national leadership” (all emphasis in original) .4 

In his recent comprehensive and insightful analysis of U.S. policy towards 

access to space, Launius has used even stronger language than the Columbia 

Board. He suggests that “the lack of a firm decision to develop a Shuttle replacement represents the single most egregious failure of space policy in hi~tory.”~ 

This essay will argue that there has been an even more fundamental and 

“egregious” failure of national space policy over the past three-plus decades 

and that the lack of a replacement for the Space Shuttle is just one of the most 

obvious manifestations of that policy failure. The series of decisions regarding 

a Shuttle replacement must be cast in the broader context of U.S. policy with 

respect to the reasons for sending people to space in the first place. The lack of 

a clear “mandate” for human spaceflight over the past 35 years has meant that 

the U.S. human spaceflight program, and indeed the NASA program overall, 

has been sustained by a complex coalition of narrow interests, not by a clearly 

4. CAIB, Report, pp. 209-211. 

5. Launius, “After Columbia,” pp. 278-279 
“A FAILURE OF NATIONAL LEADERSHIP” . . . 27 1 

articulated national goal and a stable political consensus in support of achieving that goal. As the CAIB report observed, without such a goal, NASA 

has found it necessary to gain the support of diverse constituencies. NASA has had to participate in the give and take of 

the normal political process in order to obtain the resources 

needed to carry out its programs. NASA has usually failed to 

receive budgetary support consistent with its ambitions. The 

result . . . is an organization straining to do too much with 

too little.6 

It is this situation-“straining to do too much with too little’’-that 

reflects the fundamental failure of U.S. space policy. In the 1969-1970 period, 

the administration of President Richard M. Nixon made a purposeful decision not to continue in the post-Apollo period the type of space effort that had 

taken Americans to the Moon. As Nixon stated in March 1970: 

Space expenditures must take their proper place within a rigorous system ofnational priorities. What we do in space from here 

on in must become a normal and regular part of our national 

life and must therefore be planned in conjunction with all of 

the other undertakings which are important to US.^ 

This declaration was more than rhetorical. The NASA budget was rapidly reduced in the early 1970s to less than 1 percent of the federal budget, 

approximately one-fifth of its budget share at the peak of Apollo 10 years earlier. Outside of postwar demobilization, few government activities have seen 

such a rapid decline in the resources devoted to their implementation. More 

to the point of this essay, this lowered level of budget allocations has persisted 

to the current time. 

WHAT DOES “REPLACING THE SPACE SHUTTLE” MEAN? 

Many people talk of replacing the Shuttle as if the meaning of such an 

undertaking is quite clear. Such is not the case. There are several meanings that 

could be attributed to the term “replacing the Space Shuttle.” They include 

the following: 

6. CAIB, Report, p. 209. 

7. Richard M. Nixon, “Statement About the Future of the United States Space Program,” 7 

March 1970, in U.S. President, Public Papers of the Presidents ofthe United States: Richard Nixon, 1970 

(Washington, DC: GPO, 1971), p. 251. 
272 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

Developing an advanced-technology, second-generation vehicle similar in its capabilities to the Shuttle, including the ability to carry both a 

sizable number of people and large and/or heavy cargo into low-Earth 

orbit, to provide living and working space for the crew for some period 

of time, and to be capable of various space operations such as payload 

deployment and retrieval and in-orbit servicing. Such a vehicle, presumably, would be as reusable as the Shuttle, preferably more so. 

Developing a vehicle that can carry either cargo or passengers to 

space and deliver its payload to an orbital destination such as the 

International Space Station; reusability would be a desired, but not 

necessary, characteristic. 

* Developing a vehicle only to carry people to another destination in 

space and to return them to Earth, with limited or no cargo-carrying capacity. Again, reusability would be a desired, but not necessary, 

characteristic. 

Developing a vehicle capable of transporting people both to low-Earth 

orbit and to destinations beyond Earth orbit, such as the Moon, Mars, 

or a Lagrangian point. 

Each of these types of vehicles could be considered a Shuttle replacement, and failure to differentiate among them has caused, and will continue 

to cause, policy confusion. For the purposes of this essay, the central meaning 

to be attributed to the term “Space Shuttle replacement” is a vehicle having 

the capability to transport humans to and from low-Earth orbit. Whether that 

vehicle would be reusable or not and whether it would be capable of going 

beyond Earth orbit are secondary considerations. This certainly was what the 

CAIB had in mind when it judged that “it is in the nation’s interest to replace the 

Shuttle as soon as possible as the primary means for transporting humans to and from 

Earth orbit” (emphasis in original). 

What did not happen, either during the CAIBS deliberations or since, 

was a corresponding adjustment in either the expectations placed on NASA 

by the nation’s leaders or the ambitions of those committed to the vision 

of an expansive future in space. The reality that national space policy did not 

bring ambitions and resources into balance in the 1970s, nor in the subsequent two 

decades, is the basic policyfdilure. Either NASA should have been forced by the 

White House and Congress to plan and carry out a less ambitious program, 

or those national leaders should have been willing to provide the resources 

needed to carry out the ambitious program, with human spaceflight at its 
“A FAILURE OFNATIONAL LEADERSHIP” . . . 273 

core, that NASA has proposed to implement.’ By allowing NASA to try to 

“do too much with too little,” national leaders failed in their responsibility 

as stewards of well-conceived national policy. The space sector has suffered 

as a result, most visibly with two Space Shuttle accidents and the loss of 14 

astronaut lives. 

AN ALBUM OF FRUSTRATION 

How has this “unenviable and unfortunate” situation come to be? The 

answer to this question can be portrayed by a set of ‘‘snapshots’’ taken at 

various times during the evolution of the U.S. human spaceflight effort? This 

“photo album” of the steps towards the current situation will set the stage for 

a fuller analysis of why ensuring reliable, affordable, and safe human access has 

been a continuing policy problem for the past two decades: 

1. From almost the start of serious thinking about human spaceflight, 

visionaries have expected that people would travel to and from space 

in a reusable, winged spacecraft; this image has continued to influence 

thinking about how to send people to space for most of the time since. 

2. The pressures of Cold War competition drove the United States and 

the Soviet Union to abandon a winged approach to spaceflight and to 

develop instead crew-carrying ballistic capsules launched into space 

on top of expendable rockets, most of them derived from missiles 

designed to deliver nuclear warheads over intercontinental distances. 

Until the Space Shuttle‘ was approved in 1972, only the U.S. Saturn 

family of boosters was designed from their start in the 1950s as space 

launch vehicles. 

3. Once the United States had won the race to the Moon, the National 

Aeronautics and Space Administration in 1969 proposed an ambitious 

post-Apollo space effort beginning with the rapid development of a 

Saturn V-launched, 12-person space station. As a “logistics vehicle” 

for such a station, NASA proposed developing a reusable Earth-to8. In May 1992, then-new NASA Administrator Daniel S. Goldin did recognize this situation 

and told his senior officials to stop making plans that anticipated future budget increases. This was 

one of the foundations of Goldin’s “faster, better, cheaper” guidance. But Goldin was also impatient 

and wanted to lay the foundation for human missions to Mars. This made his attempts to limit 

future ambitions not very effective. 

9. In his Astropolitics article cited earlier, Roger Launius provides a parallel and well-stated 

account of this history. 
274 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

orbit launch vehicle called the Space Shuttle. In NASA’s 1970 budget 

presentation, the space station and Space Shuttle were presented to 

Congress as a single program. When the Nixon administration refused 

to approve the space station, NASA, in the fall of 1970, deferred-not 

canceled-its space station plans and directed its Shuttle contractors to 

design a vehicle capable of carrying pieces of a space station into orbit. 

This requirement defined the width of the Shuttle payload bay as no 

less than 14 feet. Thus the currently unbreakable link between the 

Space Shuttle and International Space Station programs actually has its 

roots in decisions taken 35 years ago. 

4. In 1971, there was intense debate within the Executive Branch and its 

advisers of whether to approve Space Shuttle development. This debate 

led, in January 1972, to approval of Shuttle development as a product of 

“a series of political compromises that produced unreasonable expectations-even myths-about its performance,” with a “technically ambitious design [that] resulted in an inherently vulnerable vehicle.”” The 

Space Shuttle program was approved even in the face of a fundamental 

policy decision, made two years earlier, to reduce the priority of and 

resultant budget allocations for the civilian space program.” Based on 

that decision, the Office of Management and Budget forced NASA, in 

May 1971, to accept a $5.15-billion development cost ceiling for the 

Space Shuttle; this led NASA to abandon hopes for a two-stage, fully 

reusable vehicle and to quickly examine a wide variety of designs that 

could be developed within that cost cap. 

5. In order to make the case that the investment in developing the Space 

Shuttle was cost-effective, NASA had to gain the agreement of the 

military and intelligence communities that when it became operational, the Space Shuttle would be the only launch vehicle for almost 

all government payloads, both human crews and robotic spacecraft. In 

order to gain this agreement, NASA had to design a Shuttle with specific performance characteristics that increased its technological risks. 

CAIB noted that “the increased complexity of a Shuttle designed to 

be all things to all people created inherently greater risks than if more 

realistic technical goals had been set from the start.”” Certainly, if the 

10. CAIB, Report, p. 21. 

11. Accounts of the process that led to the decision to develop the Space Shuttle can be found in 

John M. Logsdon, “The Space Shuttle: A Policy Failure?” Science 232 (30 May 1986): 1099-1105; 

and T. A. Heppenheimer, The Space Shuttle Decision: NASA’s Search for a Reusable Space Vehicle 

(Washington, DC: NASA SP-4221, 1999). 

12. CAIB, Report, p. 23. 
“A FAILURE OF NATIONAL LEADERSHIP” . . . 275 

Space Shuttle design had been optimized for its crew-carrying role, 

a less risky vehicle, with more provisions for crew safety, could have 

been designed. 

6. A byproduct of the decisions to develop in the Space Shuttle a vehicle 

capable of launching all types of payloads was the drying up, beginning in the 1970s, of NASA funding for research and technology 

development related to any aspect of space transportation not associated with the Shuttle. Thus there was a limited base of technology 

from which NASA could draw when it did initiate or participate in 

Shuttle replacement efforts in the 1980s and 1990~’~ 

7. Soon after the first flight of the Space Shuttle in April 1981, the new 

NASA leadership set as its two top priorities bringing the Shuttle to 

operational status as soon as possible and getting presidential and congressional approval to develop a (Shuttle-launched) space station. No 

alternatives to using the Shuttle in this role were considered at the 

inception of the space station program.14 

8. Also in 1981, after only two Shuttle flights, President Ronald Reagan 

approved a formal policy statement saying that the Space Shuttle “will 

be the primary space launch system for both United States military 

and civil government mission^."'^ This policy was reinforced in a 1982 

statement of National Space Policy, which said that “completion of 

transition to the Shuttle should occur as expeditiously as possible” and 

that “government spacecraft should be designed to take advantage 

of the unique capabilities of the STS [Space Transportation System, 

another designation for the Space Shuttle] .’’I6 

9. The U.S. Air Force, as the launch agent for both military and intelligence spacecraft, early on recognized the dangers of this “all eggs in 

one basket” policy. Soon after the Shuttle was declared operational on 

13. This statement is not quite accurate. There continued to be some low-level efforts within 

NASA to examine future space transportation vehicles and technologies even as the Shuttle was 

being developed during the 1970s, but there was very limited financial support of these efforts. 

14. For a discussion ofthe steps leading to President Reagan’s approval ofa space station program, 

see Howard E. McCurdy, The Space Station Decision: Incremental Politics and Technological Choice 

(Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins, 1990). 

15. John M. Logsdon, ed., Exploring the Unknown: Selected Documents in the History of the U.S. Civil 

Space Program, vol. 4, Accessing Space (Washington, DC: NASA SP-4407, 1999), pp. 333-334. 

16. John M. Logsdon, ed., Exploring the Unknown: Selected Documents in the History ofthe U.S. Civil 

Space Program, vol. 1, Organizing for Exploration (Washington, DC: NASA SP-4407, 1995), 

pp. 591-592. 
276 CRITICAL ISSUES INTHE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

4 July 1982, after only four flights, the Air Force began to argue that 

the risks and costs of the system could be a detriment to its ability to 

perform its launch responsibilities for critical national security payloads. Most of those payloads had been designed since the late 1970s so 

that they could only be launched on the Shuttle. Beginning in 1983, 

the Air Force campaigned for approval of a backup to the Shuttle in 

order to provide assured access to space for such payloads. NASA fought 

this move. The dispute between the Air Force and NASA reached the 

White House in early 1985, where it was decided in favor of the Air 

Force.” This decision led to the development of the Titan IV expendable launch vehicle, which was capable of launching the largest military and intelligence spacecraft. After the 1986 Challenger accident, the 

Titan IV became the primary launcher for large national security missions, and those spacecraft that had been intended for Shuttle launch 

had to be redesigned at high cost. 

10. Discussions within NASA about the need to develop a second-generation replacement for the Space Shuttle began even before the Shuttle was 

launched.18 The first public statement of this need came in the report of 

the National Commission on Space in January 1986 (made public a few 

days after the Chullenger accident). The Commission concluded that 

“the Shuttle fleet will become obsolescent by the turn of the century.” 

It recommended separating cargo and “passenger” (its term) launches 

and developing, within 15 years, a new system for “passenger transport 

to and from low Earth orbit.”” In contrast, an inside-the-government 

NASA-DOD National Space Transportation and Support Study during 

1985-1986, while agreeing that in the future, separate human-carrying and cargo-carrying launch systems were desirable, concluded that 

“there was not an urgent need for an advanced manned vehicle; incremental improvements to the Space Shuttle would suffice.”2o 

11. While NASA during the 1970s and early 1980s allocated only limited 

funding to advanced space transportation technology, the Department 

of Defense did support a fair amount of such research and technology 

17. This dispute can be traced in John M. Logsdon, ed., Exploring the Unknown: Selected Documents 

in the History ofthe U.S. Civil Space Program, vol. 2, External Relationships (Washington, DC: NASA 

SP-4407, 1996), documents II-40 through 11-45, 

18. Launius, “After Columbia,” pp. 287-288. 

19. Pioneering the Space Frontier, Report of the National Commission on Space, quoted in Launius, 

20. Ivan Bekey, “Exploring Future Space Transportation Possibilities,” in Exploring the Unknown, 

“After Columbia,” p. 288. 

ed. Logsdon, vol. 4, pp. 505-506. 
“A FAILURE OF NATIONAL LEADERSHIP” . . . 277 

The National Aero-Space Plane (NASP) began as a NASA-DOD joint project in 1982. 

It called for the development of two vehicles capable of SSTO at Mach 25. It was 

intended to use a multicycle engine shifting from jet to ramjet to scramjet; it would use 

liquid-hydrogen fuel with oxygen scooped and frozen from the atmosphere. President 

Ronald Reagan had high hopes for it, announcing in the State of the Union Address 

in 1986: ”We are going forward with research on a new Orient Express that could, 

by the end of the decade, take off from Dulles Airport, accelerate up to 25 times the 

speed of sound attaining low Earth orbit, or fly to Tokyo within two hours.” It was 

canceled in 1992 without ever having flown. (NASA KSCphoto no. EL-2007-00432) 

development related to advanced-technology crew-carrying systems. 

By the early 1980s, these efforts were focused on a vehicle that used airbreathing engines to accelerate to hypersonic or perhaps even orbital 

velocity. The Air Force program was focused on a TransAtmospheric 

Vehicle (TAV), while a separate, highly classified, Advanced Research 

Projects Agency (ARPA) study was called Copper Canyon.’* In late 

1985, all Department of Defense research and development activity 

on hypersonic flight was consolidated into a program that became 

known as the National Aero-Space Plane (NASP); NASA joined the 

Department of Defense as a minority funder and comanager of the 

NASP effort. This program was given presidential endorsement in 

the 1986 State of the Union Address, delivered by President Ronald 

21. The National Aero-Space Plane Program is discussed in Andrew J. Butrica, Single Stage to 

Orbit: Politics, Space Technology, and the Questfor Reusable Rocketry (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins, 

2003), chap. 4. 
278 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

Reagan on 5 February of that year. In his address, the President spoke 

of an “Orient Express” that would, “by the end of the decade,” be able 

to “take off from Dulles Airport [near Washington, DC], accelerate 

up to 25 times the speed of sound attaining low Earth orbit, or fly to 

Tokyo within two 

12. The President’s 1986 address came only a few days after the 28 January 

explosive burning and breakup of the Space Shuttle Chullenger; seven 

crew members died in the accident. In the following months, policy 

toward use of the Space Shuttle came under intense scrutiny. First, the 

White House, on 15 August, announced that a new Shuttle orbiter 

would be built to replace Chullenger but that the Shuttle would no 

longer be used to launch commercial payloads such as communication 

satellites. On 27 December, President Reagan signed a directive that 

established a “mixed fleet” concept for government payloads, with 

“critical mission needs” supported by both the Shuttle and expendable 

launch vehicles “to provide assurance that payloads can be launched 

regardless of specific launch vehicle availabilities.” According to this 

directive, the Space Shuttle would only be used to support programs 

requiring “manned presence and other unique STS ~apabilities.”~~ 

These decisions formally reversed the policy that had been one of the 

foundations of the decision to develop the Space Shuttle-that it could 

serve as a reliable, affordable launch vehicle for all U.S. payloads. It 

focused future Shuttle use on missions where the human presence was 

essential to the mission, not merely crew members delivering cargo 

to orbit. In 1987, the Air Force announced its support for resuming 

production of the Delta and Atlas expendable launch vehicles, with the 

clear implication that the military would in the future use the Space 

Shuttle only for those few missions that required its specific capabilities. The sum of these post-Chullenger decisions meant that NASA 

became not only the operator, but also the main future user, of the 

Space Shuttle. With fewer missions to fly, with NASA having to pay 

all the costs of its operation, and with a flat or decreasing NASA budget for most of the 1990s, the Shuttle became a “mortgage” on the 

NASA budget that had to be paid. Funds for investing in its replacement could be made available only if the NASA budget were increased 

or the Shuttle program’s budget were reduced. 

22. Quoted in ibid., p. 65. 

23. See the essay by Ray A. Williamson, “Developing the Space Shuttle,” and documents 11-42 

and 11-43 in Exploring the Unknown, ed. Logsdon, vol. 4, for an account of this policy shift. 
“A FAILURE OF NATIONAL LEADERSHIP” . . . 279 

13. While DOD-NASA work on NASP continued in the late 1980s, with 

DOD bearing some 80 percent of its costs, NASA gave top priority to 

returning the Space Shuttle to flight. Leading that effort was Admiral 

Richard H. Truly, a former Shuttle astronaut who was brought back 

to NASA in the weeks following the Challenger accident as Associate 

Administrator for Spa~eflight.’~ Truly was a firm believer in the value 

of the Shuttle. When in 1989 the new administration of President 

George H. W. Bush selected him as NASA Administrator, the Space 

Shuttle gained a strong proponent at the top of the space agency. 

Then President Bush proposed an ambitious long-range vision for the 

nation’s space program in July 1989. The NASA plan for implementing that vision did not include a proposal to replace the Shuttle as the 

means for taking people to orbit, even though the plan extended over 

several decades. 

Administrator Truly’s personal embrace of the Shuttle as key to 

NASA’s future was reflected by others in NASA, particularly those 

working on the Space Shuttle program in NASA Headquarters and 

at Johnson Space Center and Marshall Space Flight Center. Rather 

than respond to criticisms of the Shuttle and calls for its replacement, 

they strove to “impose the party line vision on the environment, not 

to reconsider it.” Central to this behavior was the belief that the Space 

Shuttle could be made a safe and reliable system and should play a central role in NASA’s human spaceflight efforts for many years to come. 

This behavior, in the judgment of the Columbia Board, led to “flawed 

decision-making, self deception, introversion and a diminished curiosity” about alternatives to the Shuttle.25 

14. In 1990, the Advisory Committee on the Future of the U.S. Space 

Program, usually called the Augustine Committee after its chairman, 

aerospace executive Norm Augustine, concluded that “we are today 

overreliant on the Space Shuttle as the backbone of the civil space 

program.” The Committee recommended rapid development of “an 

evolutionary, unmanned but man-rateable, heavy lift launch vehicle” 

to replace the Space Shuttle in supporting space station assembly and 

utilization. Noting that there was no alternative to the Shuttle for 

human transportation, the Committee recommended “expedited 

24. See John M. Logsdon, “Return to Flight: RichardTruly and the Recovery &-om the Challenger 

Accident,” chap. 15 in From Evrgineering Science to Big Science, ed. Pamela E. Mack (Washington, DC: 

25. Yale University organizational studies scholar Gary Brewer, quoted in CAIB, Report, 

NASA SP-4219,1998). 

p. 102. 
280 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

development of a two-way [human] transportation capability” on 

such a launch vehicle “for use in the event of a Space Shuttle standdown.” The Augustine Committee was critical of the low level of 

NASA spending on space technology, including that related to 

advanced propulsion and aerodynamics, and called for a “two-tothree-fold enhancement” of NASA’s space technology budget. It recommended an annual increase of 10 percent in the NASA budget if 

the nation was serious about wanting a successful space program.26 

The Committee concluded its report by recommending that the 

United States should reduce “dependence on the Space Shuttle . . . for 

all but missions requiring human presence.”27 

15. After receiving presidential endorsement in 1986, the NASP program 

over the subsequent several years struggled to achieve its technological 

and schedule goals. A 1988 Defense Science Board report concluded 

that the program’s advocates had been overly optimistic in their initial 

promise of an early flight demonstration and suggested that the program should be “realistically presented to its sponsors.” A year later, 

after the Air Force withdrew funding from the program, the White 

House, in 1989, approved a stretch-out of the program (rather than its 

cancellation as proposed by Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney), 

with a flight demonstration of the X-30 test vehicle to come only after 

relevant technologies had been developed.28 In the face of competing 

budget priorities and slow technological progress, the NASP program 

was canceled in 1992, after $1.7 billion had been spent on it.29 At that 

point, the cost of a full X-30 flight-test program was estimated at $17 

billion, with another $10-20 billion to develop an operational vehi- 

~le.~O No flight demonstration was attempted, but the program left a 

technological legacy for future advanced space transportation efforts. 

Andrew Butrica observes that “the NASP concept was the wrong 

road.” By pursuing an air-breathing approach to a single stage to orbit 

26. The administration of George H. W. Bush took to heart the advice that the NASA budget 

should be substantially increased and proposed significant increases for FY 1992 and FY 1993. 

However, after coming to the White House in January 1993, the administration of President Bill 

Clinton reversed this upward trend in the NASA budget, which actually lost more than 10 percent 

in constant dollars during the eight years that Clinton was President. 

27. Report ofthe Advisory Committee on the Future ofthe U.S. Space Program (Washington, DC: GPO, 

December 1990), pp. 21,31, 33-34, 48. 

28. Logsdon, Exploring the Unknown, vol. 4, documents IV-9, IV-10, quotation from p. 562. 

29. Launius suggests that the costs were probably higher since some of the work on the NASP program was classified, and thus not all cost information was readily available (“After Columbia,” p. 290). 

30. Global Security.Org, “X-30 National Aerospace Plane (NASP),” http://www.globalsectrrity. 

ovg/military/systems/airnaft/nasp.htm (accessed 13 January 2005). 
“A FAILURE OF NATIONAL LEADERSHIP” . . . 281 

vehicle rather than one using rocket power, NASA “propelled the 

nation into an expensive program that had no chance of success.” Its 

failure “demonstrated unmistakably that an air-breathing, singlestage-to-orbit was not the road to travel.” Ivan Bekey adds that “being 

airplane-like, the NASP concept attracted powerful backing because 

it was intuitively easy to grasp. The nation fooled itself into believing 

that because the NASP image was what was desired, the reality itself 

was therefore attainable.’’31 Whatever the reason, the United States 

had lost several years and almost $2 billion in pursuing a failed path 

towards a Shuttle replacement. 

16. On 1 April 1992, Daniel S. Goldin replaced the fired Richard Truly 

as NASA Administrator. In contrast to Truly, Goldin would prove 

to be no fan of the Space Shuttle, viewing its budget demands as a 

major barrier to initiating new, innovative NASA programs.32 This 

was especially the case after 1993, when the new administration of 

President Bill Clinton retained Goldin as Administrator but declined 

to increase the NASA budget to both meet the demands of the Space 

Shuttle and the International Space Station programs and allow significant investments in major new efforts such as a Shuttle replacement. 

The Space Shuttle budget had peaked at over $5.5 billion per year as 

NASA recovered from the Challenger accident; the Bush administration, in early 1992, had proposed a $4.1-billion allocation. By the time 

Dan Goldin left office in November 2001, the Shuttle budget had been 

reduced by another 25 percent, to $3.2 billion per year. Goldin initiated 

the switch of Shuttle operations to private-sector management both as 

a cost-savings measure and as a way to encourage NASA engineers to 

focus on developing new capabilities. Until 1999, when he declared 

a “space launch crisis,” Goldin was unwilling to allocate significant 

resources to Shuttle upgrades. Even so, Goldin, during his long tenure, 

came to recognize that successful and safe operation of the Shuttle was 

critical to political and public support of NASA’s programs. His expectation was that by innovative partnerships with the private sector, the 

technological developments on which to base a Shuttle replacement 

could be achieved without a multibillion-dollar government investment. This unfortunately proved to be a false hope. 

31. Butrica, Single Stage to Orbit, pp. 66, 81; Bekey, “Exploring Future Space Transportation 

Possibilities,” p. 508. 

32. As one indication of his attitude, it IS reported that Goldin had removed from the cabin of 

the NASA Administrator’s airplane all the pictures of the Space Shuttle that had been placed there 

under Richard Truly. 
282 CRITICAL kWJES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

17. In 1992, during the last months of the George H. W. Bush administration, the Vice President’s Space Policy Advisory Board, which advised 

the National Space Council, recommended the development by 2000 

of an expendable “Spacelifter” launch vehicle, which would be humanrated, and also the development of a new Personnel Launch System for 

use with it. This would allow the government to “phase out the Space 

Shuttle at the earliest opport~nity.”~~ With the November 1992 election of a new administration, the recommendations contained in the 

Advisory Board’s report were stillborn. 

18. In 1993, both NASA Administrator Goldin and the U.S. Congress 

requested that the NASA staff carry out a comprehensive study of 

alternate approaches to accessing space through 2030. A principal 

goal of the study was “to make major reductions in the cost of space 

transportation (at least 50 per cent), while at the same time increasing 

safety for flight crews by at least an order of magnitude.” The Access 

to Space Study examined three alternatives: 1) an upgraded Shuttle, 

2) new expendable vehicles using conventional technologies, and 

3) “new reusable vehicles using advanced technologies.” The study 

concluded that “the most beneficial option is to develop and deploy 

a fully reusable single-stage-to-orbit (SSTO) pure-rocket launch 

vehicle fleet” that would allow the phasing out of the Space Shuttle, 

beginning in 2008.34 

19. This conclusion of the Access to Space Study became formalized when 

President Clinton approved a new statement of National Space 

Transportation Policy in August 1994. That statement gave NASA the 

responsibility “to support government and private sector decisions by 

the end of this decade on the development of an operational next generation reusable launch system.” NASA was to focus its research “on 

technologies to support a decision no later than December 1996 to 

proceed with a sub-scale demonstration which would prove the concept of single-stage-to-orbit.” The policy envisioned that the private 

sector “could have a significant role in managing the development and 

operation of a new reusable space transportation It was 

extremely unusual, if not unprecedented, for a specific technological 

solution such as the SSTO approach to be written into a presidential 

policy statement on space. 

33. Logsdon, Exploring the Unknown, vol. 4, document IV-6, p. 550. 

34. Ibid., document IV-14, pp. 585-586. 

35. Ibid., document IV-16, p. 628. 
“A FAILURE OF NATIONAL LEADERSHIP” . . . 283 

20. Given the White House policy directive, NASA, over the following 

two years, organized a competition among potential developers of the 

subscale flight demonstrator. Three companies submitted proposals. 

Rockwell International proposed a vehicle that was in many ways a 

second-generation version of the Space Shuttle; Rockwell had been 

the prime contractor for the Shuttle. McDonnell Douglas proposed 

a version of the Delta Clipper vehicle that had been developed under 

The McDonnell Douglas Delta Clipper-Experimental (DC-XA) reusable launch 

vehicle (RLV) was originally developed for DOD. NASA assumed control of the 

vehicle in the summer of 1995. The DC-XA was to have been an SSTO vertical 

takeoff/vertical landing launch vehicle concept, whose development would 

significantly reduce launch cost and provide a test bed for NASA RLV technology. 

(NASA MSFC image no. MSFC-95732141 
284 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

the sponsorship of the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization to 

demonstrate simpler space operations technique^.^^ Lockheed Martin 

proposed an advanced-technology vehicle based on the use of a linear 

aerospike engine. On 2 July 1996, Vice President A1 Gore announced 

that NASA had selected the most technologically advanced (and thus 

the riskiest) of these proposals, that from Lockheed Martin. The reasoning behind this decision has not been adequately explored. 

At that time, the plan was to have the first flight of what was 

christened the X-33 by March 1999 and to complete a 15-flight test 

program by the end of that year. The goal was to demonstrate the 

technological foundation for a decision by Lockheed Martin to invest 

its own funds in a full-scale operational vehicle, which the company 

named VentureStar.TM The X-33 program would be a cooperative 

undertaking between NASA and Lockheed Martin, with NASA pro- 

\ viding $941 million of the required funding and Lockheed providing 

$220 million. Once Lockheed Martin developed the VentureStarTM 

using private capital, the assumption was that NASA would be a 

major customer for its services, but also that a booming commercial 

space industry would emerge. The combination of government and 

commercial demand for access to space, it was claimed, would allow 

Venturestarm to be a profitable ~ndertaking.~~ 

Although Lockheed Martin, over the following several years, promoted theVentureStarTM project as symbolic of its status on the cutting 

edge of future technologies, the X-33 program encountered technological difficulties almost from its inception. In November 1999, there was 

a major test failure of the vehicle’s hydrogen fuel tank; by that time, 

the White House and NASA were losing confidence that the program 

would be able to overcome its technological hurdles. In March 2001, 

NASA announced that it would provide no more funding for the X33, effectively killing it well before a flight demonstration could be 

attempted. At that point, NASA had spent $912 million on the project, 

while Lockheed Martin had exceeded its planned investment, having 

put $356 million into the X-33.38 

21. Some in the Executive Office of the President and at NASA had, 

by at least 1998 (if not before), become skeptical that the X-33 pro36. See Butrica, Single Stage to Orbit, parts I11 and IV, for a discussion of the origins and fate of the 

37. NASA Marshall Space Flight Center, “Lockheed Martin Selected to Build the X-33,” news 

38. Leonard David, “NASA Shuts Down X-33, X-34 Programs,” Space.com, 1 March 2001, 

Delta Chpper program. 

release 96-53, 2 July 1996. 

http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/missions/x33~cancel~OlO3Ol. html (accessed 5 February 2005). 
“A FAILURE OF NATIONAL LEADERSHIP” . . . 285 

gram would be able to overcome its technical challenges and would 

provide the information needed to decide when and how to replace 

the Shuttle. In 1998, the Office of Management and Budget asked 

NASA to fund the aerospace industry to carry out what were called 

Space Transportation Architecture Studies to determine 1) if the Space 

Shuttle system should be replaced; 2) if so, when the replacement 

should take place and how the transition should be implemented; and 

3) if not, what is the upgrade strategy to continue safe and affordable 

flight of the Space Shuttle beyond 2010. Five industry teams examined 

these questions through 1999 and came up with a variety of approaches 

to meeting both NASA and commercial-sector launch requirements. 

Many of the suggested approaches for taking humans to space involved 

a capsule-type spacecraft launched on top of an expendable launch 

vehicle. NASA leadership viewed such proposals as not being adequately forward-looking. 

22. In 1999, NASA Administrator Daniel Goldin declared a “space launch 

crisis” and urged the White House to add funds to the NASA budget for necessary safety upgrades to the Shuttle. Substantial funds for 

this purpose were added to the NASA FY 2001 budget, submitted to 

Congress in early 2000. However, this upgrade initiative had a short 

lifespan. Within a year, funding for upgrades was reduced by over 

one-third in response to rising Shuttle operating costs and the need to 

stay within a fixed Shuttle budget.39 

23. Based on the results of the Space Transportation Architecture Studies 

and the increasingly evident problems with the X-33 program, the 

NASA FY 2001 budget also contained a new Space Launch Initiative. 

This effort was to provide some $4.8 billion over five years to conduct 

studies and technology development to identify the most promising 

path to replacing the Space Shuttle and meeting other launch requirements. The hope was that this effort could provide the basis for a 2006 

decision on what type of Shuttle replacement to develop, with a target 

date of 2012 for its initial launch. Three contractor teams-Boeing, 

Lockheed Martin, and a joint team of Orbital Sciences and Northrop 

Grumman-by early 2002 had identified 15 launcher concepts for 

detailed 

39. CAIB, Report, p. 114. 

40. Leonard David, “Plans for Next Generation ‘Shuttle’ Ends First Phase; 15 Concepts Have 

Emerged,” Space.com, 30 April 2002, http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/sIi~firstphase~020430. 

html (accessed 5 February 2005). 
286 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

24.The Space Launch Initiative was also short-lived. By the end of 2002, 

White House and top-level NASA optimism that it would provide the 

hoped-for basis for deciding to develop a second-generation, advancedtechnology replacement for the Space Shuttle had evaporated. In 

November 2002, NASA announced that it was terminating the Space 

Launch Initiative and reallocating its funding to a new Integrated Space 

Transportation Plan. According to this plan, the Shuttle’s life would be 

extended so that it could fly until 2020, and potentially to 2030. The 

Shuttle would be used for missions requiring its cargo-carrying and 

orbital-operations capabilities. However, for missions carrying only crew 

to and from the International Space Station, a new Orbital Space Plane 

(OSP) would be developed, but as a complement to, not a replacement 

for, the Shuttle.The OSP would not be an advanced-technology vehicle; 

the goal was to have it available for use as an ISS crew-rescue vehicle by 

2010, eliminating dependence on the Russian Soyuz spacecraft to perform this function.The OSP would also become a crew-transfer vehicle 

by 2012, capable of carrying four or more astronauts to the International 

Space Station.The OSP would be launched either in the Shuttle’s cargo 

bay or atop an expendable launch vehicle. A third element of the plan 

was funding of technologies and studies for an eventual next-generation 

vehicle to replace the Shuttle. No date was set for such a replacement 

vehicle to enter service. 

The Integrated Space Transportation Plan was also a reaction to the 

lack of a long-term plan for U.S. human spaceflight. Without knowing how long the International Space Station would operate, it was not 

possible to determine how long the Space Shuttle would be needed. 

Without a post-ISS goal for human spaceflight, particularly given the 

collapse of the commercial space launch market, it also was not clear 

what kind of “post-Shuttle” vehicle to develop. 

25. On 1 February 2003, Shuttle orbiter Columbia broke up overTexas, and 

all seven crew members aboard died. As noted at the start of this essay, 

the August 2003 report of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board 

set off, in the following months, a sweeping review of national space 

policy. On 14 January 2004, President George W. Bush announced a new 

“Vision for Space Exploration” centered on “a sustained and affordable 

program of human and robotic exploration of the solar ~ystem.”~’ The 

newvision had as a key element the decision to retire the Space Shuttle 

as soon as the assembly of the International Space Station was declared 

41. White House, “Renewed Spirit of Discovery.” 
“A FAILURE OF NATIONAL LEADERSHIP’’ . . . 287 

complete, in 2010 or soon thereafter. To replace the Shuttle, the Vision 

calls for the development of a Crew ExplorationVehicle (CEV) to carry 

humans into space, first to low-Earth orbit and eventually to the Moon 

and Mars. This vehicle will house the crew as they travel into space 

and thus will indeed replace the Shuttle as the means for U.S. human 

access to space.The CEV is the latest of the many attempts to develop a 

replacement for the Space Shuttle as a human transport vehicle. One can 

only hope that it will be become reality, unlike its predecessors. 

One cannot escape the conclusion that these 25 “snapshots” add up to a 

portrait of failure-failure to provide for the United States’ “assured access” to 

space for its citizens. Since 1981, there has been only one way for the United 

States to send people into space-at least using U.S. hardware. That way, of 

course, has been the Space Shuttle, and with its two fatal accidents, the United 

States lost human access to space twice-first for 32 months, and then for more 

than 30 months.The United States will not have independent access to space 

for humans between the time the Space Shuttle is retired in 2010 and the CEV 

begins crewed operations.This interval could be as long as four years, and during 

that time, the only way for U.S. astronauts to get to and from the International 

Space Station will be on Russian spacecraft. 

It is worth noting that “assured access” for key national security and other 

robotic payloads has been a stated national policy since at least 1988. In its 1988 

statement of National Space Policy, the Reagan administration declared that 

“United States space transportation systems must provide a balanced, robust, and 

flexible capability with sufficient resiliency to allow continued operations despite 

failures in any single system.” The 1991 National Space Policy of President 

George H.W. Bush stated that “assured access to space is a key element of U.S. 

national space policy.’742 This policy continues in force today. President George W. 

Bush, on 21 December 2004, approved a new National Space Transportation 

Policy which stated that “‘assured access’ is a requirement for critical national 

security, homeland security, and civil missions.” To be fair, this most recent statement also suggests that assured access to space for humans is also a desired policy 

objective. It declares that “access to space through U.S. space transportation capabilities is essential . . . to support government and commercial human spaceflight.”43 If this objective were met, it would signifjr a strong commitment to 

human spaceflight on the part of the U.S. government.As the following analysis 

suggests, such a strong commitment has been missing for many years. 

42. Thor Hogan and Vic Villhard, “National Space Transportation Policy: Issues for the Future,” 

43. Office of Science and Technology Policy, Executive Office of the President, “National Space 

RAND Science andTechnology Working PaperWR-105-OSTP, October 2003, p. 7. 

Transportation Policy,” fact sheet, 6 January 2005. 
288 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

THE ROOT CAUSES OF THE FAILURE TO 

DEVELOP A SHUTTLE REPLACEMENT 

There can be no one explanation for why this complex chain of developments has taken place. But certainly it is possible to suggest some of the 

fundamental reasons for the lack of a Shuttle replacement more than 30 years 

after the original commitment to the Space Shuttle program. 

W. D. Kay, in his book Can Democracies Fly in Space, suggests that the 

“space program’s failures, like its earlier successes, have multiple causes, all of 

them ultimately traceable to the way the American political process operates.” 

Space policy is “a political outcome, a product of the discussion, debates, competition, and compromises that attend all public issues.” While there could 

be alternate frameworks within which to examine the reasons why there has 

been no replacement for the Space Shuttle, this essay will adopt the political 

perspective suggested by Kay. He sets out a framework that provides a useful 

way to analyze this situation. Kay suggests that it is possible to conceptualize 

the creation of space policy in terms of three levels of analysis: 

1. An organizational output, produced by the hardware, procedures, and 

personnel developed and trained by NASA. 

2. A political activity, an outgrowth of the ongoing debates, compromises, votes, and other decisions involving NASA, its contractors, the 

Congress, various executive agencies, and a number of other loosely 

coordinated (and in some cases competing) individuals, institutions, 

and organizations, both public and private. 

3. A national enterprise, the product of a society and a people possessing 

not only a certain level of technical expertise, but also a high degree 

of consensus and a determination expressed through its political 

representatives . . . .44 

These three levels of analysis, and particularly viewing space policy as the 

foundation of a national enterprise, help to understand was has happened in 

the space sector over the past three and one-half decades. 

44. W. D. Kay, Can Democracies Fly in Space? The Challenge of Revitalizing the U.S. Space Program 

(Westport, CT Praeger Publishers, 1995), pp. 33, 26-27. 
“A FAILURE OFNATIONAL LEADERSHIP” . . . 289 

TECHNOLOGICAL HUBRIS AND ORGANIZATIONAL OUTPUTS 

In the last 20 years, the aerospace community has been given two major 

opportunities by the national leadership to develop a Shuttle replacement; 

these opportunities were accompanied by significant (although not adequate) 

funding commitments. The first of these opportunities, the NASP program, 

was initially justified on national security grounds; NASA was a junior partner in the undertaking and was not able to continue it as a development effort 

leading to a flight-test vehicle once Department of Defense funding was withdrawn. The second opportunity was the SSTO effort initiated by NASA in 

1996 in response to NASA’s internal studies and then the 1994 National Space 

Transportation Policy. 

With the benefit of hindsight, it is possible to see that these two efforts 

were very likely doomed to failure from their outset. In both cases, the approach 

selected depended on being able simultaneously to bring to an adequate level 

of maturity a variety of challenging technologies in areas such as aerodynamics, guidance and control, materials, and propulsion. Those responsible for 

both efforts within the Department of Defense, NASA, and the aerospace 

industry assured their leaders that they could overcome these technological 

challenges and move forward rapidly and with affordable costs. These assurances were at variance with what actually transpired. 

As mentioned above, the reality that the NASP program was unlikely 

soon to result in a flight vehicle became rather quickly evident after President 

Reagan gave the program national visibility in 1986. By 1988, the Defense 

Science Board had raised major questions about the technological feasibility of the undertaking. In 1989, the RAND Corporation reported “reservations” with respect to NASP coming “anywhere near its stated/advertised 

cost, schedule, payload fees to orbit, etc. . . .” and suggested that the “primary 

NASP X-30 objective-manned single stage to orbit-is exceedingly sensitive to full success in technology maturation.’”’ Ivan Bekey, a proponent of 

a rocket-based approach to space access rather than the NASP air-breathing 

approach, was less kind; he has characterized the NASP program as “the biggest swindle ever to be foisted on the country,” “full of dubious . . . claims” 

and “hot air.”46 

WhenVice President AI Gore announced in July 1996 that NASA had 

selected Lockheed Martin’s proposal to develop an SSTO demonstrator, he 

made a point of noting that it was the most “technologically advanced” of the 

45. Bruno Augenstein and Elwyn Harris, “Assessment of NASP: Future Options,” RAND Working 

46. Quoted in Butrica, Single Stage to Orbit, p. 79. 

Dr&WD-4437-1-AF, July 1989, p. 2. 
290 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

three competing proposals.The story of why this risky choice was made has yet 

to be told. But once again, an approach to replacing the Shuttle had been chosen 

that would require simultaneous maturation of challenging techn~logies.~’ And 

once gain, achieving that maturation, at least on the original timescale and in 

the face of an impatient NASA and national leadership, proved impossible. 

Why were these two efforts given high-level approval to proceed and 

widespread publicity when, at the time of approval, their chances of success 

were known to be low to at least some observers? This is a question deserving 

of more attention than it has received to date. 

In 1989, one veteran aerospace engineer wondered, with respect to NASP, 

“HOW could ideas that were so thoroughly explored thirty years ago, and so 

thoroughly found lacking in sufficient promise twenty years go, have suddenly become once again in vogue?” It was not technological progress that 

had brought the ideas to the fore, he concluded, but rather “blissful ignorance of the past.” Only a few of the instigators of the NASP program had 

been involved in earlier efforts, and “they were the ones who not only had 

been infected by the dream of long ago, but who had, in the process, become 

addicted to it and, therefore, immune to any amount of contrary e~idence.”~’ 

One suspects that an informed independent assessment of those who advocated the X-33 program would not be much different in its conclusions. 

The costs of a lack of historical perspective and unchecked technological 

optimism, bordering on hubris, have been high. Roger Launius has suggested 

that the X-33 program and the NASP program before it “have been enormous 

detours for those seeking to move forward with a replacement for the Space 

Shuttle. Expending bilhons of dollars and dozens of years in pursuit of reusable SSTO technology, the emphasis on this approach ensured the tardiness of 

development because of the strikingly ddkult technological challenge^."^^ The 

Columbia Board agreed, suggesting that one reason for the ‘‘failure of national 

leadership” related to the absence of a replacement for the Space Shuttle was 

“continuing to expect major technological advances” in a replacement vehicle.50 

How are nontechnical decision-makers to be protected against the enthusiasm of technological optimists? That is a topic well beyond the scope of this 

essay, but clearly, in the case of NASP and X-33, the necessary checks and 

balances were missing or not influential. 

47. It should be noted that although X-33 and then Venturestarm were widely perceived as 

a path to Shuttle replacement, the original designs were for an automated, cargo-carrying vehicle. 

Presumably, humans could be carried as “cargo,” i.e., passengers, as the reliability of Venturestarm was 

demonstrated. 

48. Carl H. Builder, “The NASP as a Time Machine,” RAND Internal Note 25684-AF, August 

1989, p. 1. 

49. Launius, “After Columbia,” p. 291. 

50. CAIB, Report, p. 211. 
‘“A FAILURE OF NATIONAL LEADERSHIP” . . . 29 1 

THE POLITICAL PROCESS AND THE STRENGTH 

OF THE PRO-SHUTTLE COALITION 

As noted by the CAIB, the Space Shuttle is “an engineering marvel that 

enables a wide variety of on-orbit operation^."^^ The Shuttle is also a program 

with a multibillion-dollar annual budget which employs thousands of people 

in various locations and is the focus of much of the activity at the Johnson 

Space Center, with a large astronaut corps located there; the Marshall Space 

Flight Center; and the Kennedy Space Center. Major and smaller aerospace 

firms across the United States work on the Shuttle program. 

It is not surprising, then, that throughout the Shuttle program’s history 

there has grown up a politically active coalition of government, contractor, 

local, and congressional supporters who argue that the Shuttle is a vehicle that 

continues to be superior in capabilities to any technologically feasible replacement, and who therefore have suggested that the preferred course of action is 

to invest scarce funds in upgrading and modernizing the Shuttle rather than 

seeking an early replacement. From the time when President Jimmy Carter (in 

1979) considered terminating the Shuttle program, through the conflicts in the 

early 1980s with the Air Force on one hand and foreign and domestic competitors on the other, to the aftermath of the Challenger and Columbia accidents, 

and perhaps even to the current time, this coalition has argued that it would be 

a mistake to rush towards a Shuttle replacement. Ten years ago, a report from 

an advisory group headed by NASA veteran Christopher Kraft argued that the 

Shuttle was “a mature and reliable system . . . about as safe as today’s technology will provide.”52 At the time of the 2003 CoZumbia accident, after the failure 

of the X-33 program and the Space Launch Initiative, NASA was planning to 

keep the Shuttle in operation until at least 2020 and potentially beyond. 

The existence of an organized coalition of public and private interests 

with a stake in the Space Shuttle program is an entirely legitimate phenomenon. The whole system design of the American political process is intended 

to allow organized interests to contend for a favorable policy outcome. In 

this case, however, there was no organized alternative interest group pushing for an early Shuttle replacement, and thus the default outcome of annual 

policy debates was likely to favor the pro-Shuttle position, or, at a minimum, 

not result in outcomes opposing it. While, for example, there was opposition 

from the scientific community and some members of Congress in the 1980s 

and 1990s to the space station program, there has been no similar consistent 

opposition to the Space Shuttle. 

51. Ibid., p. 25. 

52. Quoted in ibid., p. 118. 
292 CRITICAL ISSUES INTHE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

There were, however, limits to the political strength of the Shuttle support coalition. Although it may have been powerful enough to raise questions 

about the wisdom of proceeding rapidly towards a Shuttle replacement, it 

did not have enough power within the political process to influence decision-makers to allocate adequate resources for upgrading the Shuttle and its 

associated infrastructure. The Shuttle program budget was cut by more than 

40 percent in purchasing power between 1991 and 2000. Although some 

upgrades were introduced into the system, more were not funded or canceled 

soon after being approved, and the Shuttle’s ground infrastructure was “deteri~rating.”~~ Especially in the decade before the Columbiu accident, uncertainty 

about when the Shuttle might be replaced, as the politically weaker and not 

well organized advocates of such replacement contended with the pro-Shuttle 

coalition, created an ambivalent policy attitude towards the Shuttle program. 

This policy outcome was perhaps the worst possible situation-not enough 

funding for successful operation of the Shuttle, but also inadequate political commitment behind an effort to replace it. It was most fundamentally a 

reflection of the place that human spaceflight held, and perhaps continues to 

hold, in the list of national priorities-something that most Americans want 

to see continue but are unwilling to invest enough resources in to do well. 

This is an attitude criticized by those committed to human spaceflight. 

Launius notes that “if the United States intends to fly humans in space it 

should be willing to foot the bill for doing so.” He suggests that “if Americans 

are unwilling as a people to make that investment, as longtime NASA engineer and designer of the Mercury capsule spacecraft Max Faget [who died in 

20041 recently stated, ‘we ought to be ashamed of our~elves.”’~~ These are 

noble sentiments but do not reflect the long-standing reality of how the space 

program has been seen in terms of national priorities. 

HUMAN SPACEFLIGHT AS A NATIONAL ENTERPRISE 

Kay, writing a decade ago, observed that “three decades ago, the United 

States government made a decision to support space exploration-including 

human flight-on a rather large scale.” He questions whether “our present 

institutional arrangements and political practices prevent us from carrying 

out that decision effectively,” and thus there may be a need to “rethink our 

original policy decision.”55 

This essay asserts that at the national leadership level, the decision “to 

support space exploration-including human flight-on a rather large scale” 

53. Ibid., p. 114. 

54. Launius, “After Columbia,” p. 295. 

55. Kay, Can Democracies Fly in Space? p. x. 
‘‘A FAILURE OF NATIONAL LEADERSHIP” . . . 293 

was rethought soon after it was made and that the outcome of that rethinking 

was a much more muted commitment to the civilian space program overall, including human spaceflight. The people of the United States and their 

government have been willing, over the past 35 years, to continue a human 

spaceflight program, but only at a level of funding that has forced it to constantly operate on the edge of viability. The lack of a replacement for the 

Space Shuttle is a symptom of this larger reality. In this context, the assertion 

that the lack of a Shuttle replacement is a “failure of national leadership” is 

the logical result of the halfhearted U.S. commitment to human spaceflight. 

If there is a “failure,” then, it is the failure to reconcile the reality of limited 

support with this country’s continuing commitment to sending people into 

space. Human spaceflight may indeed be a “national enterprise”-but it is one 

that for many years has not been central to important American interests, at 

least as they are expressed through the political process. 

Kay ends his book with the question, “Can democracies fly in space?” 

His answer to this question is another question: “How badly do they want 

What will be argued below is that the answer to this second question 

is “not very badly.” 

Perhaps the single most convincing piece of evidence in support of this 

conclusion is the pattern of resources allocated to NASA over its history, as 

seen in the familiar figure repeated on the following page. Two things are 

remarkable about this pattern of resource allocation. The one most usually 

remarked upon is the rapid buildup of resources in the early 1960s in support 

of Project Apollo. This indeed was a peacetime mobilization of financial (and 

human) resources on a wartime scale. The Apollo buildup created an image 

of what a successful space program should be-one developing large-scale, 

expensive technology to take people into space. 

Equally remarkable, however, and more fundamental to the argument 

of this paper is the rapid builddown of resources allocated to NASA between 

1965 and 1974, and even more so the stability of that allocation over the past 

30 years. It: is impossible to escape the conclusion that, whatever the specific 

content of the NASA program at a particular time, the American public and 

their leaders, through the political process, have consistently decided to allocate less that 1 percent of the annual federal budget to the civilian space program as a national enterprise. This decision has been made, and reinforced, 

as the federal budget for each successive fiscal year has been assembled in the 

White House and approved or modified by the Congress. Within that allocation, national leaders have expected NASA to carry on a successful program 

of human spaceflight as well as its other activities. The result, as the CAIB 

56. Ibid., p. 193 
294 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

observed with respect to the Columbia accident, has been an agency striving to 

“do too much with too little.” 

The basic decision that the United States, after succeeding in being first 

to land humans on the Moon, would not continue an ambitious program of 

human spaceflight in Earth orbit and beyond was made in 1969-1970 as the 

administration of President Richard Nixon formulated its post-Apollo policy 

for the civilian space program. It is a decision that has been reinforced by 

Presidents Ford, Carter, Reagan, and Clinton. 

Up to 2004, only President George H. W. Bush (in 1989) suggested a 

reinvigoration of the human spaceflight program. Between President Bush’s 

1989 proposal for a “Space Exploration Initiative” and the time he was defeated 

in the 1992 election, it became clear, through the operation of the political 

process, that the country was not interested in a higher priority, more expensive human spaceflight effort.57 

The first step in the process offormulating a policy to guide the space program after the end of the Apollo program was the creation in February 1969 of 

the Space Task Group, chaired by Vice President Spiro T. Agnew. This group 

was charged with preparing “definitive recommendations on the direction 

57. See Thor Hogan, “Mars Wars: A Case History of Pohcymaklng in the American Space 

Program” (Ph.D. dlss., George Washlngton University, 2004), for a careful account of the origms 

and fate of the 1989 Space Exploration Initiative. 
“A FAILURE OF NATIONAL LEADERSHIP” . . . 295 

which the U.S. space program should take in the post-Apollo period.”58 In its 

15 September 1969 report, the Space Task Group set out several options for the 

future and, “as a focus for the development of new capability,” recommended 

that “the United States accept the long-term option or goal of manned planetary exploration with a manned Mars mission before the end of the century 

as the first target.” This recommendation was actually a watered-down version of what the Group intended to recommend. President Nixon’s advisers 

had intervened at the last minute, as the report was going into print, to make 

sure that the report did not contain the Group’s planned recommendation that 

the initial mission to Mars be carried out in the 1980s, a recommendation that 

was politically unacceptable. The report proposed that whatever option was 

chosen by the President, the NASA budget by 1980 should be anywhere from 

the same as to twice that at the peak of the Apollo program.59 

Accepting the Space Task Group’s recommendations would have meant 

accepting a long-term national commitment to a robust program of human 

spaceflight, with repeated trips to the Moon and, eventually, forays to Mars. 

This was not at all what Richard Nixon and his advisers had in mind for the 

post-Apollo space effort. Rather than reward NASA for the success of the 

Apollo 11 landing, between October 1969 and January 1970, the NASA budget for fiscal year 1971 was severely reduced. In October, NASA requested 

White House approval of a $4.5-billion budget which would allow it to begin 

to implement the recommendations of the Space Task Group; by the time the 

President’s budget was sent to Congress the following January, that amount 

had been reduced to $3.3 billion, a cut of over 25 percent from NASA’s request 

and even $400 million less than the previous year’s budget. 

This outcome was not just the result of the Nixon administration’s desire 

to submit a balanced budget; it reflected a major space policy choice. As 

Nixon’s top adviser on space policy Peter Flanigan told the President in a 6 

December 1969 memorandum: 

The October 6 issue of Newsweek took a poll of 1,321 

Americans with household incomes ranging from $5,000 to 

$15,000 a year. This represents 61% of the white population 

of the United States and is obviously the heart of your constituency. Of this group, 56% think the government should be 

spending less money on space exploration, and only 10% think 

that the government should be spending more money.6o 

58. Logsdon, Exploring the Unknown, vol. 1, document 111-22, p. 513. 

59. Ibid., document 111-25, p. 524. 

60. Ibid., document 111-27, p. 546. 
296 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

NASA Administrator Thomas Paine, who had been touring both the 

United States and foreign countries to promote a post-Apollo space program 

as set out in the Space Task Group report, met with President Nixon on 22 

January 1970 to make one last attempt to keep NASA on a path towards the 

approach laid out in the report. He had no success; Nixon told Paine that 

although he regretted the severe cuts to the NASA budget, “they were necessary in view of the overall budget situation-the reduced revenues and inflation.” Nixon discussed “the mood of the country,” which in the President’s 

judgment “was for cuts in space and defense.” Paine, ever an optimist, felt that 

the President “honestly would like to support a more vigorous space program 

if he felt the national mood favored it.” But that was not the case, and Nixon 

wanted to make sure that he was not put in a position where “the opposition 

could invidiously compare his positive statements on space to problems in 

poverty and social programs here on Earth.” Nixon did not want to appear to 

be “taking money away from social programs and the needs of the people here 

to fund spectacular crash programs out in space.” Paine also noted that in their 

meeting, “the President didn’t mention the Space Task Group Report.”61 

On 7 March 1970, the White House released a presidential statement on 

the future ofthe U.S. space program; Richard Nixon never addressed the subject in a public address. The statement was cast both as a response to the Space 

Task Group report and as an evaluation of where space fit into the country’s 

future. Its message was clear: 

Space expenditures must take their proper place within a rigorous system of national priorities. What we do in space from here 

on in must become a normal and regular part of our national 

life and must therefore be planned in conjunction with all of the 

other undertakings which are important to us.62 

The 1969-1970 interactions between NASA and the Nixon White House 

have been given detailed attention because they reflect a fundamental policy 

decision that has not been given adequate historical attention. In the months 

following the apex of U.S. success in human spaceflight with the Apollo 11 

mission, the American President decided that it was neither in his political 

interest nor, more important, consistent with the desires of the American 

public to continue with a well-funded program of human spaceflight. This 

was not, as has been suggested, a case in which “the budget begat space policy 

61. Thomas Paine, “Meeting with the President, January 22, 1970,” memo for record, 22 January 

1970, Apollo Files, University of Houston-Clear Lake Library, Clear Lake,TX. 

62. Richard M. Nixon, “Statement About the Future of the United States Space Program,” 7 

March 1970, in US. President, Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Richard Nixon, 1970 

(Washington, DC: GPO, 1971), p. 251. 
“A FAILURE OF NATIONAL LEADERSHIP” . . . 297 

instead of space policy begetting the budget.”63 Rather, it reflected a deliberate, purposeful reversal of the space policy adopted by the Kennedy administration that had led to Project Apollo. That policy held that success in highly 

visible space projects was “part of the battle along the fluid front of the cold 

war”; that “dramatic achievements in space . . . symbolize the technological 

power and organizing capacity of a nation”; that it was “man, not machines, 

that captures the imagination of the world”; and that “the nation needs to make 

a positive decision to pursue space projects aimed at national prestige”64 (emphasis 

in original). To Richard Nixon and his advisers, this was not an acceptable 

rationale for a post-Apollo space program. They did not want to put an end 

to human spaceflight, but they were unwilling to set an ambitious goal to 

guide that effort. Instead, they approved development of a means-the Space 

Shuttle-without stating clearly the objectives it was to serve. 

The decision on the future of the space program, and particularly on 

the future of its most visible element, human spaceflight, taken by the Nixon 

administration 35 years ago has remained the core national space policy until 

recently. That decision viewed the space program as a national enterprise, 

to use Kay’s term, but one of secondary priority compared to other areas of 

national activity such as a strong defense, adequate social welfare, and, since 

2001, homeland security. Based on the priority assigned to space efforts in this 

policy, for more than 30 years there hzs been a remarkably consistent share of 

the federal budget allocated to NASA. 

That budget share has also been consistently inadequate to support the 

aspirations of NASA and the space community. Neither the space agency nor 

its supporters have adjusted their aspirations to that reality. Instead, they have 

continued to hold on to the hope that either a technological breakthrough on 

the order of NASP or VentureStarTM or a shift in the national priority assigned 

to space will allow them to make their dreams reality. 

It is understandable that those most directly involved in the space sector 

harbor expansive ambitions for the future. What is not acceptable as a basis for 

government policy is to allow those ambitions to remain unchecked when the 

resources for achieving them are not, and are not likely to be, available. It is up 

to the leaders of NASA and to those to whom they report in the White House 

and Congress to steer the organization in a direction consistent with its place in 

the public’s priorities. As suggested earlier, those leaders have failed to do so. 

63. This is the argument put forth by Joan Hoff in her essay “The Presidency, Congress, and 

the Deceleration of the U.S. Space Program in the 1970s,” in Spaceflight and the Myth of Presidential 

Leadership, ed. Roger D. Launius and Howard E. McCurdy (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 

1997), p. 106. 

64. This quotation comes from the 8 May 1961 memorandum, signed by NASA Administrator 

James E. Webb and Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara, recommending that President 

Kennedy set a human lunar landing as a national goal. The memorandum can be found in Logsdon, 

Exploring the Unknown, vol. 1, p. 444. 
298 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

This analysis seems to have wandered rather far &om the focus of this essay 

on explaining why no replacement for the Space Shuttle has yet been developed. 

On the contrary-the answer to that question depends on understanding the 

context within which the human spaceflight program has operated for at least 

the last 35 years. Beginning with the Nixon administration (or perhaps even 

earlier),65 the political process by which the United States sets priorities among 

various government activities has assigned a consistently secondary priority to 

the NASA space program. Operating within that priority, NASA was able to 

develop the Space Shuttle during the 1970s only by retiring all of the systems 

that had been developed for Project Apollo, with the exception of using surplus 

equipment for the 1973 Skylab and the 1975 Apollo-Soyuz missions.With these 

two exceptions, NASA accepted a lengthy hiatus in human spaceflight as an 

acceptable price to pay for being permitted to develop the Space Shuttle. 

Once the Space Shuttle started flying in 1981 and a space station was 

approved in 1984, NASA has had no similar opportunity to stop what it was 

doing and invest the funds thereby made available in developing a Shuttle 

replacement. Instead, it has had to try both to continue its ongoing, Shuttlebased human spaceflight program and to develop new spaceflight capabilities 

within an unvarying share of the federal budget. This has, to date, proven an 

impossible challenge to surmount. Therein lies the fundamental reason why 

there is, today, no replacement for the Space Shuttle; it is a product of a space 

policy decision made many years ago and not reversed since. 

SO HAS WERE REALLY BEEN A FAILURE? 

Calling the lack of a replacement for the Space Shuttle “a failure of 

national leadership” is based on the assumption, as stated in the CAIB report, 

that “America’s future space efforts must include human presence in Earth 

orbit, and eventually beyond.”66 If the United States is to continue human 

spaceflight, so this line of argument goes, it is essential to develop a Shuttle 

replacement rather than continue to rely on the aging and expensive Shuttle. 

To have come so far in space and not to have such a replacement ready or on 

the horizon must indeed be the result of a failure on the part of those responsible for allocating national resources to provide the support needed. 

There is an alternative perspective: that a program of continuing human 

spaceflight, eventually leading to travel beyond Earth orbit, does serve the 

national interest. The rationales in support of human spaceflight are diffi65.The NASA budget actually began its rapid decline from the 1965 peak of spending on Apollo 

while Lyndon B. Johnson was President. Although Johnson was committed to completing Apollo, he 

apparently gave post-Apollo spaceflight lower priority in the context of the other issues facing hnn in 

the 1965-1968 period. 

66. CAIB, Report, p. 210. 
“A FAILURE OF NATIONAL LEADERSHIP” . . . 299 

cult to articulate to the unconvinced in convincing fashion; Launius calls 

the rationale for human spaceflight “highly pr~blematic.”~~ For example, one 

member of the space community recently commented that taking “as axiomatic that space’s highest and true calling is achieving societal goals of research 

and exploration into the unknown” is the “burdensome baggage of an aristocratic calling, now bankrupt both ideologically and financially.”68 

What appears to be needed is some form of a national debate on the future 

of human spaceflight that will allow these and other conflicting perspectives 

to be fully articulated and the long-standing policy of assigning space efforts 

a secondary priority as a national enterprise to be reassessed. As suggested 

above, the current policy that assigns space such a priority has resulted in a 

human spaceflight effort that has struggled now for many years to be a viable 

undertaking. As one recent analysis suggests, the fact that the vision of human 

spaceflight, including the resumption of human voyages of exploration, has 

not resonated “with the American public to the point where it inspires action 

is a reflection of a larger problem: the U.S. currently has no larger shared 

vision” into which a space exploration vision can fit.69 

The policy of assigning secondary priority to space is thus not a “failure” 

in a basic sense; the policy is the consistent result of a democratic political 

process and thus can be said to represent the will of the American public. It is 

also difficult to say that national leaders have failed when they have acted in 

accordance with the public will as expressed through established institutions 

and processes. 

Who then-or what-has failed? As suggested above, there has been a 

leadership failure in the sense that space ambitions and the resources to accomplish them have not been brought into balance. But perhaps the failure also 

lies with those who continue to advocate the original space dream, which was 

based on “adventure, mystery, and exploration.” To date, they have failed to 

convince enough others that this dream is worth realizing to make it a focus 

of a higher priority national (or international) enterprise. Most Americans 

appear not to care very much about a future that includes a vigorous space 

effort. Advocates have not adjusted their hopes to reflect the resources society is willing to provide them. Rather, “the dreams continue, while the gap 

between expectations and reality remains unres~lved.”~~ 

67. For a discussion of the &&culty in stating a compelling rationale for human spaceflight, see John 

M. Logsdon, “A Sustainable Rationale for Human Spaceflight,” Issues in Science and Technology (winter 

2004); Launius, “Beyond Columbia,” quotation &om p. 

68. Rick Fleeter, “ContemplatingWhich Direction 

69. Center for Cultural Studies & Analysis, “American Perception ofspace Exploration: A Cultural 

Analysis for Harmonic International and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration,” 

report to NASA, 1 May 2004, p. 3. 

70. Howard E. McCurdy, Space and the Americun Imagination (Washington, DC: Smithsonian 

Institution Press, 1997), p. 243. 

ace,” Space News (18 October 2004): 7. 
300 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

EPILOGUE: AN ACHIEVABLE VISION? 

On 14 January 2004, President George Bush laid out what has become 

known as the Vision for Space Exploration. In his speech announcing this 

new vision, the President called for a “journey, not a race.” In the formal language of the policy directive underlying the Vision, the objective is a “sustained and affordable program of human and robotic exploration of the solar 

system and bey~nd.”~’ 

Those planning this new approach to the U.S. space program appear 

to have recognized the reality described in this essay: any major new space 

initiative, if it is to be achievable, must be planned so that it can be carried 

out within a level of funding consistent with the pattern of more than three 

decades. The Vision gives highest priority within the NASA program to those 

activities related to exploration; other activities will receive lower priority and 

thus less funding in the future. A firm deadline has been set for retiring the 

Space Shuttle from service, and NASA’s activities aboard the International 

Space Station will be gradually phased out. A replacement for the Space 

Shuttle in its role of carrying Americans into space, the Crew Exploration 

Vehicle, is a key part of the new Vision. In order to stay within a politically 

feasible budget, the first crew-carrying flight of the CEV is not scheduled 

until the 2012-2014 timeframe, and the first human mission to the Moon is 

planned for 2018-2020. A several-year period during which the United States 

will have to depend on Russia for human access to space is accepted. Cost 

of achieving the Vision will be minimized by substantial international and 

private-sector involvement. According to the Vision’s financial projections, 

the NASA budget between 2004 and 2020 will increase only by 1.5 percent 

in the first five years of the new effort and not at all in constant dollars in the 

subsequent decade. 

Is this a vision that the country will support on a stable basis? Can its 

objectives be achieved within the resources pr~jected?~’ These are questions 

that cannot be answered now. What can be said is that the Vision for Space 

Exploration in its conception reflects the realities described in this essay. 

Whether its aspirations can become reality remains to be seen. 

71. White House, “Renewed Spirit of Discovery.” 

72. See U.S. Congress, Congressional Budget Office, “A Budgetary Analysis of NASA’s New 

Vision for Space Exploration,” September 2004, for a skeptical response to this question. 
CHAPTER 10 

REUSABLE LAUNCH VEHICLES OR 

EXPENDABLE LAUNCH VEHICLES? 

A PERENNIAL DEBATE 

Andrew J. Butrica 

he decades-long debate over reusable launch vehicles (RLVs) versus T expendable launch vehicles (ELVs) has been less a reasoned debate than 

a sustained argument for the building of reusable launchers instead of the 

standard throwaway rocket. The single greatest touted advantage of reusable 

launch vehicles is that they reduce launch costs.' Comparing reusable and 

expendable rockets is not simple; it is a rather complicated task not unlike the 

proverbial comparing of apples and oranges. To compare the costs of the two 

types of rockets, we must consider two types of costs, recurring and nonrecurring. Nonrecurring costs entail those funds spent on designing, developing, 

researching, and engineering a launcher (called DDR&E costs). Recurring 

costs fall into two categories: expenses for building the launcher and the costs 

of its operation and maintenance. 

Outlays for designing, developing, researching, and engineering reusable 

launchers are necessarily higher than those for expendable launchers because 

reusable rockets are technologically more challenging. For example, a reusable 

launch vehicle must have advanced heat shielding to allow it to reenter the 

atmosphere not once, but many times.Throwaway rockets have no need for such 

heat shielding. In addition, we possess a profound knowledge of expendable 

rocket technologies thanks to our long experience (over a half of a century) with 

ICBMs and other single-use rockets, while many of the technologies needed to 

build a fully reusable launcher remain in the elusive future. Construction costs, 

however, favor reusable launchers. For each launch, the cost of building a new 

expendable rocket is a recurring expense. For reusable launchers, construction 

costs are part of the upfront costs amortized over each launch. 

Because reusable launch vehicles must fly many times in order to amortize startup costs, they have to be a lot more reliable than throwaway rockets, 

1. Another cost-comparison method, but one that applies to specific launchers rather than 

launcher types and is considered to be more like comparing apples to apples (rather than oranges), 

IS to determine the cost of delivering a pound of payload into orbit using a given launch system. 
302 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

as well as more robust, so that on any given flight the craft does not suffer 

significant deterioration. The reliability of throwaway launchers is about 95 

percent-that is, on average, 1 launch in 20 fails. A reusable launcher with 

equal reliability would not be able to recoup the higher investment needed 

to develop and build it. Achieving the necessary increased robustness and 

reliability also increases the cost and decreases the useful payload weight for 

reusable launchers. 

The result of these intrinsic differences between the two launcher types 

leads to a tradeoff between the lower development costs of expendable rockets 

and the lower recurring costs of reusable launchers. In making that tradeoff, one must take into account a number of other realistic factors that favor 

expendable launchers. For example, although one can amortize reusable vehicle construction costs over many flights, they are far more expensive to build 

than expendable rockets. Building a full-scale version of the VentureStarTM, 

Lockheed Martin’s failed attempt at a reusable, single stage to orbit (SSTO) 

launch vehicle, would have cost (conservatively) more than the $1 billion 

NASA spent on the X-33 program, the intent of which was to build a prototype of the VentureStarTM craft.2 That same amount of money might have 

bought 10 expendable rockets at $100 million each. Also, the knowledge 

gained in manufacturing a large number of a given type of disposable launcher 

actually can help to lower construction costs. Thus, in order to compete with 

the low development and construction costs of the established expendable 

industry, a reusable launcher would have to fly more than 50 times. 

The gamble of the reusable launcher is that a small fleet of three to five 

vehicles could put payloads into orbit for less than the cost of the number of 

expendable rockets required to lift similar payloads. A commercial builder and 

operator of reusable launchers, however, would be burdened by the need to 

amortize development and construction costs over each mission. An obvious 

solution would be to have the government pay for most or all of the development costs and for government (NASA and the Air Force) to buy one or two 

reusable launchers for its exclusive use. 

The preceding discussion applies to a comparison of expendable rockets 

with fully reusable launchers. The economics of launching a reusable vehicle atop an expendable booster are rather different. Such hybrid systems are 

technologically more achievable than fully reusable single-stage or two-stage 

rockets. A variety of launchers that combine reusable and expendable stages 

have been under development by companies and government, and they appear 

to promise reductions in the cost of placing payloads in orbit. Throughout 

2. NASA canceled plans to have a history of the X-33 written. To date, the best brief description 

of the project’s evolution is General Accounting Office, Status of the X-33 Reusable Launch Vehicle 

Program, GAO/NSIAD-99-176 (Washington, DC: GPO, August 1999), pp. 2-8. 
REUSABLE LAUNCH VEHICLES OR EXPENDABLE LAUNCH VEHICLES? 303 

the decades-long quest for reusability, the configuration of a reusable reentry 

vehicle atop a throwaway booster (a so-called boost-glide system) has dominated launcher thinking. In these boost-glide systems, the upper stage vehicle, 

once released from its booster rocket, climbs into orbit on its own power, then 

glides to a landing. Some reusable suborbital vehicles launch from a large jet, 

such as a B-52 or an L-1011. 

Cost has not been the only factor favoring one launch technological system over another. Emotional and political considerations are certainly key, as 

is the pull on the imagination exercised by the promise of reusable launchers. 

RLV enthusiasts believe that a fully reusable rocket would provide the lowcost, reliable transport to space necessary to realize the seemingly endless possibilities of exploiting space-the “final frontier”-for colonization, mining, 

tourism, manufacturing, or just exploration. 

The history of the debate over reusable versus expendable launchers is 

complex, and one can explore it from a variety of perspectives. The most 

obvious is a narrative of the enduring endeavor to conceive and develop a 

reusable launch vehicle. This chapter begins with such an account, then discusses the evolution of space transportation policy regarding reusable and 

expendable launchers. A third section raises historiographical questions about 

launch vehicle history as well as space history in general. 

THE SPACEPLANE CONCEPT 

One of the earliest reusable vehicle concepts was that of the ~paceplane.~ 

They are like airplanes in a rather simplistic and literal way. They have wings 

and take off and land horizontally like an airplane; a pilot and copilot sit in a 

cockpit. They usually (but not always) feature a kind of air-breathing engine 

known as a cram jet.^ Their appeal is rather similar to that of jet aircraft, 

namely, the urge to go faster and higher than before that permeates the history 

of flying. Indeed, spaceplanes are little more than aircraft that fly into space. 

One of the first spaceplane concepts was that of the American rocketeer 

Robert Goddard. In a Popular Science article published in December 1931, he 

described a spaceplane (“stratosphere plane”) with elliptically shaped wings 

and propelled by a combination air-breathing jet and rocket engine. The 

rocket engine drove the vehicle while it was outside the atmosphere, and 

two turbines moved into the rocket’s thrust stream to drive two large propel3. I am excluding all of those reusable launch vehicles described in science fiction hterature. 

4. Scrumjef is a truncation of “supersonic combustion ramjet.” Ramjets are jet engines that 

propel aircraft at supersonic speeds by igniting fuel mixed with air that the engine has compressed. 

Scramjets achieve hypersonic velocities. 
304 CRITICAL ISSUES INTHE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

lers on either wing, thereby powering the vehicle while in the atm~sphere.~ 

German researcher Eugen Sanger, in his 1933 book on rocket flight, described 

a rocket-powered suborbital spaceplane known as the Silbervogef (Silver Bird), 

fueled by liquid oxygen and kerosene and capable of reaching a maximum 

altitude of 160 kilometers (100 miles) and a speed of Mach 10. Later, working with his future wife, the mathematician Irene Bredt, and a number of 

research assistants, Sanger designed the Rocket Spaceplane, launched from a 

sled at a speed of Mach 1.5. A rocket engine capable of developing 100 tons 

of thrust would boost the craft into orbit, where it could deploy payloads 

weighing up to 1 ton.6 

The appearance of ideas for craft capable of flying into space is not surprising. They reflected the interwar enthusiasm for the airplane, as well as 

excitement over rocketry, and projected those technological enthusiasms into 

space. New technologies often look like older technologies. For example, 

James Prescott Joule’s electric motor resembled a steam engine, and Samuel 

F. B. Morse built his first telegraph from a canvas stretcher, a technology 

he knew as an artist? Inventors necessarily proceed from the known to the 

technologically unknown. The passion for spaceplanes continued for decades 

more, feeding off the exciting advances in technology that propelled aircraft 

faster and faster to supersonic, then to hypersonic, speeds. 

Spaceplanes remained largely fictional concepts until 1957, when the Air 

Force initiated what became the Aerospaceplane program to develop a single 

stage to orbit vehicle powered by an air-breathing engine. By 1959, the project had evolved into the Recoverable Orbital Launch System (ROLS), an 

SSTO design that would take off horizontally and fly into a 300-mile-high 

(483-meter-high) orbit. The ROLS propulsion system collected air from the 

atmosphere, then compressed, liquefied, and distilled it in order to make liquid oxygen, which mixed with liquid hydrogen before entering the engines. 

5. Russell J. Hanmgan, Spacefiight in the Era $Aero-Space Planes (Malabar, FL Krieger Publishing 

Company, 1994), p. 71. Materials in file 824 of the NASA Historical Reference Collection at NASA 

Headquarters, Washington, DC, indicate that the article appeared in the December 1931 issue, pp. 

148-149, and was titled “A New Turbine Rocket Plane for the Upper Atmosphere.” 

6. Irene Sanger-Bredt, “The Silver Bird Story: A Memoir,” file 7910, NASA Historical Reference 

Collection, Washington, DC; Hannigan, Spacefiight in the Era $Aero-Space Planes, pp. 71-73; Michael 

J. Neufeld, The Rocket and the Reich: Peenemunde and the Coming $the Ballistic Missile Era (NewYork 

The Free Press, 1995), pp. 7-10; Richard F? HalIion, “In the Beginning Was the Dream 

Hypersonic Revolution: Eight Case Studies in the History ofHypersonicTechnology, ed. Richard P. Hdlion, vol. 

1, From Max I/alier to Project Prime, 19241967 (Dayton, OH: Special Sta!TOffice,Aeronautical Systems 

Division, Wright-Patterson AFB, 1987), pp. xi-xv. 

7. Brooke Hindle, Emulation and Invention (New York: New York University Press, 1981), pp. 

85-108, 120-121; Lewis Coe, Telegraph: A History $Morse’s Invention and Its Predecessors in the United 

States (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1993); J. M. Anderson, “The Invention of the Telegraph: Samuel 

Morse’s Role Reassessed,” IEEE Power Engineering Review 18 (July 1998): 28-29. 
REUSABLE LAUNCH VEHICLES OR EXPENDABLE LAUNCH VEHICLES? 305 

This complicated propulsion system, dubbed LACES (Liquid Air Collection 

Engine System), later renamed ACES (Air Collection and Enrichment System), 

as well as various scramjet engine concepts, underwent Air Force evaluation 

over time. Faced with the uncertainties of the single-stage design, the Air 

Force shifted the focus of the Aerospaceplane to two stage to orbit concepts in 

1962, and following the program’s condemnation by the Scientific Advisory 

Board, the Aerospaceplane died in 1963. Congress cut fiscal 1964 funding, 

and the Pentagon declined to press for its restoration.8 

Dyna-Soar 

A rather different reusable vehicle concept was the boost-glide system. 

The Peenemiinde rocket group under Wernher von Braun originally planned 

to develop a much larger missile, the A-10/A-9, capable of delivering a 1- 

ton bomb over 5,000 kilometers (3,125 miles) away. The A-10 first stage 

was a conventional booster rocket, while the A-9 upper stage was a winged 

vehicle that could glide at supersonic speeds before hitting its target. Other 

Peenemiinde work, kept secret from the Nazis, included a piloted version of 

the A-9 that would launch vertically and land horizontally, like the Space 

Shuttle. An even larger vehicle, the A-12, was a fanciful three-staged launcher 

whose top stage was a reusable winged reentry vehicle.’ None of these concepts, however, were orbital vehicles. 

At the end of World War 11, as is widely known, Wernher von Braun 

and much of the German rocket program became a vital part of the United 

States’ own missile program and contributed to the development of boostglide systems.*O Walter Dornberger, a key Nazi rocketeer and later a consultant for Bell Aircraft, persuaded that firm to undertake a study of boost-glide 

technology. In 1952, that study led to the joint development by Bell and the 

Wright Air Development Center, Dayton, Ohio, of a piloted bomber missile and reconnaissance vehicle called BoMi. A two-stage rocket would lift 

BoMi, which would operate at speeds over Mach 4. By 1956, the BoMi 

study work had evolved into a contract for Bell to develop Reconnaissance 

System 459L, commonly known as Brass Bell, a piloted two-stage boost8. Hannigan, Spaceflight in the Era of Aero-Space Planes, pp. 77-78; T. A. Heppenheimer, The 

Space Shuttle Decision: NASA’s Search for a Reusable Space Vehicle (Washington, DC: NASA SP-4221, 

1999), pp. 75-78; Hallion and James 0. Young, “Space Shuttle: Fulfillment of a Dream,” in The 

Hypersonic Revolution: Eight Case Studies in the History of Hypersonic Technology, ed. Hallion, vol. 

2, From Scramjet to the National Aero-Space Plane (Dayton, OH: Special Staff Office, Aeronautical 

Systems Division, Wright-Patterson AFB, 1987) pp. 949-951. 

9. Neufeld, Rocket and the Reich, pp. 92-93,121,138-139,156-157,283; Hallion,’% the Beginning 

Was the Dream . . . ,” p. xviii; Hannigan, Spaceflight in the Era ofAero-Space Planes, p. 73. 

10. Linda Hunt, Secret Agenda: The United States Government, Nazi Scientists, and Project Paperclip, 

1945 to 1990 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991). 
306 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

glide reconnaissance system, while the bomber part of the BoMi work 

became RoBo, a piloted hypersonic, rocket-powered craft for bombing and 

reconnaissance missions.” 

A major step in orbital boost-glide systems was the Dyna-Soar (for 

Dynamic Soaring) program. It was the final stage of a three-stage study 

of rocket-powered hypersonic flight initiated by the National Advisory 

Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) with Air Force participation. The study 

used a series of experimental aircraft (“X” vehicles) lifted into the sky by 

reusable aircraft. “Round One,” to use the NACA nomenclature, consisted of 

the Bell X-1 series, the Bell X-2 series, and the Douglas D-588-2 Skyrocket. 

“Round Two” was the series of flights eventually undertaken by the X-15. 

“Round Three” called for testing winged orbital reentry vehicles.12 

The Air Force’s Dyna-Soar program emerged from a 1957 consolidation of the NACA’s “Round Three” and several military hypersonic flight 

programs. Eventually, NASA participated in the project as well. Launched on 

an expendable booster, the Dyna-Soar X-20 would fly orbital or suborbital 

trajectories, perform reconnaissance at hypersonic speeds, and land horizontally like an aircraft at many U.S. air bases. Although the Dyna-Soar vehicle 

was never built, a prototype was near completion when Secretary of Defense 

Robert McNamara terminated the program on 10 December 1963, only eight 

months before drop tests from a B-52. The first piloted flight had been scheduled for 1964.13 

Dyna-Soar had a lot to offer the Air Force and the nation and might have 

changed history. The military might have benefited economically by possessing the world’s first reusable orbital vehicle, and the Pentagon would not have 

11. Clarence J. Geiger, “Strangled Infant: The Boeing X-20A Dyna-Soar,” in The Hypersonic 

Revolution, ed. Hallion, vol. 1, pp. 189, 191-198, a manuscript copy ofwhich is in file 11326, NASA 

Historical Reference Collection, Washington, DC, as Geiger, “History of the X-20A Dyna-Soar,” 

October 1963; additional items from files 495 and 11923, NASA Historical Reference Collection, 

Washington, DC; Hallion, “Editor’s Introduction,” in The Hypersonic Revolution, ed. Hallion, vol. 

1, p. 11-xi. 

12. Hallion, “In the Beginning Was the Dream . . . ,” p. xxi; Hallion, “Editor’s Introduction,” 

in The Hypersonic Revolution, ed. Hallion, vol. 1, pp. I-iv-I-v, 11-xi. 

13. R&D Project Card Continuation Sheet, 23 August 1957, file 11325, NASA Historical 

Reference Collection, Washington, DC; additional items in file 11340, NASA Historical Reference 

Collection, Washington, DC; Geiger, “Strangled Infant,” pp. 198-199, 201-204, 261, 263, 266, 

276-278, 296-297, 299-301,305, 308-309. A number of studies are available on the Dyna-Soar 

program. See, for instance, Terry Smith, “The Dyna-Soar X-20: A Historical Overview,” Quest: 

The History .f Spacefight Magazine 3, no. 4 (1994): 13-18, 23-28; Matt Bacon, “The Dynasoar 

Extinction,” Space 9 (May 1993): 18-21; Roy Franklin Houchin 11, “The Rise and Fall of DynaSoar: A History of Air Force Hypersonic R & D, 1944-1963” (Ph.D. diss., Auburn University, 

1995); Houchin, “The Diplomatic Demise of Dyna-Soar: The Impact of International and 

Domestic Political Affairs on the Dyna-Soar X-20 Project, 1957-1963,” Aerospace Historian 35 

(December 1988): 274-280. 
REUSABLE LAUNCH VEHICLES OR EXPENDABLE LAUNCH VEHICLES? 307 

Artist’s concept of a Dyna-Soar manned space glider being launched into space by a 

modified Titan ICBM. The glider, riding on the nose of the Titan, would be separated 

from its booster, leaving the spacecraft in piloted, near-orbital flight. The pilot could 

glide to a conventional landing at an Air Force base. The Boeing Company was the 

prime contractor for the glider, which was a US. Air Force program. Only a prototype 

of the glider was built before the program was terminated on 10 December 1963. 

(Boeing drawing S-5938, dated 22 September 1960) 
308 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

been forced to become NASA’s political ally in the space agency’s political 

struggle to win funding for its Space Shuttle program. Also, Dyna-Soar could 

have provided NASA a less expensive, but two-stage, orbital shuttle. The 

knowledge gained from the research program, which included over 14,000 

hours of wind tunnel tests, could have been applied to a number of applications from glide bombers to future spacecraft. Moreover, after termination 

of the program, Boeing carried out a small “X-20 continuation program” for 

several more years that involved testing various X-20 components and design 

features both in ground facilities and on flight research vehicles. The Renk 41 

high-temperature nickel alloy developed for the X-20 reappeared in the 1970s 

as part of the airframe structure and heat shielding for Boeing’s Reusable 

Aerodynamic Space Vehicle (RASV) .14 

Lifting Bodies 

Also of note among these early boost-glide systems was a group of reusable suborbital vehicles known as lifting bodies. A lifting body is a wingless aerodynamic shape that develops lift-the force that makes winged craft 

fly-because of its peculiar body shape. Research on lifting bodies began in 

early 1957 at the NACA’s Ames Aeronautical Laboratory (now NASA’s Ames 

Research Center). Following NASA’s success with its wooden M2-F1, the Air 

Force joined NASA at Edwards AFB in the test-flight program of the rocketpowered M2-F2, launched from a B-52 from 1966 until its crash in 1967.15 

The most prominent of these lifting-body craft was the Air Force’s X24B, built by Martin Marietta in 1972. A modified X-24B powered by aerospike engines became Lockheed’s Space Shuttle design concept in the latter 

1960s, the Starclipper, while the X-24B’s shape also inspired the design of 

what eventually became Lockheed skunk works’ X-33 launch vehicle. Despite 

the apparent name similarity, the X-24B had rather different shapes and distinct origins from the X-24A lifting body built for NASA, though both had a 

role in the Air Force’s lifting-body program.16 

The RASV 

Even as NASA and industry were building the Space Shuttle, the search 

for a reusable Shuttle replacement was under way. As with lifting-body research, 

14. Geiger, “Strangled Infant,” pp. 319-320, 369; Andrew K. Hepler interview, tape recording 

and transcript, Seattle, WA, by Butrica, 11 July 2000, NASA Historical Reference Collection; 

Hepler and E. L. Bangsund, Boeing Aerospace Company, Seattle, WA, Technology Requirementsfor 

Advanced Earth Orbital Transportation Systems, vol. 1, Executive Summary (Washington, DC: NASA 

Contractor Report CR-2878, 1978). 

15. R. Dale Reed, Wingless Flight: The Lijing Body Story (Washington, DC: NASA SP-4220, 1997), 

pp. 9, 67,69-72, 75, 87, 91,9698, 102, 106-109, 116; John L.Vitelli and Hallion, “Project PRIME: 

Hypersonic Reentry &om Space,” in The Hypersonic Revolution, ed. Hallion, vol. 1, p. 529. 

16.Vitelli and Hallion,“Project PRIME,” pp. 558,566,571,577-596,694-695,699,702-704,711. 
REUSABLE LAUNCH VEHICLES OR EXPENDABLE LAUNCH VEHICLES? 309 

NASA led the way. In 1972, the Langley Research Center, with the approval 

of NASA Headquarters, set up a small group to study the possibility of growing an aircraft known as the Continental/SemiGlobal Transport (C/SGT) into 

a single stage to orbit vehicle.The C/SGT would take off, almost attain orbit, 

then land, delivering people or cargo to any place on Earth in less than 2 hours. 

Langley researchers’ analyses of the vehicle suggested that with just a little bit 

more speed, the C/SGT could achieve orbit.17 

Using Shuttle technology as the starting point for their study of the structures, materials, and engines needed for a Shuttle replacement, the Langley 

analysis team evaluated the impact of improving structures and materials 

(such as composites) beyond the Space Shuttle on various configurations. The 

improved materials promised to reduce overall vehicle weight significantly, 

thereby seeming to bring SSTO transport within the realm of the possible>* 

Then, in 1975, Langley funded two industry studies of SSTO rocket concepts 

carried out by teams from Martin Marietta Denver and Boeing Seattle. The 

stated purpose of the study was to determine the future technology development needed to build an operational rocket-powered, single stage to orbit 

Space Shuttle replacement by the year 1995. Each team concluded that such a 

vehicle was feasible using technology available in the near term.” 

Next, Boeing tried to sell their vehicle design from the Langley 1975 

study to the Air Force. The company’s interest in the reusable SSTO vehicle 

was “based on the belief that the reusable airplane type operation of earth 

orbit transportation vehicles will allow considerable improvement in cost per 

flight and flexibility.”20 The vehicle would have incorporated both proven 

and unproven technologies. The cylindrically shaped, delta-winged, reusable 

single stage to orbit craft, powered by Space Shuttle Main Engines, would 

have take off with the help of a sled and land horizontally on a conventional 

runway. It would have used a combination of aluminum-brazed titanium and 

Ren6 41, a high-temperature nickel alloy developed for the Dyna-Soar X20, for both its structure and heat shielding. The vehicle would have stored 

liquid-hydrogen fuel in its body and liquid oxygen in its wings. The integration of the liquid-hydrogen and liquid-oxygen tanks into the load-carrying 

17.Alan Wilhite intemew, tape recording and transcript, NASA Langley Research Center, Hampton, 

VA, by Butrica, 22 May 1997, NASA Historical Reference Collection,Washington, DC. 

18. Charles H. Eldred interview, tape recording and transcript, NASA Langley Research Center, 

Hampton,VA, by Butrica, 20 May 1997, NASA Historical Reference Collechon,Washington, DC. 

19. The two studies were Rudolph C. Haefeli, Earnest G. Littler, John B. Hurley, and Marhn G. 

Winter, Denver Division, Marhn Marietta Corporation, Technology Requirements for Advanced EarthOrbital Transportation Systems: Final Report (Washmgton, DC: NASA Contractor Report CR-2866, 

October 1977); and Andrew K. Hepler and E. L. Bangsund, Boeing Aerospace Company, Seattle, WA, 

Technology Requirements for Advanced Earth Orbital Transportation Systems, vol. 1, Executive Summary, and 

vol. 2, Summary Report (Washington, DC: NASA Contractor Report CR-2878,1978). 

20. Hepler and Bangsund, Technology Requirements for Advanced Earth Orbital Transportation Systems, 

1:13-14. 
310 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

structure (that is, the wings and the main body of the craft), combined with 

the metallic shell made of honeycomb panels, went far in reducing overall 

vehicle weight.21 

Boeing soon interested the Air Force Space and Missiles System 

Organization (Los Angeles Air Force Station) in this vehicle concept. The Air 

Force dubbed it the Reusable Aerodynamic Space Vehicle (RASV) and, in 

1976, provided funding for a seven-month preliminary feasibility study of the 

RASV concept. It concluded (not surprisingly) that the RASV was feasible 

and that it would fulfill Air Force requirements. Among those requirements 

were flying 500 to 1,000 times “with low cost refurbishment and maintenance as a design goal” from a launch site in Grand Forks, North Dakota, 

into a polar orbit or once around the planet in a different orbit. The vehicle 

would have to reach “standby status within 24 hours from warning. Standby 

to launch shall be three minutes.”22 

In all, the Air Force invested $3 million in the project for technology 

development. The service had become convinced that the RASV potentially 

could provide a manned platform that could be placed above any point on the 

planet in less than an hour and could perform a variety of missions, including reconnaissance, rapid satellite replacement, and general space defense. 

In December 1982, Boeing Chairman T. A. Wilson gave the RASV effort 

the go-ahead to propose a $1.4-billion prototype vehicle to the Air Force.23 

Boeing, however, would not build the RASV. 

The problem was not the steep technological hurdles that the firm would 

have to leap, such as development of the sled to accelerate the RASV to a 

speed of 600 feet per second or achievement of fast turnaround time (24 hours 

or perhaps as short as 12 hours) for the Strategic Air Command (SAC).24 The 

Air Force ordered two classified studies of single stage to orbit technologies, 

“Science Dawn” (1983-1985) and “Have Region” (1986-1989), conducted by 

industry partners Boeing, Lockheed, and McDonnell Douglas. They inter21. Ibid., 1:14-16,2:191; Hepler interview. 

22. Boeing Aerospace Company, Final Report on Feasibility Study ofReusable Aerodynamic Space Vehicle, 

vol. 1, Executive Summary (Kent,WA Boeing Aerospace Company, November 1976), pp. 5,35. 

23. Hallion, “Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow: From Shuttle to the National Aero-Space 

Plane,” in The Hypersonic Revolution, ed. Hallion, vol. 2, p. 1334; P. Kenneth Pierpont, “Preliminary 

Study ofAdaptation of SST Technology to a Reusable Aero-space Launch Vehicle System,” NASA 

Langley Working Paper NASA-LWP-157, 3 November 1965; Boeing RASV proposal, December 

1982, file 256, X-33 Archive, record group 255, accession number 255-01-0645, Washington 

National Records Center, Suitland, MD (hereafter, X-33 Archive); Jess Sponable interview, tape 

recording and transcript, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC, by Butrica, 19 January 1998, 

NASA Historical Reference Collection, Washington, DC; Gary Payton and Jess Sponable, 

“Designing the SSTO Rocket,” Aerospace America (April 1991): 40. 

24. Hepler interview. 
REUSABLE LAUNCH VEHICLES OR EXPENDABLEAUNCH VEHICLES? 31 1 

preted the study results as demonstrating the technological feasibility of the 

RASV for SAC.25 But instead of proceeding with further RASV studies, the 

Air Force chose to develop a space vehicle that not only operated like an 

aircraft, as the RASV did, but had air-breathing jet engines, too. That space 

vehicle would be known as the National Aero-Space Plane (NASP). 

The National Aero-Space Plane 

With NASP, the spaceplane quest returned.26 The milestone moment 

was President Ronald Reagan’s State of the Union Address, delivered on 4 

February 1986, just days after the Challenger disaster. Reagan declared: “We 

are going forward with research on a new Orient Express that could, by the 

end of the decade, take off from Dulles Airport, accelerate up to 25 times the 

speed of sound attaining low Earth orbit, or fly to Tokyo within two 

As portrayed by the President, the Orient Express would be both a high-speed 

aircraft and a single stage to orbit vehicle, powered by air-breathing engines. 

The program merged two existing efforts. 

One was the TransAtmospheric Vehicle (TAV) program, set up in 1982 

as an Air Force study of Space Shuttle replacement concepts. Air-breathing 

engines were a serious, though not exclusive, consideration. The program 

considered a variety of both single- and two-stage vehicle configurations, 

powered by either rocket or jet engines.28 Interest in the TransAtmospheric 

Vehicle grew as a direct result of the increased need for launchers driven 

25. Raymond L. Chase, “Science Dawn Overview,” March 1990, file 235, X-33 Archive; Major 

Stephen Clift, “Have Region Program: Final Brief,” September 1989, file 235, X-33 Archive; 

Sponable interview. 

26. For background information on NASP, see the materials in file 106, box 4, X-33 Archive; 

Larry Schweikart, “Command Innovation: Lessons from the National Spaceplane Program,” 

in Innovation and the Development $Flight, ed. Roger D. Launius (College Station: Texas A&M 

University Press, 1999), pp. 299-323; Hannigan, Spaceflight in the Era ofAero-Space Planes, passim; 

Schweikart, “The National Spaceplane: Evolving Management Approaches to a Revolutionary 

Technology Program,” Essays in Economic and Business History 12 (1994): 118-33; Alan W. Wilhite, 

Richard W. Powell, Stephen J. Scotti, Charles R. McClinton, S. Zane Pinckney, Christopher I. 

Cruz, L. Robert Jackson, James L. Hunt, Jeffrey A. Cerro, and Paul L. Moses, “Concepts Leading 

to the National Aero-Space Plane Program” (paper read at the 28th Aerospace Sciences Meeting, 

Reno, NV, 8-11 January 1990), file 703, box 23, X-33 Archive. 

27. Quoted in Scott Pace, “National Aero-space Plane Program: Principal Assumptions, Findings, 

and Policy Options,” RAND publication P-7288-RGS, December 1986, p. 1. Reagan’s speechwriters 

confused the NASP reusable single stage to orbit vehicle with the Orient Express, a McDonnell 

Douglas hypersonic aircraft design in which Federal Express had shown interest. The confusion 

probably screened the flight vehicle’s military mission, though the McDonnell Douglas prototype 

claimed to be capable of performing either a NASP single stage to orbit or an Orient Express mission, 

depending on the vehicle’s propulsion system. See Paul Czysz interview, tape and transcript, NASA 

Langley Research Center, Hampton, VA, by Erik M. Conway, 17 July 2001, pp. 1-5, 8-9, 11. 

28. Hallion, “Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow,” pp. 1337, 1340-1341, 1345. 
312 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

by the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) and Space Station F~eedorn.’~ The 

second program was the classified three-phase Copper Canyon program of 

the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), which funded research on 

scramjet hypersonic vehicles3’ The Copper Canyon and TransAtmospheric 

Vehicle efforts merged to form a larger program that comprised the gamut 

of government agencies involved in hypersonic air-breathing engine studies at one time or another: NASA, ARPA, the Air Force, the Navy, and the 

Strategic Defense Initiative Organization (SDIO) . On 1 December 1985, the 

title National Aero-Space Plane (NASP) replaced all earlier designation^.^^ 

The NASP program initially proposed to design and build two research 

craft, the X-30, at least one of which was to achieve orbit by flying in a single 

stage through the atmosphere at speeds up to Mach 25. The X-30 would 

use a multicycle engine that shifted from jet to ramjet and scramjet speeds as 

the vehicle ascended, burning liquid-hydrogen fuel with oxygen scooped and 

frozen from the atmosphere. The engine and vehicle designs had come from 

Tony DuPont, an aerospace designer who had developed a multicycle jet and 

rocket engine under contract with NASA, then ARPA.32 DuPont’s vehicle 

design rested on a number of highly questionable assumptions, optimistic 

interpretations of results, and convenient omissions (such as landing gear) .33 

NASP, like the Aerospaceplane program, fell victim to budget cuts, but 

this time as a result of the end of the Cold War. Congress canceled NASP in 

1992, during fiscal 1993 budget deliberations. Although the program never 

came near to building or flying hardware, NASP contributed significantly to 

the advance of materials capable of repeatedly withstanding high temperatures 

(on the vehicle’s nose and body) or capable of tolerating repeated exposure to 

extremely low temperatures (the cryogenic fuel tanks) .34 

29. Ibid., pp. 1336-1337, 1340-1341. 

30. John V. Becker, “Confronting Scramjet: The NASA Hypersonic Ramjet Experiment,” 

in The Hypersonic Revolution, ed. Hallion, vol. 2, pp. VI.xii, VI.xiv, 765, 786-789, 824, 841; 

Heppenheimer, The National Spaceplane (Arlington, VA: Pasha Market Intelligence, 1987), p. 

14; Hallion, “Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow,” p. 1361; Larry Schweikart, “The Quest for the 

Orbital Jet: The National Aerospace Plane Program, 1983-1995,” manuscript, pp. 1.30-1.31, NASA 

Historical Reference Collection, Washington, DC. For background on these and other hypersonic 

research projects, see Erik Conway, High-speed Dreams: NASA and the Technopolitics of Supersonic 

Transportation, 1945-1999 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins, 2005). 

31. Heppenheimer, The National Spaceplane, p. 14; Hallion, “Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow,” 

pp. 1334, 1362-1364; Schweikart, “The Quest for the Orbital Jet,” pp. 1.30-1.31; Becker, 

“Confronting Scramjet,” in The Hypersonic Revolution, ed. Hallion, vol. 2, p. VI.xv. 

32. Robert Jones interview, tape and transcript, NASA Langley Research Center, Hampton, VA, 

by Erik M. Conway, 25 June 2001, pp. 8-9; Conway to Butrica, e-mail message, 5 April 2002; 

Schweikart, “The Quest for the Orbital Jet,” pp. 1.19-1.20,1.23,1.28,111.31,111.43-111.44; Hallion, 

“Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow,” pp. 1346, 1351, 1379. 

33. Schweikart, “The Quest for the Orbital Jet,” pp. 1.11-1.12, 1.19-1.20, 1.23, 1.28, 111.43. 

34. Ibid., pp. III.37-III.38,111.41-111.42. 
REUSABLE LAUNCH VEHICLES OR EXPENDABLE LAUNCH VEHICLES? 313 

The Delta Clipper 

The end of NASP was not the end of efforts to realize a fully reusable launch vehicle. In parallel with, but never in competition with, NASP 

was the SSTO Program of the SDIO. This program differed radically from 

its predecessors that had attempted to develop flight technology; instead, it 

tested the flight operations of a single stage to orbit vehicle, the Delta Clipper 

Experimental (DC-X). Its intent was not to develop technology, but to demonstrate “aircraft-like’’ operations, which included autonomous operations, 

minimal launch and operational crews, ease of maintenance, abort capability, 

and short turnaround time. The novelty of the SSTO Program also was to 

combine the goal of “aircraft-like” operations with the use of an “X’ vehicle 

and a “lean” management approach by both government and industry in the 

hope of expediting the project and keeping costs low. 

In early 1990, the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization started the 

SSTO Program. The 10-month-long Phase I consisted of design studies and 

the identification of critical technologies by Boeing, General Dynamics, 

McDonnell Douglas, and Rockwell Internati~nal.~~ In June 1991, following a review of Phase I concepts by NASA’s Langley Research Center, the 

SDIO solicited proposals for Phase 11. The Statement of Work described the 

capabilities of the full-scale operational single stage to orbit vehicle-which 

would loft SDI Brilliant Pebbles payloads into orbit-and the Phase I1 small 

suborbital “X” vehicle, its support infrastructures (such as the launchpad), 

and operational concepts.36 Of the three contractors competing-General 

Dynamics, McDonnell Douglas, and Rockwell International-the SDIO 

selected McDonnell Douglas in August 1991 to build its Delta Clipper 

Experimental (DC-X) in 24 months. The firm clearly understood the need 

to demonstrate operations rather than develop te~hnology.~’ 

McDonnell Douglas rolled out the 111-foot (34-meter) DC-X in 

record time, four months ahead of schedule, in April 1993. The company 

built the Delta Clipper out of modified existing hardware, some of which, 

such as welding rods and hinges, they purchased literally from local hardware stores. Pressure regulators and cryogenic valves came from Thor 

missiles formerly positioned in Europe, and the manufacturer of the alu35. McDonnell Douglas Space Systems Company, “Single Stage to Orbit Program Phase I 

Concept Definition,” 13 December 1990, file 267, X-33 Archive; General Dynamics Space Systems 

Division, “Concept Review Technical Briefing,” 13 December 1990, file 265, X-33 Archive; Space 

Transportation Systems, Boeing Defense and Space Group, “Single Stage to Orbit Technology 

Demonstration Concept Review Technical Briefing,” 12 December 1990, file 264, X-33 Archive; 

Rockwell International, “SDIO Single Stage to Orbit Concept Review,” 12 December 1990, file 

259, X-33 Archive. 

36. “NASA Evaluation of SDIO Phase I SSTO Concepts,” n.d., file 294, X-33 Archive. 

37. Sponable interview. 
314 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

minum liquid-oxygen and -hydrogen tanks was not an aerospace firm, but 

Chicago Bridge and Iron (CBI) of Birmingham, Alabama.38 More importantly, McDonnell Douglas sought to achieve SSTO Program operational 

goals. The Flight Operations Control Center at the White Sands Missile 

Range, New Mexico, consisted of a compact, low-cost, 40-foot (12-meter) 

mobile trailer. Three people operated the ground support equipment and 

launched the DC-X, not the hundreds typically used for NASA or military 

rocket launches. Former astronaut Pete Conrad was the “flight manager.” 

McDonnell Douglas designed the DC-X so that they could fly it again after 

only three days. Eventually, on 8 June 1996, the Clipper team demonstrated 

a one-day (26-hour) turnaro~nd.~~ 

By the time the DC-X undertook its first flight on 18 August 1993, the 

world had changed dramatically. The Cold War was over, and defense cuts 

were the order of the day. As DC-X flight trials took place, the future of 

funding for those flights, as well as for completion of the program, grew less 

certain. Money for Phase I11 disappeared, and various bureaucratic maneuvers stymied White House and congressional approval of financing. The 

predicament grounded the Clipper after only three flights, until the NASA 

Administrator intervened financially in January 1994.40 

NASA’s “Xy Vehicles 

By January 1994, NASA Administrator Daniel S. Goldin had become 

interested in single stage to orbit and other kinds of reusable launchers. His 

interest did not arise from any internal NASA studies, such as those conducted 

by the Langley Research Center as early as the 1970s, nor from the influence 

of high-level individuals at NASA Headquarters, such as Ivan Bekey, Director 

38. Paul L. Klevatt interview, tape recording and transcript, Tustin, CA, by Butrica, 14 July 

2000, NASA Historical Reference Collection, Washington, DC; William Gaubatz interview, tape 

recording and transcript, Huntington Beach, CA, by Butrica, 25 October 1997, NASA Historical 

Reference Collection, Washington, DC; Klevatt, “Design Engineering and Rapid Prototyping for 

the DC-X Single Stage Rocket Technology Vehicle,” AIAA-95-1425 (paper read at AIAA-ASMEASCE-AHS-ASC Structures, Structural Dynamics, and Materials Conference, New Orleans, LA, 

10-12 April 1995). 

39. Klevatt interview; McDonnell Douglas Space Systems Company, “Single Stage to Orbit 

Program Phase I Concept Definition,” 13 December 1990, file 267, X-33 Archive; Charles “Pete” 

Conrad interview, tape recording and transcript, Rocket Development Company, Los Alamitos, 

CA, by Butrica, 22 October 1997, NASA Historical Reference Collection, Washington, DC; Luis 

Zea, “The Quicker Clipper,” Final Frontier (October 1992): 4, file 267, X-33 Archive; Mark A. 

Gottschalk, “Delta Clipper: Taxi to the Heavens,” Design News (September 1992), file 292, X-33 

Archive; Leonard David, “Unorthodox New DC-X Rocket Ready for First Tests,” Space News 

(11-17 January 1993): 10. 

40. George E. Brown, Jr., to Les Aspin, 31 January 1994, file 293, X-33 Archive; Ben Iannotta, 

“DC-X Hangs by Thin Thread Despite Short-term Reprieve,” Space News (7-13 February 1994): 

4; Iannotta, “Pentagon Frees Funds for More DC-X Flights,” Space News (9-15 May 1994): 4; 

Warren E. Leary, “Rocket: Program Faces Budget Ax,” New York Times (31 January 1994): 13A. 
REUSABLE LAUNCH VEHICLES OR EXPENDABLE LAUNCH VEHICLES? 31 5 

of Advanced Programs in the Office of Space Flight, although Bekey was to 

play a role?’ Rather, the Administrator was reacting to a September 1992 

mandate from Congress to assess national space launch requirements, particularly in light of declining federal budgets.42 

The NASA Access to Space Study considered NASA, military, and commercial launch needs for the period between 1995 and 2030. It examined 

three different launcher alternatives option^")^^ and strongly concluded in 

favor of pursuing the development of a single stage to orbit replacement for the 

Space Shuttle, especially because it appeared to be the best approach to reducing overall launch ~osts.4~ Indeed, the single stage to orbit zeal of the Access 

to Space team was so strong that they proposed a NASA technology development program using an “X” vehicle-the X-2000 (for the program’s final 

year of operation)-to be built entirely by NASA with joint funding from the 

Pentagon. The X-2000, not by chance, closely resembled the Phase 111 vehicle 

of the Delta Clipper pr0gram.4~ 

NASA, however, was not going to build the X-2000. In April 1994, the 

White House released a draft National Space Transportation Strategy that 

made NASA “the lead agency for technology development and demonstration for advanced next generation reusable launch system^.'"^ It also decreed, 

in section 111, paragraph 2(b): “Research shall be focused on technologies 

to support a decision, no later than December 1996, to proceed with a subscale flight demonstration which would prove the concept of single-stage to 

orbit.”47 In this way, the new space transportation policy committed NASA to 

the development of reusable and single stage to orbit space launch vehicles. 

Because that policy designated NASA as the lead agency for reusable 

launchers and the Department of Defense as the lead agency for expendable 

41. Ivan Bekey interview, tape recording and transcript, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC, 

by Butrica, 2 March 1999, NASA Historical Reference Collection, Washington, DC. 

42. U.S. House of Representatives, Conference Report, 102nd Cong., 2nd sess., Report 102-902 

(Washington, DC: GPO, 1992), pp. 69-70. 

43. Arnold D. Aldrich and Michael D. Griffin to Daniel S. Goldin, “Implementation Plan for 

‘Access to Space’ Review,” 11 January 1993, file 197, X-33 Archive; Office of Space Systems 

Development, NASA, “Access to Space Study: Summary Report,” January 1994, pp. 2-5, 8-58, 

file 100, X-33 Archive; Access to Space Study Advanced Technology Team, “Final Report,” vol. 

1, “Executive Summary,” July 1993, pp. iii, 38, file 85, X-33 Archive. According to Bekey in the 

aforementioned interview, the study initially was to compare Space Shuttle upgrades and a new 

expendable, or partially reusable, launcher. These alternatives ultimately became Option 1 and 

Option 2. 

44. Bekey interview. 

45. Ben Iannotta, “Winged X-2000 Project Considered,” Space News (15-28 November 1993): 

14; “Single Stage to Orbit Advanced Technology Demonstrator (X-2000),” briefing, August 

1993, file 122, X-33 Archive; “Single Stage to Orbit: Advanced Technology Demonstrator: SSTO 

Concept Proposal, X-2000,” August 1993, file 162, X-33 Archive. 

46. Draft, National Space Transportation Strategy, April 26, 1994, file 153, X-33 Archive. 

47. Cited in NASA news release 95-1, 12 January 1995. 
316 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

the DC-X was transferred to NASA, where it formed the initial 

component of the Agency’s Reusable Launch Vehicle (RLV) Program. While 

NASA’s DC-XA (where “A” stood for Advanced) tested certain key operational concepts, such as a critical rotational maneuver and a 72-hour turnaround time, the vehicle also was a technology dem~nstrator.~~ 

In addition to the DC-XA, NASA’s new RLV Program consisted of two 

additional “X’ vehicles. One, the X-34, also known as the Reusable Small 

Booster Program, would demonstrate certain technologies and operations useful 

to smaller reusable vehicles launched from aircraft. Among those were autonomous ascent, reentry, and landing; composite structures; reusable liquid-oxygen 

tanks; rapid vehicle turnaround; and thermal-protection material^.^' The other 

was the X-33, known also as the Advanced Technology Demonstrator Program, 

which proved far more challenging technologically. Among the operations and 

technologies it would demonstrate were reusable composite cryogenic tanks, 

graphite composite primary structures, metallic thermal-protection materials, 

reusable propulsion systems, autonomous flight control, and certain operating 

systems, such as electronics for monitoring vehicle hard~are.~’ 

The X-33 program experienced insurmountable difficulties. After seeming 

to overcome weight and control problems, the X-33 project encountered one 

delay after another because of complications and obstacles encountered in the 

design and construction of the linear aerospike engines and the construction and 

testing of the composite liquid-hydrogen tanks. The vehicle’s launch was postponed from the original March 1999 date to sometime in 2003. However, with 

program expenditures totaling over $1.4 billion, construction of the vehicle halted 

and the components were divided up among NASA and the contractor^.'^ 

48. Department of Defense, “Space Launch Modernization Plan: Executive Summary,” April 

1994, p. 29; Iannotta, “Congress, NASA Dueling Over Reusable Rocket Management,” Space 

News (23-29 May 1994): 25. 

49. After the death of General Graham, the DC-XA took on the name Clipper Graham. The 

DC-XA differed from the DC-X in six main areas: 1) a switch from an aluminum oxygen tank 

to a Russian-built aluminum-lithium alloy cryogenic oxygen tank with external insulation, 2) an 

exchange ofthe aluminum cryogenic hydrogen tank for a graphite-epoxy composite liquid-hydrogen 

tank with a low-density reinforced internal insulation, 3) a graphite-epoxy composite intertank 

structure, 4) a graphite-epoxy composite feedline and valve assembly, 5) a gaseous-hydrogen and 

-oxygen auxiliary power unit to drive the hydraulic systems, and 6) an auxiliary propulsion system 

for converting liquid hydrogen into gaseous hydrogen for use by the vehicle’s reaction control 

system. See Delma C. Freeman, Jr., Theodore A. Talay, and R. Eugene Austin, “Reusable Launch 

Vehicle Technology Program,” IAF 96-V.4.01 (paper read at the 47th International Astronautical 

Congress, Beging, China, 7-11 October 1996), p. 3, file 92, X-33 Archive. 

50. John W. Cole, “X-34 Program,” in “X-33/X-34 Industry Briefing, October 19, 1994,” file 

12, X-33 Archive, especially slide 1A-1216. 

51. X-33 announcement in Commerce Busrness Daily (29 September 1994), file 276, X-33 Archive. 

52. Several other serious troubles emerged along the way, but I have mentioned only the best 

known of the numerous X-33 problems. See NASA news release 00-157, 29 September 2000; 

continued on the next page 
REUSABLE LAUNCH VEHICLES OR EXPENDABLE LAUNCH VEHICLES? 317 

This artist‘s concept shows the X-33 Advanced Technology Demonstrator, a subscale 

prototype reusable launch vehicle (RLV), in its 1997 configuration. Named the 

VentureStarTM, this vehicle was to have been manufactured by Lockheed Martin‘s 

“skunk works.” The VentureStarTM was one of the earliest versions of the RLVs 

developed in an attempt to replace the aging Shuttle fleet. The X-33 program was 

discontinued in 2001 without flight. (NASA MSFC image no. MSFC-9711197) 

Shortly after the start of the RLV Program, NASA also initiated the 

Pathfinder and Trailblazer programs to develop low-cost reusable space 

transport. Pathfinder involved technology experiments conducted on existing flight vehicles, such as the Space Shuttle. Trailblazer, on the other 

hand, entailed the construction of entirely new “X” vehicles to demonstrate advanced space transport technologies and operations. In August 1998, 

NASA solicited proposals for Future-X, the first of the Trailblazer vehicles,53 

and, in December, announced that it had entered into negotiations with 

continued from the previous page 

“Development Troubles Push First X-33 Flight Back to July ’99,” article 34208 in Aerospace Daily 

(24 June 1997, electronic edition), hard copy in file 225, X-33 Archive; Brian Berger, “Activists Say 

Lockheed Should Not Compete for X-33 Funds,” Space News 11 (16 October 2000): 21. 

53. NASA news release 98-141,3 August 1998. 
318 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

Boeing to design and build the Advanced Technology Vehicle (ATV), the 

first “X” vehicle to fly in orbit and to reenter the atmo~phere.~~ 

The Advanced Technology Vehicle soon became the X-37. The Shuttle 

would carry the craft into space, then release it. The X-37 would orbit the 

planet, then return to Earth through the atmosphere, testing heat shielding and 

other advanced space materials and technologies. The vehicle’s shape derived 

from that of the X-40A, an unpowered Air Force craft designed and built by 

Boeing’s Phantom Works. In August 1998, the Air Force drop-tested the X40A from an Army Black Hawk helicopter above Holloman Air Base, New 

Mexico, and the vehicle landed under remote control on a runway. The Air 

Force provided partial funding for the X-37 in the hope of realizing some of 

the objectives of its Space Maneuver Vehicle (SMV), a reusable winged craft 

capable of deploying satellites, weapons, and antisatellite devices; inspecting 

enemy satellites; and other military missions. The Space Maneuver Vehicle 

could have remained in orbit for up to a year and would have been capable of 

a 72-hour t~rnaround.~~ 

No discussion of NASA’s reusable “X” vehicles would be complete without at least a mention of the defunct Crew Recovery Vehicle (CRV), which 

would have served as a lifeboat for the International Space Station (ISS). Drop 

tests of the X-38, an experimental 80-percent scale version of the vehicle, 

at increasing altitudes from a B-52 began in 1999. The basic design for the 

X-38 and CRV originated at NASA’s Langley Research Center as the HL10 (Horizontal Lander) lifting body. The initial HL-10 design derived from 

photographs of the BOR-4 (Unpiloted Orbital Rocketplane in Russian), a 

Russian reusable rocket, that had landed in the Indian Ocean. Renamed the 

HL-20 by NASA Headquarters, the vehicle concept subsequently became 

popular in NASA launcher studies.56 

54. NASA news release c98-w, 8 December 1998. 

55. NASA news release 99-139, 14 July 1999; Frank Sietzen, Jr., “Air Force’s Needs Shape 

Newest NASA X Rocket,” Space.com, 25 August 1999, http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/ 

business/x37_brief~g.html, hard copy in file 386, X-33 Archive; “Space Maneuver Vehicle Drop 

Test Planned for Early August,” article 110718 in Aerospace Daily (21 July 1998, electronic edition), 

hard copy in file 226, X-33 Archive; “USAF Sets Aug. 4 Test of Space Maneuver Vehicle,” article 

111407 in Aerospace Daily (30 July 1998, electronic edition), hard copy in file 226, X-33 Archive; 

“Competition Likely for Space Maneuver Vehicle Demonstrator,” article 111904 in Aerospace Daily 

(6 August 1998, electronic edition), hard copy in file 226, X-33 Archive. 

56. Theodore A. Talay interview, tape recording and transcript, NASA Langley Research Center, 

by Butrica, 21 May 1997, NASA Historical Reference Collection, Washington, DC; Doug Stanley 

interview, tape recording and transcript, Orbital Sciences Corporation, Dulles, VA, by Butrica, 25 

February 1999, NASA Historical Reference Collection, Washington, DC; “NASA’s X-38 Station 

Lifeboat Testbed Completes a Drop Test,” article 124222 in Aerospace Daily (9 February 1999, electronic 

edition), hard copy in file 386, X-33 Archive;Andrew Bridges,“Space Station Lifeboat Sails to Success 

in Desert Test,” Spaceviews (2 November 2000), hard copy available in file 854, X-33 Archive. 
REUSABLE LAUNCH VEHICLES OR EXPENDABLE LAUNCH VEHICLES? 31 9 

Commercial Launchers 

NASA and the Air Force were not the only developers of reusable 

launchers during the 1990s. As the global market for satellite launches grew 

throughout the decade, small startup companies entered the field with plans 

for a variety of two-stage reusable vehicles. Among those was Kelly Space & 

Technology, initially headed by Michael S. Kelly. Starting in 1993, with funding from NASA and the Air Force, the firm began developing the Astroliner, 

a reusable glider towed to launch altitude by a Boeing 747 aircraft using patented Eclipse towing technology. An expendable stage launched from the 

Astroliner would place payloads in orbit. Subsequently, Kelly received NASA 

funding to develop its reusable la~ncher.~’ 

A comparable two-stage system that combined a reusable first stage 

with a throwaway second stage was Pioneer Rocketplane’s Pathfinder. The 

two-seat Pathfinder aircraft powered by air-breathing and (RD-120) rocket 

engines would have taken off from Vandenberg AFB, taken on additional 

liquid oxygen in midair from a Boeing 747 freighter, then climbed outside 

the atmosphere, where it would release an upper stage and its payload, then 

reenter the atmosphere and land like an aircraft.58 Pursuing development of a 

different two-stage launch system known as the K-1 is the Kistler Aerospace 

Corporation. The K-1 was an unpiloted vehicle powered by surplus Russian 

NK-33 and NK-43 engines. It would launch vertically and be capable of a 

turnaround of nine days. A system of parachutes and air bags (field-tested in 

1998) would allow the company to recover and reuse both the booster and 

orbital stages.59 

The only single stage to orbit vehicle under commercial development-Rotary Rocket Company’s Roton-also was the only one that did 

57. Kelly news releases for 7 October 1996, 22 May 1997, and 2 February 1998, file 373, X-33 

Archive. 

58. “RLV Startups Have Enough Capital, But Worry About Regulation,” article 37503 

in Aerospace Daily (13 February 1998, electronic edition), hard copy in file 226, X-33 Archive; 

“Rocketplane System,” Pioneer Rocketplane Web site, http: //www.rocketplane. corn. 

59. “RLV Startups Have Enough Capital”; “Kistler May Shift Flight Tests to Australia,” article 

37615 in Aerospace Daily (23 February 1998, electronic edition), hard copy in file 226, X-33 Archive; 

“Developments in the Field of Space Business are Briefly Noted,” article 109711 in Aerospace Daily 

(7 July 1998, electronic edition) and article 111101 (27 July 1998), hard copies in file 226, X33 Archive; Frank Morring, Jr., “Tight Money Forces Slowdown at Kistler Aerospace,” article 

122111 in Aerospace Daily (8 January 1999, electronic edition), hard copy in file 386, X-33 Archive; 

“Northrop Grumman Increases Stake in Kistler’s K-1 Vehicle,” article 127002 in Aerospace Daily 

(22 March 1999, electronic edition), hard copy in file 386, X-33 Archive; “Kistler Has a Line 

on Remaining Financing, But Much Rests on Contingent Funds,” article 132104 in Aerospace 

Daily (2 June 1999, electronic edition), hard copy in file 386, X-33 Archive; “NASA Taps Kistler 

to Evaluate ISS Access Options,” article 163106 in Aerospace Daily (28 August 2000, electronic 

edition), hard copy in file 854, X-33 Archive; additional materials in file 179, X-33 Archive. 
320 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

not receive NASA funding. The firm’s founder, Gary Hudson, with funding 

from the private sector, has pursued single stage to orbit concepts since the 

1980s. A staunch believer in private enterprise, Hudson received substantial 

backing for the Roton from author Tom Clancy, along with other investors. 

Like the Delta Clipper, the Roton would take off and land vertically but 

would use rocket-powered rotors for the final descent and touchdown, much 

like a helicopter.60 

Analysis of a Perennial Debate 

The quest for reusability certainly has had its losses, mistakes (NASP), 

overly ambitious projects (X-33), and seemingly fruitful routes taken but 

abandoned (Dyna-Soar, RASV). Success has been partial for three major reasons: l) the major technological challenges of achieving full reusability and 

“aircraft-like’’ operations; 2) the lack of an ongoing technology development 

program; and 3) the toll on the search for a new launch system taken by past 

space policy and political decisions. Current policy does not redress these 

issues, but rather appears to exacerbate, not assuage, them. 

POLICY 

The Era of Space Transportation 

Space transportation policy obviously did not begin to include reusable 

launch vehicles until reusable launchers were about to become a reality. The 

evolution of launchers as a means for transporting people was gradual, beginning with the recoverable, but not reusable, craft used for the Mercury and 

Gemini missions.61 Similarly, the means for transporting astronauts to the 

Moon were the recoverable, single-use Apollo spacecraft. These vehicles differed from ordinary transportation in that they could not be used more than 

once. Aircraft, for instance, can fly over and over again, and that reusability 

is an essential characteristic of any form of transportation. We therefore can 

think of the advent of the Space Shuttle as ushering in a new era or phase of 

space history, as well as a new period of space policy that would address issues 

related to space transportation. 

In this new era, everything-whether reusable or expendable-that carried a payload conceptually was transportation. The Shuttle held a privileged 

60. Materials relating to Gary Hudson and the Roton rocket are in fde 348, X-33 Archive. 

61. Starting in 1959, the Air Force’s ASSET (Aerothermodynamic/elastic Structural Systems 

Environmental Tests) boost-glide system involved lofting small, reusable hypersonic gliders from 

Cape Canaveral on top of expendable rockets. The gliders were recovered, and though they 

potentially were reusable, none ever flew more than once. See Hallion, “ASSET Pioneer of Lifting 

Reentry,” in The Hypersonic Revolution, ed. Hallion, vol. 1, pp. 449-450, 510, 512-513, 515-516, 

518, 523-524. 
REUSABLE LAUNCH VEHICLES OR EXPENDABLE LAUNCH VEHICLES? 321 

place in the constellation of space transporters. It was not only the only reusable launch vehicle, but also the Space Transportation System (STS). Despite 

the de facto mix of expendable and reusable launchers, government policy 

leaned toward domination by the reusable Space Shuttle. Driving this policy 

were claims and assurances-made as early as the 1960~~~---that the Shuttle 

would be a low-cost, reliable launcher (a space “bus” or space “truck”). In 

addition, NASA aggressively marketed the Space Shuttle as a vehicle that 

could place any satellite into orbit.63 Ironically, the Shuttle would not only 

inspire and empower space policy, it would impede it as well. 

President Ronald Reagan made this “one-size-fits-all” strategy national 

policy through National Security Decision Directive 8, “Space Transportation 

System,” dated 13 November 1981. It stated, succinctly, that “the STS will be 

the primary space launch system for both United States military and civil government missions.” Moreover, its language, that the Shuttle would “service 

all authorized space users,” left the door open for a subsequent enlargement of 

this basic space policy. 

The issuance of National Security Decision Directive 42, “National 

Space Policy,” on 4 July 1982, reiterated the “one-size-fits-all” policy and, 

more importantly, defined the “authorized space users” of the Space Shuttle as 

“domestic and foreign, commercial, and g~vernmental.”~~ In effect, the new 

space policy called for making the Shuttle available to all commercial users, 

provided no conflicts with national security resulted. The directive marked 

a dramatic policy shift, indeed, a redefinition of space policy, not seen since 

the launch of Sputnik in 1957, because for the first time in the history of the 

U.S. space program, a high-level official document made a direct reference to 

the American business c~mmunity.~~ Between November 1982 and January 

1986, the Space Shuttle carried 24 communication satellites into orbit on 11 

flights. Five were for private corporations: Westar 6, two Telstars, and two 

SATCOMs. Others were for foreign clients, including Canada (four Aniks), 

62. The Post-Apollo Space Program: A Report for the Space Task Group (Washington, DC: NASA, 

September 1969), pp. 1, 6. 

63. Hans Mark, The Space Station: A PersonalJourney (Durham: Duke University Press, 1987), pp. 

61-65; Heppenheimer, Space Shuttle Decision, pp. 275-280; David M. Harland, The Space Shuttle: 

Roles, Missions and Accomplishments (Chichester, U.K.: Praxis Publishing, Ltd., 1998), pp. 411-412. 

64. Christopher Simpson, National Security Directives of the Reagan and Bush Administrations: The 

Declassified History .f U.S. Political and Military Policy, 2981-2991 (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 

1995), pp. 136-143 (classified version) and pp. 144-150 (unclassified version); “National Space 

Policy,” 4 July 1982, file 386, X-33 Archive. An NSDD 42 innovatlon ofat least equal significance 

was the establishment of the National Security Council Senior Interagency Group (Space), usually 

referred to as simply SIG (Space), as the primary forum for the formulation of space policy. Chaired 

by the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs, SIG (Space) was the locus of policymaking throughout the two terms of Ronald Reagan’s presidency. 

65. W. D. Kay, “Space Policy Redefined (Again),” chap. 7 in DeJning NASA: The Historical 

Debate over the Agency’s Mission (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005). 
322 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

Australia (two AUSSATs), Indonesia (two Palapas), India (INSAT), and Saudi 

Arabia (ARABSAT).‘j6 

The 1972 decision by President Richard Nixon to build the Space Shuttle 

short-circuited debate on the desirability of investing in new expendable 

launch vehicles and facilities and froze them in 1970s technologies. NASA 

no longer ordered Delta or Atlas launches, and the Air Force began shutting 

down production lines for the Titan.67 Expendable launch systems began to 

age and became increasingly expensive to build and operate (which added to 

the cost of military and NASA space programs) because needed improvements 

in launch technology had been set back some two decades. The Shuttle already 

was expensive to operate and soon would show its grounding in yesterday’s 

technology. Space transportation came to be perceived as consuming too large 

a share of the federal budget, thereby shutting out opportunities for new science and technology initiatives. Eventually, the government would have to 

spend over $12 billion to restore abandoned ELV operations and to transfer 

satellites designed for the Shuttle back to these aging launchers.68 

A Mixed Fleet 

National space transportation policy, however, soon crashed on the rocks 

of reality-and on the launchpad. Following a launch failure of a Titan 34D 

on 28 August 1985, the Air Force temporarily suspended Titan launches 

until after an inve~tigation.~~ Fivemonths later, the Challenger accident, on 

28 January 1986, grounded the STS for two years, a watershed moment for 

the U.S. space program, for NASA, for the Department of Defense, and for 

space commerce. What made the accident so damaging, aside from the loss of 

human life, was the policy that placed NASA, military, and commercial payloads aboard the Shuttle. The dependence on the Space Shuttle as the nation’s 

“primary” launch system impaired the ability of the nation’s defense and intelligence agencies to place payloads into orbit, and it stymied the development 

of a commercial’launch industry which had been struggling against both the 

Shuttle and its European ELV competitor, Ariane. 

66. Dennis R. Jenkins, Space Shuttle: The History of Developing the National Space Transportation 

System (Marceline, MO: Walsworth Publishing Co., 1992), pp. 286-287. 

67. For a discussion ofthe process leading up to Nixon’s decision, see Heppenheimer, Space Shuttle 

Decision; Dorsey Oles Boyle, “The Nixon Space Policy, 1969-1974” (M.A. thesis, University of 

Maryland at Baltimore County, 1993). 

68. National Space Council, “Final Report to the President on the U.S. Space Program,” January 

1993, pp. 5,33, file 017, box 1, X-33 Archive; John M. Logsdon and Craig Reed, ‘‘Commercializing 

Space Transportation,” in Exploring the Unknown: Selected Documents in the History of the U.S. Civil 

Space Program, ed. John M. Logsdon, vol. 4, Accessing Space (Washington, DC: NASA SP-4407, 

69. William Boyer, “Titan IV Explosion Halts Launch Program,” Air Force Times 54 (16 August 

1999), pp. 408-409. 

1993): 33. 
REUSABLE LAUNCH VEHICLES OR EXPENDABLE LAUNCH VEHICLES? 323 

Shortly after the Challenger tragedy, additional expendable launcher failures took place. A more disastrous Titan 34D launch accident on 18 April 

1986 effectively grounded military space operations on both coasts until 

the military and industry could ensure the Titan’s reliability. The rocket 

exploded only 8 seconds after lifting off. Upper sections of its solid rockets 

and fuel showered the launchpad, causing severe damage to nearby launch 

facilities. In some instances, large steel fragments were blown 3,000 feet from 

the explosion, which also created a toxic cloud that rose to an altitude of 

8,000 feet before being blown over the Pacific Ocean. The following month, 

on 3 May 1986, a Delta carrying the $57-million GOES-G weather satellite 

broke up about 90 seconds after liftoff from Cape Canaveral, Florida. The 

root cause of the failure (a lightning strike) needed to be determined before 

more Deltas could fly. 

The lessons learned (or that ought to have been learned) from these various launch accidents were that NASA needed to reduce its dependence on the 

Space Shuttle and that the nation needed a variety of launchers, both reusable 

and expendable, as well as a variety of disposable rockets. Collectively, these 

incidents brought home the dangers of relying on one or two launch systems. 

Subsequently, National Security Decision Directive 254, “United States Space 

Launch Strategy,” 27 December 1986, took NASA and the Space Shuttle out 

of competition with potential commercial launch providers. Specifically, the 

directive stipulated that “NASA shall no longer provide launch services for 

commercial and foreign payloads subject to exceptions for payloads that: (1) 

are Shuttle-unique; or (2) have national security or foreign policy implications.” By “Shuttle-unique,” the directive meant payloads requiring either 

human intervention or facilities available only on the Space Shuttle.7O 

President Reagan approved a revised national space policy on 5 January 

1988. It too overthrew the long-standing notion of the Shuttle as the nation’s 

“primary” launch system and established the de facto mixed fleet of launchers as p01icy.~’ Essentially, NASA henceforth would use the (partially) reusable Space Shuttle, and the Department of Defense would rely on expendable 

70. James A. Baker I11 to Economic Policy Council, “Presidential Policy Directive-Space 

Commercialization,” 6 October 1986, file 387, X-33 Archive; “Presidential Directive on National 

Space Policy,” fact sheet, 11 February 1988, p. 9, file 386, X-33 Archive. 

71. The classified space policy was not released until 11 February 1988, following completion of 

a parallel review of commercial space policy being conducted by the Economic Policy Council. 

See NSDD 293, “Presidential Directive on National Space Policy,” 5 January 1988; “Presidential 

Directive on National Space Policy,” fact sheet, 11 February 1988, pp. 7, 9-10, file 386, box 15, 

X-33 Archive. The essential parts of the 1988 national space policy that attempted to foster a 

domestic launch industry made their way into legislation as the Commercial Space Launch Act 

Amendments of 1988 (Public Law No. 100-657). See Kim G. Yelton, “Evolution, Organization, 

and Implementation of the Commercial Space Launch Act and Amendments of 1988,” Haruard 

Journal ofLaw G. Technology 4 (1989): 34. 
324 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

launchers?’ This institutional division between expendable and reusable 

launchers based on whether or not the launcher carried humans remained in 

effect over the following years, buttressed by intervening space policy declarations, despite partisan and ideological changes in White House leadership. The policy was based not on any study of expendable versus reusable 

launch vehicles, but on the exigencies of national security and the promotion 

of (space) business, not to mention the underlying assumption (and fact) that 

the only “human-rated’’ launcher was the partially reusable Space Shuttle. 

A New World (Dis)Order? 

The period of George H. W. Bush’s presidency, 1989-1993, was marked 

more by change than by continuity with the past. The biggest change-the 

winding down of the decades-long Cold War-had many consequences for 

space transportation, especially for the use of reusable and expendable launchers, as well as for the federal budget, the economy, and strategic planning. For 

starters, the budget reality that emerged at the end of the Cold War meant 

that fewer government dollars were available for space transportation. The 

government would have to find cheaper ways to launch payloads. The pressure to reduce launch costs was reflected in the December 1992 study “A Post 

Cold War Assessment of U.S. Space Policy.” It called for the scaling back 

of all NASA, Defense Department, and Department of Energy space facilities, whether operated by the government or a contractor; the elimination 

of all duplication within governmental agencies with space programs; and 

the formation of a nonpartisan commission modeled after the Base Closure 

Commission to suggest consolidation measures.73 

The end of the Cold War also raised new questions about the usefulness 

of President Reagan’s quixotic Strategic Defense Initiative, which had its own 

launcher needs. Additionally, with the Soviet Union no longer a military foe, 

to what extent was it now feasible (or legal) for the United States government 

and launch industry to acquire Russian technology, such as rocket engines, or 

even Russian launchers? By the end of George H. W. Bush’s presidency, space 

policy also began to accommodate new space launch trade agreements with 

Russia as well as 

72. There have been exceptions. Typically, Defense Support Program (DSP) satellites are launched 

into geosynchronous orbit by a combination of a Titan IV booster and an Inertial Upper Stage. 

However, one DSP satellite was launched using the Space Shuttle on mission STS-44 (24 November 

1991). Also, policy excluded NASA specifically from maintaining its own expendable launchers. If 

the Agency wanted to launch on an ELV, it would have to turn to the Pentagon or industry. 

73.Vice President’s Space Policy Advisory Board,“A Post Cold War Assessment of US. Space Policy,” 

December 1992, pp. 39-43, file 016, box 1, X-33 Archive. 

74. See National Space Policy Directive 2, “Commercial Space Launch Policy,” 5 September 

1990, in National Space Council, “Final Report to the President on the U.S. Space Program.” 
REUSABLE LAUNCH VEHICLES OR EXPENDABLE LAUNCH VEHICLES? 325 

Similarly, a surfeit of now-useless missiles and hardened silos became 

available for nonmilitary uses. Could those Minuteman I1 ICBMs be used to 

conduct scientific research, as the United States had done with V-2 rockets 

brought back from Germany after World War That is exactly what 

the Universities Space Research Association wanted to do with the surplus 

missiles. Specifically, the association proposed conducting a pilot program 

to demonstrate low-cost, short-duration, small scientific satellite missions 

in support of university research and technology development. The initial 

problem was getting the missiles transferred from the military to NASA.’6 

Into this mix of questions and problems President Bush threw a new 

space program that would require the development of its own launch system. The Space Exploration Initiative (SEI) was a grandiose plan to return 

to the Moon, set up a lunar base, and send astronauts to Mars by 2019. Like 

space station Freedom, it would require development of a heavy-lift expendable rocket?’ As a result, both NASA and the Defense Department were in 

the market for an expendable launcher, but the Senate Commerce Committee 

essentially zeroed out its funding before the program even began.’8 

In addition to supporting the development of medium- and heavy-lift 

ELVs by and for both NASA and the Defense Department, the Bush administration funded two programs to create innovative reusable launch vehicles: 

the National Aero-Space Plane and the SDIO’s Single Stage to Orbit Program 

(DC-X) . Both were the most technologically challenging kind of reusable 

transport to build: single stage to orbit launchers. Technological change generally occurs incrementally, not in giant leaps, and an operational single stage 

to orbit vehicle is too much of a leap. To date, no single stage to orbit craft has 

taken off or landed on this planet. These launchers likely will remain in the 

domain of science fiction and fantasy for a long time into the future, like the 

Stur Trek transporter or the Stargate. 

75. See David H. DeVorkin, Science with a Vengeance: How the Military Created the U.S. Space 

Sciences after World War I1 (New York: Springer, 1992); William R. Corliss, NASA Sounding Rockets, 

1958-1968: A Historical Summary (Washington, DC: NASA SP-4401, 1971). 

76. Materials in file 130, box 5, X-33 Archive, relate to the use of excess DOD ballistic missiles 

by the Universities Space Research Association. 

77. Synthesis Group on America’s Space Exploration Initiative, “America at the Threshold: 

America’s Space Exploration Initiative,” n.d., p. 31, file 104, box 4, X-33 Archive; William Piland, 

“Space Transportation in the Future: Practical Considerations,” presentation to Access to Space 

Red Team, 4 June 1992, file 430, box 16, X-33 Archive. Piland pointed out that SEI could be 

accomplished with existing ELVs and the Russian Energia launcher. National Space Policy Directive 

6, Space Exploration Initiatrve Strategy, dated 13 March 1992, dealt with Bush’s SEI. A copy is in 

National Space Council, “Final Report to the President on the U.S. Space Program,” appendix 111, 

“National Space Policy Directives.” 

78. Lyn Ragsdale, “Politics Not Science: The U.S. Space Program in the Reagan and Bush 

Years,” in SpaceJlight and the Myth of Presidential Leadership, ed. Launius and Howard E. McCurdy 

(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), pp. 161, 163-164. 
326 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

The Vision Thing 

The undertaking of these single stage to orbit, as well as expendable 

launch vehicle, programs required for the Strategic Defense Initiative, the Space 

Exploration Initiative, and Space Station Freedom shaped space transportation 

policy during George Bush’s presidency. In addition, the search for a Space 

Shuttle replacement continued, and the nation’s aging launchers and launch 

facilities-the heritage of the “one-size-fits-all” Shuttle policy-demanded 

attenti0n.7~ The basis for the institutional division that made NASA responsible 

for reusable launchers and the Defense Department responsible for single-use 

rockets continued to be the implicit assignment of the role ofhuman spaceflight 

to NASA and its Space Shuttle.80 In the future, however, those roles might 

change, as reusable launchers began to supply the nation’s launch needs. 

Bush’s National Space Launch Strategy, released 24 July 1991, laid the 

groundwork for that change to take place. The strategy charged the Defense 

Department and NASA with joint development, funding, and management 

of a new suite of expendable rockets capable of lifting medium and heavy payloads for both civil and military use and set the first flight of the new system 

for 1999. Reflecting the stringent budgetary environment and the new direction of space commercialization, the space launch strategy called for the two 

agencies to explore potential participation by the private sector.81 The 10-year 

space launch technology plan mandated by the space launch strategy, issued in 

October 1991 by NASA and the Departments of Defense and Energy, painted 

a picture of what the nation’s fleet of launchers would look like a decade later, 

as well as the technologies needed to get there. 

By then, the United States would have a new family of expendable launchers, known as the National Launch System (NLS), including a heavy-lift rocket 

for the Space Exploration Initiative. Reusable launchers continued to be the 

technological system of choice for human spaceflight, although the expendable launchers under development would have the capability and high reliability required to boost a crew into orbit as part of a Space Shuttle-replacement 

launch system. Starting in 2005, Reusable Aerospace Vehicles, in the language 

79. See, for example, National Research Council, From Earth to Orbit: An Assessmeat of 

Transportation Options (Washington: National Academy Press, 1992), p. 3, copy available in file 102, 

box 4, X-33 Archive. 

80. “National Space Policy,” 2 November 1989, file 374, box 15, X-33 Archive; White House, 

Office of the Press Secretary, “U.S. National Space Policy,” fact sheet, 16 November 1989, file 

374, box 15, X-33 Archive; National Space Policy Directive 3, “U.S. Commercial Space Policy 

Guidelines,” issued 12 February 1991 in National Space Council, “Final Report to the President 

on the U.S. Space Program,” appendix 111, “National Space Policy Directives.” 

81. Interagency Working Group on Space Transportation, “Current National Space Policy on 

Space Transportation,” p. 2; National Space Policy Directive 4, “National Space Launch Strategy,” 

in National Space Council, “Final Report to the President on the U.S. Space Program,” appendix 

111, “National Space Policy Directives,” pp. 111-27-111-28. 
REUSABLE LAUNCH VEHICLES OR EXPENDABLE LAUNCH VEHICLES? 327 

of the plan, would complement and later replace the Shuttle. The plan included 

a reusable military launcher known as the Military Aerospace Vehicle, which 

also would be operable around 2005, just in time to replace the Space Shuttle. 

Initially, a robotic version of the craft could be launched to address commercial 

launch needs, and a later version could be equipped to carry a crew. By merging 

NASA, military, and commercial launch needs, the 10-year plan envisioned the 

possibility of a low-cost-per-flight reusable vehicle that would satisfy all of the 

nation’s launcher needs. 82 In effect, the plan for implementing Bush’s launcher 

strategy would have committed the same mistake as his predecessor’s space 

policy, which put all of its launch eggs in a single, reusable basket. 

The NASA Access to Space Study 

The election of William Jefferson Clinton as President in November 

1992 opened the door to a significant change in launcher policy. The new 

Democratic administration would want to shape space policy to suit its own 

agendas, which were certain to be different from those of its Republican predecessors. Three studies formed the basis for the new space transportation 

policy, and they came to different conclusions about the future of reusable 

launchers, especially single stage to orbit rockets. The most important of those 

was NASA’s Access to Space Study. Mandated by the House Subcommittee on 

Space of the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology in 1992, Access 

to Space focused on future launch systems, analyzed the launcher needs of 

NASA, Defense, and industry, and developed various alternatives for addressing those needs for the period 1995 to 2030.83 

Option 1 involved retaining the Space Shuttle until 2030. The Option 

1 team endorsed fresh studies of flyback, fully reusable liquid-fueled Shuttle 

boosters in order to increase safety and to reduce costs. Option 2 replaced the 

Shuttle in 2005 with a new expendable launcher using state-of-the-art technology. Option 3 was more daring. It would replace the Space Shuttle in 2030 

with “an unspecified . . . next-generation, advanced technology system . . . 

a ‘leapfrog’ approach, designed to capitalize on advances made in the NASP 

and SDI [the DC-XI programs to achieve order-of-magnitude improvements 

in the cost effectiveness of space tran~portation.”~~ 

82. Natlonal Space Council, “Ten-Year Space Launch Technology Plan,” October 1992, pp. ES-1, 

ES-2,l-1,2-8,2-10,2-11, file 103, box 4, X-33 Archive. 

83. Ivan Bekey, “Access to Space,” IAF-94-V.1.515 (paper read at the 45th Congress of the 

International Astronautical Federal, Jerusalem, Israel, 9-14 October 1994), p. 3, copy available in 

file 098, box 3, X-33 Archive, summarizes the Access to Space Study more succinctly than the study’s 

own executive summary. 

84. Office of Space Systems Development, NASA Headquarters, “Access to Space Study: 

Summary Report,” January 1994, p. 71, file 100, box 3, X-33 Archive; Arnold D. Aldrich, “NASA’s 

continued on the next page 
328 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

The Option 3 team considered three launcher architectures.The first was a 

rocket-powered SSTO ship.The second was a single stage to orbit craft powered 

by a combined rocket and air-breathing propulsion system. A combination of 

rocket and air-breathing engines propelled the third architecture, which was a 

two stage to orbit launcher. As part of the Option 3 study, the team specifically 

compared a generic rocket-powered single stage to orbit launcher with the NASP, 

looking at such factors as cost, risk, and development schedule.They concluded 

against NASP and all other air-breathing vehicles because their technological 

difficulty would drive up costs and require a longer period of development.The 

Option 3 team report concluded that reusable launchers could replace mediumload throwaway rockets, leaving expendable launchers to lift heavy payloads in 

the short term, and that in time, reusable vehicles would replace even those.85 

Once each team selected the best vehicle design from the range of alternatives considered, the Access to Space Study then compared all of the winning 

designs. This comparison necessarily included weighing expendable rockets 

against reusable launchers. The study concluded that the most beneficial option 

was to develop and deploy a fleet of fully reusable, rocket-powered single stage 

to orbit vehicles and recommended phasing out current throwaway rocketsas well as the Shuttle-beginning around 2008. The new reusable launch 

vehicles would be able to accommodate all conceivable NASA, military, and 

commercial payloads, and-despite their need for a large upfront investment, 

especially in technological development-they would cut government launch 

costs by up to 80 percent while increasing vehicle reliability and safety by 

about an order of magnitude.86 

After the Access to Space Study, several of the NASA officials involved in 

it began to proselytize their belief in the near-term feasibility of SSTO rockets in various venues, including such popular journals as Aerospace America.87 

Furthermore, the Space Frontier Foundation-dedicated to human colonization 

continuedjom the previous page 

Access to Space Study,” 21 November 1993, file 101, box 4, X-33 Archive; Arnold D. Aldrich and 

Michael D. Griffin to Daniel S. Goldin, “Implementation Plan for ‘Access to Space’ Review,” 11 

January 1993, file 197, box 7, X-33 Archive. According to Ivan Bekey in his interview cited earlier, 

the study initially was to compare Shuttle upgrades and a new expendable, or partially reusable, 

launcher. These alternatives ultimately became Option 1 and Option 2. 

85. Access to Space Advanced Technology Team, “Final Report,” vol. 1, “Executive Summary,” July 

1993, file 85, box 3, X-33 Archive; Office of Space Systems Development, NASA Headquarters,“Access 

to Space Study: Summary Report,” p. 71;“Integration of Existing ELVs into the Option 3 Architecture,” 

in Access to Space Advanced Technology Team, “Final Report,” vol. 1, “Executrve Summary.” 

86. An order of magnitude is a tenfold increase. See Aldrich, “NASA’s Access to Space Study,” 

87. See, for example, Bekey, “SSTO Rockets: A Prachcd Possibility,’’ Aerospace America 32 (July 

1994): 32-37; Robert E.Austin and Stephen A. Cook, “SSTO Rockets: Streamlining Access to Space,” 

Aerospace America 32 (November 1994): 34; and Austin, “Studies Show SSTO Plan is Feasible,” Space 

News (31 July 31-6August 1995), among others in file 352, box 14, X-33 Archive. 

pp. 8-12. 
REUSABLE LAUNCH VEHICLES OR EXPENDABLE LAUNCH VEHICLES? 329 

of space--organized a congressional briefing in the spring of 1996 that they 

called Cheap Access to Space. The message to Congress was to support single 

stage to orbit vehicle programs as the only way to get low-cost space launchers, 

and in particular to fund the DC-X (then a NASA program) and NASA’s X-33. 

With generous funding from NASA Headquarters, the foundation organized the 

Cheap Access to Space symposium in July of 1997 with the same message.88 

Defense Department Studies 

The NASA Access to Space enthusiasm for reusable and single stage to orbit 

rockets was missing from the two Defense Department studies that contributed to the formulation of Clinton administration space transportation policy. Instead, they proposed to keep launching the existing disposable rockets. 

Such, for instance, was the conclusion of the so-called “Bottom-Up Review.” 

Completed in 1993, the “Bottom-Up Review” of military launchers, like 

NASA’s Access to Space, considered three alternatives. Alternative 1 was to 

extend the life of current military expendable rockets, while Alternative 2 

was to develop a new launch system. Alternative 3 funded the development 

of advanced reusable launch vehicle technologies and maintained current 

expendable launchers until the Pentagon could switch to reusable vehicles. 

Alternative 3 evaluated four reusable launcher concepts chosen for their level 

of increasing technological complexity, ranging from a flyback first stage to 

a fully reusable two stage to orbit craft, plus two different single stage to 

orbit designs, one powered by rockets and the other by a combination of 

rockets and air-breathing engines. Ultimately, the study team eliminated 

Alternative 3 but shifted the SSTO rocket to Alternative 2 for consideration. 

Unlike NASA’s Access to Space, the “Bottom-Up Review” did not embrace 

single stage to orbit rockets or reusable launchers in general. Rather, it concluded that the current fleet of expendable boosters was fulfilling the Defense 

Department’s launcher needs and selected Alternative l.89 

The other key Defense Department launcher study stemmed from a congressional mandate, like NASA’s Access to Space. Section 213 of the National 

Defense Authorization Act for 1994 directed the Defense Secretary to develop 

a plan for modernizing its launchers and launch facilities, lowering the costs of 

manufacturing current single-use rockets, and developing a new launch sys88. The presentations from the Cheap Access to Space congressional briefing are in file 360, box 

14, X-33 Archive. Notes and other materials from the Cheap Access to Space Symposium held in 

Washington on 21-22 July 1997, inchding the $100,000 in underwriting from NASA, are in file 705, 

box 24, X-33 Archive, and more detded information on the NASA underwriting is in file 842, box 

28, X-33 Archive. 

89. Director, Strategic & Space Systems, “Space Launch Systems Bottom-Up Review,” 4 May 

1993, file 233, box 8, X-33 Archive; “Executive Summary,” in Space Launch Modernization Study, 

April 1994, pp. 5-6, file 142, box 5, X-33 Archive. 
330 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

tem. Issued in April 1994, the Space Launch Modernization Study, better known 

as the Moorman Report after its chairman, Air Force Lieutenant General 

Thomas S. Moorman, Jr., considered four launcher options?O 

Option 1 would have maintained the current fleet ofELVs-Delta, Atlas, 

Titan-and the Space Shuttle while NASA funded a technology program that 

eventually would lead to the development of a reusable launcher to replace the 

Shuttle. In Option 2, NASA also funded development of an RLV and continued using the Shuttle, but the current throwaway rockets were upgraded. 

Option 3 involved developing a new expendable launcher. One version would 

launch only cargo and eventually would replace current systems, while the 

other would carry either cargo or passengers, one day replacing both the current expendable rockets and the Space Shuttle. Option 4 involved developing 

a reusable vehicle in cooperation with NASA, plus setting up a governmentmandated launch corporation. The arrangement would bring together public 

and private financing; government and contractors would share the costs.’l 

Although directed to select the “most attractive” option, the Moorman 

Report simply presented the four options without stating a preference for any 

of them.92 Despite its apparent ambiguity, the report contained a number of 

suggestions that soon became part of national space policy. For instance, it 

recommended that NASA-because of its need to continue human spaceflight and to replace the Shuttle-be assigned the lead for developing RLVs, 

with the Defense Department maintaining a cooperative reusable launcher 

program that would include experimental flight demonstrations. The X-33 

program embodied that suggestion. Meanwhile, the Defense Department 

would take the lead in developing single-use rockets, and each agency would 

manage and fund efforts within their area of responsibility. That recommendation became policy. The Moorman Report, however, was not immune to 

the raging enthusiasm for reusable launch vehicles, especially for the growing 

commercial launch industry. It proclaimed that once reusable vehicles reduced 

launch costs by a factor of 10, they would “ignite a commercial space 

They were not alone in that belief. 

90. “Executive Summary,” in Space Launch Modernization Study, April 1994, pp. 1-2, 15-23, 

file 142, box 5, X-33 Archive; Lieutenant General Thomas S. Moorman, Jr., “DoD Space Launch 

Modernization Plan,” briefing to the Commercial Space Transportation Advisory Committee 

(COMSTAC), 10 May 1994, file 588, box 29, X-33 Archive; Bekey, “Access to Space,” p. 14. 

91. “Executive Summary,” in Space Launch Modernization Study, pp. 15-19; Moorman, “DoD 

Space Launch Modernization Plan”; Bekey, “Access to Space,” p. 14. 

92. Nonetheless, on the question of developing a new launcher, it recommended that the Defense 

Department develop a heavy-lift launcher. See “Executive Summary,” in Space Launch Modernization 

Study, p. 25. 

93. “Executive Summary,” in Space Launch Modernization Study, p. 29; Moorman, “DoD Space 

Launch Modernization Plan.’’ 
REUSABLE LAUNCH VEHICLES OR EXPENDABLE LAUNCH VEHICLES? 331 

The 1994 Space Transportation Policy 

The Moorman Report, the “Bottom-Up Review,” and the Access to 

Space studies quickly became the foundation for the preparation of a new 

space launch policy by the Clinton White House Office of Science and 

Technology Policy (OSTP), which had absorbed the duties of the National 

Space Council.94 Its goal was to piece together a single, coherent space transportation policy95 that addressed the various launch vehicle needs of NASA, 

the Pentagon, and industry, while taking into account the changing character 

of the era following the Cold War. Signed by President Clinton in August 

1994, the new space transportation policy addressed the range of ills afflicting 

the country’s launchers and facilities. 

It ruled, for instance, on the use of excess Minuteman missiles96 and gave 

Russian launch vehicles a larger role by involving that country in the space 

station pr0gram.9~ The policy also proposed the modernization of existing 

launch systems (both expendable rockets and the Shuttle) and facilities and 

the development of a new reusable launch vehicle that would reduce “greatly” 

the cost of putting payloads in orbit. In addition, it extended and expanded 

the standing policy of fostering the commercialization of space, as well as the 

international competitiveness of the U.S. commercial launch 

~ 

94. The actual work of preparing the policy was carried out by the Interagency Working Group 

on Space Transportation. Established by the Office of Science and Technology Policy, it consisted 

of representatives of the various agencies with an interest in space policy: NASA; the Defense 

Department; the Joint Chiefs of Stafe the National Security Council; the Director of Central 

Intelligence; the Departments of State, Commerce, Treasury, and Transportation; the Council of 

Economics Advisors; the Nuclear Energy Commission; the Office of Management and Budget; the 

Office of the Vice President; and the United States Trade Representative. See Office of Science 

and Technology Policy, Executive Office of the President, “Interagency Working Group on Space 

Transportation Representatives,” May 1994, file 147, box 5, X-33 Archive. 

95. The National Space Transportation Policy replaced National Space Policy Directive (NSPD) 2, 

NSPD 4, and National Security Directive (NSD) 46, “CapeYork,” as well as the porhons that pertain 

to space transportation of NSPD l/NSD 30, “National Space Pohcy”; NSPD 3, “US. Commercial 

Space Policy Guidelines”; and NSPD 6, “Space Exploration Initiahve Strategy.” See Interagency 

Working Group on Space Transportahon, “Current National Space Pohcy on Space Transportation,” p. 

1; National SpaceTransportation Policy, draft, 10 May 1994, file 147, box 5, X-33 Archive. 

96. Office of Science and Technology Pohcy, Wute House, “Statement on National Space 

Transportation Policf 5 August 1994, fde 147, box 5, X-33 Archive; Presidentlal Decision Directive 

National Science andTechnology Council (NSTC) 4,5 August 1994, file 147, box 5, X-33 Archive. 

97. The Joint Statement on Cooperation in Space, signed by Vice President Albert Gore, Jr., 

and the Russian Prime Minister in September 1993, laid the foundation for the two countries to 

cooperate on the Station project. The 1 November 1993 addendum approved by President Clinton 

declared that the Russian launchers (as well as the Shuttle) would carry the various Station segments 

and that Russia was a full partner in the project. See “Use of foreign launch vehicles for the Space 

Station has already been approved by the President,” file 149, box 6, X-33 Archive. 

98. Richard DalBello, Office of Science and Technology Policy, White House, to multiple 

addressees, “May 17, 1994 Meeting of the Interagency Working Group on Space Transportation,” 

11 May 1994, file 147, box 5, X-33 Archive. 
332 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

The 1994 National Space Transportation Policy continued the standing 

decision to utilize a mixture of expendable and reusable launchers but added 

the notion of a lead agency for each type of launch technological system, as 

the Moorman Report had recommended. The new language shifted the basis 

for distinguishing institutional responsibilities from the nature of the payload 

(human spaceflight) to the type of technological system utilized (expendable versus reusable launch vehicle). Thus, NASA would be the lead agency 

in developing the “next generation” of reusable launchers-including single 

stage to orbit rockets-while the military would implement improvements in 

expendable rockets on behalf of the entire national security sect0r.9~ 

Even though the Space Transportation Policy made NASA the lead 

agency for the development of reusable launchers, individuals within the Air 

Force, such as Simon P. Worden, and Congress, especially Representative 

Dana Rohrabacher (R-California) , wanted to continue work on such reusable military craft as the TransAtmospheric Vehicle and the Space Maneuver 

Vehicle.Io0 The position of the Defense Department, however, was that the 

1994 Space Transportation Policy clearly gave NASA the responsibility for 

reusable launchers, not the Department, and the Pentagon preferred to split 

the funding the same way. The Air Force recently had started the Evolved 

Expendable Launch Vehicle (EELV) program to develop a low-cost heavylift expendable rocket in collaboration with Boeing and Lockheed Martin. 

As a result, Paul G. Kaminski, Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition 

and Technology, explained, the Department had “no requirement to initiate an additional program.” NASA Administrator Dan Goldin agreed with 

Kaminski on splitting launch vehicle funding in the same way that the space 

transportation policy divided up launch vehicle responsibilities.”’ 

99. Office of Science and Technology Policy, White House, “Statement on National Space 

Transportation Policy,” 5 August 1994; Presidential Decision Directive NSTC 4, 5 August 1994. 

The DOD, in cooperation with NASA, could use the Shuttle to meet national security needs. 

Launch priority would be provided for national security missions as governed by appropriate 

NASA/DOD agreements. Launches necessary to preserve and protect human life in space would 

have the highest priority except in times of national emergency. NASA would maintain the Shuttle 

until a replacement became available. 

100. Rohrabacher to members of the House Appropriations National Security Subcommittee, 

“A request for assistance on this week’s markup,” 11 July 1995, file 506, box 19, X-33 Archive; 

“Department of Defense Appeal: FY 1996 Defense Authorization Bill,” 15 June 1995, file 506, 

box 19, X-33 Archive; Jeffrey M. Lenorovitz, “Reusable Launcher Backers Push X-Plane Test 

Program,” Aviation Week G Space Technology (25 July 1994): 24-25, copy available in file 180, box 7, 

X-33 Archive; Warren Ferster, “U.S. Air Force Awards 2 Study Contracts for Space Plane,” Space 

News 8 (8-14 September 1997): 19, copy available in file 192, box 7, X-33 Archive; James Cast to 

Gary Payton, e-mail message, 4 September 1997, copy available in file 192, box 7, X-33 Archive. 

101. Paul G. Kmnslu, Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisitlon and Technology, to Goldin, 4 

May 1995, file 506, box 19, X-33 Archive; Goldin to Kaminski, 12 June 1995, fde 506, box 19, X-33 

continued on the next page 
REUSABLE LAUNCH VEHICLES OR EXPENDABLEAUNCH VEHICLES? 333 

What is striking about the 1994 Space Transportation Policy is that it was 

the first space policy statement to contain language regarding a specific program, NASA’s X-33 project. That peculiarity was the direct result of strong 

NASA lobbying. One set of proposed language made NASA focus on developing technologies “to support a decision no later than December 1996 to 

proceed with a subscale flight demonstration which would prove the concept 

of SST0.”’02 Later, the Agency suggested wording that supported its single 

stage to orbit project by authorizing technology development leading up to a 

June 1997 decision to proceed with a subscale flight demonstration to “prove 

the concept of Single Stage To Orbit (SSTO).”’03 Another iteration of draft 

policy added: “The technology development program will lead to the fullscale development of a next generation reusable space transportation system 

by the end of the decade.”’04 NASA subsequently made a point of holding 

back the release of the Cooperative Agreement Notice for the X-33 program 

until after the White House reviewed NASA’s plans for implementing the 

1994 space policy and responded to NASA in writing.lo5 Thus, the Space 

Transportation Policy represented a clear victory for NASA’s pursuit of single 

stage to orbit launchers and reusable launch vehicles in general. 

The RLV Bubble Bursts 

The same enthusiasm for reusable launchers translated to the commercial launch industry, too. Government policy-the 1994 Space Transportation 

Policy-and government investment in such projects as the NASP and the 

DC-X, followed now by the X-33, favored the development of reusable 

launch vehicles. In part, too, this enthusiasm resulted from one of the touted 

advantages of reusable launch vehicles, namely, their lower operating costs. 

This advantage took on new importance because of the considerable, in fact 

unprecedented, number of launches projected to take place in the near future. 

Setting up the Milstar, Teledesic, Orbcomm, Intermediate Circular Orbit 

(ICO), Globalstar, and Iridium networks would involve launching literally 

hundreds of satellites. 

continuedjiom the previous page 

Archive; “Memorandum of Agreement between Air Force Space Command, the Air Force Research 

Laboratory, and the National Aeronautics and Space Ahmstration for Cooperative Technology 

Development Support of NASA Reusable Launch Vehicles and Air Force Military Spaceplanes,” 12 

October 1997, file 506, box 19, X-33 Archve. 

102. Office of Science and Technology Policy, White House, “Statement on National Space 

Transportation Policy,” 5 August 1994; Presidential Decision Directive NSTC 4, 5 August 1994. 

103. “NASA Comments on the Draft National Space Transportation Strategy Directive and on 

May 17 Interagency Comments,” 19 May 1994, file 147, box 5, X-33 Archive. 

104. Gary Krier to JeffHofgard, “NASA Comments to the OSTP National Space Transportation 

Strategy Draft of 8 April 1994,” 20 April 1994, file 151, box 6, X-33 Archive. 

105. Richard DalBello, Technology Division, OSTP, to Jack Mansfield, NASA, 8 November 

1994, file 153, box 6, X-33 Archive. 
334 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

Commercial launch firms’ enthusiasm for reusable launch vehicles was 

reflected in the technological shift that took place between 1989 and 1999 

within the industry. In 1989, when the Department of Transportation issued 

the first commercial launch licenses,lo6 expendable rockets based on 1950s 

technology and established companies with deep roots in the militaryindustrial complex dominated the industry. These included Martin Marietta, 

manufacturer of the Titan; McDonnell Douglas, maker of the Delta rocket; 

and General Dynamics, which built the Atlas-Centaur. The nation’s smaller 

startup launch providers also were utilizing expendable launchers: the 

Conestoga rocket of Space Services, Inc. (SSI); the Industrial Launch Vehicle 

(ILV) of the American Rocket Company (AmRoc); and Conatec, Inc., and 

E’Prime Aerospace Corporation used various sounding rocket^.'^' 

The picture in 1999 was quite different. Reusable vehicles were now 

the space launcher dtr jour, thanks mainly to the enthusiasm of a half dozen 

relatively small startup launcher companies that were developing RLVs for 

commercial and government payloads. Among these were the Astroliner of 

Kelly Space and Technology, the K-1 of Kistler Aerospace Corporation,”’ 

the Pathfinder of Pioneer Rocketplane, Rotary Rocket Company’s Roton 

C-9, Space Access’s SA-1, and Vela Technology Development’s Space Cruiser 

System.”’ Meanwhile, with NASA funding, Lockheed Martin was developing 

its single stage to orbit VentureStarTM, as well as the X-33 prototype; Orbital 

Sciences Corporation was building and testing the X-34; Boeing was working on the Future X Trailblazer; and Scaled Composites was involved in the 

X-38 Crew Return Vehicle program.”’ The Space Maneuver Vehicle, moreover, was under development by the Air Force Space Command in conjunction with McDonnell Douglas, Lockheed Martin, and the Boeing Phantom 

106. Stephanie Lee-Miller, “Message from the Director,” October 1989, in Department of 

Transportation Office of Commercial Space Transportation, The U. S. Ofice of Commercial Space 

Transportation Ffth Annual Report (Washington, DC: GPO, 1990), copy available in file 393, box 

15, X-33 Archive. 

107. U.S. Department of Transportation, Office of Commercial Space Transportation, “Annual 

Report to Congress: Activities Conducted under the Commercial Space Launch Act,” 1987, pp. 

5-6, file 391, box 15, X-33 Archive. 

108. Walter Kistler, Bob Citron, and Thomas C. Taylor, “A Small, Reusable Single Stage to Orbit 

Rocketship,” IAF-94-V.3.536 (paper read at the 45th Congress of the International Astronautics 

Federation, Jerusalem, Israel, 9-14 October 1994), file 179, box 7, X-33 Archive; Kistler Aerospace 

Corporation, “K-1 Aerospace Vehicle Overview,” December 1997, file 179, box 7, X-33 Archive. 

109. Unless indicated otherwise, the following discussion of RLV projects is from Associate 

Administrator for Commercial Space Transportation, “1999 Reusable Launch Vehicle Programs 

& Concepts,” January 1999, pp. 7, 22-29, file 564, box 20, X-33 Archive; and Bill Sweetman, 

“Rocket Planes,” Popular Science 232 (February 1998): 40-45, file 180, box 7, X-33 Archive. 

110. The vehicle would be attached to the International Space Station as a means of returning 

to Earth if an emergency required an immediate evacuation of the Station, if an astronaut had a 

medical emergency, or if the Shuttle were grounded and the astronauts had to return to Earth. 

Strictly speaking, the X-38 was not an RLV, that is, it was not intended to be a launch vehicle but 

was capable of multiple flights nonetheless. 
REUSABLE LAUNCH VEHICLES OR EXPENDABLE LAUNCH VEHICLES? 335 

Works.”’ Nor was RLV fever confined to the United States. Similar efforts 

were under way in the United Kingdom, India, and Japan.l12 

This RLV bubble burst in 2000, just as various high-technology industries were beginning to soften. Space commerce, because of its high capital requirements, was one of the first to falter, starting with the failure of 

Motorola’s Iridium communication satellite constellation. The possibility of 

winning the Ansari X Prize encouraged some firms to keep trying, however.113 Meanwhile, NASA terminated its RLV programs: the X-33 and the 

X-34 on 1 March 2001, followed by the Future X Trailbla~er,”~ and the X-38 

prototype Crew Return Vehicle on 29 April 2002. The space agency was out 

of the business of developing reusable launchers. 

The New Bush 

George W. Bush brought about major changes in Clinton space policy 

largely through his appointee to head NASA, Sean O’Keefe. Within a month 

of taking charge, O’Keefe embarked on a series of measures that brought 

NASA and the Defense Department into closer collaboration on technology 

development, including a possible jointly developed reusable launch vehi~le.”~ 

While O’Keefe was drafting NASA once again into military service, Defense 

Secretary Donald Rumsfeld announced the revival ofpresident Reagan’s spacebased missile defense system and elevated the agency’s status from the Ballistic 

Missile Defense Organization to the Missile Defense Agency (MDA) on 4 

January 2002 in recognition of the high national priority that the President 

gave to missile defense.’16 Bush, however, did not give space commercialization the same status, perhaps because his policy advisers believed that the major 

downturn in the market for commercial launch services had undermined the 

111. The Air Force gave study contracts to both Lockheed Martin and McDonnell Douglas Space 

Division to develop concept designs for the suborbital vehicle. McDonnell Douglas based its design 

on the DC-X. The Boeing Phantom Works was developing the SMV. 

112. Associate Administrator for Commercial Space Transportation, “1999 Reusable Launch 

Vehicle Programs & Concepts,” January 1999, pp. 7, 22-29, file 564, box 20, X-33 Archive; 

Sweetman, “Rocket Planes,” pp. 40-45, file 180, box 7, X-33 Archive. 

113. The X Prize was a $10-million prize offered to the first entrant able to launch a vehicle 

capable of carrying three people to a 100-kilometer suborbital altitude and repeating the flight 

within two weeks. See Associate Administrator for Commercial Space Transportation, “1999 

Reusable Launch Vehicle Programs & Concepts,” pp. 30-32; Rebecca Anderson and Michael 

Peacock, “Ansari X-Prize: A Brief History and Background,” NASA History Division Web site, 

http://history.nasa.gov/x-prize. htm (accessed 24 March 2005). 

114. The goal of Future X was to develop vehicles more technologically advanced than the X-33. 

It consisted of a series of experimental flight demonstrators called the Pathfinder and Trailblazer 

series. Material on the Future X program can be found in file 184, box 7, X-33 Archive. 

115. Marc Selinger, “Air Force, NASA Studying Joint Development of New Reusable Launch 

Vehicles,” article 197714 in Aerospace Daily (25January 2002, electronic edition), hard copy in file 

854, X-33 Archive. 

116. “BMDO’s Name Changed to Missile Defense Agency,” article 196406 in Aerospace Daily (7 

January 2002, electronic ehtion), hard copy in file 854, X-33 Archive. 
336 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

ability of industry to recoup the considerable investments needed to develop 

launch systems.”’ Instead, on 14 January 2004, he revived his father’s failed 

Space Exploration Initiative as the Vision for Space Exploration.”’ 

Later that year, on 21 December 2004, the White House released a new 

space transportation policy. It raised more questions than it answered. The 

policy made no basic changes in existing space commerce policy, but it did 

throw up barriers to the commercial launch industry by allowing the government to use excess ballistic missiles when their use was cheaper than flying 

on a commercial launcher. It also made it harder for companies to put payloads on foreign launchers (despite the reliance on Russian launchers following the Columbia disaster). Furthermore, the new space transportation policy 

did not make reusable and expendable launcher responsibility the basis for 

distinguishing the institutional responsibilities of NASA and the Defense 

Department. Instead, it made the Defense Secretary responsible for national 

security launchers and facilities, and the NASA Administrator responsible for 

“the civil sector,” without any mention of reusable or expendable launchers or 

even which agency had responsibility for human spaceflight. 

The central issue addressed by the policy was the need for launchers to 

achieve the Vision for Space Exploration. It declared that the Space Shuttle 

would return to flight, complete assembly of the Space Station by the end of 

the decade, then retire. Concurrently, NASA would develop a new “crew 

exploration vehicle” for human pacef flight."^ Furthermore, it declared that 

the Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle (EELV) program was now “the foundation for access to space” for intermediate and heavy payloads serving both 

military and civilian missions. The policy also directed NASA and DOD to 

develop jointly a version of the EELV suitable for “space exploration.” 

In January 2004, NASA announced that it would begin developing the 

Crew Exploration Vehicle, a piloted vehicle to carry humans into orbit “and 

beyond,” as well as to ferry astronauts to and from the Space Station following 

the retirement of the Shuttle. Different versions of the vehicle could operate 

in Earth orbit or near the Moon or even on the surface of Mars. The Crew 

Exploration Vehicle effort was part of what the space agency was calling its 

Constellation Systems Theme, a set of projects to develop, test, and deploy the 

various systems needed to prosecute the Vision for Space Exploration. In addition, NASA planned to use an established military acquisition process known 

as spiral or evolutionary acquisition to develop space exploration hardware. 

117. “U.S. Space Transportation Policy,” fact sheet, 6 January 2005, p. 2. 

118. Office of the Press Secretary, White House, “Executive Order President’s Commission on 

Implementation of United States Space Exploration Policy,” 30 January 2004. 

119. The following section is from “U.S. Space Transportation Policy,” fact sheet, 6 January 

2005, except where noted. 
REUSABLE LAUNCH VEHICLES OR EXPENDABLE LAUNCH VEHICLES? 337 

The first spiral or stage would deliver humans to orbit in a Crew Exploration 

Vehicle by 2014. The second would land humans on the Moon’s surface by 

2020, followed by extended lunar visits in the third stage.’” All of these proposed systems would be launched on top of an EELV. 

In the end, the 2004 Space Transportation Policy and its implementation 

seemed to assign reusable vehicles the same role played by Mercury, Gemini, 

and Apollo capsules: sitting atop expendable boosters. This time, though, the 

rocket of choice was the Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle and its future 

variants. Implicit in the decisions underlying the latest space transportation 

policy was the assumption of a reduced launch rate. Reusable launch vehicles 

only make economic sense if they have numerous payloads to launch, and 

their absence in the 2004 Space Transportation Policy can be interpreted as 

an admission (or at least an assumption) that launch rates for the foreseeable 

future will be low. One must wonder, then, what the thinking is that lies 

behind the current Russian effort to build the Kliper reusable launch vehicle 

for transporting crew and cargo to the Space Station. Do they see launch rates 

rising? Is the purpose of the Kliper just to bring down launch costs below 

those for the Soyuz for the cash-starved Russian space effort?”’ 

In the relatively brief period between 1980 and 2005, the status of reusable launch vehicles in national space transportation policy waxed and waned 

more than once. The perception that there was something called space transportation began as people started to fly into space on a reusable, rather than a 

recoverable, craft; that is, the notion of transportation involved both reusability and human spaceflight. Thus, the advent of the Space Shuttle engendered 

and dominated (monopolized) space transportation policy. Beginning in 1986, 

however, reusable craft took their place alongside expendable launchers in a 

mixed fleet. The dividing line between NASA and Defense Department institutional responsibilities was human spaceflight, but that did not give NASA 

responsibility for all reusable and the Pentagon responsibility for all expendable launchers. Nonetheless, the 1994 Space Transportation Policy explicitly 

did enunciate that technological separation of institutional responsibilities, 

and it created the framework within which a tremendous commercial and 

governmental enthusiasm for reusable launch vehicles thrived. That policy 

also broke new ground by mentioning-for the first time-specific space programs. Following the collapse of enthusiasm that began in 2000, reusable 

launch vehicles disappeared from space transportation policy. 

120. NASA, fiscal year 2006 budget request, http://~~~.na~a.gov/pdf/l07488main~FYO6~low. 

pdf; pp. SAE 5-2, SAE 5-3, SAE 6-1, SAE 6-4 to 6-6. On spiral acquisition, see, for example, 

Alexander R. Slate, “Evolutionary Acquisition: Breaking the Mold-New Possibilities from a 

Changed Perspective,” Program Manager 31 (May-June 2002): 6-13. It is from the lingo of spiral 

acquisition that NASA has picked up the phrase “system of systems.” 

121.Anatoly Zak,“Russians Propose a New Space Shuttle,” IEEE Spectrum 42 (February 2005): 13-14. 
338 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

HISTORIOGRAPHY 

A Question 

The history of air travel in the United States can be traced back to a time 

over two centuries ago. A symposium held at the National Air and Space 

Museum attempted to deal with the subject, a sort of “bicentennial survey” 

held in the year of the U.S. bicentennial, specifically on 4 November 1976.122 

The history of motorized winged flight is much shorter, of course, and the 

first Sputnik launches took place scarcely two decades before the symposium. 

Several of the speakers lamented the chore of condensing 15 or 70 years of 

history into 20 minutes. In placing their talks in a broader context, historian 

Thomas Parke Hughes noted that 70 years was not a large amount of time. 

Nor did he find aeronautics and astronautics to be “an overwhelmingly significant” subject. “We are dealing here with a very short period of time and 

one episode in a long history of man and te~hnology.”’~~ 

Little has changed in the intervening two decades since Hughes made that 

observation.The year 2007 will mark only the 50th anniversary of the Sputnik 

launches, followed by NASA’s 50th anniversary. Fifty years is a short historical 

span; it is certainly not histoive d Zongue &vie. Furthermore, during the past two 

decades, the amount of printed literature and unpublished talks on space history 

has multiplied swiftly, confirming once again the de Solla Price curve. 124 Despite 

this growth, we lack a “big picture” understanding of space history. A different, 

but associated, question is how space history fits into general histories, such as 

those of the United States, or into specialized histories, such as the history of 

transportation. Is space history such a peculiar topic of study that it does not 

lend itself to integration into other histories, into larger historical questions? 

A recent joint publication of the American Historical Association and 

the Society for the History of Te~hnology’~’ that surveyed U.S. transportation 

history ended with a chapter on “airways,” but not a mention of space travel. 

Is going into space such a peculiar human endeavor that its history must be 

segregated from the other categories into which we parse history? Is it because 

many space and space history enthusiasts act as if the space program were a 

nontheistic religion? Or should we be asking whether space transportation is 

122. Eugene M. Emme, ed., Two Hundred Years of Flight in America: A Bicentennial Survey, 

AAS History Series, vol. 1 (San Diego: Univelt, Inc., for the American Astronautical Society, 

1977). The symposium sponsors were NASM, the AIAA, SHOT, and AAS, which published the 

proceedings. 

123. Hughes, “Perspectives of a Historian of Technology: A Commentary,” in Two Hundred Years 

of Flight in America, ed. Emme, p. 257. 

124. Derek de Solla Price, Science Since Babylon, 1st edition (New Haven, CT Yale University 

Press, 1961). 

125. Robert C. Post, Technology, Transport, and Travel in American History (Washington, DC: 

American Historical Association, 2003). 
REUSABLE LAUNCH VEHICLES OR EXPENDABLE LAUNCH VEHICLES? 339 

really a form of transportation? Was there anything of substance to the transportation references common to space travel-such as the Space Transportation 

System and National Space Transportation Policy-or were they just figures of 

speech, similar to the analogies with aircraft and ships reflected by the terms 

spacecraft, spaceplane, rocket ship, and spaceship’26 or, say, the maritime analogies 

used by presidential speech writer^'^' and space advocates?’28 

One of the peculiar aspects of space launch vehicles is their origins in 

rocketry, which for centuries served largely military purposes. The aerospace 

engineer Maxwell W. Hunter I1 captured the difference between the two uses 

of rocket technology with his use of the terms “ammunition” and “transportation.” Expendable rockets, he wrote, were ammunition, while reusable launch 

vehicles were tran~portation.“~ The shift from “ammunition” to “transportation” was not just one of application, but also a change of perception that 

occurred once people replaced the bombs, electronic instrumentation, and 

other inanimate objects that had served for decades as the sole payloads carried 

into space or the uppermost reaches of the atmosphere. The transformation of 

a military technology into a mode of transport is rather unique in world history, perhaps as unique as turning swords into plowshares. 

The reverse, turning transportation into a weapon, is certainly not 

unique, but rather a common occurrence in history. In recent times, we 

have witnessed aircraft turned into weaponry on 7 December 1941 and 11 

September 2001, for example. Automobiles and trucks also have become 

bomb delivery systems in the hands of Timothy McVeigh and colleagues 

on 19 April 1995, against the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, 

and Ramzi Yousef and his fellow coconspirators on 26 February 1993, 

against the World Trade Center in New York City. Any form of transpor126. Another term that evokes the maritime analogy is spacefaring. Much can be written on the 

analogy between moving through outer space and sailing, as I suggested in Single Stage to Orbit: 

Politics, Space Technology, and the Questfor Reusable Rocketry (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins 2003), 

127. For example, President Kennedy told a crowd at the Rice University stadium, “We intend 

to be first . . . to become the world’s leading space-faring nation” (John F. Kennedy, address at Rice 

University, 24 September 1962, Public Papers ofthe Presidents Washington, DC: National Archives 

and Records Service, 19631, p. 329). 

128. Lieutenant Colonel Daniel 0. Graham, the well-known proponent of what became the 

Strategic Defense Initiative, believed that a U.S. space-based global defense system would bring 

about a Pax Americana similar to the Pax Britannica induced by Britain’s domination of the world’s 

oceans. See Erik K. Pratt, Selling Strategic Defense: Interests, Ideologies, and the Arms Race (Boulder, 

CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1990), p. 96. 

129. See, for example, Hunter to E. P. Wheaton, vice president for research and development, 

Lockheed, “Orbital Transportation,” 28 October 1965, pp. 1-2, file 338, box 13, X-33 Archive. 

The distinction between ammunition and transportation appears throughout Hunter’s oeuvre. See, 

for instance, Hunter, “The SSX: A True Spaceship” (manuscript, 2000), pp. 17, 18,22; and Hunter, 

“The SSX: A True Spaceship” (manuscript, 4 October 1989), pp. 2, 6, both in file 338, box 13, 

X-33 Archive. 

pp. 21-22, 217. 
340 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

tation can undergo this transformation, pet we cannot imagine any bomb 

delivery system or other form of weapon system being turned into a form 

of transportation. Although certain military-use vehicles have found civilian applications-such as the Jeep of World War I1 and the High Mobility 

Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle (more commonly known as the Hum Vee 

or Hummer)-they always served as military transport vehicles, never as 

weapon systems. One could stretch the point and argue that the Bradley M2 

Fighting Vehicle or the Abrams M1 tank could be turned into transport, 

but their high maintenance and operational costs, frequent need for maintenance and repairs, lack of reliability, and poor performance only highlight 

the absurdity of the proposition. 

If we define space transportation as human flight into space via reusable 

launch vehicles (the key being the combination of vetcsability and humans in 

space), then the real question historians need to answer is not whether space 

transportation is really transportation and therefore part of transportation history. Space travel clearly has many characteristics in common with the various 

forms of terrestrial transportation. One can point to numerous aspects of space 

transportation shared by other forms of transportation, from the model-building of amateurs to the carrying of cargo and passengers (both astronauts and 

tourists) to desired destinations. Even the inherent danger of space travel has 

had its precedents in the boiler explosions that pervaded early steam-powered 

transporters. Like other forms of transportation, travel to places off the planet 

requires a complex infrastructure. 

For instance, one can compare the launch infrastructure required by 

rocketry with the infrastructures that support automobile or truck travel. In 

addition to the nation’s vast network of roads, signage (and the systems needed 

to maintain and operate them), and facilities for refueling and repairing vehicles (gas and repair stations), these include such legal and regulatory elements 

as driving rules and laws, driver license and registration facilities, driver education, vehicle inspections and inspection stations, and various regulatory 

agencies from the local motor vehicle agency to the Interstate Commerce 

Commission and the Department of Transportation. Infrastructure issues 

also are relevant to the choice between using a solid-fueled or a liquid-fueled 

rocket. Similarly, in the early history of the automobile, different engine 

types (electric, steam, gas) required a dedicated infrastructure. Reusable and 

expendable launch vehicles similarly have different infrastructure needs. 

Historians often claim that one properly cannot write the history of a 

subject until the passage of a certain amount of time. The subject, like a bottle 

of wine, must age and somehow achieve a certain degree of ripeness before it 

is suitable for historical inquiry. Space history, as measured from Goddard’s 

first liquid-fueled rocket near Auburn, Massachusetts, on 16 March 1926 to 

the present, does not span a very long period, just eight decades-even less if 
REUSABLE LAUNCH VEHICLES OR EXPENDABLE LAUNCH VEHICLES? 341 

one counts from Sputnik forward. In comparison, Georg Agricola, nearly a 

half millennium ago, recounted the use of railways in mining operation^,'^^ 

and the Appian Way is centuries older still. And yet, histories that cover periods as short as five years or less have been-and are continually being-written. The challenge is not the relatively short length of the space travel era nor 

its topical nature. Historians routinely research and write about events that 

have taken place only a few years earlier-or investigate history as it happen~.’~’ The real question is a challenge, the challenge for space historians to 

integrate their work into the larger historical context, with its rich fabric of 

political, economic, social, and cultural threads. 

130. Georg Agricola, De Re Meiallica (Basil, Switzerland: H. Frobenium and N. Episcopium, 

1556), trans. and annotated by Herbert Clark Hoover and Lou Henry Hoover (London: The Mining 

Magazine, 1912). 

131. This was the subject of a recent panel, “Doing the History of the Recent Past: 

Historiography, Sources, Disciplinary Boundaries . . . ,” held by the Society for the History of 

Technology in 1997. The panel’s contributors consisted of Joseph N. Tatarewicz, “In from the 

Cold or Out in the Cold? Warriors and Nuclear Weaponeers Search for their Place in History”; 

Pascal Griset, “Oral History and Recent Evolutlons in the History of French Industry”; and 

Butrica, “From the X-Files: Some Source and Historiographical Problems of the X-33 History 

Project, or ‘History Made While You Wait.”’ 

SECTION V 

NASA CULTURES 

INTRODUCTION 

ne of the main conclusions ofthe Columbia Accident Investigation Board 0 was that “the organizational causes of this accident are rooted in 

the Space Shuttle Program’s history and culture” and that over many years at 

NASA, “cultural traits and organizational practices detrimental to safety and 

reliability were allowed to develop . . . .”’ The idea of organizational culture 

is therefore a critical issue, though, as La Porte points out in this section, it 

is a “slippery concept” with a “high degree of operational ambiguity, its use 

subject to stiff criticism.” Although organizational culture may in fact mean 

many things, all three authors in this section find the concept useful, for lack 

of a better term, to refer to what La Porte characterizes in the NASA context 

as “the norms, shared perceptions, work ways, and informal traditions that 

arise within the operating and overseeing groups closely involved with the 

systems of hazard.” Slippery as it may be as a concept, organizational culture is 

important to understanding real-world questions, such as those that Vaughan 

(a sociologist by profession and a staff member of the CAIB) enumerates in her 

article: How do organizations gradually slide into negative patterns? Why do 

negative patterns persist? Why do organizations fail to learn from mistakes and 

accidents? Although human and technical failures are important, she finds their 

root causes in organizational systems. In order to reduce accidents, therefore, 

organizational systems and their cultures must be studied and understood. 

The first two papers in this section concentrate on organizational culture 

as it relates to accidents in human spaceflight, here restricted to those in 

NASA’s space program. Vaughan focuses on the Space Shuttle Challenger and 

Columbia accidents in 1986 and 2003, respectively, while Brown adds the 

ground-based Apollo 204 (also known as Apollo 1) fire in 1967. Altogether, 

17 astronauts were killed in these accidents, triggering massive criticism, investigations, official reports, and personal and organizational soul-searching. 

Vaughan finds that, due to overly ambitious goals in an organization strapped 

for resources, NASA’s Apollo-era technical culture was turned into a “culture 

of production” by the time of the Challenger accident, a culture that persisted 

through Columbia and was characterized by “cultural mandates for businesslike efficiency, production pressures, allegiance to hierarchy, and rulefollowing.” The result was what she calls “the normalization of deviance”-in 

other words, over time, that which was deviant or anomalous incrementally 

became redefined as normal, most notably Solid Rocket Booster (SRB) O-ring 

behavior in cold weather for Challenger and foam hits from the External 

1. Columbia Accident Investigation Board, Report (Washngton, DC: NASA and GP0,August 2003), 

chap. 8. Chapter 8 was largely written by DianeVaughan. 
346 CRITICAL ISSUES INTHE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

Tank (ET) to the wing of the Shuttle in the case of Columbiu. Lack of communication, which she terms “structural secrecy,” within layers of NASA 

administration compounded the problem. 

Vaughan believes that the thesis of “history as cause” in the CAIB report 

demonstrates how the history of decisions made by politicians and by NASA 

engineers and managers combined twice to produce disaster. She warns that 

economic strain and schedule pressure still exist at NASA and that in such 

circumstances, system effects, including accidents, tend to reproduce. It is 

important to note that it is not possible to prevent all accidents, but, she concludes, the Challenger and Columbiu accidents, with their long incubation 

periods, were preventable. In her view, reducing the probability of accidents 

means changing NASA’s culture as well as externally imposed expectations 

and limitations, a difficult and ongoing process, one in which social scientists 

must play a role in a systematic way. 

Brown, a historian of technology in the Science, Technology and Society 

program at MIT, takes another approach by analyzing the “disjunctures’’ in 

the three fatal NASA accidents. In the case of Apollo 204, the disjuncture is 

between the engineers designing and managing the spacecraft and the technicians manufacturing it. For the two Shuttle accidents, the disjuncture is 

between managers controlling the Shuttle program and engineers maintaining and analyzing the spacecraft. By way of explaining these disjunctures, he 

analyzes the three accident reports and relates their styles and conclusions to 

the engineering practices of NASA and its contractors. Whereas the Apollo 

204 report concluded that poor engineering practice was the sole cause of the 

fire, the Challenger Commission, by contrast, emphasized secondary causes 

in addition to the technical O-ring failure, including the decision to launch, 

schedule pressure, and a weak safety system. As emphasized in Vaughan’s 

paper, the Columbiu report went even further, pointing (partly at her urging) 

to equal importance for technical and social causes. 

Reading the three accident reports to gain historical insights, Brown 

finds that they suggest a growing separation between management and engineering over the period under review. They reveal an asymmetry assumed by 

the accident investigators, in the sense that the technical/engineering causes 

are to be understood as “context-free and ahistorical activity,” while management causes are to be understood in a complex historical and cultural framework. Brown therefore asks two questions: what historical processes caused 

this separation between management and engineering? And what changes in 

engineering over the quarter century covered by the accident reports might 

be important for placing engineering in its own historical and cultural context? In answer to the latter, he enumerates three changes: widespread use 

of computers, changes in engineering education, and the move away from 
INTRODUCTION - SECTION V 347 

systems engineering as an organizing philosophy. During the period 1967 to 

2003, modeling, testing, and simulation had changed from hand calibration 

to computer-based calculations, resulting in loss of transparency. For example, 

Boeing engineers who used a computer model known as “Crater” to predict the effects of foam impacts on the Shuttle were unaware of its limitations precisely because the process had been computerized; this ignorance 

greatly affected their ability to make engineering judgments. Over the same 

period, engineering education, which was moving toward science and away 

from design, rendered engineering more abstract and less connected to reality. 

The Challenger and Columbia reports criticized the lack of engineering design 

expertise in some of the contractors involved. Finally, whereas systems engineering was the guiding philosophy of the space program at the time of the 

Apollo 204 fire, Total Quality Management and the “faster, better, cheaper” 

approach replaced system engineering during the 1990s for senior management, while engineers still used the tools of system management. 

La Porte takes a broader view, tackling the issues of high-reliability 

systems that must operate across decades or generations, as NASA must do 

in planning and implementing its vision to take humans to the Moon and 

Mars. Drawing on a variety of empirical studies in the social and management sciences, including nuclear power plant operation and waste disposal, 

he undertakes this analysis of highly reliable operations that take place over 

decades, and he assumes high levels of public trust over that time. Such longterm operations also involve issues of institutional constancy. He finds, among 

other things, that high-reliability organizations (HROs) must have technical 

competence, stringent quality-assurance measures, flexibility and redundancy 

in operations, decentralized decision-making, and an unusual willingness 

to reward the discovery and reporting of error without assigning blame. 

Maintaining an organizational culture of reliability exhibiting these characteristics is difficult, but important. Nor can HROs become overly obsessed 

with safety; they must strive equally for high levels of production and safety. If 

the Shuttle never launches, NASA fails its mission in equal measure as it does 

when it has accidents. La Porte also emphasizes the importance of external 

“watchers,” including congressional committees and investigating boards, to 

sustaining high-reliability organizations, a factor also evident in Vaughan’s 

and Brown’s analyses of the accident reports. 

La Porte notes that, for obvious reasons, maintaining these characteristics 

over long-term, even trans-generational, efforts is the least-understood process 

in terms of empirical studies. In an attempt to shed light on this problem, he 

examines the idea of “institutional constancy” and concludes that in order for 

such long-term efforts to be successful, an agency such as NASA must demonstrate to the public and to Congress that it can be trusted to keep its word long 
348 CRITICAL ISSUES INTHE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

into the future, and it must “show the capacity to enact programs that are faithful to the original spirit of its commitments.” La Porte discusses the characteristics associated with institutional constancy, summarized in his table 13.2. 

He, too, calls for further empirical and analytical study, especially to delineate 

requirements for long-term institutional constancy and trustworthiness. 

Implicitly or explicitly, these papers also deal with the question of risk. 

The Challenger Commission found that its managers and engineers understood risk in very different ways, with the engineers seeing it as quantifiable and the managers as flexible and manageable. The Columbia Accident 

Investigation Board noted similar differences in the perception of risk. La Porte 

broaches the question of risk averseness and the public’s risk-averse demand for 

very reliable operations of intrinsically hazardous systems. He suggests research 

on the conditions under which the public would be willing to accept more 

risk, given that such operations can never be risk-free. NASA’s “Risk and 

Exploration” symposium, held in late 2004 in the midst of the Hubble Space 

Telescope controversy and with the Shuttle still grounded, came to a similar 

conclusion: the public needs to be made aware that accidents are not completely preventable. 

Nevertheless, the three views in this section, by a sociologist, a historian, 

and a political scientist, shed important light on NASA cultures and, if one 

accepts their arguments, on ways to reduce accidents in what inevitably remains 

a high-risk endeavor. How to balance risk and exploration is the key question. 

2. Steven J. Dick and Keith Cowing, Risk and Exploration: Earth, Sea and Sky (Washington, DC: NASA 

SP-2005-4701,2005). 
CHAPTER 11 

CHANGING NASA: THE CHALLENGES OF 

ORGANIZATIONAL SYSTEM FAILURES 

Diane Vaughan 

n both the Columbia and Challenger accidents, NASA made a gradual slide I into disaster. The history of decisions about the risk of Solid Rocket Booster 

O-ring erosion that led to Challenger and the foam debris that resulted in 

Columbia is littered with early warning signs that were misinterpreted. For years 

preceding both accidents, technical experts defined risk away by repeatedly 

normalizing technical anomalies that deviated from expected performance. 

The significance of a long incubation period leading up to an accident is that 

it provides greater opportunity to intervene and to turn things around, avoiding the harmful outcome. But that did not happen. The Columbia Accident 

Investigation Board’s report concluded that NASA’s second Shuttle accident 

resulted from an organizational system failure, pointing out that the systemic 

causes of Challenger had not been fixed.’ In fact, both disasters were triggered 

by NASA’s organizational system: a complex constellation of factors including 

NASA’s political/economic environment, organization structure, and layered 

cultures that affected how people making technical decisions assessed risk. 

These three aspects of NASA’s organizational system interacted, explaining 

the origins of both accidents. 

The amazing similarity and persistence of these systemic flaws over the 

17 years separating the two accidents raise several questions: How do organizations gradually slide into negative patterns? Why do negative patterns persist? Why do organizations fail to learn from mistakes and accidents? In this 

chapter, I examine NASA’s experience to consider the challenges of changing NASA’s organizational system and to gain some new insight into these 

questions. My data for this analysis are my Challenger research, experience as 

a researcher and writer on the staff of the Columbia Accident Investigation 

Board, conversations and meetings with NASA personnel at Headquarters 

and a NASA “Forty Top Leaders Conference” soon after the CAIB report 

release, and, finally, a content analysis of the two official accident investigation 

1. Columbia Accident Investigation Board, Report (Washington, DC: NASA and GPO, August 

2003). 
350 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

reports.2 Summarizing from my testimony before the CAIB, I begin with a 

brief comparison of the social causes of Challenger and Columbia to show the 

systemic causes of both, how the two accidents were similar and different, 

and how and why NASA twice made an incremental descent into di~aster.~ 

I then review the conclusions of the Presidential Commission investigating 

the Challenger accident and their recommendations for change, the changes 

NASA made, and why those changes failed to prevent the identical mistake 

from recurring in Columbia.4 Next, I contrast the Commission’s findings with 

those of the CAIB report and discuss the CAIB’s recommendations for changing NASA, the direction NASA is taking in making changes, and the challenges the space agency faces in preventing yet a third Shuttle accident. 

Robert Jervis, in System Effects, considers how social systems work and 

why so often they produce unintended consequence^.^ He stresses the importance of dense interconnections and how units and relations with others are 

strongly influenced by interactions at other places and at earlier periods of 

time. Thus, disturbing a system produces chains of consequences that extend 

over time and have multiple effects that cannot be anticipated. I will argue in 

this chapter for the importance of analyzing and understanding the dynamics 

of organizational system failures and of connecting strategies for change with 

the systemic causes of problems. The “usual remedy” in the aftermath of a 

technological accident is to correct the causes of a technical failure and alter 

human factors that were responsible so that they, too, can be fixed. However, 

the root causes of both human and technical failure can be found in organizational systems. Thus, remedies targeting only the technology and individual error are insufficient. Neither complacency, negligence, ignorance, 

poor training, fatigue, nor carelessness of individuals explains why, in the 

face of increasing in-flight damage, NASA made flawed decisions, continuing to fly. The lessons to be learned from NASA’s experience are, first, in 

order to reduce the potential for gradual slides and repeating negative patterns, NASA and other organizations dealing with risky technologies must go 

beyond the search for technical causes and individual error and search the full 

range of social causes located in the organizational system. Second, designing 

and implementing solutions that are matched to those causes is a crucial but 

challenging step in preventing a recurrence. 

2. Diane Vaughan, The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA 

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Diane Vaughan, “History as Cause: Columbia and 

Challenger,” chap. 8 in Columbia Accident Investigation Board, Report; Presidential Commission 

on the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident, Report to the President by the Presidential Commission on the 

Space Shuttle Challenger Accident, 5 vols. (Washington, DC: GPO, 1986). 

3. Vaughan, “History as Cause,” pp. 185-204. 

4. Presidential Commission on the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident, Report to the President. 

5. Robert Jervis, System Effects: Complexity in Political and Social L$e (Princeton: Princeton 

University Press, 1997). 
CHANGING NASA: THE CHALLENGES OF ORGANIZATIONAL.. . 351 

NASA’s SLIPPERY SLOPE: O-RINGS, FOAM DEBRIS, AND 

NORMALIZING DEVIANCE 

In a press conference a few days after the Columbia tragedy, NASA’s Space 

Shuttle Program Manager, Ron Dittemore, held up a large piece of foam 

approximately the size of the one that fatally struck Columbia and discounted 

it as a probable cause of the accident, saying, “We were comfortable with it.” 

Prior to the Challenger accident in 1986, that phrase might have been said 

about O-ring erosion by the person then occupying Dittemore’s position. 

The O-ring erosion that caused the loss of Challenger and the foam debris 

problem that took Columbia out of the sky both had a long history. Neither 

anomaly was permitted by design specifications, yet NASA managers and 

engineers accepted the first occurrence, then accepted repeated occurrences, 

concluding after examining each incident that these deviations from predicted 

performance were normal and acceptable. In the years preceding NASA’s two 

This photograph of the Space Shuttle Challenger accident on 28 January 1986 was 

taken bya 70-millimeter tracking camera at site 15, south of Pad 39B. at 11:39:16.061 

EST. One of the Solid Rocket Boosters can be seen at the top of the view. (Image no. 

STS-51L 10181; Kennedy Space Center alternative photo no. is 108-KSC-86PC-747) 
352 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

accidents, managers and engineers had normalized recurring technical anomalies-anomalies that, according to design specifications, were not allowed. 

How-and why-was the normalization of technical deviations possible? 

We must avoid the luxuries of retrospection, when all the flawed decisions of the past are clear and can be directly linked to the harmful outcomes, 

and instead see the events preceding each accident as did the personnel making 

risk assessments, as the problems unfolded. As managers and engineers were 

making decisions, continuing to launch under the circumstances they had 

made sense to them. The immediate social context of decision-making was an 

important factor. Although NASA treated the Shuttle as if it were an operational vehicle, it was experimental: alterations of design and unpredictable 

flight conditions led to anomalies on many parts on every mission. Because 

having anomalies was normal, neither O-ring erosion nor foam debris was the 

signal of danger it seemed in retrospect. In both cases, engineering decisions 

were made incrementally, anomaly by anomaly. Accepting the first deviation set a precedent on which future decisions were based. After inspection 

and analysis, engineers calculated a safety margin that placed initial damage 

within a safety margin showing that the design could tolerate even more. 

In addition, the pattern of information had an impact on how managers 

and engineers were defining and redefining risk. As the anomalies began 

to occur, engineers saw signals of danger that were mixed-an anomalous 

incident would be followed by a mission with none or a reduced level of 

damage, so they believed they had fixed the problem and understood the 

parameters of cause and effect. Or signals were weak-incidents that were 

outside what had become defined as the acceptable parameters were not 

alarming because their circumstances were so unprecedented that they were 

viewed as unlikely to repeat. And finally, signals became routine, occurring 

so frequently that the repeating pattern became a sign that the machine was 

operating as predicted. The result was the production of a cultural belief that 

the problems were not a threat to flight safety, a belief repeatedly reinforced 

by mission success. Both erosion and foam debris were downgraded in official 

systems categorizing risk over time, institutionalizing the definition of these 

problems as low-level problems. 

Although these patterns are identical in the two accidents, two differences are noteworthy. First, for O-ring erosion, the first incident of erosion 

occurred on the second Shuttle flight, which was the beginning of problem 

normalization; for foam debris, the normalization of the technical deviation 

began even before the3rst Shuttle was launched. Damage to the thermal-protection system-the thousands of tiles on the orbiter to guard against the heat of 

reentry-was expected due to the forces at launch and during flight, such that 

replacement of damaged tiles was defined from the design stage as a maintenance problem that had to be budgeted. Thus, when foam debris damage 
CHANGING NASA: THE CHALLENGES OF ORGANIZATIONAL.. . 353 

was observed on the orbiter tiles after the first Shuttle flight in 1981, it was 

defined as a maintenance problem, not a flight hazard. This early definition 

of the foam problem as routine and normal perhaps explains a second difference. Before the Challenger disaster, engineering concerns about proceeding with more frequent and serious erosion were marked by a paper trail of 

memos. The foam debris problem history also had escalations in occurrence 

but showed no such paper trail, no worried engineers. 

These decisions did not occur in a vacuum.To understand how these two 

technical anomalies continued to be normalized, we need to grasp the important role that NASA’s political and budgetary environment played and how 

the history of the Space Shuttle program affected the local situation. Decisions 

made by leaders in the White House and Congress left the space agency constantly strapped for resources to meet its own sometimes overly ambitious goals. 

The Agency’s institutional history was one of competition and scarcity, which 

created a “trickle-down effe~t.”~ Thus, the original, pure technical culture of 

NASA’s Apollo era was reshaped into a culture ofproduction that existed at the 

time of Challenger and persisted over 50 launches later, for Columbia. NASA’s 

original technical culture was reshaped by new cultural mandates for businesslike efficiency, production pressures, allegiance to hierarchy, and rule-following. 

This culture of production reinforced the decisions to proceed. Meeting 

deadlines and schedule was important to NASA’s scientific launch imperatives and also for securing annual congressional funding. Flight always was 

halted to permanently correct other problems that were a clear threat to take 

the Shuttle out of the sky (a cracked fuel duct to the Space Shuttle main 

engine, for example), but the schedule and resources could not give way for a 

thorough hazard analysis of ambiguous, low-lying problems that the vehicle 

seemed to be tolerating. Indeed, the successes of the program led to a belief 

that NASA’s Shuttle was an operational, not an experimental, system, thus 

affirming that it was safe to fly. Finally, the fact that managers and engineers 

obeyed the cultural mandates of hierarchy and protocol reinforced the belief 

that the anomalies were not a threat to flight safety because NASA personnel 

were convinced, having followed all the rules, that they had done everything 

possible to assure mission safety. 

Both problems had gone on for years. Why had no one recognized what 

was happening and intervened, halting NASA’s two transitions into disaster? 

The final piece of the organizational system contributing to both accidents 

was structural secrecy. By this I refer to how organization structure concealed 

the seriousness of the problems from people with responsibility for technical oversight who might have turned the situation around prior to both 

6. Diane Vaughan, “The Trickle-Down Effect: Policy Decisions, Risky Work, and the Challenger 

Accident,” Cal$ornia Management Review 39 (winter 1997): 1-23. 
354 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

accidents. Organization structure affected not only the flow of information, 

a chronic problem in all organizations, but also how that information was 

interpreted. Neither NASA's several safety organizations nor the four-tiered 

Flight Readiness Review (FRR), a formal, adversarial, open-to-all structure 

designed to vet all engineering risk assessments prior to launch, called a halt 

to flying with these anomalies. Top administrators and regulators alike were 

dependent upon project groups for engineering information and analysis. As 

managers and engineers reinterpreted warning signs as weak, mixed, and routine signals, normalizing deviance, that diagnosis was what got passed up the 

hierarchy. Instead of reversing the pattern of flying with erosion and foam 

debris, Flight Readiness Review ratified it. 

The structure of safety regulation also affected understandings about risk. 

NASA's internal safety system-both times-a) had suffered safety personnel 

cuts and de-skilling as more oversight responsibility was shifted to contractors in an economy move and b) was dependent upon the parent organization 

for authority and funding, so it had no ability to independently run tests that 

might challenge existing assessments. NASA's external safety panel had the 

advantage of independence but was handicapped by inspection at infrequent 

intervals. Unless NASA engineers defined something as a serious problem, it 

was not brought to the attention of safety personnel. As a result of structural 

secrecy, the cultural belief that it was safe to fly with these two anomalies prevailed throughout the Agency in the years prior to each of NASA's tragedies. 

TWO ACCIDENTS: THE REPRODUCTION OF SYSTEM EFFECTS 

I have shown how the organizational system worked in the years preceding both accidents to normalize the technical anomalies: the immediate 

context of decision-making-patterns of information; the context of multiple 

problems; mixed, weak, and routine signals-the culture of production, and 

structural secrecy all interacted in complex ways to neutralize and normalize risk and keep NASA proceeding with missions. To show how NASA's 

organizational system affected the crucial decisions made immediately before 

both accidents, I now revisit the unprecedented circumstances that created 

yet new signals of potential danger: an emergency teleconference held on the 

eve of the 1986 Challenger launch, when worried engineers recommended not 

launching in unprecedented cold temperatures predicted for the next day, and 

the events at NASA after the 2003 Columbiu foam debris strike, when engineers again expressed concerns for flight safety. I selectively use examples of 

these incidents to show similarities and differences, recognizing that doing so 

greatly simplifies enormously complicated interactions? An initial difference 

7. For details, see Vaughan, Challenger Launch Decision, chap. 8; and CAIB, Report, chap. 6. 
CHANGINGASA: THE CHALLENGES OF ORGANIZATIONAL.. . 355 

that mattered was the window of opportunity for decision and number of 

people involved. The Challenger teleconference was held prelaunch, involved 

34 people in three locations, consuming several hours of one day, the proceedings unknown to others at NASA. Columbia’s discussion was postlaunch, 

with a window of 16 days before reentry, and videos of the foam debris strike 

were widely circulated, involving people throughout the Agency. They can 

be called crisis situations only in retrospect because at the time these events 

were unfolding, many participants did not define it as a crisis situation, which 

was, in fact, one of the problems. 

In both scenarios, people facing unprecedented situations came to the 

table with a cultural belief in the risk acceptability of O-ring erosion and foam 

debris based on years of engineering analysis and flight experience. Thus, 

both the history of decision-making and the history of political and budgetary decisions by elites had system effects. As these selected examples show, the 

mandates of the culture of production for efficiency, schedule, hierarchy, and 

protocol infiltrated the proceedings. Also, structural secrecy acted as before, 

feeding into the tragic outcomes. 

Schedule pressure showed when Challenger’s Solid Rocket Booster 

Project Manager and Columbia’s Mission Management Team (MMT) 

Head, responsible for both schedule and safety, were confronted with 

engineering concerns. Both managers repeated that preexisting definition of risk, sending to others a message about the desired result. 

Schedule pressure on managers’ thinking also showed when engineers 

proposed a temperature criterion for Challenger that would jeopardize 

the launch schedule for all launches, and for Columbia when obtaining 

satellite imagery would require the orbiter to change its flight orientation, thus prolonging the mission and likely jeopardizing the timing 

of an important future launch. Believing the safety of the mission was 

not a factor, both managers focused on future flights, making decisions 

that minimized the risk of delay. 

* In both cases, hierarchy and protocol dominated; deference to engineering expertise was missing. In the Challenger teleconference, unprecedented and therefore open to innovation, participants automatically 

conformed to formal, prelaunch, hierarchical Flight Readiness Review 

procedures, placing engineers in a secondary role. The postlaunch 

Columbia Mission Management Team operation, intentionally decentralized to amass information quickly, also operated in a hierarchical, 

centralized manner that reduced engineering input. Further, engineering attempts to get satellite imagery were blocked for not having 

followed appropriate protocol. In both cases, norms requiring quanti- 
356 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

tative data were pushed, rendering engineering concerns insufficient; 

they were asked to prove that it was unsafe to fly, a reverse of the 

normal situation, which was to prove it was safe to fly. Engineers animated by concern took the issue to a certain level, then, discouraged 

and intimidated by management response, fell silent. A difference for 

Columbia: the rule on rule-following was inoperative for management, 

whose definition of risk was influenced by an “informal chain of command”-one influential person’s opinion, not hard data. 

* Organization structure created structural secrecy, as people structurally peripheral to the technical issue, either by location or expertise or 

rank, had information but did not feel empowered to speak up. Thus, 

critical input was lost to the decision-making. The weakened safety 

system was silent. No safety representative was told of the Challenger 

teleconference. Present at the Columbia MMT meeting but weak in 

authority, safety personnel interjected no cautions or adversarial challenges; information dependence and organizational dependence gave 

them no recourse but to follow the management lead. 

This overview shows these accidents as the unanticipated consequences 

of system effects, the causes located in the dynamic connection between three 

layers of NASA’s organizational system: 

1) Interaction and the Normalization of Deviance: A history of decision-making in which, incrementally, meanings developed in which 

the unacceptable became acceptable. The first decisions became a 

basis for subsequent ones in which technical anomalies-signals of 

danger-were normalized, creating a cultural belief in the safety of 

foam and O-ring anomalies. 

2) The Culture of Production: History was important in a second way. 

Historic external political and budgetary decisions had system effects, 

trickling down through the organization, converting NASA’s original, pure technical culture into a culture of production that merged 

bureaucratic, technical, and cost/schedule/efficiency mandates that, 

in turn, reinforced decisions to continue flying with flaws. 

3) Structural Secrecy: These same external forces affected NASA’s organization structure and the structure of the safety system, which in 

turn affected the interpretation of the problem, so that the seriousness 

of these two anomalies was, in effect, unknown to those in a position 

to intervene. Instead, before the crisis events immediately preceding 
CHANGING NASA: THE CHALLENGES OF ORGANIZATIONAL. . . 357 

the accidents, a consensus about these anomalies existed, including 

among agents of social control-top administrators and safety personnel-who failed to intervene to reverse the trend. 

With these systemic social causes in mind, I now turn to the problem of 

repeating negative patterns and learning from mistake by considering the “Findings” and “Recommendations” of the report of the Presidential Commission on 

the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident, NASA’s changes in response, and why 

the changes NASA implemented failed to prevent a second tragedy.’ 

THE PRESIDENTIAL COMMISSION: 

CONNECTING CAUSES AND STRATEGIES FOR CONTROL 

Published in June 1986, the Presidential Commission’s report followed the 

traditional accident investigation format of prioritizing the technical causes of 

the accident and identifying human factors as “contributing causes,” meaning 

that they were of lesser, not equal, importance. NASA’s organizational system 

was not attributed causal significance. However, the report was pathbreaking 

in the amount of its coverage of human factors, going well beyond the usual 

focus on individual incompetence, poor training, negligence, mistake, and 

physical or mental impairment. 

Chapters 5 and 6 examine decisions about the O-ring problems, adhering to the traditional human factorshndividual failure model. Chapter 5, “The 

Contributing Cause of the Accident,” examines the controversial eve-of-thelaunch teleconference. A “flawed decision making process” is cited as the primary 

causal agent. Managerial failures dominate the empirical “Findings”: the teleconference was not managed so that the outcome reflected the opposition of many 

contractor engineers and some of NASA’s engineers; managers in charge had a 

tendency to solve problems internally, not forwarding them to all hierarchical 

levels; the contractor reversed its first recommendation for delay “at the urging 

of Marshall [Space Flight Center] . . . to accommodate a major c~stomer.”~ 

Chapter 6, “An Accident Rooted in History,” chronicled the history of 

O-ring decision-making in the years preceding the teleconference. Again, the 

empirical Findings located cause in individual failures.” Inadequate testing was 

done; neither the contractor nor NASA understood why the O-ring anomalies were happening; escalated risk-taking was endemic, apparently “because 

they got away with it the last time”; in a thorough review at Headquarters in 

1985, information “was sufficiently detailed to require corrective action prior 

8. Presidential Commission on the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident, Report to the President. 

9. Ibid., p. 104. 

IO. Ibid., p. 148. 
358 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

to the next flight”; managers and engineers failed to carefully analyze flight 

history, so data were not available on the eve of Challengeu’s launch to properly evaluate the risks.” The system failure cited was in the anomaly tracking 

system, which permitted flight to continue despite erosion, with no record of 

waivers or launch constraints, and paid attention only to anomalies “outside 

the data base.” 

Both chapters described decision-making, focusing on interaction, but 

did not explain why decisions were made as they were. Chapter 7, “The Silent 

Safety Program,” turned to organizational matters, initially addressing them 

in the traditional accident investigation frame. The Commission noted the 

failures: “lack of problem reporting requirements, inadequate trend analysis, misrepresentation of criticality and lack of involvement in critical discussions.”’2 For example, they found so many problems listed on NASA’s Critical 

Items List that the number reduced the seriousness of each. Acknowledging 

that top administrators were unaware of the seriousness of the O-ring problems, the Commission labeled the problem a “communication failure,” thus 

deflecting attention from organization structure as a cause of the problems. In 

evaluating NASA’s several safety offices and panels, however, the Commission 

made a break with the human factors approach by addressing the structure of 

regulatory relations. The Commission found that in-house safety programs 

were dependent upon the parent organization for funding, personnel, and 

authority. This dependence showed when NASA reduced the safety workforce even as the flight rate increased. In another economy move, NASA had 

increased reliance upon contractors, relegating many NASA technical experts 

to safety oversight of contractor activities, becoming dependent on contractors rather than retaining safety control in-house. 

In chapter 8, “Pressures on the System,” the Commission took an unprecedented step by examining schedule pressure and its effects on the NASA organization. However, this pressure, according to the report, was NASA-initiated, 

with no reference to external demands or restrictions on the Agency that might 

have contributed to it.The fault rested with NASA’s own leaders.“NASA began 

a planned acceleration of the Space Shuttle launch schedule . . . . In establishing 

the schedule, NASA had not provided adequate resources for its attainment. 

As a result, the capabilities of the system were strained . . . .”13 The system 

being analyzed is the flight production system: all the processes that must 

be engaged and completed in order to launch a mission. The report states 

that NASA declared the Shuttle “operational” after the fourth experimental 

flight even though the Agency was not prepared to meet the demands of an 

11. Ibid., p. 148. 

12. Ibid., p. 152. 

13. Ibid., p. 164. 
CHANGING NASA: THE CHALLENGES OF ORGANIZATIONAL. . . 359 

operational schedule. This belief in operational capability, according to the 

Commission, was reinforced by NASA’s history of 24 launches without a failure prior to Challenger and to NASA’s legendary “can-do” attitude, in which 

the space agency always rose to the challenge, draining resources away from 

safety-essential functions to do it.14 

Next consider the fit between the Commission’s “Findings,” above, and 

their “Recommendations” for change, summarized as follow^.'^ Many of the 

changes, if properly implemented, would reduce structural secrecy. The 

Commission mandated a review of Shuttle Management Structure because 

Project Managers felt more accountable to their Center administration than 

the Shuttle Program Director, thus vital information bypassed Headquarters. 

The Commission targeted “poor communications” by mandating that NASA 

eliminate the tendency of managers not to report upward, “whether by 

changes of personnel, organization, indoctrination or all three”; develop rules 

regarding launch constraints; and record Flight Readiness Reviews and 

Mission Management Team Meetings. Astronauts were to be brought into 

management to instill a keen awareness of risk and safety.I6 

Centralizing safety oversight, a new Shuttle Safety Panel would report 

to the Shuttle Program Manager. It would attend to Shuttle operations, rules 

and requirements associated with launch decisions, flight readiness, and risk 

management. Also, an independent Office of Safety, Reliability and Quality 

Assurance would be established, headed by an Associate NASA Administrator, 

with direct authority over all safety bodies throughout the Agency, and reporting to the NASA Administrator. With designated funding to give it independence, SR&QA would direct reporting and documentation of problems and 

trends affecting flight safety. Last, but by no means least, to deal with schedule 

pressures, the Commission recommended that NASA establish a flight rate 

that was consistent with its resources. 

These were the official lessons to be learned from Challenger. The 

Commission’s “Findings” and “Recommendations,” in contrast to those 

later forthcoming from the CAIB, were few and very general, leaving NASA 

considerable leeway in how to implement them. How did the space agency 

respond? At the interaction level, NASA addressed the flawed decisionmaking by following traditional paths of changing policies, procedures, and 

processes that would increase the probability that signals of danger would 

be recognized. NASA used the opportunity to make changes to “scrub the 

system totally.” The Agency rebaselined the Failure Modes Effects Analysis. 

All problems tracked by the Critical Items List were reviewed, engineering 

14. Ibid., pp. 171-177. 

15. Ibid., pp. 198-201 

16. Ibid., p. 200. 
360 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

fixes implemented when possible, and the list reduced. NASA established Data 

Systems and Trend Analysis, recording all anomalies so that problems could 

be tracked over time. Rules were changed for Flight Readiness Review so 

that engineers, formerly included only in the lower-level reviews, could participate in the entire process. Astronauts were extensively incorporated into 

management, including participation in the final prelaunch Flight Readiness 

Review and signing the authorization for the final mission “go.” 

At the organizational level, NASA made several structural changes, 

centralizing control of operations and safety.17 NASA shifted control for the 

Space Shuttle program from Johnson Space Center in Houston to NASA 

Headquarters in an attempt to replicate the management structure at the time 

of Apollo, thus striving to restore communication to a former level of excellence. NASA also initiated the recommended Headquarters Office of Safety, 

Reliability and Quality Assurance (renamed as Safety and Mission Assurance), 

but instead of the direct authority over all safety operations, as the Commission 

recommended, each of the Centers had its own safety organization, reporting 

to the Center Director.l8 Finally, NASA repeatedly acknowledged in press 

conferences that the Space Shuttle was and always would be treated as an 

experimental, not operational, vehicle and vowed that henceforth, safety 

would take priority over schedule in launch decisions. One step taken to 

achieve this outcome was to have an astronaut attending Flight Readiness 

Reviews and participating in decisions about Shuttle readiness for flight; 

another was an effort to bring resources and goals into alignment. 

Each of these changes addressed causes identified in the report, so why 

did the negative pattern repeat, producing the Columbia accident? First, the 

Commission did not identify all the social causes of the accident. From our 

post-Columbiu position of hindsight, we can see that the Commission did not 

target NASA’s institutional environment as a cause. The powerful actors whose 

actions precipitated “Pressures on the System” by their policy and budgetary 

decisions do not become part of the contributing-cause scenario. NASA is 

obliged to bring resources and goals into alignment, although resources are 

determined externally. NASA took the blame for safety cuts, which were 

attributed to NASA’s own “perception that less safety. reliability and quality 

assurance activity would be required during ‘routine’ Shuttle operation^."'^ 

The external budgetary actions that forced NASA leaders to impose such 

efficiencies were not mentioned. Most of the Commission’s recommended 

changes aimed at the organization itself, in particular, changing interactions 

17. CAIB, Report, p. 101. 

18. Ibid. 

19. Presidential Commission on the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident, Report to the President, 

p. 160. 
CHANGING NASA: THE CHALLENGES OF ORGANIZATIONAL. . . 361 

structure. The Commission did not name culture as a culprit, although production pressure is the subject of an entire chapter. Also, NASA’s historic 

“can-do” attitude (a cultural attribute) is not made part of the “Findings” 

and “Recommendations.” Thus, NASA was not sensitized to possible flaws 

in the culture or that action needed to be taken. The Commission did deal 

with the problem of structural secrecy; however, in keeping with the human 

factors approach, the report ultimately places responsibility for “communication failures” not with organization structure, but with the individual middle 

managers responsible for key decisions and inadequate rules and procedures. 

The obstacles to communication caused by hierarchy and consequent power 

that managers wielded over engineers, stifling their input in crucial decisions, 

are not mentioned. These obstacles originate in organization structure but 

become part of the culture. 

Second, consider NASA’s response to these “Recommendations” and 

the challenges they faced. Although NASA’s own leaders played a role in 

determining goals and how to achieve them, the institutional environment 

was not in their control. NASA remained essentially powerless as a government agency dependent upon political winds and budgetary decisions made 

elsewhere. Thus, NASA had little recourse but to try to achieve its ambitious 

goals-necessary politically to keep the Agency a national budgetary priority-with limited resources. The intra-organizational changes that NASA did 

control were reviewed in the CAIB report.” It found that many of NASA’s 

initial changes were good. However, a critical one-the structural changes to 

centralize safety-was not enacted as the Commission had outlined. NASA’s 

new Headquarters Office of Safety, Reliability and Quality Assurance did 

not have direct authority, as the Commission mandated; further, the various 

Center safety offices in its domain remained dependent because their funds 

came from the activities that they were overseeing.’l 

The CAIB also found that other changes-positive changes-were 

undone by subsequent events stemming from political and budgetary decisions made by the White House and Congress. The new, externally imposed 

goal of the International Space Station (ISS) forced the Agency to mind the 

schedule and perpetuated an operational mode. As a consequence, the culture 

of production was unchanged; the organization structure became more complex. This structural complexity created poor systems integration; communication paths were not clear. Also, the initial surge in post-Challenger funding 

was followed by cuts, such that the new NASA Administrator, Daniel Golden, 

introduced new efficiencies and smaller programs with the slogan “faster, better, cheaper.” As a result of the squeeze, the initial increase in NASA safety 

20. CAIB, Report. 

21. Ibid., pp. 101, 178-179. 
362 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

personnel was followed by a repeat of pre-accident economy moves that again 

cut safety staff and placed even more responsibility for safety with contractors. 

The accumulation of successful missions (defined as flights returned without 

accident) also reproduced the belief in an operational system, thus legitimating these cuts: Fewer resources needed to be dedicated to safety. The loss of 

people and subsequent transfer of safety responsibilities to contractors resulted 

in a deterioration of post-Challenger trend analyses and other NASA safety 

oversight capabilities. 

NASA took the report’s mandate to make changes as an opportunity to 

make others it deemed necessary, so the number of changes actually made is 

impossible to know and assess, much less report in a chapter of this length. The 

extent to which additional changes might have become part of the problem 

rather than contributing to the solution is also unknown. Be aware, however, 

that we are assessing these changes from the position of post-Columbia hindsight, tending to identify all the negatives associated with the harmful outcome.22 The positive effects, the mistakes avoided by post-Challenger changes, 

The 13-member Columbia Accident Investigation Board poses for a group photo taken 

in the CAIB boardroom. The official STS-107 insignia hangs on the wall in the center 

of the boardroom. From left to right, seated, are Board members G. Scott Hubbard, 

Dr. James N. Hallock, Dr. Sally Ride, Chairman Admiral Hal Gehman (ret.), Steven 

Wallace, Dr. John Logsdon, and Dr. Sheila Widnall. Standing, from left to right, are 

Dr. Douglas D. Osheroff, Major General John Barry, Rear Admiral Stephen Turcotte, 

Brigadier General Duane Deal, Major General Kenneth W. Hess, and Roger E. Tetrault. 

(CAIB photo by Rick Stiles, 2003) 

22. William H. Starbuck, “Executives’ Perceptual Filters: What They Notice and How They 

Make Sense,” in The Executive Effect, ed. Donald C. Hambrick (Greenwich, CT JAI, 1988). 
CHANGINGASA: THE CHALLENGES OF ORGANIZATIONAL.. . 363 

tend to be lost in the wake of Columbiu. However, we do know that increasing 

system complexity increases the probability of mistake, and some changes did 

produced unanticipated consequences. One example was NASA’s inability to 

monitor reductions in personnel during a relocation of Boeing, a major contractor, which turned out to negatively affect the technical analysis Boeing 

prepared for NASA decision-making about the foam problem.23 Finally, 

NASA believed that the very fact that many changes had been made had so 

changed the Agency that it was completely different from the NASA that 

produced the Challenger accident. Prior to the CAIB report release, despite the 

harsh revelations about organizational flaws echoing Chullenger that the CAIB 

investigation frequently released to the press, many at NASA believed no parallels existed between Columbia and Challenger.24 

THE CAIB: CONNECTING CAUSES WITH 

STRATEGIES FOR CONTROL 

Published in August 2003, the Columbia Accident Investigation Board 

report presented an “expanded causal model” that was a complete break with 

accident investigation tradition. Turning from the usual accident investigation focus on technical causes and human factors, the CAIB fully embraced 

an organizational systems approach and was replete with social science concepts. Further, it made the social causes equal in importance to the technical 

causes, in contrast to the Commission’s relegation of nontechnical causes to 

“contributing causes.” Part 1 of the CAIB report, “The Accident,” addressed 

the technical causes; part 2, “Why the Accident Occurred,” examined the 

social causes; part 3 discussed the future of spaceflight and recommendations 

for change. 

In the executive summary, the CAIB report articulated both a “technical cause statement” and an “organizational cause statement.” On the latter, 

the Board stated that it “places as much weight on these causal factors as on 

the more easily understood and corrected physical cause of the accident.”25 

With the exception of the “informal chain of command” operating “outside 

the organization’s rules,” this organizational cause statement applied equally 

to Challenger: 

The organizational causes of this accident are rooted in the 

Space Shuttle Program’s history and culture, including the 

23. CAIB, Report. 

24. Michael Cabbage and William Harwood, CommCheck . . . The Final Flight ofShuttle Columbia 

25. CAIB, Report, p. 9. 

(New York: Free Press, 2004), p. 203. 
364 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

original compromises that were required to gain approval for 

the Shuttle, subsequent years of resource constraints, fluctuating priorities, schedule pressures, mischaracterization of the 

Shuttle as operational rather than developmental, and lack 

of an agreed national vision for human space flight. Cultural 

traits and organizational practices detrimental to safety were 

allowed to develop, including reliance on past success as a 

substitute for sound engineering practices (such as testing to 

understand why systems were not performing in accordance 

with requirements); organizational barriers that prevented 

effective communication of critical safety information and 

stifled professional differences of opinion; lack of integrated 

management across program elements; and the evolution of an 

informal chain of command and decision-making processes 

that operated outside the organization’s rulesz6 

The part 2 chapters described system effects. In contrast to the 

Commission’s report, the CAIB explained NASA actions as caused by social 

factors. Chapter 5, “From Columbia to Challenger,” began part 2 with an analysis of NASA’s institutional environment. Tracking historic decisions by leaders in NASA’s political and budgetary environment and the effect of policy 

decisions on the Agency after the first accident, it showed how NASA’s external environment caused internal problems by shaping organization culture: 

the persistence of NASA’s legendary can-do attitude, excessive allegiance to 

bureaucratic proceduralism and hierarchy due to increased contracting out, 

and the squeeze produced by “an agency trying to do too much with too 

little” as funding dropped so that downsizing and sticking to the schedule 

became the means to all ends.27 The political environment continued to 

produce pressures for the Shuttle to operate like an operational system, and 

NASA accommodated. Chapter 6, “Decision Making at NASA,” chronicled 

the history of decision-making on the foam problem, showing how the weak, 

mixed, and routine signals behind the normalization of deviance prior to 

Challenger also precipitated NASA’s second gradual slide into disaster. Chapter 

6 presented evidence that schedule pressure directly impacted management 

decision-making about the Columbia foam debris hit. Also, it showed how 

NASA’s bureaucratic culture, hierarchical structure, and power differences 

created missing signals, so that the depth of engineer concerns and logic of 

their request for imagery were not admitted to poststrike deliberations. 

26. Ibid. 

27. Ibid., pp. 101-120. 
CHANGING NASA: THE CHALLENGES OF ORGANIZATrONAL . . . 365 

Chapter 7, “The Accident’s Organizational Causes,” stepped back from 

the reconstruction of the decision history to examine how the organizational 

context affected the decisions traced in chapter 6. The chapter set forth an 

analysis of NASA’s organizational culture and structure. The focal point was 

the “broken safety culture” that resulted from a weakened safety structure 

that, in turn, caused decision-makers to “miss the signals the foam was sending.”” Organization structure, not communication failure, was responsible for 

problems with conveying and interpreting information. Systems integration 

and strong independent NASA safety systems were absent. Incorporating the 

social science literature from organization theory, theories of risk, and accidents, this chapter surveyed alternative models of organizations that did risky 

work, posing some safety structures that NASA might consider as models for 

revamping the Agency. Then, in the conclusion, it connected these organizational factors with the trajectory of decision-making after the Columbia foam 

strike. Chapter 8, “History as Cause: Columbiu and Challenger,” compared the 

two accidents. By showing the repeating patterns, it established the second 

accident as an organizational system failure, making obvious the causal links 

within and between the three preceding chapters. It demonstrated that the 

causes of Challenger had not been fixed. By bringing forward the thesis of “history” as cause, it showed how both the history of decision-making by political 

elites and the history of decision-making by NASA engineers and managers 

had twice combined to produce a gradual slide into disaster. 

Now consider the fit between the Board’s expanded causal model and 

its “Findings” and its “Recommendations.” Empirically, the CAIB found the 

same problems as did the Presidential Commission and in fact recognized that 

in the report: schedule pressure; dependent and understaffed safety agents; 

communication problems stemming from hierarchy, power differences, and 

structural arrangements; poor systems integration and a weakened safety 

system; overburdened problem-reporting mechanisms that muted signals of 

potential danger; a can-do attitude that translated into an unfounded belief in 

the safety system; a success-based belief in an operational system; and bureaucratic rule-following that took precedence over deference to the expertise 

of engineersz9 The data interpretation and causal analysis differed, however, because the CAIB report integrated social science analysis and concepts 

throughout part 2: culture, institutional failure, organizational system, history 

as cause, structure, the normalization of deviance, and the causal linkages 

between the three empirical chapters. Thus, the CAIB targeted for change 

each of the three layers of NASA’s organizational system. A second difference 

28. Ibid., p. 164. 

29. Ibid., p. 100. 
366 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

was that the number of findings and recommendations was greater and each 

was more detailed and specific than those of the Commission. A few of those 

illustrative of the organization system approach to change follow. 

Chapter 5, “From Challenger to Columbia,” tracing historic decisions by 

leaders, included neither findings nor recommendations about NASA’s external environment. However, in contrast to the Commission’s report, the CAIB 

specifically implicated decision leaders by the data in chapter 5, and in the 

introduction to part 2, the CAIB report stated that the Agency 

accepted the bargain to operate and maintain the vehicle in the 

safest possible way. The Board is not convinced that NASA has 

completely lived up to the bargain, or that Congress and the 

Administration have provided the funding and support necessary for NASA to do so. This situation needs to be addressedif the nation intends to keep conducting human space flight, it 

needs to live up to its part of the bargain.30 

Policy and budgetary decisions by leaders again show up in the “Findings” 

and “Recommendations” in chapters 6 and 7. Chapter 6, “Decision Making at 

NASA,” makes three Recommendations, primary among them the adoption 

of “a Shuttle flight schedule that is consistent with available re~ources.”~~ Also, 

it advocated training the Mission Management Team, which did not operate 

in a decentralized mode or innovate, instead adhering to an ill-advised protocol in dealing with the foam strike. As Weick found with forest-fire fighters 

in a crisis, the failure “to drop their tools,” which they were trained to always 

carry, resulted in death for most.32 The CAIB recommendation was to train 

NASA managers to “drop their tools,” responding innovatively rather than 

bureaucratically to uncertain flight conditions and to decentralize by interacting across levels of hierarchy and organizational b~undaries.~~ 

Chapter 7, “The Accident’s Organizational Causes,” asserts the important 

causal role ofa broken safety culture and NASA’s cultural “blind spot” that kept 

them from getting the signals the foam was sending. The “Recommendations” 

advocated changes in the structure of NASA’s safety system: the broken safety 

culture was to be fixed by changing the safety structure. The Commission 

charged NASA to create an “independent Technical Engineering Authority” 

with complete authority over technical issues, its independence guaranteed by 

funding directly from NASA Headquarters, with no responsibility for sched30. CAIB, Report, p. 97. 

31. Ibid., p. 139. 

32. Karl E. Weick, “The Collapse of Sensemaking in Organizations: The Mann Gulch Disaster,” 

33. CAIB, Report, p. 172. 

Administrative Science Quarterly 38 (1993): 628-652. 
CHANGINGASA: THE CHALLENGES OF ORGANIZATIONAL. . . 367 

ule or program After Challenger, cost, schedule, and safety were all 

the domain of a single office. Second, NASA Headquarters’ Office of Safety 

and Mission Assurance would have direct authority and be independently 

resourced. Finally, to assure that problems on one part of the Shuttle (e.g., 

the foam debris from the External Tank) took into account ramifications for 

other parts (e.g., foam hitting the orbiter wing), the Space Shuttle Integration 

Office would be reorganized to include the orbiter, previously not included. 

Chapter 8, “History as Cause,” presented general principles for making 

changes, rather than concrete recommendations. These principles incorporate 

the three layers of NASA’s organizational system and the relationship between 

them. First, decision-malung patterns that normalize deviance should be altered 

by “strategies that increase the clarity, strength, and presence of signals that challenge assumptions about risk,” which include empowering engineers, changing 

managerial practices, and strengthening the safety system.35 Second, this chapter 

reiterates the accountability at higher levels, stating, “The White House and 

Congress must recognize the role of their decisions in this accident and take 

responsibility for safety in the future.”36 Later and more specifically, “Leaders 

create culture. It is their responsibility to change it . . . .The past decisions of 

national leaders-the White House, Congress, and NASA Headquarters-set 

the Columbia accident in motion by creating resource and schedule strains that 

compromised the principles of a high-risk technology organi~ation.”~’ Third, 

at the organizational level, culture and structure are both targets for change. 

Understanding culture should be an ongoing research-based project. Necessary 

changes to organization structure must be carefdly considered because of the 

law of unintended consequences: change and increased complexity produce 

mistake; changing structure can change culture in unpredictable ways. 

The report made it imperative that NASA respond to many of these recommendations prior to the Return to Flight Evaluation in 2005.38 Although 

change is still under way at NASA, it is appropriate to examine the direction 

NASA is taking and the obstacles the Agency is encountering as it goes about 

implementing change. 

Signals of Danger and the Normalization of Deviance 

Because the Space Shuttle is and always will be an experimental vehicle, 

technical problems will proliferate. In such a setting, categorizing risk will 

34. Ibid., p. 193. 

35. Ibid., p. 203. 

36. Ibid., p. 196. 

37. Ibid., p. 203. 

38. Prior to the resumption of Shuttle launches, progress on these changes was monitored and 

approved by a NASA-appointed board, the Covey-Stafford Board, and also by the U.S. Congress 

House Committee on Science, which has official oversight responsibilities for the space agency. 
368 CRITICAL ISSUES INTHE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

always be difficult, especially with low-lying, ambiguous problems, like foam 

debris and O-ring erosion, where the threat to flight safety is not readily 

apparent and mission success constitutes definitive evidence: calculations and 

lab experiments are approximations, but flight outcome is considered the final 

test of engineering predictions. The decision problem is not only how to 

categorize the many elements and variations in risk, but how to make salient 

early warning signs about low-lying problems that, by definition, will be seen 

against a backdrop of more serious problems. 

The new NASA Engineering and Safety Center (NESC), created after 

the Columbia accident, is to be a safety resource for engineering decisions 

throughout the Agency. NESC will review recurring anomalies that engineering had determined do not affect flight safety to see if those decisions were 

correct.39 Going back to the start of the Shuttle program, NESC will create a 

common database, looking for missed signals, reviewing problem dispositions, 

and taking further investigative and corrective action when deemed necessary. However, as we have seen from Columbia and Challenger, what happens 

at the level of everyday interaction, interpretation, and decision-making does 

not occur in a vacuum, but in an organizational system in which other factors 

affect problem definition, corrective actions, and problem dispositions. 

The Culture of Production: 

NASA’s Political/Economic Environment 

NASA remains a politically vulnerable agency, dependent on the White 

House and Congress for its share of the budget and approval of its goals. After 

Columbia, the Bush administration supported the continuation of the Space 

Shuttle program and supplied the vision for NASA’s future that the CAIB 

report concluded was missing: the space program would return to exploration 

of Mars. However, the funds to make the changes required for the Shuttle to 

return to flight and simultaneously accomplish this new goal were insufficient. 

Thus, NASA, following the CAIB prescription, attempted to align goals and 

resources by phasing out the Hubble telescope program and, eventually, planning to phase out the Shuttle itself. Further, during the standdown from launch 

while changes are implemented, the International Space Station is still operating and remains dependent upon the Shuttle to ferry astronaut crews, materials, and experiments back and forth in space. Thus, both economic strain and 

schedule pressure still persist at NASA. How the conflict between NASA’s 

goals and the constraints upon achieving them will unfold is still unknown, 

but one lesson from Challenger is that system effects tend to reproduce. The 

Board mandated independence and resources for the safety system, but when 

39. Frank Morring, Jr., “Anomaly Analysis: NASA’s Engineering and Safety Center Checks 

Recurring Shuttle Glitches,” Aviation Week 6 Space Technology (2 August 2004): 53. 
CHANGINGASA: THE CHALLENGES OF ORGANIZATIONAL.. . 369 

goals, schedule, efficiency, and safety conflicted post-Challenger, NASA goals 

were reined in, but the safety system also was compromised. 

The Organization: NASA Structure and Culture 

In the months preceding the report release, the Board kept the public and 

NASA informed of some of the recommended changes so that NASA could 

get a head start on changes required for Return to Flight. With the press 

announcement that the CAIB would recommend a new safety center, and 

pressed to get the Shuttle flying again, NASA rushed ahead to begin designing 

a center despite having no details about what it should entail. When the report 

was published, NASA discovered that the planned NASA Engineering and 

Safety Center (NESC) it had designed and begun to implement was not the 

Independent Technical Authority that the Board recommended. Converting 

to the CAIB-recommended structure was resisted internally at NASA, in 

large part because the proposed structure a) did not fit with insiders’ ideas 

about how things should work and where accountability should lie and b) 

was difficult to integrate into existing operations and structures. NESC is in 

operation, as described above, but NASA is now working on a separate organization, the Independent Technical Authority, as outlined by the CAIB. 

Whereas CAIB recommendations for changing structure were specific, 

CAIB directions for changing culture were vague.The CAIB was clear about 

implicating NASA leaders, making them responsible for changing culture. What 

was the role of NASA leaders in cultural change, and how should that change be 

achieved? The report’s one clear instruction for making internal change was for 

correcting the broken safety culture by changing the structure of the safety system. From my participation in meetings at NASA, it was clear that NASA leaders did not understand how to go about changing culture.To these leaders, who 

were trained in engineering and accustomed to human factors analysis, changing culture seemed “hzzy.” Many NASA personnel believed that the report’s 

conclusion about Agencywide cultural failures wrongly indicted parts of NASA 

that were working well. More fundamentally, they had a problem translating the 

contents of the report to identi@ what changes were necessary and what actions 

they implied. Each of the three causal chapters contained explicit information 

about where necessary cultural changes were needed 

1) Chapter 5 shows actions by leaders in OMB, Congress, the White House, 

and NASA made cost and schedule a part of the organization culture, 

competing with safety and technical and scientific innovation as goals. 

2) Chapter 6 shows how the technical anomaly became normalized, 

experience with the foam debris problem leading to a cultural belief 

that foam was not a threat to flight safety. 
370 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

3) Chapter 7 points out a gap; administrators’ belief in NASA’s strong 

“safety culture” was contradicted by the way the organization actually operated in this accident. Layers of structure, hierarchy, protocol, 

power differences, and an informal chain of command in combination stifled engineering opinion and actions, impeding information 

gathering and exchange, showing a culture where deference to engineering technical expertise was missing. The belief that operations 

were safe led NASA to buy as much safety as they felt they needed; 

cutbacks were made in safety personnel accordingly. 

So changes that targeted the cause of NASA’s cultural problems had 

to be three-pronged. But how to do it? NASA’s approach was this: On 16 

December 2003, NASA Headquarters posted a Request for Proposals on 

its Web site for a cultural analysis to be followed by the implementation of 

activities that would eliminate cultural problems identified as detrimental to 

safety. Verifying the CAIB’s conclusions about NASA’s deadline-oriented 

culture, proposals first were due 6 January; then the deadline was extended 

by a meager 10 days. Ironically, the CAIB mandate to achieve cultural 

change itself produced the very production pressure about which the report 

had complained. Although the study was to last three years, NASA required 

data on cultural change in six months (just in time for the originally scheduled date of the Return to Flight Evaluation, later deferred several times), 

then annually. 

The bidders were corporate contractors with whom NASA frequently 

worked. Details are not available at this writing, but the awardee conducted 

a “cultural analysis” survey to gather data on the extent and location of 

cultural problems in the Agency. The ability of a survey to tap into cultural problems is questionable because it asks insiders, who can be blinded 

to certain aspects of their culture. A better assessment results when insider 

information is complemented by outside observers who become temporary 

members, spending sufficient time there to be able to identify cultural patterns, examine records, and interview asking open-ended questions. A further problem is implied in the initial response rate of 40 percent, indicating 

that insider viewpoints tapped will not capture Agencywide cultural patterns. Further, this survey was to be followed by plans to train and retrain 

managers to listen and decentralize and to encourage engineers to speak up. 

Thus, the Agency response would be at the interactional level only, leaving 

other aspects of culture identified in the CAIB report-such as goals; schedule pressures; power distribution across the hierarchy and between administrators, managers, and engineers-unaddressed. The agency that had always 

been expected to do too much with too little was still struggling with that 

all-too-familiar situation. 
CHANGING NASA: THE CHALLENGES OF ORGANIZATIONAL.. . 371 

CONCLUSION: LESSONS LEARNED 

The dilemmas of slippery slopes, repeating negative patterns, and learning from mistake are not uniquely NASA’s. We have evidence that slippery 

slopes are frequent patterns in manmade disasters.40 We also know that slippery slopes with harmful outcomes occur in other kinds of organizations 

where producing and using risky technology is not the goal: think of the 

incursion of drug use into professional athletics, U.S. military abuse of prisoners in Iraq, and Enron-to name some sensational cases in which incrementalism, commitment, feedback, cultural persistence, and structural secrecy seem 

to have created an organizational “blind spot” that allowed actors to see their 

actions as acceptable and conforming, perpetuating a collective incremental 

descent into poor judgment. Knowing the conditions that cause organizations 

to make a gradual downward slide, whether the manmade disasters that result 

are technical, political, financial, public relations, moral, or other, does give 

us some insight into how it happens that may be helpful to other managers 

hoping to avoid these problems. 

In contradiction to the apparent suddenness of their surprising and sometimes devastating public outcomes, mistakes can have a long incubation period. 

How do early warning signs of a wrong direction become normalized? A first 

decision, once taken and met by either success or no obvious failure (which 

also can be a success!), sets a precedent upon which future decisions are based. 

The first decision may be defined as entirely within the logic of daily operations because it conforms with ongoing activities, cultural norms, and goals. 

Or, if initially viewed as deviant, the positive outcome may neutralize perceptions of risk and harm; thus, what was originally defined as deviant becomes 

normal and acceptable as decisions that build upon the precedent accumulate. 

Patterns of information bury early warning signs amidst subsequent indicators 

that all is well. As decisions and their positive result become public to others 

in the organization, those making decisions become committed to their chosen line of action, so reversing direction-even in the face of contradictory 

information-becomes more difficult. 

The accumulating actions assume a taken-for-granted quality, becoming 

cultural understandings, such that newcomers may take over &om others without questioning the status quo; or, if objecting because they have fresh eyes 

that view the course of actions as deviant, they may acquiesce and participate upon learning the decision logic and that “this is the way we do it here.” 

Cultural beliefs persist because people tend to make the problematic nonprob40. Barry M. Turner, Man-made Disasters (London: Wykeham, 1978); Scott A. Snook, Friendly 

Fire: The Accidental Shootdown 0fU.S. Black Hawks over Northern Iraq (Princeton: Princeton University 

Press, 2000). 
372 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

lematic by defining a situation in a way that makes sense of it in cultural terms. 

NASA’s gradual slides continued because 1) the decisions made conformed to 

the mandates of the dominating culture of production and 2) because organization structure impeded the ability of those with regulatory responsibilities-top 

administrators, safety representatives-to critically question and intervene. 

Why do negative patterns repeat? Was it true, as the press concluded after 

Columbia, that the lessons of Challenger weren’t learned? When we examined 

the lessons of Challenger identified in the “Findings” and “Recommendations” 

of the Commission’s 1986 report, they located cause primarily in individual 

mistakes, misjudgments, flawed analysis, flawed decision-making, and communication failures. The findings about schedule pressures and safety structure were attributed also to flawed decision-making, not by middle managers 

but by NASA leaders. In response, the Commission recommended adjusting decision-making processes, creating structural change in safety systems, 

and bringing goals and resources into alignment. NASA acted on each of 

those recommendations; thus, we could say that the lessons were learned. The 

Columbia accident and the CAIB report that followed taught different lessons, 

however. They showed that an organizational system failure, not individual 

failure, was behind both accidents, causing the negative pattern to repeat. So, 

in retrospect, we must conclude that from Challenger NASA learned incomplete lessons. Thus, they did not connect their strategies for control with the 

full social causes of the first accident. 

Events since Columbiu teach an additional lesson: we see just how hard it is 

to learn and implement the lessons of an organization system failure, even when 

the CAIB Report pointed them out. Further, there are practical problems. 

NASA leaders had difficulty integrating new structures with existing parts of 

the operation; cultural change and how to go about it eluded them. Some of 

the CAIB recommendations for change were puzzling to NASA personnel 

because they had seen their system working well under most circumstances. 

Further, understanding how social circumstances affect individual actions is 

not easy to grasp, especially in an American ethos in which both success and 

failure are seen as the result ofindividual action.41 Finally, negative patterns can 

repeat because making changes has system effects that can produce unintended 

consequences. Changing structure can increase complexity and, therefore, the 

probability of mistake; it can change culture in unpredictable ways.42 

41.Afier a presentation in which I translated the cultural change implications ofthe CAIB report to a 

group of ahnistrators at NASA Headquarters, giving examples of how to go about it, two adrmmstrators 

approached me. Drawing parallels between the personalities of a Columbia engineer and a Challenger 

engineer who both acted aggressively to avert an accident but, faced with management opposition, 

backed off, the administrators wanted to know why replacing these individuals was not the solution. 

42. Charles B. Perrow, Normal Accident3 (New York: Basic Books, 1994); Diane Vaughan, “The 

Dark Side of Organizations: Mistake, Misconduct, and Disaster,” Annual Review of Sociology 25 

continned on the next page 
CHANGING NASA: THE CHALLENGES OF ORGANIZATIONAL. . . 373 

Even when the lessons are learned, negative patterns can still repeat. The 

process and mechanisms behind the normalization of deviance make incremental change hard to detect until it’s too late. Change occurs gradually, the 

signs of a new and possibly harmful direction occurring one at a time, injected 

into daily routines that obfuscate the developing pattern. Moreover, external 

forces are often beyond a single organization’s ability to control. Cultures of 

production, whether production of police statistics, war, profits, or timely 

Shuttle launches, are a product of larger historical, cultural, political, ideological, and economic institutions that produce them. Making organizational 

change that contradicts them is difficult to implement but, in the face of continuing and consistent institutional forces, even more difficult to sustain as 

time passes. The extent to which an organization can resist these conditions 

is likely to vary as its status and power vary. Although compared to some, 

NASA seems a powerful government agency, its share of the federal budget is 

small compared to other agencies. In the aftermath of both accidents, NASA 

changes were undermined by subsequent events, many of which they could 

not control. Political and budgetary decisions of elites created new goals, 

resulting in new structures, making the system more complex; by not giving 

sufficient support, they reproduced a culture dominated by schedule pressures, 

deadlines, resource scarcity, bureaucratic protocols, and power differences that 

made it difficult to create and sustain a different kind of NASA where negative patterns do not repeat. It may be argued that under the circumstances, 

NASA’s Space Shuttle program has had a remarkable safety record. 

But even when everything possible is done, we cannot have mistake-free 

organizations because system effects will produce unanticipated consequences. 

Because the Shuttle is unprecedented and flight conditions unpredictable, 

NASA will always have many postflight anomalies to deal with, and low-lying 

problems with hard-to-decipher, uncertain outcomes like O-ring erosion and 

foam debris will always be a challenge. Part of the remedy is to increase the 

power and effectiveness of the safety system, but the critical piece to this 

puzzle is changing the culture of production. For Columbia, as for Challenger, 

resources-both time and money-were not available for thorough hazard 

analysis to fully explore why these two technical problems were occurring 

and the implications of continuing to fly with flaws. The reason they were 

not thoroughly analyzed and fixed was that the level of risk assigned to these 

problems was low. The definition of risk precluded the dedication of time and 

money to problems that had no clear potential for high costs. Further, all contingencies can never be predicted; most people don’t understand how social 

continuedfvom the previous page 

(1999): 271-305; Diane Vaughan, “Organisational Rituals of Risk and Error,” in Organisational 

Encounters with Risk, ed. Bridget M. Hutter and Michael K. Power (Cambridge: Cambridge 

University Press, 2005). 
374 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

context affects individual action and so cannot create strategies of control that 

connect with the social causes of a problem; organizational changes that correct one problem may, in fact, have a dark side, creating unpredictable others; 

and external environments are difficult to control. 

Jervis describes the unintended consequences and harmful outcomes that 

result from complex interactions in social systems.43 When complex, interactive technical systems, like the Space Shuttle, are run by complex organizations, like NASA, the probability of accidents is increased. Thus, system effects 

force us to recognize that it is not possible to prevent all accidents. However, 

it is important to remember that both of NASA’s accidents had a long incubation period, and thus were preventable. By addressing the social causes of gradual 

slides and repeating negative patterns, organizations can reduce the probability 

that mistakes and accidents will occur. To do so, connecting strategies for correcting organizational problems with their social causes is crucial. Social scientists can play a significant role. First, we have research showing the problem 

of the slippery slope is perhaps more frequent than we now imagine, but less 

is known about cases where this pattern, once begun, is reversed.44 Building 

a research base about organizations that make effective cultural change and 

reverse downward slides is an important step. Further, by their writing, analysis, and consulting, social scientists can 1) teach organizations about the social 

sources of their problems, 2) advise on strategies that will address those social 

causes, and 3) explore the system effects of planned changes, helping to forestall unintended consequence^.^^ 

43. Robert Jervis, System Effects: Complexity in Political and Social L$e (Princeton: Princeton 

University Press, 1997). 

44. Turner, Man-made Disasters; David Miller, The Icarus Paradox: How Exceptional Companies Bring 

About Their Own Downfall (New York: Harper, 1990), but see Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Confidence: 

How Winning Streaks and Losing Streaks Begin and End (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004). 

45. See, e.g., Rosabeth Moss Kanter, The Changemasters (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983), 

and Confidence: How Winning Streaks and Losing Streaks Begin and End (New York: Simon & Schuster, 

2004); Karlene H. Roberts, “Managing High Reliability Organizations,” Cal$ornia Management 

Review 32, no. 4 (1990): 101-114; Karl E. Weick, Kathleen Sutcliffe, and David Obstfeld, 

“Organizing for High Reliability,” Research in Organizational Behavior 21 (1990): 81-123; Todd R. 

La Porte and Richard Consolini, “Working in Practice but not in Theory: Theoretical Challenges 

of High-Reliability Organizations,”Journal ofpublic Administration Research and Theory 1 (1991): 19- 

47; Diane Vaughan, “The Trickle-Down Effect: Policy Decisions, Risky Work, and the Challenger 

Accident,” Cal$ornia Management Review 39 (winter 1997): 1-23; Lee Clarke, Mission Improbable: 

Using Fantasy Documents to Tame Disaster (Chicago: University of Chicago Press: 1999); Anita L. 

Tucker and Amy C. Edmondson, “Why Hospitals Don’t Learn from Failures: Organizational and 

Psychological Dynamics that Inhibit System Change,” Cal$ornia Management Review 45 (winter 

2003): 55-72; Karen Marais, Nicolas Dulac, and Nancy Leveson, “Beyond Normal Accidents 

and High Reliability Organizations: The Need for an Alternative Approach to Safety in Complex 

Systems,” (unpublished manuscript, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2004); Amy C. 

Edmondson, Michael Roberto, and Richard Bohmer, The Columbia’s Last Flght (multimedia business case, Harvard Business School, 2005). 
CHANGINGASA: THE CHALLENGES OF ORGANIZATIONAL.. . 375 

Second, NASA's problem of the cultural blind spot shows that insiders 

are unable to identify the characteristics of their own workplace structure 

and culture that might be causing problems. This suggests that rather than 

waiting until after a gradual slide into disaster or repeat of a negative pattern 

to expose the dark side of culture and structure, organizations would benefit from ongoing cultural analysis by ethnographically trained sociologists 

and anthropologists giving regular feedback, annually replaced by others to 

avoid seduction by the cultural ethos and assure fresh insights. Bear in mind 

this additional obstacle: the other facet of NASA's cultural blind spot was 

that the Agency's success-based belief in its own goodness was so great that 

it developed a pattern of disregarding the advice of outside experts.46 To the 

extent that the CAIB report's embrace of an organizational system approach 

becomes a model for other accident investigation reports, other organizations 

may become increasingly aware of the social origins of mistakes and of the 

need to stay in touch with how their own organizational system is working. 

46. CAIB, Report, chap. 5. 

CHAPTER 12 

ACCIDENTS, ENGINEERING, AND HISTORY AT NASA, 

1967-2003 

Alexander Brown 

ection 203(a)(3) of the National Aeronautics and Space Act directs NASA S to “provide for the widest practicable and appropriate dissemination of 

information concerning its activities and the results thereof.”’ To fulfill that 

mandate, NASA Administrator T. Keith Glennan instituted the NASA 

History Office in 1959? The office has stayed open ever since, collecting 

archival materials for NASA staff and outside researchers, writing history, 

and commissioning a wide range of works on NASA’s history. Over the last 

decade, the budget of NASA’s history office has remained constant at around 

$335,000 per annum, although funds allocated to the history office from 

project offices vary from year to year. Even assuming such a level over the 

lifetime of the office, and not adjusting for inflation, NASA’s commitment to 

telling its own history has cost the organization at least $15 million. But this 

figure is dwarfed by three official histories of NASA not commissioned by 

the history office. In 1967, 1986, and 2003, NASA spent $31 million, $75 

million, and $152.4 million to produce multivolume accounts of fatal accidents in the manned space pr~gram.~ These three accident reports examined 

the fatal fire in Apollo 204 (Apollo 1) in 1967, the explosion of the Solid 

Rocket Booster in STS-51L (Challenger) in 1986, and the destruction of the 

orbiter in STS-107 (Columbia). 

Fatal accidents in publicly funded systems catch particular media and 

public attenti~n.~ Governments become compelled to conduct wide-ranging 

1.John M.Logsdon et al.,eds., Exploring the Unknown:Selected Documents in the History ofthe US. Civil 

Space Program, vol. 1, Oganizingfor Exploration (Washington, DC: NASA SP-4407,1995), p. 337. 

2. Roger D. Launius, “NASA History and the Challenge of Keeping the Contemporary Past,” 

Public Historian 21, no. 3 (summer 1993): p. 63. 

3. For Apollo 1, see Ivan D. Ertel and Roland Newkirk, wth Courtney G. Brooks, TheApollo SpacecrujE 

A Chronology, vol. 4 (Washington, DC: NASA SP-4009,1978); for Challenger, see Frank Ohveri,“NASA 

gets $50 &on for Shuttle Investigation,” Florida Today (21 February 2004); for Columbia, see Paul 

Recer,”NASA Columbia Cleanup costs near $400M,” Newsday (1 1 September 2003). 

4. Thomas White, Jr., “Establishment ofBlame as a Framework for Sensemaking in the Space Policy 

Subsystem: A Study of the Apollo 1 and Challenger Accidents” (Ph.D. diss., Virginia Polytechnic 

continued on the next page 
378 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

investigations to reassure the public of the safety of the system and the integrity of the funding process. Accidents at NASA are particularly public and so 

demand an investigation process that is accountable not only to the Congress 

but also to the American people. NASA accident investigation boards are 

forced to draw connections between national politics and engineering design 

and operations. The process of writing a final report also forces an accident 

investigation body to tell one coherent story about the accident-how the 

accident happened, what and who was at fault, and how steps can be taken to 

ensure the accident cannot happen again. 

But as Peter Galison has observed in his study of aircraft accidents in the 

1980s, accident reports are inherently unstable. They are multicausal in their 

historical explanations, and yet embedded in the very process of investigation 

is a drive for a single point of culpability upon which to base moral responsibility and recommendations for corrective action. Accident reports, then, are 

always ambiguous about the appropriate explanatory scale, so that it is never 

clear which is the right scale for analysis-whether the small scale or the large 

scale, the inflexible O-ring or the schedule pressure imposed on NASA by the 

White House and Congress.’ 

Galison is certainly correct to assert that reports show an explanatory 

tension, but this instability between frames of analysis is not just a function of 

the particular genre of accident reports. Engineering has changed such that 

there is now a social and epistemological gap between the management of 

engineering and engineering practice. The analytical tension in the investigation reports mirrors the real gap between engineers and managers at NASA. 

Furthermore, the reports are analytically asymmetrical, treating engineering 

as a context-free activity while explaining management in a sophisticated 

historical and cultural framework. 

These gaps are not just a phenomenon inherent to accident reports, but 

the outcome of a set of historical and historiographical changes. The Apollo 

204 accident shows the disjuncture between the engineers designing and 

managing the project and the technicians manufacturing the spacecraft. The 

Challenger and Columbiu accidents show that disjuncture has shifted to the 

gap between managers controlling the project and engineers maintaining and 

analyzing the spacecraft. Similarly, since the 1980s, the organizational theory and organizational communications communities have joined the aeronautical engineering community in paying significant scholarly attention to 

continuedfrom the previous page 

Institute and State University, 2000). White’s thesis analyzes the ways in which blame was allocated 

in these two accidents but also makes it very clear that public and political concern and outrage 

were extremely high in both cases. 

5. Peter Galison, “An Accident of History,” in Atmospheric Flight in the Twentieth Century, ed. Peter 

Galison and Alex Roland (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2000), pp. 343. 
ACCIDENTS, ENGINEERING, AND HISTORY ATNASA, 1967-2003 379 

accidents at NASA. Their engagement has shifted attention to the historical 

and organizational context of management decision-making surrounding the 

accidents. No historians of engineering and technology have matched this 

contextualization of management with a history of the engineering involved 

in the accidents or an attempt to integrate the two. 

This paper will briefly lay out the accidents and discuss the findings of 

their investigative bodies. The changing historiographical styles, frameworks, 

and conclusions of the reports will be analyzed. These changes will be linked 

to changes in the practice of engineering by NASA and its contractors. Finally, 

some suggestions will be made for future research into accidents and changes 

in engineering. 

APOLLO 204 

On 27 January 1967, Spacecraft 012, assigned to the Apollo 204 mission, 

was undergoing a Plugs-Out Integrated Test on Pad 34 at Kennedy Space 

Center in Florida. The internal power systems of the newly delivered 

Command and Service Module were being tested, and so the crew cabin was 

pressurized to 16 pounds per square inch (psi) of pure oxygen. There were 

three astronauts on board: Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee. At 

around 6:31 p.m. EST, the crew reported a fire in the spacecraft. Less than 20 

seconds later, the spacecraft heatshield had ruptured and flame had burst into 

the service tower. The crew in the Command and Service Module (CSM) 

level of the support tower immediately evacuated the area but quickly returned 

with what firefighting and protective gear they could find. However, they 

were unable to extinguish the fire immediately or remove the crew from the 

cabin. Meanwhile, the crew had attempted to remove the middle hatch of the 

spacecraft but had been overcome before doing so. Firefighting crews and 

medical support arrived approximately 20 minutes later. 

NASA Deputy Administrator Robert Seamans had already considered the 

possibility of an accident in the manned spaceflight program, after Neil Armstrong 

and Dave Scott in GeminiVIII had lost control of their capsule after docking 

with an Agena booster.6 In the aftermath of GeminiVIII, he developed a set of 

procedures to be followed should an accident ever occur. On the evening of 28 

January, he followed those procedures and immediately convened an accident 

review board.7The board convened at Kennedy Space Center in Florida and was 

6. Robert C. Seamans, Aiming at Targets (Washington, DC: NASA SP-4106, 1996), pp. 135-136; 

Barton 6. Hacker and James M. Grimwood, On the Shoulders of Titans: A History of Project Gemini 

(Washington, DC: NASA SP-4203, 1977), pp. 308-319. 

7. Apollo 204 Review Board, appendix a-G, “Board Minutes,” in Report OfApollo 204 Review 

Board to the Administrator, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Washington, DC: GPO, 

1967), pp. 1-5-1-6. 
380 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

The mission officially designated Apollo/Saturn 204 is more commonly known as 

Apollo 1. This close-up view of the interior of the Command Module shows the effects 

of the intense heat of the flash fire that killed the prime crew during a routine training 

exercise. While they were strapped into their seats inside the Command Module atop 

the giant Saturn V Moon rocket, a faulty electrical switch created a spark that ignited 

the pure-oxygen environment. The speed and intensity of the fire quickly exhausted the 

oxygen supply inside the crew cabin. Unable to deploy the hatch due to its cumbersome 

design and the lack of breathable oxygen, the crew lost consciousness and perished. 

They were astronauts Virgil I. ”Gus“ Grissom (the second American to fly into space), 

Edward H. White II (the first American to ”walk” in space), and Roger B. Chaffee (a 

“rookie” on his first space mission). (JSC image no. S-67-21294, 28January 1968) 

chaired by Floyd “Tommy” Thompson, Director of NASA’s Langley Research 

Center.8 The board was made up of three senior NASA engineers, a chemist 

from the Bureau of Mines, an Air Force officer from the Inspector General’s 

office, NASA Langley’s general counsel, and an astronaut.’ 

On 5 April 1967, the Apollo 204 Review Board presented its report to 

NASA Administrator James Webb. They concluded that the fire was caused 

8. James R. Hansen, Engineer in Charge: A History ofthe Langley Aeronautical Laboratory, 1917-1958 

9. Apollo 204 Review Board, appendix a-G, “Board Minutes,” pp. 2-1-2-17. 

(Washington, DC: NASA SP-4305, 1987), pp. 387-391. 
ACCIDENTS, ENGINEERING, AND HISTORY AT NASA, 1967-2003 381 

by an unknown source of electrical arc, probably malfunctioning wire insulation around the environmental control unit on the floor of the spacecraft, 

although the cause would never be definitively known. The spark then ignited 

nylon netting, Velcro strips, and other combustible materials inside the spacecraft. These materials would have been removed before spaceflight, but under 

test conditions were not seen as hazardous. The coolant inside the spacecraft, 

water-glycol, was flammable and left a flammable residue in the cabin after 

evaporation. As the pipes melted, coolant leaked and ignited, further fueling 

the fire. The fire was rendered particularly dangerous by the high-pressure, 

pure-oxygen environment inside the spacecraft during the test. The crew was 

unable to use the inward-opening inner hatch under the pressurized conditions. The Board determined that the crew had died from asphyxiation caused 

by fumes from the fire." 

The Board told a story of engineering failure, identifying six conditions 

that led to the fire, and provided recommendations to fix the engineering 

problems they identified. These conditions were a sealed cabin with a pressurized atmosphere, extensive distribution of flammable materials in the cabin, 

vulnerable wiring carrying spacecraft power, vulnerable plumbing containing combustible and corrosive coolant, inadequate escape provisions, and an 

inadequate provision for rescue or medical assistance." 

After the Board made their engineering recommendations, they spoke 

briefly about the larger circumstance surrounding the accident: 

Having identified the condition that led to the disaster, the 

Board addressed itself to the question of how these conditions 

came to exist. Careful consideration of this question leads the 

Board to the conclusion that in its devotion to the many difficult problems of space travel, the Apollo team failed to give 

adequate attention to certain mundane but equally vital questions of crew safety. The Board's investigation revealed many 

deficiencies in design and engineering, manufacture and quality control. When these deficiencies are corrected the overall 

reliability of the Apollo Program will be increased greatly." 

On 27 February 1967, the Senate Committee on Aeronautical and Space 

Sciences started to hold hearings on the Apollo 204 fire, and on 11 April, the 

House Committee on Science and Astronautics started to hold hearings into 

the Apollo 204 fire. 

10. Ibid., pp. 5-1-5-12. 

11. Ibid., p. 5-12. 

12. Ibid., p. 5-12. 
382 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

On the first day of the hearings before the Senate, NASA Administrator 

James Webb, Deputy Administrator Seamans, and Associate Administrator 

George Mueller were sandbagged by the Democratic Senator from Minnesota, 

Walter Mondale. Mondale asked them about a report that Apollo Program 

Director Major General Sam Phillips had prepared in 1965 after visiting 

North American Aviation (NAA), manufacturers of the pacec craft.'^ Mueller 

first denied any knowledge of the report, arguing that Phillips had prepared 

many reports on many NASA contractors. Webb then argued that he was not 

going to release the report for reasons of commercial confidentiality, as it contained details of contract negotiations between NASA and NAA.I4 Senators 

Brooke, Percy, and, in particular, Mondale became highly critical of NASA’s 

unwillingness, as they saw it, to be accountable to elected 0fficia1s.l~ 

The Phillips report was damning. Phillips had written: 

I am definitely not satisfied with the progress and outlook of 

either program and am convinced that the right actions now 

can result in substantial improvement of position in both programs in the relatively near future. 

Even with due consideration of hopeful signs, I could not find 

a substantive basis for confidence in future performance. I 

believe that a task group drawn from NAA at large could rather 

quickly verify the substance of our conclusions, and might be 

useful to you in setting the course for improvements.’6 

Phillips recommended that NAA thoroughly revise (and in many cases 

implement) systems management and engineering procedures. He called 

for them to implement a program management system and to significantly 

improve their manufacturing and quality contr01.’~ 

The House hearing subcommittee was chaired by Representative Olin 

Teague of Texas, a long-term supporter of the space program. The hearings were contentious-with a Republican from Illinois, Donald Rumsfeld, 

taking particular aim at NASA senior officials Webb, Seamans, and Faget. 

Rumsfeld took objection to the constitution of the Board, arguing that it 

13. Senate Committee on Aeronautical and Space Sciences, Apollo Accident, Hearing, 90th Cong., 

14. Ibid., pp. 131-132. 

15. Ibid., pp. 217, 331-332; Senate Committee on Aeronautical and Space Sciences, Apollo 204 

Accident. Report of the Committee on Aeronautical and Space Sciences, United States Senate, with Additional 

Mews (Washington, DC: GPO, 1968), pp. 13-16. 

1st sess., 7 February 1967, pp. 125-127. 

16. Samuel Phillips, cover letter to Lee Atwood, in “NASA Review Team Report,” 1965. 

17. Ibid., pp. 1-20. 
ACCIDENTS, ENGINEERING, AND HISTORY ATNASA, 1967-2003 383 

was made of people responsible for the areas of work whose failure they were 

investigating. NASA was, in effect, investigating itself. Rumsfeld was also 

concerned about the narrow focus of the Board’s report, suggesting that they 

had defined their terms very specifically to avoid investigating larger problems within NASA management. Finally, he wanted to know why NASA 

did not have a separate and independent safety organization.18 Webb and 

Seamans gave fairly weak responses to Rumsfeld’s questions and were only 

saved by Teague’s interruptions. 

But the worst was still to come for NASA. It was revealed that in the 

initial awarding of the CSM contract to NAA, NAA had scored lower in the 

technical assessment than Martin. The Congressmen used this revelation to 

imply some sort of improper relationship between NASA and NAA.19 In the 

final days of the House hearing, Thomas Baron, a quality-assurance inspector from NAA, presented to the Committee a detailed report of deficiencies, 

official malfeasances, and general complaints about the standard of workmanship and care at NAA.’O While the Baron report was eventually proved to be 

largely personal grievances and unproven accounts of interactions between 

workers at NAA, it all contributed to a larger picture ofpoor management and 

workmanship at NAA and poor supervision at NASA. 

Although the Apollo 204 Board did not blame any individuals for the 

fire, there were consequences. Joseph Shea, manager of the Apollo Spacecraft 

Program Office, and Harrison Storms, NAA’s vice president in charge of the 

Space and Information Division, were both moved out of their positions.” 

Deputy Administrator Seamans also resigned soon after the investigation had 

concluded, his personal relationship with James Webb having deteriorated 

dramatically over the fire.” 

CHALLENGER 

On 28 January 1986, the Space Shuttle Challenger launched from Kennedy 

Space Center on mission 51-L. There were seven astronauts on board: Dick 

Scobee, Michael Smith, Ellison Onizuka, Judith Resnik, Ronald McNair, 

Christa McAuliffe, and Gregory Jarvis. Their mission was to deploy and 

18. House Committee on Science and Astronautics, Investigation into Apollo 204 Acddent, Hearings 

before the Subcommittee on NASA Oversight, 90th Cong., 1st sess., 10 April 1967, pp. 10-14. 

19. Ertel and Newkirk, The Apollo Spacecraft: A Chronology, vol. 4, entry €or 11 May 1967. 

20. Thomas Ronald Baron, “An Apollo Report,” in House Committee on Science and 

Astronautics, Investigation into Apollo 204 Accident, pp. 483-500. 

21. Ertel and Newkirk, The Apollo Spacecraft: A Chronology, vol. 4, entry for 7 April 1967; Mike 

Gray, Angle $Attack: Harrison Storms and the Race to the Moon, 1st ed. (New York W. W. Norton, 

1992), pp. 254-255. 

22. Seamans, Aiming at Tavgets, pp. 145-147. 
384 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

recover a satellite in orbit and to conduct flight-dynamics experiment^.'^ 

Christa McAuliffe, a teacher from New Hampshire, was to conduct a science lesson in orbit.24 The 28th of January was a very cold morning. The 

temperature at Kennedy Space Center in Florida had dropped below freezing 

overnight, and ice teams had been sent out three times to examine potential 

damage. Parts of the Space Shuttle, including the Solid Rocket Boosters, were 

still below freezing point at launch. The ambient air temperature was 36”F, 15 

degrees lower than any previous flight.25 

Less than a second after launch, at 11:38 a.m. EST, a puff of gray smoke 

emerged from the right Solid Rocket Booster (SRB). Over the next 2 seconds, eight more puffs of smoke, blacker and more dense, emerged from the 

same place on the SRB. Thirty-seven seconds after launch, the Shuttle experienced a 27-second period of severe wind shear, stronger than any other 

Shuttle launch had experienced. Fifty-eight seconds after launch, a small flame 

appeared on the aft field joint of the right SRB. Over the next 14 seconds, the 

flame grew rapidly, burning through the lower strut holding the SRB to the 

External Tank. Seventy-two seconds after launch, the strut burned through 

and the right SRB rotated around the upper strut, crashing into the External 

Tank. The tank collapsed, venting the hydrogen fuel into the atmosphere. 

The fuel immediately ignited, and the entire Shuttle flew into the fireball. 

The orbiter entered the fireball, broke up under severe aerodynamic load, and 

fell back into the Atlantic Ocean. There were no survivors.26 

On 3 February 1986, President Ronald Reagan appointed the Presidential 

Commission on the Space Shuttle Challenger A~cident.’~ The Commission 

was chaired by William Rogers, Secretary of State under Richard Nixon 

and an attorney by training and experience. The Commission included two 

astronauts, a test pilot, two physicists, another attorney, three engineers, a 

senior Air Force officer, an aerospace journalist, and an astronomer. Another 

engineer was executive director. The Commission conducted public and private hearings over the early part of 1986 and presented its report to President 

Reagan on 6 June 1986. 

Like the Apollo 204 Review Board, the Commission understood its 

objectives to be investigating the accident and providing a series of rec23. Presidential Commission on the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident, Report to the President, 

5 vols. (Washington, DC: GPO, 1986), p. 16; “John F. Kennedy Space Center-51-L Shuttle 

Mission,” http://www-pao. ksc.nasa.gov/kscpao/shuttle/mi~sions/51-l/mission-51-l. html. 

24. For Christa McAuliffe’s official NASA biography, see http://www.jsc.nasa.gov/Bios/htmlbios/ 

mcaulijie. html. 

25. Presidential Commission on the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident, Report to the President, vol. 

26. Ibid., pp. 20-21. 

1, pp. 16-21. 

27. Ibld., pp. 212-213. 
ACCIDENTS, ENGINEERING, AND HrsToRY AT NASA, 1967-2003 385 

The STS-51L crew members. In the back row, from left to right: mission specialist 

Ellison S. Onizuka, Teacher in Space participant Sharon Christa McAuliffe, payload 

specialist Greg Jarvis, and mission specialist Judy Resnik. In the front row, from left to 

right: pilot Mike Smith, commander Dick Scobee, and mission specialist Ron McNair. 

(JSC image no. 585-44253,15 November 19851 

ommendations for a return to safe flight.28 And like the Apollo Board, the 

Commission examined the physical causes of the accident but was also critical 

of NASA and its contractors as organizations: 

The genesis of the Challenger accident-the failure of the joint 

of the right Solid Rocket Motor-began with decisions made 

in the design of the joint and in the failure by both Thiokol 

(manufacturer of the Solid Rocket Motors) and NASA's Solid 

Rocket Booster project office to understand and respond to 

facts obtained during testing.29 

28. Ibid., p. 1. 

29. Ibid., p. 166. 
386 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

The Commission determined that a combustion gas leak through the aft field 

joint on the right Solid Rocket Motor caused the flame plume. The field joint 

was designed to be sealed by O-rings. On STS-51L7 the O-rings failed to 

work because ambient temperature was too cold and the O-rings lost resilience and hence their ability to seal quickly.30 The Commission’s report took 

aim at poor management decisions, arguing that schedule- and cost-conscious 

managers misunderstood and overruled the safety judgments of engineers. 

They concluded that flaws existed in NASA’s decision-making process and 

that these flaws had caused NASA to decide to launch STS-51L when there 

was reason to believe that launching would be risky and potentially catastrophic. NASA’s safety system was indicted as silent and ineffective in the face 

of increasing pressure on the launch schedule. Finally, the Commission suggested that these flaws were rooted in the history of the Space Shuttle program 

and the history of NASA.31 

Commissioner Richard Feynman went further in appendix F to the 

report. This appendix contained Feynman’s personal observations from his 

service on the Commission and particularly addressed the difference he had 

observed between NASA and Thiokol engineers and managers. Feynman 

observed that managers and engineers tended to calculate risk in very different ways-managers determining risk from a number of qualitative factors, whereas engineers calculated risk quantitatively, using standard statistical 

methods. He also observed that these two methods tended to produce widely 

divergent results. Managers generally understood risks to be orders of magnitude less than engineer^.^' Feynman was highly critical of this gap, arguing 

that there were only two ways to understand it. The first was dishonesty on 

the part of managers, designed to ensure a continuous flow of funding for the 

Shuttle. The second was an incredible lack of communication between engineers and managers.33 He argued that to ensure safe operation of the Shuttle, 

NASA managers needed to understand the realities of risk involved in flying 

high-performance vehicles like the Shuttle. After all, he concluded, “for a 

successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for 

Nature cannot be fooled.”34 

30. Ibid., chaps. 3,4. 

31. Ibid. Chapter 5 discusses management decisions; chapter 6, the historical background of the 

accident; and chapter 7, NASA’s safety program. 

32. Richard Phillips Feynman and Ralph Leighton, What Do You Care What Other People Think? 

Further Adventures of a Curious Character, 1st ed. (New York: Norton, 1988), pp. 179-184. This volume also contains a version of appendix F edited for clarity, pp. 220-237. For the original version, 

see Presidential Commission on the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident, Report to the President, pp. 

F-1-F-5. 

33. Feynman and Leighton, What Do You Care What Other People Think? pp. 236-237. 

34. Presidenhal Commission on the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident, Report to the President, p. F-5. 
ACCIDENTS, ENGINEERING, AND HISTORY AT NASA, 1967-2003 387 

The Commission’s report echoed Feynman’s findings, even though he 

felt upset that his opinions had not been adequately incorporated into the final 

document.35 The report suggested that NASA management and NASA engineers saw the material world in very different ways-the engineers understanding risk as quantifiable and determined by the material world, whilst 

managers understood risk as flexible and manageable in commercial and political contexts. The cause of the accident, the report concluded, was the failure 

of communication between these two perspectives. The ultimate expression 

of this philosophy was the statement by Jerald Mason of Morton Thiokol telling Robert Lund, vice-president of engineering, “You’ve got to put on your 

management hat, not your engineering hat” in order to determine whether the 

Challenger would launch the next day despite engineers’ concerns over the safety 

of the Solid Rocket Motor.36 In its final recommendations, the Commission 

wanted design changes to the Solid Rocket Motor, reform of the Shuttle program management structure, and the establishment of a Shuttle Safety Panel and 

an independent Office of Safety, Reliability and Quality Assurance. 

The House Committee on Science and Technology started holding hearings on the Challenger accident on 10 June 1986. As in Apollo 204, from 

which the Committee drew its precedent, hearings were delayed until the 

Commission report was published. The Committee conducted 10 days of 

hearings, questioning senior NASA and Morton Thiokol officials, as well as 

members of the Commission, astronauts, and Morton Thiokol engineers.” 

While the Committee endorsed the findings of the Commission, their report 

went further: 

The Committee feels that the underlying problem which led 

to the Challenger accident was not poor communication or 

inadequate procedures as implied by the Rogers Commission 

conclusion. Rather the fundamental problem was poor technical decision-making over a period of several years by top 

NASA and contractor personnel, who failed to act decisively 

to solve the increasingly serious anomalies in the Solid Rocket 

Booster joints.38 

Neither the Commission nor the Committee explicitly laid blame at the 

feet of any individuals. However, their criticisms of management at NASA’s 

35. Feynman and Leighton, What Do You Care What Other People Think? pp. 199-205. 

36. Presidentd Comssion on the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident, Report to the President, p. 94. 

37. House Commttee on Science andTechnology, Investigation ofthe Challenger Accident: Report ofthe 

38. Ibid., p. 5. 

Committee on Science and Echnology, House of Representatives, 99th Cong., 2nd sess., 1986, pp. 37-38. 
388 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

Marshall Space Flight Center and at Morton Thiokol were duly noted by 

those organizations. Most of Morton Thiokol management involved in the 

launch decision were reassigned, retired, or resigned, including Jerald Mason 

and Robert Lund. At NASA, Associate Administrator for Space Flight Jesse 

Moore resigned, while MSC Director William Lucas and booster project 

manager Lawrence Mulloy both retired early.39 

COLUMBIA 

On 16 January 2003, the Space Shuttle Columbiu launched from Kennedy 

Space Center on mission 107. There were seven astronauts on board: Rick 

Husband, William McCool, Michael Anderson, David Brown, Kalpana 

Chawla, Laurel Clark, and Ilan Ramon. Fifty-seven seconds after launch, at 

around 10:40 a.m. EST, the Columbia entered a period of unusually strong 

wind shear, which created a low-frequency oscillation in the liquid oxygen 

in the External Tank.40 At 81.7 seconds after launch, at least three pieces of 

Thermal Protection System foam detached from the left bipod ramp of the 

External Tank and fell backwards at between 416 and 573 miles per hour, 

smashing through the leading edge of the left wing of the orbiter. The largest 

piece of foam was around 2 feet long and 1 foot wide. The launch was otherwise without incident, and Columbia arrived in orbit by 11:39 a.m. EST. 

On 23 January, Mission Control e-mailed commander Husband and pilot 

McCool to inform them of the foam strike, informing them that some foam 

had hit the orbiter but reassuring them that “we have seen this phenomenon 

on several other flights and there is absolutely no concern for entry.”41 

On 1 February 2003, after a successful 17-day mission, the orbiter reentered the Earth’s atmosphere for a landing at Kennedy Space Center. As the 

orbiter reentered, superheated air penetrated the left wing through the foam 

strike in the leading edge and started to melt away the wing from the inside. 

At around 9:OO a.m. EST, the orbiter broke up under severe aerodynamic 

load and disintegrated over the Southwest of the United States. There were 

no survivors. 

Around 1O:OO a.m. on 1 February 2003, NASA Administrator Sean 

O’Keefe declared a Shuttle Contingency and, acting under procedures set in 

place after the Challenger accident, established the International Space Station 

39. Claus Jensen, No Downlink: A Dramatic Narrative About the Challenger Accident and Our Time, 

1st ed. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996), pp. 354-355; Richard S. Lewis, Challenger: 

The Final Voyage (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), pp. 222-223. 

40. Columbia Accident Investigation Board, Report, vol. 1 (Washington, DC: NASA and GPO, 

41. Ibid., p. 159. 

2003), pp. 33-34. 
ACCIDENTS, ENGINEERING, AND HISTORY AT NASA, 1967-2003 389 

and Space Shuttle Mishap Interagency O’Keefe named Admiral 

Harold Gehman as Chair of the Board. Gehman was retired from the Navy 

and had recently headed the investigation into the terrorist attack on the USS 

Ex officio, there were immediately seven Board members: four military officers with responsibilities for safety in their home services, a Federal 

Aviation Administration representative, a Department of Transportation representative, and a NASA Center Director. O’Keefe soon thereafter named 

both NASA’s Chief Engineer and the counsel to Glenn Research Center to 

the Board. Over the next six weeks, five more members were appointed to the 

renamed Columbia Accident Investigation Board. They included an aeronautical engineer and former Air Force Secretary, a physicist, a former astronaut 

and Challenger Commission member, a space policy expert, and the retired 

CEO of a major defense c~ntractor.~~ Over the first six months of 2003, the 

Board held hearings and conducted investigations into the Columbia accident 

and, on 26 August 2003, released its report. 

The CAIB report identified the physical cause of the accident as the 

foam strike on the left wing leading edge. But unlike the Apollo 204 Board, 

which briefly mentioned organizational and other factors, or the Challenger 

Commission, which described these factors as contributory, the CAIB emphasized that factors other than the proximate physical cause were as, if not more, 

important in understanding the Columbia accident: 

Many accident investigations make the same mistake in defining causes. They identify the widget that broke or malfunctioned, then locate the person most closely connected with the 

technical failure: the engineer who miscalculated an analysis, 

the operator who missed signals or pulled the wrong switches, 

the supervisor who failed to listen, or the manager who made 

bad decisions. When causal chains are limited to technical 

flaws and individual failures, the ensuing responses aimed at 

preventing a similar event in the future are equally limited: 

they aim to fix the technical problem and replace or retrain the 

individual responsible. Such corrections lead to a misguided 

and potentially disastrous belief that the underlying problem 

has been solved. The Board did not want to make these errors. 

A central piece of our expanded cause model involves NASA 

as an organizational whole. 

42. Ibid., pp. 231-232. 

43.William Langewiesche, “Columbia’s Last Flight,” Atlantic Monthly (November 2003): 65-66. 

44. CAIB, Report, p. 232. 
390 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

The organizational causes of this accident are rooted in the 

Space Shuttle Program's history and culture, including the 

original compromises that were required to gain approval for 

the Shuttle Program, subsequent years of resource constraints, 

fluctuating priorities, schedule pressures, mischaracterizations 

of the Shuttle as operational rather than developmental, and lack 

of an agreed national vision. Cultural traits and organizational 

practices detrimental to safety and reliability were allowed 

to develop, including: reliance on past success as a substitute 

for sound engineering practices (such as testing to understand 

why systems were not performing in accordance with requirements/specifications); organizational barriers which prevented 

effective communication of critical safety information and 

stifled professional differences of opinion; lack of integrated 

management across program elements; and the evolution of an 

informal chain of command and decision-making processes 

that operated outside the organization's rules. 

In the Board's view, NASA's organizational culture and 

structure had as much to do with this accident as the External 

Tank foam.45 

Seventeen years after Challenger, the Board concluded that many of 

the findings of the Challenger Commission were still applicable to the Space 

Shuttle program in the early 21st century. They were critical of the similarities 

between the Challenger and Columbia accidents, noting in the Columbia accident flawed decision-making processes, a silent safety program, and schedule 

pressure. The Board also observed that the causes of these failures were rooted 

in NASA's history and culture; the history of the Space Shuttle program had 

been a history of the normalization of deviance. Increasingly large engineering problems that had not caused catastrophic failures had been incorporated 

into NASA's experience base instead of raising safety concerns. NASA had 

come to rely on past success (or lack of past catastrophe) rather than rigorous 

testing and analysis. NASA's safety system was still silent. Decision-making 

was still flawed, with managers and engineers still unable to communicate 

effectively about risk. 

The Commission recommended design changes to the Thermal Protection 

System on the External Tank, reform of the Space Shuttle Integration Office, 

training for the Mission Management Team, the establishment of an indepen45. Ibid., p. 177. 
ACCIDENTS, ENGINEERING, AND HISTORY AT NASA, 1967-2003 391 

dent Technical Engineering Authority with safety responsibilities, and rendering the NASA Office of Safety and Mission Assurance independent and 

with total oversight of the Space Shuttle program safety ~rganization.~~ 

READING ACCIDENT REPORTS AS HISTORY 

The Apollo 204 report is almost exclusively devoted to an analysis of 

the engineering problems that the Board argued caused the fire. It divides its 

analysis into two parts, parts IV and V of the report.47 Part IV, “History of 

the Accident,” provides a chronology of the accident from August 1964 until 

28 January 1967. The sections discussing the fabrication, delivery, and inspection of the CSM spacecraft, which cover the period from August 1964 until 

December 1966, take up less than 10 percent of the report. The remainder of 

the history of the accident is a detailed chronology of the Plugs-Out Integrated 

Test of CSM 012, starting around 5 hours and 30 minutes before the accident. Part V, “Investigation and Analysis,” has four sections: “Inspection and 

Disassembly,” “Chronology,” “Data Analyses,” and “Cause of the Fire.” Both 

the “Inspection and Disassembly” and “Chronology” sections are strictly narrative. “Data Analyses” discusses analyses of spacecraft telemetry data and 

crew voice transmissions from less than a minute before the accident, while 

the “Causes of the Fire” section notes deficiencies in electrical equipment 

and wiring insulation, the effects of electrical arcs on wiring and coolant 

on other equipment, and the effects of a cabin environment of pure oxygen 

under pressure. The sole mention of other, larger contributory factors is the 

final paragraph, noting that these engineering problems came about through 

deficiencies in design and man~facturing.~’ 

But none of the political circumstances surrounding the Apollo program-its iconic status as the martyred President Kennedy’s legacy, as a visible symbol of American technical prowess, as a marker of position in the 

Cold War-were identified as contributory. Nor was NASA’s organizational 

structure or its culture. No individuals were identified as bearing particular 

responsibility for the accident. The report makes clear that poor engineering 

practice, whether design, management, or operation, was to blame. 

The report ofthe Presidential Commission on the Space Shuttle Challenger 

Accident is a striking contrast to the Apollo 204 report. Even superficially, 

the reports are dissimilar. The Apollo 204 report looks like a report-it is 

46. Ibid., chap. 11. 

47. Parts I, If, and 111 describe the Board’s legal authority, the biographies of its members, and 

48. Apollo 204 Review Board, Report to the Administrator, National Aeronautics and Space 

the proceedings of the Board. 

Administration (Washington, DC: GPO, 1967), pp. 5-12. 
392 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

monochromatic, printed in standard Government Printing Office format, and 

appears very similar to a multitude of other NASA reports. The report on the 

Chullengev accident looks more like a magazine or coffee table book. It has large 

sections of color photographs used as visual evidence by the Commission, was 

printed on glossy paper, and was written in a narrative form familiar to readers 

of nonfiction. It opens with a preface and an introduction, outlining the task 

of the Commission and contextualizing the development of the Space Shuttle. 

The report goes on to outline the events of 28 January 1986 and from there 

leads into its analysis of the physical cause of the accident in a chapter simply 

titled “The Cause of the Accident.’”’ The remainder of the report analyzes 

the series of events that contributed to the accident: the chain of decisions that 

led to the decision to launch, the history of design problems with the O-ring 

system, the political and organizational pressures to launch, and the failure of 

the safety system.50 In seeking to understand the contributory causes of the 

accidents, the Commission’s report does not explicitly draw on any theoretical 

work. The report’s footnotes are to transcripts of Commission hearings or to 

original NASA and Morton Thiokol documents, rather than any other writings on accidents or safety. 

The Presidential Commission was clear that there were physical causes 

for the accident-in this case, the failure of the O-rings to seal correctly. 

But unlike the Apollo 204 Review Board, the Commission saw secondary 

contributing causes. These secondary causes were the flawed launch decision, political pressures on the launch schedule, and a silent safety system. The 

1967-model report, setting out an understanding of engineering failures to be 

fixed with engineering solutions, was changed into a critique of both engineering and management with separate solutions for each area of endeavor. 

The report of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board (CAIB) was 

even more like a magazine. Unlike the Apollo 204 and Chullengev reports, 

the CAIB report has its own logo and its own page headers and footers. The 

report contains sidebars to provide contextual or background material and is 

illustrated with images of the Columbia in preparation and in flight and images 

of the Columbia crew both before and during the 107 mission. 

Like the Chullengev report, the CAIB report devotes only one chapter, 

chapter 3, to the proximate physical cause of the accident-the separation of 

Thermal Protection System (TPS) foam from the External Tank and its subsequent impact on the leading edge of the orbiter. But the report has four chapters, chapters 5 to 8, discussing the context of the decision-making that led 

to the breakup of the orbiter on reentry. Chapter 3 discusses the engineering 

49. Presidential Commission on the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident, Report to the President, vol. 1, 

50. Ibid., chaps. 5 through 8, respectively. 

chap. 4. 
ACCIDENTS, ENGINEERING, AND HISTORY ATNASA, 1967-2003 393 

analyses the Board performed, the history of External Tank design decisions, 

and the conclusions to be drawn from these, but it does so without using any 

theory, simply presenting this engineering section as needing no context or 

justification. It is only where the Board starts to examine the decision-making of NASA engineers and managers that led to the Columbia disaster that 

more sophisticated explanatory frameworks are needed. The Board drew on 

a variety of theoretical perspectives, considering Charles Perrow’s theory of 

normal accidents and the work of both Scott Sagan and Todd La Porte on 

high-reliability theory.51 

Perhaps most interestingly, the CAIB report drew heavily on the work 

of Diane Vaughan. Vaughan’s 1996 book, The Challenger Launch Decision, set 

out a sociological explanation for the flawed decision, arguing that, far from 

the managerial misconduct identified by the Challenger report, the accident 

can best be understood in terms of the normalization of deviance, the culture of production at NASA and Morton Thiokol, and structural ~ecrecy.~’ 

Vaughan argued: 

This book explicates the sociology of mistake. It shows how 

mistake, mishap and disaster are socially organized and systematically produced by social structures. No extraordinary 

actions by individuals explain what happened: no intentional 

managerial wrongdoing, no rule violations, no conspiracy. 

The cause of disaster was a mistake embedded in the banality 

of organizational life.53 

This perspective informed chapter 8 of the CAIB report, where the Board 

drew explicit links between the Challenger and Columbia accidents, applying 

the components of Vaughan’s analysis to Columbia. The Board concluded: 

First, the history of engineering decisions on foam and O-ring 

incidents had identical trajectories that “normalized” these 

anomalies, so that flying with these flaws became routine and 

acceptable. Second, NASA history had an effect. In response 

to White House and Congressional mandates, NASA leaders 

took actions that created systemic organizational flaws at the 

time of Challenger that were also present for Columbia.54 

51. CAIB, Rep0rt.p. 180. 

52. Diane Vaughan, The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at 

53. Ibid., p. xiv. 

54. CAIB, Report, p. 195. 

NASA (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 
394 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLiGHT 

Unlike the Challenger report, the CAIB report gives equal weight to the organizational causes of the accident, arguing that while mistakes were made, the organizational structure of NASA was more to blame that any individual failings. 

The three reports suggest a story of growing separation of management 

and engineering. As Peter Galison has suggested, this may simply be a result 

of the instability between frames of analysis: the desire both to localize and to 

diffuse the locus of causation, to find a single physical cause, and to explain 

the accident in terms of larger organizational and cultural problem^.^' But it is 

interesting to note that these two activities are not only juxtaposed as possible 

sources of accidents, but also understood and analyzed in different ways. There 

has been a growing sophistication in the ways that decision-making and its 

contexts have been understood. There is a transition from Apollo 204’s oneparagraph analysis of larger causes, to Chullenger’s inclusion of organizational 

and political factors as contributory, to Columbia’s equal pairing of technical 

and social causes. There is a corresponding increase in the contextualization 

of these social elements of the analysis, from rudimentary mentions in Apollo 

204 to a full examination and consideration of sociological and organizational 

theory literature in Columbia. 

But there is an interesting asymmetry in these reports as well. As analyses of decision-making and its historical and cultural contexts have grown 

ever more sophisticated in these accident reports, the discussions of physical 

causes have remained remarkably similar. In each accident report, a number 

of possible causes are considered and eliminated before attention is turned to 

the actual cause. In each of the sections of the reports dealing with physical 

cause, there is little or no contextualization of engineering and design decision-making and no attempt to locate the discussion in a body of literature. 

This separates the physical and technical causes of accidents from their contexts and sets up the two activities-engineering and decision-making about 

engineering-as two quite different activities, to be understood and analyzed 

in different terms. In this formulation, engineering seems to be understood on 

its own terms, as a context-free and ahistorical activity, whereas management 

decision-making is understood as contingent and located within a complex 

historical and cultural framework. 

This asymmetry immediately opens two questions. First, what historical 

processes caused the separation of engineering and management in the manned 

space program from 1967 to the present day? Second, what changes in engineering over the same period can be seen in the three accident reports and 

might provide the basis for understanding engineering in its own historical and 

cultural context? The disciplines of the history of technology and the history of 

science provide some directions to go look for answers to these questions. 

55. Galison, “An Accident of History,” p. 4. 
ACCIDENTS, ENGINEERING, AND HISTORY AT NASA, 1967-2003 395 

Engineering accidents can be understood in a similar way to scientific 

controversies. A scientific controversy is resolved when the winners declare 

that their account is true and opponents are no longer taken seriously by the 

relevant scientific community.56 Just as scientific controversies open up the 

inner workings of a laboratory or research group, so accidents open up the 

internal practices and politics of engineering. But accidents also provide a way 

to examine how engineers go about activities other than design and innovation. Most studies of engineers and engineering focus on design because it is 

the most creative and innovative element of the engineer’s craft.57 However, 

the vast majority of time spent by engineers is taken up with the development 

and operation of technologies rather than their design. Accident investigations 

take a comprehensive look at the design, manufacture, and operation of the 

broken artifact or system and so provide a way to look at engineering work 

at the routine, everyday level, as well as at the creative design level. The process of investigating an accident results in the extensive description of these 

everyday routines, routines that are often seen as so mundane as to leave little 

trace in the documentary record of the project. Thus, if these NASA accident reports are examined as a historian might examine them, they can trace 

changes in both design and routine engineering. 

By treating accidents and their investigations as windows into engineering at NASA, there are at least three aspects of engineering at NASA that have 

changed since the 1960s-the widespread use of computers in engineering, the 

emergence of astronautical engineering as a new hscipline, and a move away 

from systems engineering as an organizing philosophy for large projects. 

Computing 

Since the 1960s, computers have become ubiquitous, and there is a growing 

literature that points to the ways in which interaction with computers reshapes 

56. This particular interpretation of scientific controversy is taken from the works of Bruno 

Latour and Wiebe BiJker in particular. See Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists 

and Engineers through Society (Cambridge, MA Harvard University Press, 1987); Bruno Latour and 

Steve Woolgar, Laboratory L@: The Construction ofScientijicFacts (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University 

Press, 1986); Wiebe E. Bgker, Thomas Parke Hughes, and T. J. Pinch, The Social Construction of 

Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology (Cambridge, MA: MIT 

Press, 1987). 

57. This point was well made by John Staudenmaier in his surveys of the field of history of 

technology. See John M. Staudenmaier, Technology’s Storytellers: Reweaving the Human Fabric 

(Cambridge, MA: Society for the History of Technology and the MIT Press, 1985); John M. 

Staudenmaier, “Recent Trends in the History of Technology,” American Historical Review 95, no. 3 

(1990). For examples of this focus on design to the exclusion of other aspects of engineering, see, 

for example, Walter G. Vincenti, What Engineers Know and How They Know It: Analytical Studies 

fiom Aeronautical History, Johns Hopkins Studies in the History of Technology (Baltimore: Johns 

Hopkins, 1990); Henry Petroski, To Engineer Is Human: The Role OfFailure in Successjul Design (New 

York St. Martin’s Press, 1985). 
396 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

the ways people live and work.58 Just like scientists, the engineering profession 

has adopted computing extensively, with almost all elements of engineering 

activity now mediated through computers-design, simulation modeling, 

communications, logistics, financial management, and admini~tration.~~ Over 

the period 1967-2003, modeling, testing, and simulation moved from being 

largely hand-calibrated to being almost exclusively computer-mediated.60 

The Columbia Accident Investigation Board report shows, however, that this 

process involved the loss of much of the transparency of older techniques. 

A brief history of the modeling tool Crater illustrates this process well. 

Crater was originally built in 1966 by Allen Richardson at Rockwell. It was 

designed in conjunction with NASA engineers to predict the effects of hypervelocity impacts on multilayer surfaces like those of the Apollo CSM. Crater 

was a curve fit from a data set generated in part from Gemini experience and 

in part from testing performed by General Motors and NASA on aluminum 

honeycomb materials. Crater could predict threshold velocities and penetration damage but was complex to use; the number and complexity of calculations needed to derive a result made it time-consuming and prone to error. 

Crater was validated using small pieces of foam and ice on single tiles. During 

the process of turning empirical data into a predictive equation, the limitations and contingencies of these initial data sets were lost.61 Furthermore, the 

process of computerization of Crater rendered the uncertainties inherent in 

the tool even more invisible, and the specific mode of computerization, a 

plug-in-the-numbers spreadsheet, gave a false sense of clarity and certainty to 

the results. Thus, an engineer unaware of the history of the tool and its limita58. See Sherry Turkle, The Second Se2f: Computers and the Human Spirit (New York: Simon 

& Schuster, 1984); and Sherry Turkle, L$e on the Screen: Identity in the Age ofthe Internet (New 

York Simon & Schuster, 1995), for an examination of how interaction through the mediation 

of computers changes identity. More specifically, Dominique Vinck and Eric Blanco, Everyday 

Engineering: An Ethnography of Design and Innovation, Inside Technology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 

2003), and Susan Leigh Star, The Cultures of Computing (Oxford, U.K., and Cambridge, MA: 

Blackwell Publishers, 1995), start to address how engineering and scientific work has changed. 

59. For a general overview of computing since World War 11, see Paul E. Ceruzzi, A History 

$Modern Computing, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003). Paul E. Ceruzzi, Beyond the 

Limits: Flight Enters the Computer Age (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), provides a good outline 

of the introduction of computers into aerospace, although the focus of the work is on-board computers rather than ground equipment or design tools. Gary Lee Downey, The Machine in Me: An 

Anthropologist Sits among Computer Engineers (New York: Routledge, 1998), and Louis L. Bucciarelli, 

Designing Engineers, Inside Technology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), both provide ethnographies of engineering that discuss the effects of the ubiquity of computers in the workplace. 

60. For a good overview of this topic, see Sergio Sismondo and Snait Gissis, “Practices of 

Modelling and Simulation,” Special Issue of Science in Context 12 (1999). George E. Smith, “The 

Dangers of Cad,” Mechanical Engineering (February 1986), gives an early warning of the dangers of 

increasingly closed simulation tools. 

61. Allen Richardson interview, by A. Brown, 15 February 2005. 
ACCIDENTS, ENGINEERING, AND HISTORY ATNASA, 1967-2003 397 

tions, as was the Boeing engineer who did the Columbia analysis, could not 

know that the predictive powers of Crater were unknown outside a limited 

range of values. The piece of foam that fell from Columbia’s external tank was 

640 times larger than Crater’s valid range. The Crater model predicted that 

the foam strike would have broken entirely through the Thermal Protection 

System of the Shuttle and exposed the aluminum wing structure.62 But because 

the engineers were aware that there were limitations to the tool, but not aware 

of how to correct or modify the model, they dismissed their results as too 

conservative and not predictive of a problem. 

This example shows that the Boeing engineers were working in a mode 

of engineering where their relationships to the materials and objects that they 

build and study were profoundly mediated through a computer and profoundly dependent on the uncritical acceptance of the findings and assumptions of previous generations of engineers. In January 2003, Boeing engineers 

and NASA’s Debris Assessment Team had no choice but to accept the results 

of their Crater analysis. Their reliance on a computer model, with the inherent lack of access to the mechanics of the model, let alone the assumptions 

and uncertainties underlying it, had profoundly affected their ability to make 

engineering judgments. A similar story can be told about the External Tank 

bolt catchers-their safety margin, flagged by the Board as dangerously low 

and a possible source of disaster, was computed using ancient data sets whose 

origins and limitations had been obscured by computeri~ation.~~ 

Engineering Education 

There is a growing trend in the history of science to look towards pedagogy as a lens through which to understand how science and scientists come 

to be.64 David Kaiser writes, “Scientists are not born, they are made. The 

ways in which this happens bears the marks of time and place.”65 This observation holds equally true for engineers. Engineering education has changed 

since Apollo 1. In the late 1960s, engineering schools started to move towards 

62. CAIB, Report, pp. 144-145. 

64. David Kaiser, Pedagogy and the Practice of Science. Historical and Contemporary Perspectives 

(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), is a collection of essays examining science pedagogy over a 

variety of disciplines, places, and times. Andrew Warwick, Masters of Theory: Cambridge and the Rise 

of Mathematical Physics (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003), a study of mathematical training in 19th-century Cambridge and its relationship to 19th-century physics in Britain, is 

perhaps the most sustained development of the argument for the value of the study of pedagogy. 

Sharon Traweek, Beamtimes and L$fimes. The World of Hzgh Energy Physicists (Cambridge, MA: 

Harvard University Press, 1988), examines contemporary Japanese physicists and identifies education as critical in the formation of a distinctively Japanese way of doing physics. 

. 63. Ibid , pp. 86-88. 

65. Kaiser, Pedagogy and the Practice of Science, p. 1. 
398 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

engineering science and away from engineering design as a model for the discipline.66 Engineering students were required to take classes in physics, math, 

and chemistry to give them a thorough grounding in the physical sciences 

before going on to engineering classes. The ongoing effects of the National 

Defense Education Act of 1958 meant changes towards more easily teachable 

and assessable modes of learning as educators struggled to manage massive 

expansions in class sizes.67 The combination of these two trends meant that 

for many freshmen and sophomores in the 1970s, engineering meant doing 

physics and math problem sets rather than sketching, building, and working 

with their hands.68 This mode of learning fit well with the growing presence 

of computers in education, providing students with the mathematical tools 

needed to build and use their own software. As computers became ubiquitous, 

so engineering schools brought computing into engineering education. 

These changes served to both render engineering more abstract and 

arcane, less connected to its objects of study, and to make it more automated. 

Both the Challenger and Columbia reports are critical of the relationships 

between NASA and its contractors, and particularly critical of the lack of 

engineering design and development capacity amongst some of the contractor~.~~ Embodying engineering judgment in computer programs can devalue 

that judgment when embodied in engineers, leading to downgrading of the 

institutional value placed on engineers as employees. This leaves engineers 

and their skills more vulnerable to privatization and commodification and 

hence leads to the downgrading of the engineering design capacity of commercial organizations. 

The new discipline of astronautics or astronautical engineering was also 

emerging over this period, intertwined with the development of NASA as an 

66. Rosalind H. Williams, Retooling: A Historian Confronts Technological Change (Cambridge, MA: 

MIT Press, 2002), pp. 40-42. 

67. Barbara Barksdale Clowse, Brainpower for the Cold War: The Sputnik Crisis and National Defense 

Education Act of 1958 (Westport, CT Greenwood Press, 1981), examines the initial responses to the 

Sputnik crisis. David Kaiser, “Scientific Manpower, Cold War Requisitions, and the Production 

of American Physicists after World War 11,” Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 33 

(fall 2002), looks specifically at the relationship between Cold War geopolitics and changing styles 

of science and education during this period. 

68. Both Kathryn Henderson, On Line and on Paper: Visual Representations, Visual Culture, and 

Computer Graphics in Design Engineering, Inside Technology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), and 

Eugene S. Ferguson, Engineering and the Mind’s Eye (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), examine 

the changes in engineering brought about by changes in the ways in which students learn to interact with the material world. Ferguson discusses the loss of a visual intuitiveness amongst young 

engineers brought about by a move to a more analytic style of engineering in the 1960s and 1970s. 

Henderson looks at the ways in which engineering knowledge and practices are transformed when 

computer visualization tools are introduced into the workshop and drafting room. 

69. Presidential Commission on the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident, Report to the President, pp. 

194-195; CAIB, Report, pp. 110-118. 
ACCIDENTS, ENGINEERING, ANDHISTORY AT NASA, 1967-2003 399 

organization.7O The new discipline drew heavily on the principles of aeronautical engineering but taught students how to apply these principles in higher 

stress environments-at higher temperatures and pressures, with higher aerodynamic loads, in high-radiation environments, using finer tolerance manufacturing, and with larger and more complex vehicle systems. The new 

discipline of astronautical engineering had to learn how to manage problems 

with testing the massive vehicles it built. In many cases, it was physically 

impossible to adequately test astronautical hardware, and so new methods of 

producing knowledge about complex systems like computer modeling and 

simulation were developed. The Apollo 204 report illustrates the engineering 

challenges that accompanied the transition from designing and developing 

craft to operate within the atmosphere to craft designed to operate in the 

space environment. As the report makes clear, the levels of both precision and 

complexity needed to build a spacecraft grew dramatically, perhaps beyond 

the capacity of North American Aviation engineers to keep up. As astronautics developed, engineering scale, engineering knowledge, and engineering 

management changed. 

The Systems Approach 

Systems engineering as a philosophy emerged from the complex military 

defense projects of the 1950s. It can be best described as a “set of organizational structures and processes to rapidly produce a novel but dependable 

technological artifact within a predictable budget.”71 Systems engineering was 

one element in a long history of the application of scientific and engineering 

principles to complex commercial or organizational problems, a history that 

started with Taylorism and scientific management in the late 19th ~entury.’~ 

Systems engineering involved the use of engineering ideas to organize large 

engineering projects-most profoundly, systems engineering defines project 

70. W. Henry Lambright, Powering Apollo:]ames E. Webb of NASA (Baltimore: John Hopkins, 

1995); W. Henry Lambright, Edwin A. Bock, and Inter-university Case Program, Launching 

NASA’s Sustaining University Program (Syracuse, NY Inter-universay Case Program, 1969); 

Howard E. McCurdy, Inside NASA: High Technology and Organizational Change in the U.S. Space 

Program (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1993). 

71. Stephen B. Johnson, The Secret of Apollo: Systems Management in American and European Space 

Programs (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 2002), p. 17. 

72. See James R. Beniger, The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the 

Information Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), and JoAnne Yates, Control 

through Communication: The Rise ofSystem in American Management (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1989), 

for a brief introduction to the literature on system and scientific management. Robert Kanigel, 

The One Best Way: Frederick Window Taylor and the Enigma ofEfficiency (New York: Viking, 1997), 

and Hugh G. J. Aitken, Scientific Management in Action: Taylorism at Watertown Arsenal, 1908-1915 

(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), both provide excellent introductions to Taylor 

and scientific management. 
400 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

management as an engineering problem best solved by engineers and engineering practice. In this philosophy, management becomes a subset of engineering 

practice. The large SAGE (Semi-Automatic Ground Environment) air defense 

and Atlas missile projects trained a generation of engineers how to apply systems engineering ideas to complex research, development, and manufacturing 

pr0.jects.7~ Systems management experts from the Air Force and the aerospace 

industry were brought into NASA to manage the Apollo program as it grew 

in the 1960~:~ The Apollo 204 accident marks the moment of transition into a 

full acceptance of systems engineering as the guiding philosophy of the space 

program, whereas throughout the early part of the 1960s, there was tension 

between the aircraft manufacturers and the missile-program-trained NASA 

engineering managers. Indeed, the most common historiographical interpretation of the larger significance of Apollo 204 is simply that-the fire forced 

NASA and its contractors to find new ways of managing the complexity of the 

Apollo program, and systems management was the new ~ay.7~ 

The manned spaceflight community within NASA made the transition 

from research and development to being primarily an operational organization in the 1980s and 1990s, as the focus of the U.S. manned spaceflight 

program moved from exploration to ready access to low-Earth orbit. Systems 

engineering as an overarching philosophy for the management of complexity 

was replaced with new approaches drawn from both the business and government worlds. This does not mean that the tools that collectively made up 

systems engineering-configuration control boards, integrated management 

73. Agatha C. Hughes and Thomas Parke Hughes, Systems, Experts, and Computers: The Systems 

Approach in Management and Engineering, World War II and After, Dibner Institute Studies in the History 

of Science and Technology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000); Thomas Parke Hughes, Rescuing 

Prometheus, 1st ed. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1998); and Kent C. Redmond and Thomas M. 

Smith, From Whirlwind to Mitre: The RGD Story of the SAGE Air Defense Computer (Cambridge, 

MA: MIT Press, 2000), all discuss the origins of systems management in the ballistic missile and 

air defense programs of the 1950s. 

74. Johnson’s The Secret of Apollo: Systems Management in American and European Space Programs is 

by far the most comprehensive examination of the rise of systems management in the U.S. space 

program. See also Arnold S. Levine, Managing NASA in the Apollo Era (Washington, DC: NASA 

SP-4102, 1982); John M. Logsdon, Managing the Moon Program: Lessons Learned from Project Apollo: 

Proceedings ofan Oral History Workshop (Washington, DC: NASA SP-4514, 1999). 

75. For examples of this type of interpretation, see Andrew Chaikin and Tom Hanks, A Man on 

the Moon: The Voyages ofthe Apollo Astronauts (New York: Penguin Books, 1998), chap. 1; Charles 

A. Murray and Catherine Bly Cox, Apollo, the Race to the Moon (New York: Simon & Schuster, 

1989), chaps. 15-16; William E. Burrows, This New Ocean: The Story ofthe Space Age, 1st ed. (New 

York: Random House, 1998), pp. 406-415. Astronaut and flight controller biographies make a 

similar point. See, for example, Frank Borman and Robert J. Serling, Countdown: An Autobiography, 

1st ed. (New York: W. Morrow, 1988), chap. 9; Michael Collins, Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut’s 

Journeys (New York: Farrar, 1974), pp. 269-275; Christopher C. Kraft, Flight: My Lije in Mission 

Control (New York: Dutton, 2001), pp. 269-278; Gene Kranz, Failure Is Not an Option: Mission 

Controlfrom Mercury to Apollo 13 and Beyond (New York: Simon & Schuster, ZOOO), pp. 208-214. 
ACCIDENTS, ENGINEERING, AND HISTORY AT NASA, 1967-2003 401 

systems, resident program offices at contractors-ceased to be used, but rather 

that the philosophy that a collection of these tools was the best way to manage 

a program was replaced by other ways of 

Total Quality Management, reengineering, and “faster, better, cheaper” 

took the place of systems engineering in the 1990s, part of a larger cultural 

trend in the United States that valorized the business approach to organization 

and emphasized the merits of private free-enterprise solutions to problems 

previously thought the realm of government.” The idea of using scientific 

and engineering principles to solve business and organizational challenges was 

replaced by the application of business and commercially derived management 

philosophy to an engineering organization. 

Changes in engineering practice over the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s meant 

that engineers in the manned space program were working in the increasingly mediated environment of computer-based engineering whilst working 

on technological systems that were becoming increasingly complex, difficult 

to test, and designed to operate at an increasingly high performance envelope. 

Margins for error grew ever smaller, whilst the computer-based tools being 

used to manage that margin grew increasingly less transparent. At the same 

time, the shared organizational philosophy of systems engineering was being 

abandoned by senior management in favor of more commercially oriented 

ideas, while engineers still used the tools of systems management. 

FURTHER RESEARCH 

There are several areas that call for further research in order to put 

together a picture of changes in engineering in the U.S. manned space program. The first area is studies of engineering in practice in the late 20th 

century. Although the genre of engineering ethnographies is growing, it is 

still small. Some of these studies examine the impact of computers in the 

engineering workplace, but none do so in the context of aeronautics or astronautics. Howard McCurdy’s work on NASA culture provides an excellent 

base to work from but focuses on organizational change rather than engineering change from the 1970s Furthermore, the field needs not just 

in-depth studies of engineering practice, but broad-scope surveys comparable 

to Sylvia Fries’s NASA Engineers in the Age of Apoll0.7~ We do not yet know 

76. See CAIB, Report, pp. 105-110. 

77. Howard E. McCurdy, Faster, Better, Cheaper: Low-Cost Innovation in the U.S. Space Program 

78. McCurdy, Inside NASA: High Technology and Organizational Change in the U.S. Space Program; 

79. Sylvia Doughty Fries, NASA Engineers and the Age of Apollo (Washington, DC: NASA SP- 

(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 2001). 

McCurdy, Faster, Better, Cheaper: Low-Cost Innovation in the U. S. Space Program. 

4104, 1992). 
402 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

enough about the educational and demographic characteristics of NASA engineers from the 1970s onwards. 

There is a need for a body of literature on the recent institutional and 

cultural history of engineering comparable to the literature on the rise of the 

engineering profession in the later half of the 19th century. We know much 

about the ways in which engineers developed a clearly articulated professional identity, created a standardized curriculum and accreditation process, 

and made themselves middle-class in the late 19th century.80 We know much 

about the engineering triumphs of the early 20th century and the involvement of engineers in the winning of World War I1 and the Cold War, both 

as producers of military technology but also as the creators of the consumer 

society.*’ But we know little about how engineers have responded to changing 

economic and cultural circumstances since the 1960s. 

We need more nuanced histories of the NASA of the 1970s, 1980s, and 

1990s. Reflecting the ongoing cultural legacy of the Apollo program, much of 

the literature on the U.S. manned spaceflight program focuses on the triumphs 

of the 1960s. Those histories that do attempt to cover the entire history of the 

program tend to fall into a declensionist mode of writing, discussing NASA’s 

decline and fall from Apollo. A more nuanced understanding of the legacy of 

the Apollo program, including a more realistic assessment of the relative safety 

of Apollo and Shuttle missions, might serve to provide a new framework in 

which to understand the history of NASA over this period. 

80. For example, see Edwin T. Layton, The Revolt of the Engineers: Social Responsibility and the 

American Engineering Profession (Cleveland: Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1971); 

George S. Emmerson, Engineering Education: A Social History (New York: David & Charles; Crane, 

1973); David F. Noble, America by Design: Science, Technology, and the Rise ofcorporate Capitalism, 1st 

ed. (New York: Knopf, 1977); Brendan Patrick Foley, “Fighting Engineers: The U.S. Navy and 

Mechanical Engineering, 1840-1905” (Ph.D. thesis, MIT, June 2003). 

81. See Thomas Parke Hughes, American Genesis: A Century of Invention and Technological 

Enthusiasm, 1870-1970 (New York: Penguin Books, 1990); David A. Hounshell, From the American 

System to Mass Production, 1800-1932: The Development of Manufacturing Technology in the United 

States (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1984); Terry S. Reynolds, The Engineer in America: A Historical 

Anthology from Technology and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). 
CHAPTER 13 

INSTITUTIONAL ISSUES FOR CONTINUED 

SPACE EXPLORATION: HIGH-RELIABILITY SYSTEMS 

ACROSS MANY OPERATIONAL GENERATIONSREQUISITES FOR PUBLIC CREDIBILITY~ 

Todd R. La Porte 

ighlighting critical issues arising from the evolution of a large govern- H ment enterprise is both important and occasionally painful and sometimes provides a basis for exciting next steps. Calling out critical technical 

issues from past developments inspires engineers and makes visible to policymakers likely requests for program funding to address them. A “critical issues” 

focus also holds the promise of exploring other sorts of issues: those that arise 

in deploying technologies.’ These are particularly interesting when they entail 

large-scale organizations that are judged to be highly hazardous. 

This paper highlights the challenges and issues involved when we wish 

large, technically rooted organizations to operate &Y mow effectively, with 

much less error than they should be expected to exhibit-given what we know 

about organizations more generally. Recall that “Murphy’s Law” and trialand-error learning are reasonably accurate descriptors of how all organizations generally behave. Routinely expecting otherwise is quite remarkable. 

First, let us set a context. In your mind’s eye, imagine space-related activities two or three decades into the future. President George W. Bush’s current 

vision for NASA focused the Agency’s efforts in the early 21st century, and 

1. This paper draws on presentations to the Workshop on Space Policy held by the National 

Academies of Science in Irvine, CA, 12-13 November 2003; the National Academies’ Board 

on Radioactive Waste Management Panels on “Principles and Operational Strategies for Staged 

Repository Systems,” 27 June 2001, and “Long-Term Institutional Management ofHazards Sites,” 7 

August 2001, both held in Washington, DC; and the American Association for the Advancement of 

Science (AAAS) symposium, “Nuclear Waste: File and Forget? Institutional Challenges for HighReliability Systems Across Many Operational Generations-Can Watchfulness Be Sustained?” held 

in Denver, CO, 18 February 2003. Since these presentations were given to quite different, nearly 

mutually exclusive audiences, the various conference sponsors have agreed to this repetition. 

2. This conference on “Critical Issues” casts a wider net and includes issues relevant to the understanding of policy development, technical operations as well as systems safety, and the conduct of 

historical studies of large systems per se. 
404 CRITICAL ISSUES INTHE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

our reach has extended to periodic flights to the Moon and to an international 

space platf~rm.~ With international cooperation, three to four major launches 

and recoveries a year have become more or less routine. Another six or seven 

unmanned launches resupply the Station and various probes for scientific programs. Assume that national intelligence and communications demands require 

another half dozen annually. And imagine that commercial spaceflight enthusiasts have found enough “venture capitalists” and adventurers to sustain several highly visible, elite space experiences. This is edging toward 20 launches a 

year and evokes images of science fiction and early Stur Trek tableaux. 

This sort of future moves us well beyond the sharply defined, novel images 

of machinery and spectacularly framed astronauts spacewalking against the black 

of the heavens. It conjures the extraordinary organizations that these activities 

imply. There would be the early vestiges of, say, a U.S.-European Union space 

traffic control-analogous to the existing global air traffic control system-alert 

to tracking both space vehicles and the detritus of former flights, closely concentrating on bringing each flight to rest without encountering objects aloft or 

mishaps ofhuman or mechanical origin. Operational scope would be widespread 

and expected to continue indefinitely. This organizational reach is extraordinary. 

It immediately raises the question of the “operational sustainability” of NASA’s 

space missions, especially those that propel humans into space. 

The missions and the technologies that typify NASA and its industrial 

contractors prompt demands that NASA programs exhibit highly reliable, 

humanly safe operations, often projected to continue for a number of management generations (say some 10 to 15 years each). NASA has, in the past, taken 

up these challenges emphasizing both engineering controls and administrative 

controls that embrace safety and effective performance. 

This paper highlights a third emphasis: the organizational relationships 

and safety culture of the Agency and its contractors that would manage an 

astonishing array of complicated technical systems and far-flung facilities 

making up a global space complex. It draws on work examining the operations of several mature, large-scale technical systems. Then it considers in this 

light the qualities likely to be necessary in the evolution of NASA’s humansin-space activities if they are routinely to achieve a high degree of public 

acceptance and sustained credibility. 

Putting the question directly: What organizational conditions have arisen 

when the operating technologies are so demanding or hazardous that trial- 

~ 

3. President George W. Bush, “A Renewed Spirit of Discovery: The President’s Vision for 

U.S. Space Exploration,” 14 January 2004, folder 12886, NASA Hlstorical Reference Collection, 

Washington, DC. For NASA’s most recent expression of this declaration, see NASA, “The New 

Age of Exploration: NASA’s Direction for 2005 and Beyond,” February 2005, same folder. The 

operative portion from the mission: “To understand and protect our home planet, To explore the 

universe and search for life, To inspire the next generation of explorers.” 
INSTITUTIONAL ISSUES FOR CONTINUED SPACE EXPLORATION: . . . 405 

and-error learning, while likely, no longer seems to be a confident mode of 

learning and when the next error may be your last trial? 

What can be said about managing large-scale technical systems, responsible for often highly hazardous operations on missions that imply operational 

stability for many, many years? The institutional design challenges are to provide the work structures, institutional processes, and incentives in such ways 

that they assure highly reliable operations4 over the very long term-perhaps 

up to 50 years5-in the context of continuously high levels of public trust and 

confidence.6 My purpose here is less to provide a usable explication of these 

concepts (see the supporting references) and more to demonstrate, by a blizzard of lists, the complexity and range of the institutional conditions implied 

by NASA’s program reach. I foreground properties that are especially demanding, keeping these questions in mind: How often and at what effort does one 

observe these characteristics in the organizational arenas you know best? Could 

one imagine such an ensemble within NASA in the foreseeable future? 

PURSUING HIGHLY RELIABLE OPERATIONS 

Meeting the challenges of highly reliable operations has been demonstrated in enough cases to gain a rough sense of the conditions that seem associated with extraordinary performance. These include both internal processes 

and external relations. What can be said with some confidence about the 

qualities NASA managers and their overseers could seek?7 (See table 13.1.) 

4. Initial empirical work included close study of the operations of U.S. An Traffic Control, aircraft 

carriers at sea, and nuclear power plants. For summaries, see G. I. Rochhn, “Reliable Organizations. 

Present Research and Future Directions,” andT. R. La Porte,“High Reliabdity Orgaruzations: Unlikely, 

Demanding and at ksk,” both injournal of Crisis and Contingency Management 4, no. 2 (June 1996): 55- 

59 and 60-71, respectively; T. R. La Porte and P. M. Consohni,“Workmg in Prachce but not inTheory: 

Theoretical Challenges of High Rehability Organizations,”Journal of Public Administration Research and 

Theory 1, no. 1 (January 1991): 19-47; K. H. Roberts, “New Challenges to Orgmzahond Research: 

High Rehabihty Organizations,” Iadustrial Crisis Quarterly 3 (1989): 11 1-125. 

5. Prompting the concept of‘hstitutional constancy.” See mscussion later in thls chapter, along with 

T. R. La Porte and A. Keller, “Assuring Institutional Constancy. Requisites for Managing Long-Lived 

Hazards,” Public Administration Review 56, no. 6 (November/December 1996): 535-544. 

6. In the context of this paper, sustaining public trust and confidence, while a very important 

consideration, takes second seat to the issues of reliable operations across multiple generations. 

Public trust is a condition that evokes high institutional demands and calls for a discussion that 

extends beyond the limitations of this paper. See, for example, U.S. Department ofEnergy (DOE), 

“Earning Public Trust and Confidence. Requisite for Managing Radioactive Waste. Report of the 

Task Force on Radioactive Waste Management, Secretary of Energy Advisory Board,” November 

1993, available online at kttp. //www.seab.enevgy.gov/pubhcations/trust.pdf; T. R. La Porte and D. 

Metlay, “Facing a Deficit of Trust: Hazards and Institutional Trustworthiness,” Public Administration 

Review 56, no. 4 (July-August 1996): 341-347. 

7. Draw generalized inferences from this discussion with care. These findings are based mainly on 

three types of organizations, each with a limited number of cases, and bits from others (e.g., K. H. 

continued on the next page 
406 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

Table 13.1. Characteristics of Highly Reliable Organizations (HROs) 

Internal Processes 

1. Strong sense of mission and operational goals, commitment to highly reliable 

operations, both in production and safety. 

2. Reliability-enhancing operations. 

A. Extraordinary technical competence. 

B. Sustained, high technical performance. 

C. Structural flexibility and redundancy. 

D. Collegial, decentralized authority patterns in the face of intense, 

high-tempo operational demands. 

E. Flexible decision-making processes involving operating teams. 

F. Processes enabling continual search for improvement. 

G. Processes that reward the discovery and reporting of error, even 

one’s own. 

3. Organizational culture of reliability, including norms, incentives, and 

management attitudes that stress the equal value of reliable production and 

operational safety. 

External Relationships 

1. External “watching” elements. 

A. Strong superordinate institutional visibility in parent organization. 

B. Strong presence of stakeholding groups. 

2. Mechanisms for “boundary spanning” between the units and these watchers. 

3. Venues for credible operational information on a timely basis. 

continued from the previous page 

Roberts, “Some aspects of organizational cultures and strategies to manage them in reliabllity enhancing orgamzations,”]or*rnal of Managerial Issues 5 [1993]: 165-1 81).Though these organizations operate 

in quite chfferent instituQonal deus, we cannot say they represent a systematic sample. No one now 

knows what the population of HROs mght be. And hghly rehable operations are keenly sought for 

situations that are not so dramancally hazardous in the physical sense, e.g., HRO operations in financial 

transactions or in the performance of soplsticated computer chips or large software programs. See 

K. H. Roberts and C. Libuser, “From Bhopal to bhng: Orgamzational design can mtigate risk,” 

Ovganizational Dynamics 21 (1993): 15-26. In these situahons, motivahon stems &om fear of serious 

financial losses that are seen as amounting to institunonal, not physical, death. 
INSTITUTIONAL ISSUES FOR CONTINUED SPACE EXPLORATION: . . . 407 

Internal Processes’ 

Oyunizationally defined intention. High-reliability organizations (HROs) 

exhibit a strong sense of mission and operational goals that stress assuring ready 

capacity for production and service with an equal commitment to reliability in 

operations and a readiness to invest in reliability-enhancing technology, processes, and personnel resources. In cases such as our space operations, these goals 

would be strongly reinforced by a clear understanding that the technologies 

upon which the organizations depend are intrinsically hazardous and potentially dangerous to human and other organisms. It is notable that for U.S. space 

operations, there is also high agreement within the operating organizations 

and in the society at large about the seriousness of failures and their potential 

costliness, as well as the value ofwhat is being achieved (in terms of a combination of symbolic, economic, and political factors). This consensus is a crucial 

element underlying the achievement of high operational reliability and has, 

until recently, increased the assurance of relatively sufficient resources needed 

to carry out failure-preventing/quality-enhancing activities. Strong commitment also serves to stiffen corporate or agency resolve to provide the organizational status and financial and personnel resources such activities require. But 

resolve is not enough. Evidence of cogent operations is equally crucial. 

Reliability-enhancing operations. These include the institutional and operational dynamics that arise when extraordinary performance must be the rule 

of the day-features that would be reinforced by an organizational culture of 

reliability, i.e., the norms and work ways of operations.’ A dominant quality 

of organizations seeking to attain highly reliable operations is their intensive 

technical and social interdependence. Characterized by numerous specialized 

functions and coordination hierarchies, this prompts patterns of complexly 

related, tightly coupled technical and work processes which shape HROs’ 

social, structural, and decision-making character.” 

8. This section draws strongly from La Porte and Consolini, “Working in Practice but not 

in Theory”; Rochlin, La Porte, and Roberts, “The self-designing high-reliability organization: 

Aircraft carrier flight operations at sea,” Naval War College Review 40, no. 4 (1987): 76-90; La 

Porte, “High Reliability Organizations”; Rochlin, “Reliable Organizations: Present Research 

and Future Directions,” pp. 55-59; T. R. La Porte, “High Reliability Organizations: Unlikely, 

Demanding and at Risk,” pp. 60-71; K. H. Roberts, “Some characteristics of high reliability 

organizations,” Organization Science 1, no. 2 (1990): 160-177; P. R. Schulman, “Negotiated Order 

of Organizational Reliability,” Administration G Society 25, no. 3 (November 1993): 356-372. 

9. K. E.Weick,“Organizational culture as a source of hgh reliability,” CaliJornia Management Review 29 

(1987): 112-127; K. H. Roberts,“Some aspects of organizational cultures and strategies to manage them 

in reliabdity enhancing organizations,”Journal of Managerial Issues 5 (1993): 165-181. 

10. La Porte and Consolini, “Working in Practice but not in Theory”; Rochlin, “Reliable 

Organizations: Present Research and Future Directions”; C. Perrow, Normal Accidents: Living With 

High-Risk Technologies (New York: Basic Books, 1984); K. H. Roberts, K. H. and G. Gargano, 

“Managing a High Reliability Organization: A Case for Interdependence,” in Managing Complexity 

in Hkh Technology Industries: Systems and People, ed. M. A. Von Glinow and S. Mohrmon (New 

York: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 147-159. 
408 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

The social character of the HRO is typified by high technical/professional competence and performance, as well as thorough technical knowledge 

of the system and awareness of its operating state. 

1. Extraordinary technical competence almost goes without saying. But 

this bears repeating because continuously attaining very high quality 

requires close attention to recruiting, training, staff incentives, and 

ultimately the authority relations and decision processes among operating personnel who are, or should be, consummately skilled at what 

they do. This means there would be a premium put on recruiting 

members with extraordinary skills and an organizational capacity to 

allow them to burnish these skills in situ via continuous training and 

an emphasis on deep knowledge of the operating systems involved. 

Maintaining high levels of competence and professional commitment 

also means a combination of elevated organizational status and visibility for the activities that enhance reliability. This would be embodied 

by “high reliability professionals”” in positions with ready access to 

senior management. In aircraft carrier operations, this is illustrated 

where high-ranking officers are assigned the position of Safety Officer 

reporting directly to the ship’s captain. 

2. HROs also continuously achieve high levels of operational performance accompanied by stringent quality assurance (QA) measures 

applied to maintenance functions buttressed by procedural acuity.” 

Extensive performance databases track and calibrate technical operations and provide an unambiguous description of the systems’ operating state. NASA’s extraordinary investment in collecting system 

performance data is a prime example of this characteristic. These data 

inform reliability statistics, quality-control processes, accident modeling, and interpretations of system readiness from a variety of perspectives. In some organizational settings, the effectiveness of these 

analyses is enhanced by vigorous competition between groups formally responsible for safety.13 

11. P. Schulman, E. Roe, M. van Eeten, and M. de BruiJne, “High Reliability and the 

Management of Critical Infrastructures,” Journal of Crisis and Contingency Management 12, no. 1 

(March 2004): 14-28. Also see David Mindell’s chapter in this book and his attention to the self 

“identity” of technical operators. 

12. Schulman, “Negotiated Order of Organizational Reliability”; M. Bourrier, “Organizing 

Maintenance Work at Two American Nuclear Power Plants,” Journal of Crisis and Contingency 

Management 4, no. 2 (June 1996): 104-112. 

13. T. R. La Porte and C. Thomas, “Regulatory Compliance and the Ethos of Quality 

Enhancement: Surprises in Nuclear Power Plant Operations,” Journal ofpublic Administration Research 

and Theory 5, no. 4 (December 1994): 250-295. 
INSTITUTIONAL ISSUES FOR CONTINUED SPACE EXPLORATION: . . . 409 

HROs’ operations are enabled by structural features that exhibit operational flexibility and redundancy in pursuit of safety and performance, and 

overlapping or nested layers of authority relationships. 

3. Working with complex technologies is often hazardous, and operations are also carried out within quite contingent environments. 

Effective performance calls for flexibility and “organizational slack” 

(or reserve capacity) to ensure safety and protect performance resilience. Such structural flexibility and redundancy are evident in three 

ways: key work processes are designed so that there are parallel or 

overlapping activities that can provide backup in the case of overload 

or unit breakdown and operational recombination in the face of surprise; operators and first-line supervisors are trained for multiple jobs 

via systematic rotation; and jobs and work groups are related in ways 

that limit the interdependence of incompatible function^.'^ NASA has 

devoted a good deal of attention to aspects of these features. 

The three characteristics noted so far are, in a sense, to be expected 

and command the attention of systems engineering and operational managers in NASA and other large-scale technical programs. There is less explicit 

attention to understanding the organizational relationships that enhance their 

effectiveness. I give these a bit more emphasis below. 

4. Patterns of formal authority in large organizations are likely to be 

predominately hierarchical (though this may have as much to do with 

adjudicative functions as directive ones). And, of course, these patterns are present in HROs as well. Top-down, commandlike authority behaviors are most clearly seen during times of routine operations. 

But importantly, two other authority patterns are also “nested or overlaid” within these formal relations. Exhibited by the same participants 

who, during routine times, act out the roles of rank relations and 

bureaucrats, in extraordinary times, when the tempo of operations 

increases, another pattern of collegial and functionally based authority relationships takes form. When demands increase, those members 

14. For work on functional redundancy, see especially M. Landau, “Redundancy, Rationality, 

and the Problem of Duplication and Overlap,” Public Administration Review 27 (July/August 1969): 

346-358; A. W. Lerner, “There is More Than One Way to he Redundant: A Comparison of 

Alternatives for the Design and Use of Redundancy in Organizations,” Administration G Society 

18 (November 1986): 334-359; D. Chisholm, Coordination Without Hierarchy: Inzormal Structures in 

Multi-organizational Systems (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989); C. F. L. Heimann, 

“Understanding the Challenger Disaster: Organizational Structure and the Design of Reliable 

Systems,” American Political Science Review 87 (June 1993): 421-435. 
410 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

who are the most skilled in meeting them step forward without bidding to take charge of the response, while others who may “outrank” 

them slip informally into subordinate, helping positions. 

And nested within or overlaid upon these two patterns is yet 

another well-practiced, almost scripted set of relationships that is activated during times of acute emergency. Thus, as routine operations 

become high-tempo, then perhaps emergencies arise, observers see 

communication patterns and role relationships changing to integrate 

the skills and experience apparently called for by each particular situation. NASA has had dramatic experience with such patterns. 

Within the context of HROs’ structural patterns, decision-making 

dynamics are flexible, dispersed among operational teams, and include 

rewards for the discovery of incipient error. 

5. Decision-making within the shifting authority patterns, especially 

operating decisions, tends to be decentralized to the level where 

actions must be taken. Tactical decisions often develop on the basis 

of intense bargaining and/or collegial interaction among those whose 

contributions are needed to operate effectively or problem-solve. 

Once determined, decisions are executed, often very quickly, with 

little chance for review or a1terati0n.I~ 

6. Due in part to the irreversibility of decisions once enacted, HROs put 

an unusual premium on assuring that decisions will be based on the best 

information available. They also try to insure that their internal technical and procedural processes, once put in motion, will not become the 

sources of failure.This leads, as it has within NASA, to quite formalized 

efforts, continually in search of improvement via systematically gleaned 

feedback, and periodic program and operational reviews. These are frequently conducted by internal groups formally charged with searching 

out sources of potential failure, as well as improvements or changes in 

procedures to minimize the likelihood of failure. On occasion, there 

may be several groups structured and rewarded in ways that puts them 

in direct competition with each other to discover potential error, and, 

due to their formal attachment to different reporting levels of the management hierarchy, this encourages the quick forwarding of information 

about potential flaws to higher authority.16 

15. Roberts, “Some characteristics of high reliability organizations”; Schulman, “Negotiated 

Order of Organizational Reliability.” 

16. La Porte and Thomas, “Regulatory Compliance and the Ethos of Quality Enhancement”; 

Diane Vaughan, The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA 

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990). 
INSTITUTIONAL ISSUES FOR CONTINUED SPACE EXPLORATION:. . . 411 

Notably, these activities, due to their intrinsic blame-placing potential, while they may be sought by upper management in 

a wide variety of other types of organizations, are rarely conducted 

with much enthusiasm at lower levels. In response, HROs exhibit a 

most unusual willingness to reward the discovery and reporting of 

error without peremptorily assigning blame for its commission at the 

same time. This obtains even for the reporting of one’s own error in 

operations and procedural adherence. The premise of such reward 

is that it is better and more commendable for one to report an error 

immediately than to ignore or to cover it up, thus avoiding untoward 

outcomes as a consequence. These dynamics rarely exist within organizations that operate primarily on punishment-centered incentives, 

that is, most public and many private organizations. 

Organizational culture of reliability. Sustaining the structural supports for 

reliability and the processes that increase it puts additional demands on the 

already intense lives of those who operate and manage large-scale, advanced 

technical systems. Operating effectiveness calls for a level of personal engagement and attentive behavior that is unlikely to be manifest merely on the basis 

of formal rules and economic employee contracts. It requires a fully engaged 

person responding heedfully to norms of individual and group relations that 

grow out of the particular demands and rewards of the hazardous systems 

involved.” For lack of a better concept to capture these phenomena, let us 

accept the slippery concept of “organizational culture” as a rough ordering 

notion.” A culture of organizational reliability refers to the norms, shared 

perceptions, work ways, and informal traditions that arise within the operating and overseeing groups closely involved with the systems of hazard.” 

Recall that HROs strive equally for high levels ofproduction and safety.20 

HROs face the challenge of being reliable both as producers (many under all 

manner of demanding conditions) and as safety providers (under conditions 

of high production demands). While most organizations combine varying 

17. Weick, “Organizational culture as a source of high reliability”; Roberts, “Some aspects of 

organizational cultures.” 

18. The concept of organizational culture captures the sense that there are norms, values, and 

“taken for granted” modes of behavior and perceptions that shape interpersonal and group relations. 

At the same time, the concept retains a high degree operational ambiguity, its use subject to stiff 

criticism. See J. S. Ott, The Organizational Culture Perspective (Chicago: Dorsey Press, 1989); Roberts, 

“Some aspects of organizaaonal cultures”; G. I. Rochlin, “Les organizations ‘a’ haute fabilite’: bilan et 

perspective de recherche” (Highly Reliable Organizations: Exploration and Research Perspectives), 

chap. 2 in Organiser lajabilite, ed. M. Bourrier (Paris: L‘Harmattan, 2001). 

19. Roberts, “Some characteristics ofhigh reliability organizations”; “Nuclear Power Operations: 

A Cross-Cultural Perspective,” Annual Review DfEnergy and the Environment 19 (1994): 153-187. 

20. Cf. Rochlin, “Reliable Organizations: Present Research and Future Directions”; Schulman, 

“Negotiated Order of Organizational Reliability.” 
412 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

degrees of production plus service/safety emphasis, HROs have continuously 

to strike a balance. In times of routine, safety wins out formally (though 

watchfulness is harder to sustain); in times of high tempo/surge, this becomes 

reordered (though watchfulness is much more acute). This suggests an organizational culture integrating the familiar norms of mission accomplishment 

and production with those of the so-called safety culture.21 

Elements of the results are operator/member ilan, operator autonomy, 

and intrinsic tension between skilled operators and technical experts. 

Operating personnel evince an intense ilan and strongly held expectations for themselves about the value of skilled performance. In the 

face of hazard, it takes on a kind of prideful wariness. There are often 

intense peer-group pressures to excel as a highly competitive team and 

to cooperate with and assist each other in the face of high operating 

demands. This includes expectations of fulfilling responsibilities that 

often go well beyond formal role specifications. For example, there is 

a view that “whoever spots a problem owns it” until it is mitigated or 

solved in the interest of full, safe functioning. This sometimes results in 

operators realizing that, in the face of unexpected contingencies, they 

may have to “go illegal,” i.e., to go against established, formal procedures if the safety operating procedures appear to increase the difficulty of safely meeting the service demands placed on the organization. 

Operator ilan is reinforced by clearly recognized peer-group incentives that signal high status and respect, pride in one’s team, emphasis 

on peer “retention” and social discipline, and reward for contributing 

to quality-enhancing, failure-preventing activities. 

Hazardous operations are often time-critical, where effectiveness 

depends on keen situational awareness. When it becomes clear that 

speedy, decisive action must be taken, there is little opportunity for 

assistance or approval from others.22 Partly as a result, HRO operators come to develop, indeed insist upon, a high degree of discretion, 

autonomy, and responsibility for activities “on their watch.”23 Often 

typified as being “king of my turf,” this is seen as highly appropriate 

by both other operators and supervisors. 

21. See G. I. Rochlin, “Safe operations as a social construct,” Ergonomics 42, no. 11 (1999): 

1549-1560; cf. Weick, “Organizational culture as a source of high reliability.” 

22. See K. E.Weick, K. M. Sutchffe, and D. Ohsdeld,“Orgamzing for high reliabdity: Processes of collechve mmdfulness,” Research in Ovgnnizational Behavior 21 (1999): 81-123, for a related perspective. 

23. K. H. Roberts, D. M. Rousseau, and T. R. La Porte, “The culture of high reliability: 

Quantitative and qualitative assessment aboard nuclear powered aircraft carriers,” journal of High 

Technology Management Research 5, vol. 1 (spring 1994): 141-161. 
INSTITUTIONAL ISSUES FOR CONTINUED SPACE EXPLORATION:. . . 413 

But operator autonomy is often bought at a moderate price. The HROs 

we studied all operated complex technical systems that put a premium 

on technical engineering knowledge as well as highly skilled operating knowledge and experience. These two types of skills are usually 

formally distinguished in the occupational roles designations within 

HROs. Each has a measure of status; each depends on the other for 

critical information in the face of potential system breakdown and 

recovery if problems cannot be contained. But in the operators’ eyes, 

they have the ultimate responsibility for safe, effective operation. They 

also have an almost tactile sense of how the technical systems actually function in the organization’s operating environments, environments that are likely to be more situationally refined and intuitively 

more credibly understood than can be derived from the more abstract, 

cognitively based knowledge possessed by engineers. The result is an 

intrinsic tension between operators and technical experts, especially 

when operators judge technical experts to be distant from actual operations, where there is considerable confidence placed on tacit knowledge of system operations based on long operating e~perience.~~ 

These dominant work ways and attitudes about behavior at the operating 

levels of HROs are prompted by carrying out activities that are closest to the 

hazards and suggest the important affective nature of HRO dynamics. These 

patterns provide the basis for the expressive authority and “identitive complian~e”~’ norms that sustain the close cooperation necessary when facing the 

challenges of unexpected high-tempo/high-surge situations with minimum 

internal harm to people and capital equipment. But HROs operate in the 

context of many interested outsiders: sponsors, clients, regulators, and surrounding neighborhoods. Relations with outside groups and institutions also 

play a crucial role. 

External Relationships 

HRO performance is clearly dependent on extraordinarily dense patterns 

of cooperative behavior within the organization. These are extensive, often 

quite intense, and unusual both in terms of achieving continuous reliability and 

in higher costs. As such, they are difficult to sustain in the absence of external 

reinforcement. Continuous attention both to achieving organizational missions 

and to avoiding serious failures requires repeated interactions with-one might 

24. G. I. Rochlin and A. von Meier, “Nuclear Power Operations: A Cross-Cultural Perspective,” 

25. See A. Etzioni, “Organizational Control Structure,” chap. 15 in Handbook .f Organizutions, 

pp. 153-187; Rochlin, “Safe operations.” 

ed. J. G. March (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1965), pp. 650-677. 
414 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

say pressures from-elements in the external environment, not only to insure 

resources, but, as importantly, to buttress management resolve to maintain the 

internal relations outlined above and to nurture HROs’ culture of reliability. 

These cultural characteristics are the most important of all the properties of 

HROs, for if they are absent, the rest are difficult to achieve and sustain. 

NASA has certainly learned how external interests-we will call them 

“the watchers”-can enter into the Agency’s everyday life, especially when 

major failures are seized upon as a chance to ventilate concerns about operational reliability.26 “Watchers” include externally situated, independent public 

bodies and stakeholding interest groups and the institutional processes that 

assure their presence, efficacy, and use of tools for external monitoring in the 

interest of hazard evaluations. 

Aggressive, knowledgeable “watchers” increase the likelihood that a) 

reliability-enhancing operations and investments will be seen as legitimate by 

corporate and regulatory actors, b) such costs should be absorbed, and c) regulations and internal social demands should be allowed in the interest of safety. 

This may mean investing, on one hand, in developing and training external 

review groups and in some instruments of behavioral surveillance, e.g., random drug tests, and, on the other, assuring these “watchers” that HRO leaders will quickly be held accountable for changes that could reduce reliability 

in service or safety. These watching groups may be either formal or informal 

and are found both within the HRO’s immediate institutional environment, 

eg, congressional committees, and outside it. 

It is crucial that there be clear institutional interests in highly reliable 

performance. This should be evident in strong, superordinate institutional elements of the parent organization, such as agency and corporate headquarters 

or command-level officers (e.g., utility corporate headquarters, higher military command, and Washington agency headquarters), and sometimes industrial association watchdogs (e.g., the nuclear industry’s Institute for Nuclear 

Power Operators, or INPO).27 

At the same time, the persistent presence of external stakeholding groups 

assures attentiveness (and occasional resentment). These groups range from 

quite formal public watchers, such as regulatory overseers (e.g., state Public 

Utility Commissions, Nuclear Regulatory Commissions, the Environmental 

Protection Agency, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and the 

Occupational Safety and Health Administration), user and client groups (e.g., 

instrument-rated pilots using air traffic control services and Congresspersons), 

to a wide sweep of “public interveners” (e.g., state, local governments, land26. Diane Vaughan’s work (cited above) and conference paper contrasting the Challenger and 

27. T. Rea, Hostages to Each Other (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). 

Columbia accident reports gives eloquent testament to the dynamics of intense external scrutiny. 
INSTITUTIONAL ISSUES FOR CONTINUED SPACE EXPLORATION:. . . 415 

use advocates, and citizen interest groups). Finally, this important function is 

also played by professional peer bodies and by HRO alumni who are seen as 

operationally knowledgeable observers. They are likely to be accorded respect 

both by other outsiders and by the HRO operators themselves. 

An abundance of external watchers seems crucial in attaining continuous, highly reliable operations and a culture of reliability. So are boundaryspanning processes through which encouragement and constraints are exercised 

in the interest of product/safety reliability. Two types are evident. First, there 

are formally designated positions and/or groups who have external oversight 

responsibilities. Two examples of formalized channels are Nuclear Regulatory 

Commission On-site Residents, two or three of whom are assigned to each 

nuclear power plant, with nearly complete access to power plant information, 

review meetings, etc., and, second, military liaison officers who are permanently 

assigned to air traffic control centers. Sometimes these boundary-spanning 

activities are expressed in aircraft carriers’ operations via dual reporting 

requirements for nuclear engineering officers to report problems immediately, 

not only to the ship’s captain, but to a central nuclear affairs office at naval 

headquarters in Washington, DC, as well. 

Boundary spanning, and with it increased transparency, also occurs 

intermittently in the form of periodic formal visits from “check” or review 

groups, who often exercise powerful sanctions if their reviews do not measure 

up. These activities come in a number offorms, for example, phased inspections 

and training checks in aircraft carrier combat preparations, as well as the more 

familiar Inspector General reviews, and nuclear power utilities requirements to 

satisfy rigorous performance in responding to the NRC-mandated, biannual 

activation of power plant emergency scenarios in which all the relevant local 

and state decision-makers engage in a daylong simulation leading to possible 

regional evacuation under the watchful eye of NRC and FEMA inspectors.28 

Finally, external watchers, however well provided with avenues of access, 

must have available full, credible, and current information about system performance. This almost goes without saying, for these data, often in the form 

of annual evaluations, hazard indices, statistical summaries noted above, and 

indicators of incipient harm and the early onset of danger, become a crucial 

basis for insightful reviews and public credibility. 

This is a formidable array of conditions for any organization to seek or to 

sustain, even for the short term. To what degree would they suffice over the 

long term? This will become a major challenge for NASA as missions take on 

multiyear scope and programs are premised on a long-term human presence 

in space. 

28. La Porte and Thomas, “Regulatory Compliance and the Ethos of Quality Enhancement.” 
416 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

ASSURING INSTITUTIONAL CONSTANCY AND 

FAITHFULNESS IN THE FUTURE 

Many highly reliable organizations operate systems whose fd range of 

positive and negative outcomes can be perceived more or less i~nmediately.~~ 

When this happens, organizational leaders can be rewarded or held accountable. But when operating systems are also capable of large-scale and/or widely 

distributed harm which may not occur or be detected for several operational 

generations, our familiar processes of accountability falter and overseers and the 

public are likely to be concerned that such HROs be worthy of the trust placed 

in them across several generations. In NASA’s case, these challenges stem from 

the extraordinary reach of the administration’s vision for the Agency’s future. 

NASA is contemplating missions that will send humans in space for several years to facilities that are likely to be designed to last 10 to 20 years (two 

management generations). Add to this any of half a dozen hoped-for lunar 

and exploratory missions. In a much more extreme case, the management of 

nuclear materials, obligations can be expected to continue for at least 50 to 100 

years, perhaps ~enturies.~’ These cases suggest that shouldering an obligation 

to demonstrate the faithful adherence to a mission and its operational imperatives for a remarkably long time is inherent in accepting the program-even 

in the face of a variety of social and institutional environmental changes. As 

the longer term effects of such technologies become more clear, trying to take 

into account their transgenerational nature presents particularly troublesome 

challenges for managers and for students of ~rganization.~~ And it is this aspect 

of highly reliable operations about which the social and management sciences 

have the least to say. 

29. This section draws from portions of T. R. La Porte and A. Keller, “Assuring Institutional 

Constancy: Requisite for Managing Long-Lived Hazards,” Public Administration Review 56, no. 6 

(November/December 1996): 535-544. It is also informed by my work at Los Alamos National 

Laboratory (LANL) exploring the organizational challenges posed for the laboratory by its missions 

of science-based stockpile stewardship (of nuclear weapons), nuclear materials stewardship, and 

sometimes environmental stewardship. While the operations of the first two, contrasted to the 

latter, are very different, the challenges provoked by the longevity of the materials involved 

prompt very similar organizational puzzles. For a similar rendering, see T. R. La Porte, “Fiabilite 

et legitimaite soutenable” (Reliability and Sustainable Legitimacy), chap. 3 in Ovganiser lafiabiltte, 

ed. M. Bourrier (Paris: L‘Harmattan, 2001). 

30. Readers can add other technically oriented programs or activities that have a similar extraordinary property, say in the environmental or public works domain. 

31. Two conditions, noted here, increase the public demands for constancy because they undermine our typical means of ensuring accountability and are sometimes characteristic of hazardous 

technical systems. These two are 1) when the information needed to provide unequivocal evidence 

of effects is so extensive and costly that the public comes to expect that it will not be forthcoming and 2) if harmful effects occur, they are unlikely to be unequivocally detected for some time 

into the future due to the intrinsic properties of the production processes and their operating 

continued on the next page 
INSTITUTIONAL ISSUES FOR CONTINUED SPACE EXPLORATION:. . . 417 

A partial remedy is to consider what we might call “institutional constancy.” More formally, institutional constancy refers to “faithful, unchanging 

commitment to, and repeated attainment of performance, effects, or outcomes 

in accord with agreements by agents of an institution made at one time as 

expressed or experienced in a future time.”” An organization exhibits constancy when, year after year, it achieves outcomes it agreed in the past to pursue in the spirit of the original public policy bargain.33 

Conditions Encouraging Institutional Constancy34 

What little systematic examination of this remarkable intention there is 

suggests that institutional constancy requires demonstrating to the public or 

its major opinion leaders that the agency, public contractors, or firms in question (for example, NASA operating very reliably) can both be trusted to keep 

its word-to be steadfast-for long into the future and to show the capacity 

to enact programs that are faithful to the original spirit of its commitment^.^^ 

What condtions signal continued political and institutional will, steadfastness in 

“keeping the faith”? What conditions assure the capacity to follow through for 

many years, i.e., the organizational infrastructure of institutional constancy? 

Institutional purpose. Constancy is about future behavior, and the organization must signal its collective resolve to persist in its agreements, especially 

continued from the previous page 

environments. While the mind’s eye turns quickly to public organizations for examples, the argument applies with nearly equal force to the private sector in the United States, especially to those 

firms responding to the strong economic incentives for short-term gain with the systematic deferral 

of costs for some time. 

32. T. R. La Porte and A. Keller, “Assuring Institutional Constancy.’’ 

33. Think, for example, of the FAA‘s air traffic control operations, together with air carriers. 

They have consistently achieved high levels of flight safety and traffic coordination in commercial 

aviation and flight operations at sea. And the Navy has a long-term record of exceptional safety 

aboard nuclear submarines. Electrical utilities have made remarkably high levels of electrical power 

available. Great universities exhibit constancy in commitments to intellectual excellence, generation after generation, through producing very skilled undergraduates and professionals as well as 

pathbreaking research. 

34. Note: There are strong analytical and practical limitations to attaining institutional constancy 

over many generations, especially a) weak analytical bases for confidently predicting the outcomes 

of institutional activities over long periods of time, b) limited means to reinforce or reward generations of consistent behavior, and c) scanty knowledge about designing institutional relationships 

that improve rather than degrade the quality of action-taking in the future that is faithful to the 

spirit of present commitments and agreements. Incentives to improve conditions that would assure 

constancy of institutional capacities are scant. And so is interest in analysis that would improve our 

understanding of institutional and administrative design. Indeed, there is almost nothing insightful 

in the literature about increasing institutional inertia or constancy. It is still an analytical puzzle. 

35. While these two qualities are closely related, one can imagine succeeding at one without 

achieving the other. An HRO might be able to persuade the public that it was firmly committed to 

certain objectives but actually turn out to be in no position to realize them. Conversely, an HRO 

could very well be situated, motivated, and structured to carry out its commitments for years to 

come but be unable to convince the public of its steadfastness. 
418 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

with strong commitments to trusteeship in the interests of future generations. 

Measures that reinforce this perception are as follows: 

* The necessary formal, usually written goal of unswerving adherence to 

the spirit of the initial agreement or commitment; documents that can 

be used in the future to hold each generation’s organizational leaders 

accountable for their actions. 

* Strong, public articulation of commitments to constancy by high-status 

figures within an agency or firm, calling especially on professional staff 

and perhaps key labor representatives to emphasize the importance of 

constancy. Coupled with formal declarations, consistent emphasis upon 

steadfastness within an organization reinforces the otherwise difficult 

commitments of energy and public witness that are needed by key 

members of the technical staff and workforce. 

Strong evidence of institutional norms and processes that nurture the 

resolve to persist across many work generations, including, in the public sector, elements in labor contracts that extend over several political 

 generation^.^^ When these exist, they bind workers and their leaders 

to the goals of the agency, often transcending episodes of leadership 

succession. The content of these norms and the processes that reinforce them are now not well calibrated, though examples are likely 

to be found in public activities that draw the deep loyalty of technical 

staff and former members. This seems to be the case for elite military units, e.g., the U.S. Marine Corps and Navy Seals; groups within 

the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and some other public health 

activities; and some elements within U.S. air traffic control circles. A 

close examination of the internal processes of socialization the produce 

such loyalty is ~arranted.~’ 

* Commitments to courses of action, particularly those where benefits 

may be delayed until a succeeding management or political genera36. This point IS akin to the arguments made classically by P. Selznick, Leadership in Administration 

(New York: Harper & Row, 1957), and J. Q. Wilson, Bureaucracy: What Government Agencies Do and 

Why They Do It (New York: Basic Books, 1989), pp. 99-102, about the importance of institutional 

leadership and the character of the organization’s sense of mission. 

37. For an early exploration of this aspect, see Selznick, Leadership in Administration, and his discussion of the transformation of an instrumental organization into one that has been “infused with 

value,” i.e., that becomes an “institution.” For a recent project attempting to address these questions, see A. Boin, “The Early Years of Public Institutions: A Research Agenda” (paper issued by 

the Department of Public Administration, Leiden University, Netherlands, 2004). 
INSTITUTIONAL ISSUES FOR CONTINUED SPACEXPLOILATION: . . . 419 

tion, are difficult to sustain in the face of U.S. political metabolism. 

Therefore, vigorous external reinforcement from both regulatory 

agencies and “public watching” groups must be present to assure that 

the relevant agencies and their contractors will not flag in attending to 

the performance promised by one generation to the next. This would 

include reinforcing the vigor of outside groups by regularly assuring 

their formal involvement and providing sufficient resources to sustain 

their expectations and prompt their demands for consultation if the 

next generation of leaders wavers in its resolve. The optimum would 

be when these measures lead to laws, formal agreements, and foundation/nongovernmental funding and infrastructure for continual 

encouragement and sanctions for “keeping the faith.” 

The infvastructure of constancy. While strong motivations and earnestness 

are necessary, they alone do not carry the day. Other conditions should also 

be present to assure interested outsiders that actions will, in fact, be carried out 

in realizing important commitments across multiple generations. As I outline 

Table 13.2. Characteristics Associated with Institutional Constancy 

(Le., Organizational Perseverance, Faithful Adherence to the Mission and 

Its Operational Imperatives) 

1. Assurance of steadfast political will. 

A. Formal goal of unswerving adherence to the spirit of the initial agreement. 

B. Strong articulation of commitments by high-status agency leaders calling 

C. Clear evidence of institutional norms that nurture the persistence of comD. Vigorous external reinforcement from regulatory agencies and public 

on staff in achieving constancy. 

mitments across many generations. 

watching groups. 

2. Organizational infrastructure of constancy. 

A. Administrative and technical capacity to carry out constancy-assurance 

activities reinforced by agency rewards. 

B. Adequate resources to assure the “transfer” of requisite technical and 

institutional knowledge across worker and management generations. 

C. Analytical and resource support for “future impact analyses.” 

D. Capacity to detect and remedy the early onset of likely failure that threatens the future, with the assurance of remediation if failures occur. 
420 CRITICAL ISSUES INTHE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

these, return in your mind’s eye to the US. space community and the many 

organizations revolving satellite-like around the central sudstar of NASA. 

How many of the conditions I will suggest below already exist within NASA? 

How difficult would their introduction and persistence likely be? If these 

seem sparse, or absent, this points to a “critical institutional issue.” 

These conditions of constancy include the following: 

* The technical capabilities and administrative infrastructure which 

are needed to assure performance, along with agency or contractor 

rewards and incentives for articulating and pursuing measures that 

enhance constancy and intergenerational fairness. These would include 

executive socialization and training processes to reinforce commitments and long-term perspectives to nurture a culture of constancy. 

Such processes and resources are rarely provided in today’s institutional environments. Rather, perspectives and rewards are intensely 

generation-centric, characterized by quite short-term evaluations, and 

strongly reinforced by contemporary business and legislative cycles. 

In addition to assuring consistency in organizational culture, the 

resources and activities needed to “transfer” or “pass on” the organization’s critical operating, technical, and institutional knowledge from 

one work and management generation to the next are crucial. This 

includes systematic capture of critical skills and operating histories, as 

well as continuous training and evaluation of each generation’s capabilities. Some portion of each future generation should be present in 

the current one. 

The remaining conditions point to keen powers of analysis in service to 

the future. 

* Analytical supports should be evident for analysis and decision-making 

which take into account the interests of the future and enable work, 

such as “future impact analyses,” that seeks to identify the effects of 

present institutional actions on future capabilities. Something like this 

goes on during budgetary planning efforts, but, in the U.S. system, 

the timeframes are invariably merely short-term, tied to legislative 

or corporate profit reporting cycles. Scanning further into an institution’s future-at least beyond the present generation-is also called 

for. Analytical capabilities to do this are likely to require at least a 

small cadre of highly skilled professionals, systems for rewarding their 

efforts, and organizational and agency venues where their reflections 

will have a respected voice. 
INSTITUTIONAL ISSUES FOR CONTINUED SPACEXPLORATION:. . . 421 

* And, perhaps most important, publicly obvious, effective capacity 

would be in place to detect the early onset of likely failures related to 

the activities that could threaten the future. This analytical capacity 

should then be joined with institutional capabilities to initiate remedies, along with the assurance of remediation resources in the event 

failures should occur.38 Without quite visible, publicly evident, and 

well-exercised capacity for early warning and preemptive remediation, 

the public is likely to remain skeptical, potentially suspicious, and ripe 

for mobilization into recalcitrant opp~sition.~~ 

This suite of conditions intended to assure institutional constancy is very 

demanding and costly. Whether leaders would consider developing them is 

likely to be contingent upon external demand. Pressure to try is increased 

when programs exhibit three characteristics. There will be particularly 

aggressive insistence on faithfulness when agency programs a) are perceived 

to be large-scale efforts whose activities may occur across broad spatial and 

temporal spans and seem to pose potentially irreversible effects; b) are seen as 

intensely hazardous, even if the likelihood of failure is small and accompanied 

by substantial gains for the program’s prime beneficiaries; and c) pose significant risks whose costs are likely to be borne by future generations who receive 

little benefit. 

This third characteristic-temporal asymmetry of benefits and costsraises a particularly difficult dilemma. Put in question form: should current 

populations endure costs today so that future populations will not have 

In NASA’s case, this would include investing to avoid future risks against the 

accrual of present benefits, say, in symbolic returns, or perhaps knowledge 

that is potentially useful in providing novel artifacts. These long-term benefits 

38. See, for example, T. R. La Porte and C. Thomas, “Regulatory Compliance and the 

Ethos of Quality Enhancement: Surprises in Nuclear Power Plant Operations,” Journal of Public 

Admmistration Research and Theory 5, no. 4 (December 1994): 250-295. Cf. K. Shrader-Frechette, 

“Risk Methodology and Institution Bias,” Research in Social Problems and Public Policy 5 (1993): 207- 

223; dnd L. Clarke, “The Disqualification Heuristic: When Do Organizations Misperceive Risk?” 

Research in Social Problems and Public Policy 5 (1993): 289-312, for discussions ofthe conditions that 

result in operator misperception of risk, conditions that would require strong antidotes if constancy 

is to be assured. 

39. This seems clearly to be the case for the many years of political and legal travail experienced 

by the Department ofEnergy. See DOE, “Earning Public Trust and Confidence.” 

40. See, for example, R. M. Green, “Inter-generational Distributive Justice and Environmental 

Responsibility,” in Responsib es to Future Generations: Environmental Ethics, ed. E. D. Partridge 

(Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1980), R. Howarth, “Inter-generational Competitive Equilibria 

Under Technological Uncertainty and an Exhaustible Resource Constraint,”Journal ofEnvironmental 

Economics and Management 21 (1991): 225-243; B. Norton, “Environmental Ethics and the Rights 

of Future Generations,” Environmental Ethics (winter 1982): 319-338; P. Wenz, “Ethics, Energy 

Policy, and Future Generations,” Environmental Ethics 5 (1983): 195-209. 
422 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

would have to be balanced against present costs and, as importantly, future 

industrial environmental damage from large-scale facilities, or having to 

abandon teams of astronauts due to the inability to retrieve them, and, more 

remotely, infecting terrestrial populations with extraterrestrial organisms. 

Uncertainty about the knowledge and technological capacity of future 

generations exacerbates the problem. An optimistic view assumes that difficult problems of today will be more easily solved by future generations? 

No problem today is too big for the future. Skepticism about this, however, 

makes it an equivocal basis for proceeding with multigenerational programs. 

An inherent part of assuring constancy would be an agreed-upon basis, an 

“ethic,” of how costs and benefits should be distributed across generations. 

This is especially true when operational effects extend well into the future, for 

it demands that generation after generation respond to new information and 

changing value structures in coping with long-term effects. 

This array of constancy-enhancing characteristics raises serious, unresolved operational, political, and ethical questions. If an organization’s program provokes demands for nearly error-free operations, then assurances of 

institutional constancy in meeting the conditions for reliability are likely to 

be demanded as a substitute for accountability!’ Apprehensive publics seek 

assurances that these institutions, such as NASA, will be uncompromising in 

their pursuit of highest quality operations through the relevant lifetimes of the 

systems in question. 

When harmful effects may be visited upon future generations, assurances of continuity or institutional constancy take on increasing imp~rtance.~~ 

Why would this be the case? Those who implement such programs could 

quite probably escape accountability for failures. They would have retired, 

41. For comment on how responsibility should be divided between generations that accounts for 

changes in knowledge, see W. Halfele, “Energy from Nuclear Power,” Scientrfic American 263, no. 3 

(September 1990): 136-144; C. Perrings, “Reserved Rationality and the Precautionary Principle: 

Technological Change, Time and Uncertainty in Environmental Decision Making,” in Ecological 

Economics: The Science and Management of Sustainabihty, ed. R. Costanza (New York: Columbia 

University Press, 1991). 

42. For those HROs whose technical operations and consequences of failure can be seen as having constancy-evoking characteristics, ignoring “constancy magnets” is an institutionally risky 

business. This is especially the case for the combination of uneven distribution of benefits and 

costs among generations and the potential for a long lag in discovering information about possibly 

grievous damages. Setting these matters aside allows festering seeds of suspicion to multiply, and, 

if coupled with conditions that also evoke “reliability and regulatory magnets,” they are likely 

grounds for political opposition and demands for increasing rigorous regulation as a condition for 

even initial approval for new projects. But if organizational remedies are called for, how much 

additional effort and evolution of institutional capabilities could be entailed? 

43. While the mind’s eye turns quickly to public organizations, the argument applies equally to 

the private sector in the United States, especially those firms responding to the strong economic 

incentives for short-term gain and deferral of costs. 
INSTITUTIONAL ISSUES FOR CONTINUED SPACE EXPLORATION: . . . 423 

died, or moved on. Leaders of such institutions, therefore, are quite likely 

to be pressed to assure the public (especially able opinion leaders) that, as a 

condition of winning approval and resources to initiate or continue programs, 

agencies and corporate contractors involved should credibly be expected to 

keep agreements and commitments with potentially affected communities far 

into the future. 

CONCLUDING REFLECTIONS 

The reach of NASA’s space programs continues to levy remarkable operational demands, for the programs imply very long-term management of both 

the unmanned and manned aspects of space exploration and possibly commercial and security exploitation. This rather cryptic application to NASA’s space 

exploration programs of work done in other technical domains hints at the 

challenges involved when we insist on extraordinary levels of reliability that 

should go on for a number of management generations. It suggests an array of 

conditions that would become increasingly salient as NASA seeks to regularize and sustain its space traffic regime. 

These are very demanding conditions for organizational leaders to consider, much less actively insist upon, encourage, and nurture, even if we knew 

how to establish organizational patterns I have ~umrnarized.~~ It is notable that 

my discussion is based on work dealing with operations that, unlike NASA 

spucejights, were quite mature, pretty routine, and had managed to continue 

for some time. Although the HRO field work involved nearly 10 years of 

observing and intensive subjective onsite experience with each of three large 

technical systems in the study, it was not so intensive as discovering the process through which these organizations had gone to result in the variegated 

patterns that were described. We do not know exactly how they got there. 

If the constructs I have outlined here are taken seriously, it is likely to 

pose unwelcome challenges to agency and program leaders. Our workshop 

discussions called out a range of critical institutional (as well as historiographical) issues and point toward matters of serious design examination. But the 

analytical bases for designing and assuring institutional forms at substantial 

44. They are also conditions that are not likely to flourish without a high degree of public 

trust and confidence in operating and overseeing institutions-something that is in increasingly 

short supply in contemporary American culture. NASA has skated across the increasingly thin 

ice of waning public confidence in programs involving humans in space. The several high-profile 

congressional investigations and the Agency’s agony over the past decade have eroded a general 

sense of public confidence in future operations. This in itself should be seen as a major critical 

institutional issue. For an earlier consideration of this, see T. La Porte, “Institutional Challenges 

for Continued Space Exploration: High-reliability systems across many operational generations. 

Are these aspirations publicly credible?” (presented at the Workshop on Space Policy, National 

Academies of Science, Irvine, CA, 12-13 November 2003). 
424 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

scale are limited at be~t.4~ For example, there is scant work on effecting institutional constancy per se, and only limited study of the evolution of highly 

reliable organizations. A remedy to these important gaps in understanding 

requires both analytical and experimental efforts to calibrate the dynamics of 

highly reliable operations, and especially probing the requisites for long-term 

institutional constancy and trustworthiness. 

At least three additional aspects of this challenge are apparent; each 

prompts a demanding set of research imperatives (see table 13.3). 

First, we need to improve our knowledge about the wider institutional 

currents within U.S. patterns of public and corporate governance that provoke repeated, stubborn resistance to the organizational changes needed to 

sustain very reliable operations, and reassure citizens that the responsible institutions will be able to keep their word through the relevant program timeframes-and do so in ways that enhance their trustworthiness. Even if there 

is a reasonably benign political and social environment, these are qualities that 

are very difficult to establish and maintain. In answering “Why can’t we do 

Table 13.3. Research Directions: When Highly Reliable Operations, 

Long-Term Institutional Constancy, and Trustworthiness Are Indicated 

Q: Why can’t we do it? 

A: Institutional impediments to conditions sustaining very reliable operations, 

institutional constancy, and trustworthiness. 

Q: Why do we have to? 

A: Technical imperatives requiring very reliable operations over multiple political 

generations. (Seek technical design alternatives having equivalent physical and 

organic effects without HRO or institutional constancy imperatives.) 

Q: Why do we need to? 

A: Alternatively, there are institutional activities that reduce the public’s 

1. risk-averse demand for very reliable operations of intrinsically hazardous 

2. worry about the longer term consequences of operational errors, and 

3. sense of vulnerability that fosters a demand for trustworthy public 

systems, 

institutions. 

45. Some of these are highlighted in the chapters by Diane Vaughan and Philip Scranton. 
INSTITUTIONAL ISSUES FOR CONTINUED SPACE EXPLORATION:. . . 425 

it?” historical insight surely can be brought to bear. NASA is a particularly 

visible case, certainly not the only instance in which a public agency seems 

unable to alter its internal dynamics so that it avoids repeating what outsiders perceive (invariably after a serious mishap) to be dysfunctional organizational patterns. Observers of the Department of Energy’s Radioactive Waste 

Programs are also likely to regard these efforts as deeply flawed. In these 

and other cases, such evaluations arise during nearly each generation of new 

management. For NASA, it is observed that dysfunctions have afflicted each 

of the last seven Administrators with repeated problems in the evolution of 

NASA’s institutional culture. The conference papers contributed by Scranton 

and Vaughan give witness to many of these debilitating dynamics. Some of 

this is internally self-inflicted, to be sure. But for my part, I suspect more 

important sources lurk in NASA’s relations with Congress and the Agency’s 

extensive contractual community. In the early pages of the Columbia report, 

these sources of dysfunction were noted. They then escaped detailed examination thereafter. In the future, these should be the objects of as much analysis 

as NASA’s internal dynamics. The historical community seems particularly 

positioned to furnish keen insight into what-in repeated instances-seems 

likely to be the result of a much deeper structural relationship than merely a 

series of very able people somehow succumbing to individual weakness and 

local bureaucratic perversity. 

Second, we need to deepen our understanding of the technical sources 

that drive systems operators toward “having to” attain very high reliability. Technologies vary in the degree they require closely harmonized operator behavior. They also vary in their intrinsic hazardousness. Both of these 

characteristics can be shaped by the engineering design teams who provide 

the technical heart of operating systems. What is it about technical communities that prompts their members to propose technologies that require 

extraordinary behavior as a condition of delivering the hoped-for benefits? Is 

this intrinsic to some technical domains and not others? This suggests studies 

that calibrate the degree to which present technical and operational directions 

in the development of, at least, environmentally sensitive operations, materials 

management, and transportation and biological technologies a) require highly 

reliable operating organizations, b) imply long-term operating trajectories and 

potentially negative effects, and hence c) produce a requirement for high levels of public trust and confidence. In-depth sociological and historical studies 

could, one imagines, shed light on these matters. 

A better understanding of these relationships can be crucial in democratic societies. It can be argued that the more the requirements for HRO, 

institutional constancy, and public trust and confidence are present, the more 

demanding the institutional challenges will be in sustaining public legitimacy. 

A closely related emphasis follows: what changed within technical design com- 
426 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

munities would be necessary for them aggressively to seek technical design 

alternatives that provide equivalent physical and organic effects varying the 

degree to which they produce demands for high-reliability operations over 

many work generations. 

But wait, wait! Is there an alternative to the two research and development vectors just noted? They are very demanding R&D domains. Actually 

realizing the organizational imperatives that lurk within such designs is even 

more difficult to assure within private or public enterprises in the U.S. and 

abroad. Indeed, even entertaining the desirability of such changes is disputed 

by institutional leaders and provokes strong managerial reluctance to consider 

them seriously. So why are we trying? “Why do we need to?” 

The need to try (or act as if we were trying) stems, importantly, from the 

public’s expressed worry about their own exposure to what they perceive to be 

“risky systems.” They worry and appear to have a very low tolerance for risktaking. It could be argued, we need to try because “they” demand it. However, 

an alternative program of research and activities could be launched. 

What activities could be carried out which would reduce the public’s riskaverse demand for very reliable operations of intrinsically hazardous systems, 

reduce the public’s worry about the longer term consequences of operational 

errors, and lessen the public’s sense of vulnerability that nourishes a deep longing for trustworthy public institutions? As far as I know, there is very little 

systematic work exploring the grounds upon which alert publics would come 

to understand the rationality of accepting the likelihood of increased exposure 

to malfunctions of hazardous technical systems in the interest of smoothing 

production flows or stabilizing revenue streams for major investors. Nor do I 

know of any efforts to understand the basis for convincing the public explicitly that it would be acceptable to engage in developments that promise attractive short-term benefits which would export severe costs across several future 

generations to their grandchildren’s children. Worries about the potential for 

immediate exposure to personal injury or environmentally derived insult, and 

a more diffuse concern that important dangers may await our children some 

years from now, continue to spawn irritating (probably irrational) objections 

to developing and deploying exciting new technical possibilities. Well, perhaps they could produce untoward surprises, but they are (probably) manageable. We can count on clever technical solutions. 

“Why can’t they trust us?” Indeed, this deserves analytical attention as well. 

Why do alert publics feel so vulnerable that they increasingly wish for trustworthy institutions? What developments could be devised that publics would 

relax their demand for trustworthiness and accept technical leaders and provide 

support for the technical future we designers see? In effect, “Why,” as Henry 

Higgins and one technical designer put it, “why can’t they be more like us?” 
SECTION VI 

SPACE HISTORY: 

STATE OF THE ART 

INTRODUCTION 

W hat is the current state of space history as the 21st century commences and the Space Age reaches its 50th anniversary? Is it a vibrant marketplace 

of ideas and stimulating perspectives? Is it a moribund backwater of historical 

inquiry with little of interest to anyone and nothing to offer the wider historical 

discipline? As the four essays in this section demonstrate, space history is at neither 

extreme of this dichotomy. It has been energized in the last quarter century by 

a constant stream of new practitioners and a plethora of new ideas and points of 

view. A fundamental professionalization of the discipline has brought to fruition 

a dazzling array of sophisticated studies on all manner of topics in the history of 

spaceflight.Yet, as the collective authors of the section argue, there is much more 

to be done, and each offers suggestions for how historians might approach the 

field in new and different ways, each enriching what already exists. 

This section opens with an essay by Asif A. Siddiqi assessing the state of 

U.S. space history. He asserts that scholars have concentrated their work in 

one of four subfields that collectively may be viewed as making up the whole. 

As Siddiqi writes, “Some saw the space program as indicative of Americans’ 

‘natural’ urge to explore the frontier; some believed that the space program 

was a surrogate for a larger struggle between good and evil; others wrote of a 

space program whose main force was modern American technology; and others described a space program whose central actors were hero astronauts, representing all that was noble in American culture.” He notes that space history 

started as a nonprofessional activity undertaken by practitioners and enthusiasts, always viewing the field from the top down and producing an exceptionally “Whiggish” perspective on the past. In the 1980s, the field began to 

broaden, deepen, and expand through the entry of a number of professionally 

trained historians who brought new skills and new interests to the subject. A 

number of pathbreaking works have emerged, especially in the realm of the 

history of space policy, and the current state of the subdiscipline is vibrant. 

Lest space historians become complacent, however, Siddiqi concludes 

that there is still much to be done. He points to several specific areas that offer 

tantalizing possibilities for future research. These include studies on political, 

social, technological, and cultural history using themes and methodologies 

borrowed from the larger historical community. Good work has already been 

done, and Siddiqi analyzes some of this work, but many opportunities for 

additional study are present. Siddiqi expends considerable effort documenting 

a future research agenda and goes far toward identifying potentially fruitful 

avenues of research for new scholars seeking entrance into the field. 

Siddiqi also comments on the interesting and unusual circumstance of 

government sponsorship of space history and the possibility that this might 
430 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

taint the published product in some way. Many of the historians working in the 

field have been sponsored in some measure by NASA, the United States Air 

Force, or the Smithsonian Institution, either as employees of these entities or 

as contractors or fellows. What does this connection mean for the work done, 

Siddiqi asks? Clearly it plays a role, but what role? This issue itself might be a 

useful avenue of study, relating as it does to the concerns raised in the work of 

Peter Novick and others about the pursuit of objectivity in historical studies.’ 

For many years, a stigma has existed among some academic historians 

against sponsored history; such a view is usually misplaced and not a little 

naive. Those who criticize such work invariably invoke the characterization 

“court historian” to damn the effort. There are, of course, some instances 

of influence that all can point to. But the reality is that historical truth is 

elusive in any setting. Historians usually have a clientele, whether writing 

for other academic specialists in whatever field is under investigation; or for 

groups bound together by religion, ethnicity, labor, etc.; or for any number 

of identifiable groups that have an interest in the subject.2 Consciously or 

unconsciously, historians-even if they have not been formally hired to prepare histories for the group-shape their discourses to provide understanding 

about the past in relationship to ideas already present among those with an 

interest in the subject. If one strays too far afield from the major streams of 

understanding about the subject, the historian may be unable to find an outlet 

for publication, may be censured in reviews, may have his or her livelihood 

destroyed by not receiving tenure, or may lose whatever reputation he or she 

had. All of that takes place, even without serving some formal client that may 

have a vested interest in ensuring that a historian tells a story in a certain way.3 

Still, a study of the influence of government sponsorship on the field of space 

history would prove a fascinating subject of study. 

In chapter 15, Stephen B. Johnson presents a lengthy discussion of the 

historical study of military space history from the 1950s to the present. In 

this exhaustive review, Johnson divides his analysis into major sections, conforming to the various missions that the Department of Defense undertakes 

relative to space operations. After a review of overview sources of military 

history, the author undertakes an analysis of the development and fielding of 

intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM) and space launchers, which defined 

the strategic defense capabilities of the United States during the Cold War. 

1. Peter Nonck, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession 

2. See Roger D. Launius, “NASA History and the Challenge of Keeping the Contemporary 

3. See Roger D. Launius, “Mormon Memory, Mormon Myth, and Mormon History,”Journal oj 

(NewYork: Cambridge University Press, 1988). 

Past,” Public Historian 21 (summer 1999): 63-81. 

Mormon History 21 (spring 1995): 1-24. 
INTRODUCTION - SECTION VI 43 1 

From there, Johnson moves on to discussions of early-warning and space surveillance; command and control; communications; ballistic-missile defense; 

robotic intelligence and reconnaissance; military human spaceflight; weather 

and science; navigation; antisatellite and space warfare; organization, management, and acquisition of space systems; and space power theory. Johnson 

concludes with a gap analysis of “holes in the literature” and offers suggestions 

for future historical study. 

Margaret A. Weitekamp follows with a discussion of how historians 

working in space history might consider the topic with new “tools” drawn 

from social and cultural studies. Indeed, one of the most exciting areas of 

historical inquiry in the last 20 years has been the postmodern analysis of 

history. Weitekamp acknowledges that richness, which ensures within space 

history, as it has elsewhere, “the proliferation of subject areas created when 

historians wrestling with questions of race, class, ethnicity, and gender challenged the artificial nature of the consensus school’s master narrative.” She 

then surveys the field, noting important developments in the application of 

themes in social and cultural studies to the subject of space history, but more 

importantly, Weitekamp then explores the relationship between space history 

and this larger discourse. She finds that “space history exists both in ‘relation 

to’ other history subdisciplines (a terminology which implies separation from 

the other subfields and an internal cohesion within space history, two points 

that deserve questioning in their own right), and in a continually evolving 

‘relationship with’ the rest of the discipline.” 

Weitekamp also finds that the application of “critical theory” to the history of spaceflight may offer uniquely useful perspectives on the subdiscipline. She defines “critical theory” as “an umbrella term that encompasses the 

diverse and often divergent theoretical schools of structuralist, poststructuralist, feminist, Marxist, postmodern, and psychoanalytic theory that emerged 

since the 1970s in literary and anthropological analysis.” Already intriguing 

possibilities for this area have been opened through the work of Jodi Dean, 

Constance Penley, M. G. Lord, De Witt Douglas Kilgore, and other^.^ Greater 

use of these methods of historical inquiry has the potential to transform the 

field of study. 

This section closes with an intriguing and stimulating essay by David H. 

DeVorkin on the importance of the artifact in the study of the history of technology. Most historians, he asserts, do not pay much attention to the objects 

4. Jodi Dean, Aliens in America: Conspiracy Cultures jom Outerspace to Cyberspace (Ithaca, NY 

Cornell University Press, 1998); M. G. Lord, Astro Turf: The Private L$e of Rocket Science (New 

York: Walker & Co., 2005); De Witt Douglas Kilgore, Astrofuturicm: Science, Race, and Visions of 

Utopia in Space (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003); Constance Penley, NASA/ 

TREK: Popular Science and Sex in America (New York: Verso, 1997). 
432 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

that they write about. They use quite traditional sources-manuscript materials and other written work-but fail to observe carefully the actual spacecraft, 

rocket, or other physical object that performed the work under study. He asks 

the important question, “Are artifacts historical evidence? ” Of course they 

are, he notes, but few historians exploit them effectively in their own work. 

Perhaps that is because they fail to grasp their significance, but more importantly, it is probably because they do not understand how they work and why 

they were constructed in the way they were. DeVorkin argues for a greater 

appreciation of the artifact in the enterprise of historical study and the centrality of it in the narratives fashioned by historians of spaceflight. 

Collectively, these four essays point up the richness of the study of the 

history of the American effort to fly in space since the 1950s. As such, they 

represent a report from the field of its status and possibilities for the future. 

Most important, each essay points the direction for future efforts. 
CHAPTER 14 

AMERICAN SPACE HISTORY 

LEGACIES, QUESTIONS, AND OPPORTUNITIES 

FOR FUTURE RESEARCH’ 

Asif A. Siddiqi 

n the 35 years since astronauts Neil A. Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin set I foot on the Moon, no space achievement has quite captured people’s 

imaginations as Apollo. Thirty-five years after that singular event, the 

specter of Apollo still looms large as a benchmark for all that came later. 

In the context of the current inertia of the American space program-the 

Space Shuttle temporarily grounded while astronauts take to orbit in Russian 

rockets for unimaginative tours of the International Space Station-Apollo 

retains an even stronger pull to those seeking adventure and exploration.2 

Given Apollo’s centrality in popular conceptions of the history of the space 

program, it is not surprising that historical writing-both popular and 

academic-has been shaped profoundly by the experience of the Moon 

landings. Even those areas of space history that have no apparent connection 

to Apollo, such as military space history, for example, assume their historical 

places in our memory in relation to Apollo. Because of the project’s status as 

being emblematic of a lost, young, and adventurous America, space historians 

negotiating the delicate boundaries between memory and nostalgia have 

typically veered from the former to the latter with an ease that underscores 

more about the state of the current space program than the one that actually 

happened. In addition, Apollo’s huge shadow has helped to marginalize many 

important but unexplored areas of space history. 

In the past 40 years ofspace history, historians have worked within several 

interpretive approaches to space history, all of them defined and demarcated 

by the shadow of Apollo and its political backdrop, the Cold War. This essay 

is an attempt to revisit that historiography in search of some common unify1. I would like to thank Dwayne A. Day, Steven J. Dick, Roger D. Launius, and Michael J. 

2. For the current crisis, see Roger D. Launius, “After Columbia: The Space Shuttle Program and 

Neufeld for their helpful comments. 

the Crisis in Access to Space,” Artropolitics 2 (July-September 2004): 277-322. 
434 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

ing theme^.^ The goal is to identify certain interpretive and narrative patterns 

and then elaborate on areas where scholarship is lacking or where important 

questions remain unexplored? A close reading of the literature shows that historians have located their work within four different narratives based around 

exploration, competition, technology, and the astronauts. These interpretive 

paradigms continue to dominate and define our understanding of the origins, 

evolution, and nature of the American space program. The categories were 

not mutually exclusive, and the approaches have overlapped over time, but 

these four guiding themes have remained as important explanatory devices. 

Some saw the space program as indicative of Americans’ “natural” urge to 

explore the frontier; some believed that the space program was a surrogate 

for a larger struggle between good and evil; others wrote of a space program 

whose main force was modern American technology; and others described a 

space program whose central actors were hero astronauts, representing all that 

was noble in American culture.’ 

In all of the four schools, which continue to flourish today, historians 

have typically examined the history from the top looking down, describing 

only the tallest trees of a vast forest of society and culture. The first generation 

of scholarship was distinguished by a focus on linear, narrow, and progressoriented narratives unencumbered by context, critique, or culture. Historians 

also shared a nostalgic yearning for the 1960s, the halcyon period of American 

space exploration. Like the space program itself, historians repeatedly romanticized the claimed victories of Apollo without questioning many of the incontrovertible motivations and repercussions of the space program. 

Starting in the 1980s but really coming to fruition in the 1990s, a “new 

aerospace history” began to emerge. Building on a few notable works published during the late Cold War, a new generation of historians tackled the 

history of American space exploration from different perspectives involving 

politics, society, and culture. These new works distinguished themselves from 

the older canon because they revisited, cajoled, and questioned some of the 

basic foundational notions of the received space history. Some did so explic3. For earlier works on the historiography ofAmerican space exploration, see Richard P. Hallion, “A 

Source Guide to the History of Aeronautics and Astronautics,” American Studies International 20, no. 3 

(1982): 3-50; Hunter A. Dupree, “The History ofthe Exploration ofspace: From Official History to 

Contributions to Historical Literature,” Public Historian 8 (1986): 121-128; Pamela E. Mack, “Space 

History,” Technology and Culture 30 (1989): 657-665; Roger D. Launius, “The Historical Dimension 

of Space Exploration: Reflections and Possibilities,” Space Policy 16 (2000): 23-38. 

4. In the paper, I do not distinguish between the often false dichotomy of academic versus popular works. Important contributions to space history have come from both ends ofthe spectrum, and 

both have had their strengths and weaknesses. I also do not explore the study ofinternational cooperation in space history, a vast topic covered by others in this volume. Finally, due to limitations of 

length, I omit discussion of those histories dedicated to the events of the pre-Sputnik era. 

5. I list and describe representative examples from each group in the main body of the essay. 
AMERICAN SPACE HISTORY: LEGACIES, QUESTIONS.. . 435 

itly, others more implicitly. The new history also moved beyond the lenses of 

competition, exploration, technology, or astronauts. In some cases, the literature built upon the older models, while in others, it made a clean break from 

the older canon. 

Historians also moved into new areas of political, technological, social, 

and cultural history benefiting from a shared interest in new sources and new 

methodological approaches. Simultaneously, the old Cold War paradigm of 

historiography continues to flourish, propagated especially in several syntheses, creating an interpretive tension between the old and new writing that may 

promote a middle ground in the future. Whether this mix will generate new, 

interesting, and challenging ideas remains to be seen, but it has been healthy 

for the field to expand beyond the previously narrow borders, if for nothing 

else to link and relocate space history, not as something peculiar and unique, 

but as part of a broader inquiry into American history. 

EXPLORATION 

The most common motif in space historiography has been that of locating 

space exploration as part of an eons-long human urge to push the geographical frontiers of existence. Prescriptive works on space exploration published 

in the pre-Sputnik era-some of which assumed iconic status in later yearsfirmly established such an approach to history. A harbinger of this paradigm 

was Willy Ley, a veteran of early amateur German rocketry groups from the 

1930s. Updating a book he had first authored in 1944 through 21 printings, 

Ley’s Rockets, Missiles, and Man in Space (1968) was a landmark publication that 

former NASA Chief Historian Roger D. Launius has called “one of the most 

significant textbooks available in the mid-twentieth century on the possibilities of space travel.”6 A popular historical narrative tracing the evolution of 

rocket technology from the ancient Babylonians to the mid-l960s, Ley’s work 

weaved together human imperatives and technical evolution in a seamless 

whole. From the beginning, he described his book as “the story of the idea that 

we possibly could, and if so should, break away from our planet and go exploring to others, just as thousands of years ago men broke away from their islands 

and went exploring to other coasts.’” By focusing on a few scattered, talented 

individuals with a vision of space travel, Ley delineated the history of space 

6. Roger D. Launius, Frontiers of Space Exploration (Westport, CT Greenwood Press, 1998), 

p. 190; Willy Ley, Rockets, Missiles, and Men in Space (New York: Viking Press, 1968). Ley also 

published an abridged and slightly updated version of his book the following year as Events in Space 

(New York: D. McKay, 1969). 

7. Willy Ley, Rockets: The Future of Travel Beyond the Stratosphere (New York: The Viking Press, 

1945), p. 3. In popular history, others have connected space history to the exploration paradigm. 

See, for example, Daniel J. Boorstin, The Discoverers (New York: Random House, 1983). 
436 CRITICAL ISSUES INTHE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

exploration as essentially one with an individualistic character. In Ley’s world, 

technology, i.e., the means to fulfill these singular visions, was subordinated 

to the needs and whims of resourceful scientists or engineers whom he called 

“Prophets of Some Honor.” Thus, the principal actors behind space exploration were neither nations nor states, but noble visionaries. Ley also established 

a pantheon of icons for the future history of space; by giving currency to such 

names as Konstantin Tsiolkovskiy, Hermann Oberth, and Robert Goddard, 

he gave a face to the technology.8 German rocketry pioneer Wernher von 

Braun’s History ofRocketry and Space Travel (1966) (cowritten with Frederick I. 

Ordway 111) built upon Ley’s work and cemented a number of unquestioned 

narratives about the origins of the “Space Age,” including the centrality of 

von Braun’s V-2 “rocket team” in the postwar American rocket and space 

program, thus marginalizing a number of other equally important indigenous 

innovators in the American context such as the Guggenheim Aeronautical 

Laboratory at Caltech (GALCIT) and the American Rocket S~ciety.~ So powerful was this synthesis that to this day, almost all history books on space 

exploration begin by invoking Tsiolkovskiy, Oberth, and Goddard-and then 

move to von Braun’s rocket team. 

What these pioneers had in common was a sustained belief that the 

human spirit was possessed of an indomitable urge to explore and, as a corollary, to seek knowledge. In one of his most oft-repeated quotes, the Russian 

theoretician Konstantin Tsiolkovskiy (1857-1935) had written that “the earth 

is the cradle of reason, but one cannot live in a cradle forever.”” For the historian of the American space program, reason was combined with a modern 

version of manifest destiny, a marriage of the near-spiritual urge to explore 

new frontiers and the cold, hard rationale of technology. One of the earliest 

scholarly works to equate the idea of the American West with the space fron8. For biographies, see Helen B. Walters, Hermann Oberth. Father of Space Travel (New York: 

Macmillan, 1962); Hans Barth, Hermann Oberth: Vater der Raumfhrt: autorrsierte Biographie 

(Esslingen: Bechtle, 1991); David A. Clary, Rocket Man: Robert H. Coddard and the Birth of the 

Space Age (New York: Hyperion, 2003); Milton Lehman, This High Man: The Ltfe of Robert H. 

Goddard (New York: Farrar, Straus, 1963); A. Kosmodemiansky, Konstantin Tiolkovsky, 1857-1935 

(Moscow: Nauka, 1985). 

9. Wernher von Braun and Frederick I. Ordway 111, History ofRocketry and Space Travel (New 

York: Thomas Y. Cromwell Company, 1966). The book was published in revised editions in 1969, 

1975, and 1985. The final edition was published as Space Travel: A History (New York: Harper & 

Row, 1985). 

10. K. Tsiolkovskii, “lssledovanie mirovykh prostranstv reaktivnymi priborami (1911-1912 

gg.),” in Izbrannye trudy, ed. B. N. Vorob’ev and V. N. Sokol’skll (Moscow: Nauka, 1962), p. 

196. The original phrase was ‘‘nAaHeTa eCTb KOAbI6eAb pa3yMa, HO Hen6311 BeYHO XXTb 

B KOAbI6eAH,” or “Planeta est’ kolybel’ razuma, no nel’zia vechno zhit’ v kolybeli.” For typical references to the quote, see A. A. Kosmodemyansky, K. E. Tsrolkovsky-His Ltfe and Work (Moscow: 

Nauka, 1960), p. 153; William Shelton, Soviet Space Exploration: The First Decade (New York: 

Washington Square Press, 1968), pp. 12-13; Roger D. Launius, Space Stations: Base Camps to the 

Stars (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 2003), p. 9. 
AMERICAN SPACE HISTORY: LEGACIES, QUESTIONS.. . 437 

tier was The Railroad and the Space Program: An Exploration in Historical Analogy 

(1965), a collection of essays which used the American railroad as a metaphor 

for the slow human migration into space.” These early works foreshadowed 

and exemplified an important thread in the future of space history, equating 

the American frontier in the West with the space frontier beyond the Earth. 

Through the past 50 years, those looking ahead, such as policy-makers 

and spaceflight advocates from John F. Kennedy to Wernher von Braun to 

Mars Society President Robert Zubrin, have used Frederick Jackson Turner’s 

frontier motif to inspire, justify, and advocate space exploration on a grand 

scale.” Those looking back, especially space historians, have also invoked the 

frontier thesis to explain the majesty of the early years of American space 

exploration; they have explained not only how engagement with the frontier 

has shaped American society and culture, but also how the foundations of 

American society and culture-particularly democracy and individualismhave shaped space exploration. The frontier ideal resonated partly because, 

like space explorers, many of the original explorers of the West shared utopian ideals.13 The space program represented a potent union of two powerful 

strands of American culture, the search for utopia and the belief in the power 

of technology, a manifestation of 20th-century technological to pi an ism.'^ 

In the 1960s, at a time when the emerging reevaluation of the frontier thesis 

and its attendant costs to both the environment and the native peoples of the 

continent had yet to enter the mainstream discourse in American history, the 

use of the West as a guiding analogy for space exploration implied expansion, 

development, freedom, and ultimately liberation from the chains of previous 

existence. If there were pitfalls in exploration, they were minimal at best.15 

These markers of frontier exploration resonated deeply with many histori11. Bruce Mazlish, ed , The Railroad and the Space Program: An Exploration in Historical Analogy 

(Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1965). 

12. For Frederick Jackson Turner’s original works on the frontier thesis, see John Mack Faragher, 

ed., Rereading Frederick Jackson Turner: The Signtjicance of the Frontier in American History and Other 

Essays (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994); George Rogers Taylor, The Turner Thesis: 

Concerning the Role of the Frontier in American History, 3rd ed. (Lexington, MA: Heath, 1972). For 

the frontier’s resonance in modern times, see Richard Slotkin, Gnafighter Nation: The Myth ofthe 

Frontier in Twentieth Centnry America (New York: Atheneum, 1992). Roger D. Launius gives some 

notable examples ofprominent advocates invoking the frontier thesis in the 1960s in his “Historical 

Dimension of Space Exploration.” 

13. Roger D. Launius, “Perfect Worlds, Perfect Societies: The Persistent Goal of Utopia in 

Human Spaceflight,”Journal ofthe British Interplanetary Socrety 56 (2003): 338-349. 

14. For an excellent look at the origins of technological utopianism in American culture, see 

Howard P. Segal, Technological Utopianism in American Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago 

Press, 1985). 

15. For critiques of the frontier thesis, see Patricia Nelson Limerick, Clyde A. Milner 11, and 

Charles E. Rankin, eds., Trails: Toward a New Western History (Lawrence: University Press ofKansas, 

1991); Richard White, It’s Your Misfrtune and None ofMy Own: A New History ofthe American West 

(Norman. Oklahoma University Press, 1991). 
438 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

ans, enough that many still invoke them in the 21st century. Describing the 

parallel paths of the Russian and American space programs, author Robert 

Zimmerman, in Leaving Earth: Space Stations, Rival Superpowers, and the Quest 

for Interplanetary Travel (2003), compared them to colonization of Earthly 

landscapes: “The ancestors of both peoples were pioneers . . . . The land both 

groups settled was harsh, brutal, and unyielding. Death was omnipresent. Out 

of these two pioneer struggles have risen nations able to forge in the sky the 

first rockets, the first spacecraft, and the first tentative and grand attempts to 

colonize the stars.”16 Similar notions run through Bruce C. Murray’s Journey 

into Space: The First Three Decades of Space Exploration (1989) and William 

E. Burrows’s Exploring Space: Voyages in the Solar System and Beyond (1990), 

both of which explicitly deal with deep space exploration by robotic probes.” 

That Earthly exploration remains a powerful motif for making sense of space 

exploration is exemplified best by Where Next, Columbus? The Future of Space 

Exploration (1994), a collection of meditations by prominent historians that 

link Columbus’s seabound trip to the early years of space exploration.’* 

Once the landing of Apollo astronauts on the Moon in July 1969 effectively ended the “space race” for the United States, historians took up the 

challenge of chronicling this extraordinary technological achievement in a 

multitude of works, many of which framed the project as part of the human 

exploration imperative. Unlike many other programs of the 1960s, or indeed 

since, the Apollo program represented a perfect distillation of interpretive approaches that focused on exploration since the Apollo missions had 

geographical delimiters that paralleled exploration of the West: beginning 

from the known, the Earth, voyagers set out in a very physical way for the 

unknown, the Moon. In contrast, the hundreds of Earth-orbital missions since 

1972, while risky and adventurous, have not represented physical movement 

in the same way Apollo did.” NASA managers early on recognized Apollo’s 

exceptionalist nature within the space program. In the introduction to one of 

the first volumes to reflect on Apollo, then-NASA Administrator James C. 

Fletcher explicitly located the Apollo expeditions as part of a tradition stretch16. Robert Zimmerman, Leaving Earth: Space Stations, Rival Superpowers, and the Quest for 

Interplanetary Travel (Washington, DC: Joseph Henry Press, 2003), p. 460. 

17. Bruce C. Murray, Journey into Space: The First Three Decades of Space Exploration (New York: 

W. W. Norton, 1989); William E. Burrows, Exploring Space: Voyages in the Solar System and Beyond 

(New York: Random House, 1990). 

18. Valerie Neal, ed., Where Next, Columbus? The Future oJSpace Exploration (New York: Oxford 

University Press, 1994). See also Peter Bond, Reaching for the Stars: An Illustrated History oJManned 

Spacefight, 2nd ed. (London: Cassell, 1996). 

19. Deam argues that “this shift has essentially emptied the [space] program of its public character, moving spaceflight from an open embrace of political action to closed concerns with economics 

and technological determinism” (Dirk Deam, “Public Space: Exploring the Political Dimensions of 

the American Space Program” [Ph.D. diss., University of Iowa, 19991). 
AMERICAN SPACE HISTORY LEGACIES, QUESTIONS.. . 439 

Since the time of the Apollo 11 Moon landing in 1969, space history has matured 

into a much more rigorous and complex area of study, one with which the theme of 

exploration has long been associated. No photograph better illustrates this connection 

than the image of Buzz Aldrin on the Moon. It has assumed iconic proportions in 

modern society. (NASA image no. ASll-40-5903) 

ing back to the Pilgrims at Plymouth and Darwin’s voyages on the HMS 

Beugle; both were “ventures into uncharted Similarly, Harry Hurt 

111, in his For All Munkind (1988), compared the Apollo missions to Earthly 

explorations, specifically invoking “Christopher Columbus’s daring voyage to 

the New World.”21 

20. James C. Fletcher, “Foreword,” in Apollo Expeditions to the Moon, ed. Edgar M. Cortright 

21. Harry Hurt 111, For All Mankind (New York: The Atlantic Monthly Press Book, 1988), p. xiii. 

(Washington, DC: NASA, 1975). 
440 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

Beyond linking the great Earthly explorations and migrations with the 

Apollo expeditions, early works on Apollo, such as the Apollo 11 astronauts’ 

(ghostwritten) First on the Moon (1970) and Richard Lewis’s The Voyages of 

Apollo: The Exploration ofthe Moon (1974), focused predominantly on the people 

at the tip of the iceberg, i.e., the astronauts who performed the missions.22 Two 

decades later, Andrew Chaikin’s landmark A Man on the Moon (1994) continued 

in this vein, merging the exploration motif with the astronauts’ perspectives on 

the project while omitting any interpretive look at the broader political, social, 

or cultural factors behind Ap~llo.~~ By focusing exclusively on the thoughts 

of the astronauts, the details of the missions, and the nuances of the technology, Chaikin masterfully conveyed the experience of Apollo as if it were one 

in which only a few dozen people were involved. Context was provided only 

to the extent that the news media reported it at the time of the Apollo mission~.~~ Thus,in one sense, in the historiography of the space program, Apollo 

became a national, even global experience that was conceived, executed, and 

directly experienced by a few chosen ambassadors. This contradiction may not 

be as irreconcilable as it appears, for Apollo was a unique artifact of its time. 

Millions of people witnessed the first landing of humans on another celestial 

body through their black-and-white TVs in the comfort of their homes. Such 

vicarious exploration had no precedent. If the import of Apollo was ultimately 

global, signaling human migration off the planet, then its immediate communicative power was ultimately largely private, in homes and offices. 

Historically, many of those who advocated space exploration emphasized 

science as an important rationale for exploration. The literature on the history of space-based science has, however, not been significant. Several factors 

explain the weakness of a unified tradition of writing on space science history. 

These include the fragmentary nature of the field, where much of the work is 

generated from other history-of-science subdisciplines such as the history of 

physics, astronomy, life sciences, meteorology, and oceanography. The contributions in two volumes of essays separated by 10 years, Space Science Comes 

ofAge: Perspectives in the History ofthe Space Sciences (1981) and A Spacefdring 

Nation: Perspectives on American Space History and Policy (1991), underline the 

difficult struggles of nascent space-based science constituencies (within solar 

science and planetary science) to escape the shadow of their parent communi22. Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, and Edwin E. Aldrin, Jr., with Gene Farmer and Dora Jane 

Hamblin, First on the Moon (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1970); Richard S. Lewis, The 

Voyages ofApollo: The Exploration of the Moon (New York: Quadrangle, 1974). 

23. Andrew Chaikin, A Man on the Moon: The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts (New York: Viking, 

1994). 

24. For media treatments of the space program, see Andrew A. Klyukovski, “The Space Race as 

the American Dream: Fantasy Theme Analysis of ‘The New York Times’ Coverage” (Ph.D. diss., 

University of Missouri-Columbia, 2002). 
AMERICAN SPACE HISTORY LEGACIES, QUESTIONS.. . 441 

ties (physics and astronomy) .25 Additionally, science has traditionally played a 

secondary (if not tertiary) role in the American space program, behind political and military imperatives. For space historians who have chronicled the 

American space program as political, nationalistic, or technological enterprises, space science has been a corollary theme rather than a central one.26 

Two volumes of NASA’s Exploring the Unknown series chronicling the history 

of American civilian space exploration are the most important contributions 

to space science history, but the editors’ consignment of space sciences to 

volumes 5 and 6 in the series underscores the subfield’s priority in the schematic of space history Finally, historians have frequently seen space 

science as deeply connected to rationales of militarization or exploration. As 

such, space science history remains embedded with these other narratives. For 

example, in his Science with a Vengeance: How the Military Created the US Space 

Sciences after World War I1 (1992), David DeVorkin argued that space science 

was created largely due to the existence of the German V-2 missile, a weapon 

of war whose development had nothing to do with either the search for scientific knowledge or exploration.28 

25. Paul A Hank and Del Chamberlain, eds., Space Science Comes ofAge. Perspectives in the History 

.f Space Sciences (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1981). See also Karl Hufbauer, 

“Solar Observational Capabilities and the Solar Physics Community Since Sputnik, 1957-1988”; 

Joseph N. Tatarewicz, “Space Technology and Planetary Science, 1950-1985,” in A SpacPfanng 

Nation: Perspectives on American Space History and Policy, eds. Martin J. Collins and Sylvia D. Fries 

(Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), pp. 77-114, 115-132. 

26. Two important works on science performed during Apollo are framed as part of programmatic “mission-oriented” histories. See William David Compton, Where No Man Has Cone Bejore: 

A History of Apollo Lunar Exploration Mtssions (Washmgton, DC: NASA SP-4214, 1989); David 

M. Harland, Exploring the Moon: The Apollo Expeditions (London: Springer, 1999). A third, lesserknown but more accomplished work focuses exclusively on the science rather than the missions: 

Donald A. Beattie, Taking Science to the Moon: Lunar Experiments and the Apollo Program (Baltimore: 

Johns Hopkins, 2001). 

27. See particularly the excellent introductory essays in John M. Logsdon, ed., Exploring the 

Unknown: Selected Documents in the History .f the U.S. Civil Space Program, vol. 5, Exploring the 

Cosmos (Washington, DC: NASA SP-2001-4407, 2001); John M. Logsdon et al., eds., Exploring 

the Unknown: Selected Documents in the History of the US. Civil Space Program, vol. 6, Space and 

Earth Science (Washington, DC: NASA SP-2004-4407, 2004). For the few other notable works 

on the history of space science, see Charles A. Lundquist, Skylab’s Astronomy and Space Sciences 

(Washington, DC: NASA, 1979); John A. Pitts, The Human Factor: Btornedicine in the Manned Space 

Program to 2980 (Washington, DC: NASA SP-4213, 1985; John E. Naugle, First Among Equals: 

The Selection of NASA Space Science Experiments (Washington, DC: NASA SP-4215, 1991); David 

Leverington, New Cosmic Horizons: Space Astronomy from the V-2 to the Hubble Space Telescope (New 

York: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 

28. David H. DeVorkin, Science with a Vengeance: How the Military Created the US Space Sciences after 

World War II (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1992); David H. DeVorkin, “Military Origins of the 

Space Sciences in the American V-2 Era,” in National Military Establishments and the Advancement of 

Science and Technology, eds. Paul Forman and Josk M. SLnchez-Ron, Studies in Twentieth Century 

History (Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1996). See also DeVorkin’s “Solar Physics,” in 

Exploring the Unknown, vol. 6, pp. 1-37. 
442 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

COMPETITION AND NATIONAL SECURITY 

The exploration motif overlaps with a second theme running through 

the historiography of space exploration, that of competition. Richard Lewis, 

in his From Vinland to Mars: A Thousand Years ofExploration (1976), eloquently 

illustrated the ways in which competition over resources and land spurred 

exploration. He found a common imperative existing from the Greenland 

and Vinland voyages of the Viking Eric the Red all the way to the Viking 

spacecraft landings on Mars in the bicentennial year of 1976. Framing his 

narrative around this coincidence of names, Lewis focused on competition as 

a guiding metaphor for space exploration: 

The common denominator [in all exploration] is intraspecific competition . . . : deadly competition among men and 

families for land, among nations for power and wealth. This 

is the force that drove the have-nots in medieval Scandinavia 

across uncharted seas, impelled Renaissance Europe to seek 

the wealth of the Indies and circumnavigate the planet, urged 

Amundsen and Scott on the tragic race to the geographic south 

pole, and launched Americans to the Moon.29 

Like Lewis, many space historians have used competition-specifically, 

the Cold War-as a second defining lens to understand space history. Most 

popular accounts of the space race, and many from an academic perspective, 

have framed the American adventure in space as competition with an adversary who did not share the same moral commitment to freedom and equality. 

In the canon, both Sputnik and Apollo emerge, at least implicitly, as material 

representations embedded with notions of two ideologically opposed systems 

of governance. To a large degree, such evaluations of Apollo reflected rhetoric from the 1960s-from American politicians, the American media, and 

from participants in the Apollo project itself. But because accounts of the 

space race have been typically undergirded by implicit claims about morality 

of national cultures, historians rarely engaged in critiques of Apollo or the 

space program in general, since such methodological approaches would be 

tantamount to challenging the moral authority of the United States. In his 

recent Apollo: The EpicJourney to the Moon, an engaging and awe-inspiring 

account of the Apolio project, David West Reynolds distills this rationale 

succinctly and emotionally: 

29. Richard S. Lewis, From Vinland to Mars: A Thousand Years of Exploration (New York: 

Quandrangle, 1976), p. xii. 
AMERICAN SPACE HISTORY LEGACIES, QUESTIONS.. . 443 

[The Moon race] was a Cold War battle to demonstrate the 

superior ability of the superior system, capitalism versus communism . . . . And the battle did prove out the more capable 

system. . . . The reasons are many, but among them the power 

of free enterprise ranks high . . . . Free competition motivated 

American workers whose livelihoods were related to the quality and brilliance of their work, and we saw extraordinary, 

impossible things accomplished by ordinary Americans. The 

American flag on the Moon is such a powerful symbol because 

it is not a vain one. America, like no other nation, was capable 

of the Moon.30 

Beyond linking Cold War competition to celebratory nationalistic 

impulses, others used competition to revisit seminal events in space history. 

John M. Logsdon’s The Decision to Go to the Moon: Project Apollo and the 

National Interest (1970), the classic study of the original imperatives that gave 

rise to Apollo, was one of the earliest.31 Kennedy’s actual decision to go to 

the Moon stemmed from a series of politically inopportune precipitates, 

including the aborted Bay of Pigs invasion and Yuri Gagarin’s historic first 

flight into space in April 1961. Keen to respond to the unending humiliations in the new space frontier, Kennedy enlisted the aid of Vice President 

Lyndon B. Johnson to formulate an ambitious but realistic response to the 

Soviets. By the end of May, after extensive consultations with their advisers, 

Kennedy and Johnson had their goal: send Americans to the Moon before 

the end of the decade, an announcement the President made to a joint session of Congress on 25 May 1961. By synthesizing the disparate threads of 

the events of 1961 using primary documentation, Logsdon laid the 

groundwork for understanding a seminal event in U.S. space policy and thus 

built the foundation for a new interpretive school of space history, space 

policy history.32 

Cold War competition has loomed large in the vast subgenre of space 

policy history, and a number of works have sought to explain the twists and 

turns of American space policy through its interdependence with Cold War 

30. David West Reynolds, Apollo: The Epicjourney to the Moon (New York: Tehabi, 2002), p. 257. 

31. John M. Logsdon, The Decision to Go to the Moon: Project Apollo and the National Interest 

(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1970). 

32. For collections that include essays on the history of space policy, see Radford Byerly, Jr., 

ed., Space Policy Reconsidered (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1989); Radford Byerly, Jr., ed., Space 

Policy Alternatives (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992); Roger D. Launius, ed., Organizing& the 

Use of Space: Historical Perspectives on a Persistent Issue (San Diego: Univelt, 1995); Eligar Sadeh, 

ed., Space Politics and Policy: An Evolutionary Perspective (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer Academic 

Publishers, 2003). 
444 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

politics on an international scale.33 The results of several history conferences 

in the 1980s-hosted by NASA and the National Air and Space Museumbroke new ground in the field of space policy history by going beyond the 

original Cold War competition dynamic.34 A number of these papers departed 

from much of the early historiography by focusing on post-Apollo efforts 

including the space station Freedom and the Hubble Space Telescope. In exploring, for example, how NASA’s Space Station Task Force convinced a lukewarm White House to support the original Freedom proposal in the early 

1980s, Howard McCurdy highlighted the influence of government agencies 

over governmental policy.35 Others explored the dynamics of space policy 

through specific presidential administrations, thus analyzing the causes why 

some space projects survive and others don’t, depending on politics at the 

highest 

A number of space policy histories took an overtIy critical stance to NASA 

and its mission, focusing often on the lack of foresight exhibited by policymakers and managers at NASA, the Congress, and the Executive Branch.37 

Amitai Etzioni’s The Moon Doggle: Domestic and International Implications of the 

Space Ruce (1964), although not a history book, was one such early critique 

which called the entire enterprise of Apollo into doubt since he believed that 

33. See, for example, William H. Schauer, The Politlcs of Space: A Comparison of the Soviet and 

American Space Programs (New York: Holmes & Meier Publishers, 1976); Xavier Pasco, La 

Politique Spatiale des Etats-Unis: 1958-1995: Technologre, in&& national et dtbat public (Paris: 

L’Harmattan, 1997); Matthew J. Von Bencke, The Politics ofspace: A History ofU.S.-Soviet/Russian 

Competition and Cooperation in Space (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997); Dale L. Hayden, The 

International Development of Space and Its Impact on US. National Space Policy (Maxwell AFB, AL: 

Airpower Research Institute, College of Aerospace Doctrine, Research and Education, Air 

University, 2004). 

34. For the proceedings of the 1981 and 1987 conferences, see Hade and Chamberlain, Space 

Science Comes of Age; Collins and Fries, Spacefaring Nation. The proceedings of a similar conference hosted by Yale University in 1981 were published as Alex Roland, ed., A Spacefriug People: 

Perspectives on Early Spacefight (Washington, DC: NASA SP-4405, 1985). 

35. Howard E. McCurdy, “The Space Station Decision: Politics, Bureaucracy, and the Making 

of Public Policy,” in Spacefaring Nation, ed. Collins and Fries, pp. 9-28. 

36. Linda T. Krug, Presidential Perspectives on Space Exploration: Guiding Metaphors From Eisenhower 

to Bush (New York: Praeger, 1991); Derek W. Eliott, “Finding an Appropriate Commitment: 

Space Policy Development Under Eisenhower and Kennedy, 1954-1963” (Ph.D. diss., George 

Washington University, 1992); Howard E. McCurdy, The Space Station Decision: Incremental Politics 

and Technological Choice (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1990); Mark Damohn, Back Down to Earth: The 

Development of Space Policy for NASA During thejimmy Carter Administration (San Jose, CA: Authors 

Choice Press, 2001). 

37. Erik Bergaust, Murder on Pad 34 (New York: Putnam, 1968); Erlend A. Kennan and Edmund 

H. Harvey, Jr., Mission to the Moon: A Critical Reexamination of NASA and the Space Program (New 

York: Morrow, 1969); Hugo Young, Brian Silcock, and Peter Dunn, journey to Tranquillity: The 

History ofMan’s Assault on the Moon (London: Cape, 1969); Roger Handberg, Reinventing NASA: 

Human Spaceflight, Bureaucracy and Politics (Westport, CT Praeger, 2003); Greg Klerkx, Lost in 

Space: The Fall of NASA and the Dream of a New Space Age (New York: Pantheon Books, 2004). 
AMERICAN SPACE HISTORY: LEGACIES, QUESTIONS.. . 445 

it represented a cynical public relations exercise diverting attention away from 

more pressing domestic issues such as the War on Poverty.38 

Since the mid-l980s, a number of important works used the Cold War 

competition paradigm but focused specifically on national security programs, 

which constituted about half of all national expenditures on spaceflight yet 

received relatively little scrutiny from historians. The earliest academic work 

in this subfield was Paul B. Stares’s The Militarization of Space: U.S. Policy, 

1945-1984 (1985), which examined the rise of the American space weapons 

program and its largely unrecorded but substantial influence over American 

military policy.39 Writing during a time of extreme tension between the 

Soviet Union and the United States, Stares argued that the arms race was 

migrating to the arena of space by the mid-1980s. Equally groundbreaking 

was journalist William E. Burrows’s Deep Black: Space Espionage and National 

Security (1986), in which he focused on the development of highly classified 

photoreconnaissance satellites which spy on other nations. Using anonymous 

sources and declassified materials, he wove a story of a secret world that in fact 

consumed a substantial share of the American space budget but whose very 

existence was never explicitly acknowledged by the U.S. g~vernment.~~ 

The early work of Stares and Burrows was overshadowed by CIAsponsored post-Cold War declassification initiatives. In 1995, the U.S. government revealed details of one of the biggest secrets of the Cold War, the 

United States’ first operational spy satellite system, CORONA, whose satellites 

flew dozens of missions in the 1960s over secret targets in the Soviet Union, 

China, Vietnam, and elsewhere. If earlier writing on the genesis of the U.S. 

space effort emphasized civilian programs such as Vanguard and Explorer, 

the CORONA revelations helped to reframe the early years of the American 

space program as parallel and sometimes interconnected civilian and military 

38. Amitai Etzioni, The Moon Doggle: Domestic and International Implications of the Space Race 

(Garden City, NY Doubleday, 1964). For other contemporary works, see Edwin Diamond, The 

Rise and Fall of the Space Age (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1964); Vernon van Dyke, Pride and 

Power: The Rationale ofthe Space Program (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1964). 

39. Paul B. Stares, The Militarization of Space: U.S. Policy, 1945-1984 (Ithaca: Cornell University 

Press, 1985). I differentiate here between military space programs and intelligence space programs, 

both of which fall under national security programs. The former include weapons development, 

while the latter include reconnaissance satellites. The earliest open work to explore the American 

military and intelligence space programs was Phillip Klass’s Secret Sentries in Space (New York: 

Random House, 1971). Anthony Kenden was another pioneering scholar in the field. See his “U.S. 

Reconnaissance Satellite Program,” Journal oj the British Interplanetary Society (July 1978), and “A 

New U.S. Military Space Mission,” Journal of the British Interplanetary Society (October 1982). 

40. William E. Burrows, Deep Black: Space Espionage and National Security (New York: Berkley 

Books, 1986). For a Cold War-era look at space weaponization, see Curtis Peebles, Battlefor Space 

(Dorset, U.K.: Blandford, 1983). Another important contribution in the pre-CORONA-revelation era was Jeffrey T. Richelson’s America’s Secret Eyes in Space: The U.S. Keyhole Spy Satellite 

Program (New York: Harper & Row, 1990). 
446 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

projects. Where civilian efforts, especially the human spaceflight program, 

had assumed center stage in the historiography, CORONA highlighted how 

much of the old history had told only half the story. The CIA’S first deputy 

director for science and technology, Albert D. “Bud” Wheelon, who managed the CORONA program in the mid-l960s, wrote in Eye in the Sky: The 

Stovy ofthe CORONA Spy Satellites (1998): 

When the American government eventually reveals the full 

range of reconnaissance systems developed by this nation, the 

public will learn of space achievements every bit as impressive as the Apollo moon landings. One program proceeded in 

utmost secrecy, the other on national television. One steadied the resolve of the American public; the other steadied the 

resolve of American president^.^^ 

Photoreconnaissance satellite programs such as CORONA and its successors, such as the KH-9 HEXAGON and KH-11 KENNAN, consumed a 

lion’s share of the U.S. “black” space program and, in fact, drove much of early 

U.S. space policy. Historical details of other important programmatic elements 

of American national security projects, such as early-warning systems, signals 

intelligence, military communications, meteorology, navigation, antisatellite, and (abandoned) human military spaceflight projects, have come to light 

owing to the research of several historians including R. Cargill Hall, Jeffrey T. 

Richelson, and Dwayne A. Day, whose works represented a major shift in the 

scholarship on military space programs, moving from speculative works based 

on rumor, leaks, and analysis of orbital parameters to using primary documentation.42 Day’s work has been particularly groundbreaking, opening up previ41. Albert D. Wheelon, “CORONA: A Triumph of American Technology,” in Eye in the Sky: 

The Story ofthe CORONA Spy Satellites, ed. Dwayne A. Day et al. (Washington, DC: Smithsonian 

Institution Press, 1998), p. 38. 

42. For a discussion of early warning, see Jeffrey T. Richelson, America’s Space Sentinels: DSP 

Satellites and National Security (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1999); R. Cargill Hall, 

“Missile Defense Alarm: The Genesis of Space-Based Infrared Early Warning,” Quest: The History 

ofSpaceflight Quarterly 7, no. 1 (1999): 5-17. For naval strategy and military space programs, see 

Norman Friedman, Seapower and Space: From the Dawn of the Missile Age to Net-Centric Wafare 

(Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2000). For manned military programs, see Roy F. Houchin 

11’s “Why the Air Force Proposed the Dyna-Soar X-20 Program” and “Why the Dyna-Soar X-20 

Program Was Cancelled,” both in Quest: The History of Spaceflight Magazine 3, no. 4 (1994): 5-12 

and 35-37, respectively; Steven R. Strom, “The Best Laid Plans: A History ofthe Manned Orbiting 

Laboratory,” Crosslink 5, no. 2 (2004): 11-15. For weather satellite programs, see Dwayne A. Day, 

“Dark Clouds: The Classified Origins of the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program,” Spaceflight 

43 (2001): 382-385; R. Cargill Hall, “A History of the Military Polar Orbiting Meteorological 

Satellite Program,” Quest: The Hkfory of Spacefight Quarterly 9, no. 2 (2002): 4-25. For navigation 

satellites, see Bradford W. Parkinson et al., “A History of Satellite Navigation,” Navigation:Journal 

continued on the next page 
AMERICAN SPACE HISTORY LEGACIES, QUESTIONS.. . 447 

ously hidden aspects of geodetic, signals intelligence, and photoreconnaissance 

satellite pr0jects.4~ His recent work on the Air Force’s interest in developing a 

dual human space capsule and reconnaissance satellite in the late 1950s adds to 

our understanding of the motivations and strategies institutions used to achieve 

specific goals in the early days of space e~ploration.~~ 

This substantive (and generational) shift in scholarship, made possible by 

post-Cold War declassifications, has allowed the study of American mil 

space history to focus on questions common to the study of American military 

history and intelligence collection, such as civil-military relations, interservice and interorganizational rivalry, and the relationship between technological development and mission requirements. Day, for example, produced 

important scholarship on the uses of satellite intelligence in monitoring the 

supersecret Soviet human lunar landing project in the 1960s, thus illuminating 

the hitherto unknown ways in which the civilian NASA interacted with the 

intelligence community.45 Richelson’s groundbreaking The Wizurds of Lungley 

(2001), a history of the CIA’S Directorate of Science and Technology which 

developed and deployed both photoreconnaissance and signals intelligence 

systems during the Cold War, also exemplifies this new generation. Weaving 

continued from the previous page 

of the Institute of Navigation 42, no. 1, special issue (1995): 109-164; Chris Banther, “A Look into 

the History of American Satellite Navigation,” Quest: The History of Spaceflight Quarterly 11, no. 3 

(2004): 40-48. For antisatellite projects, see Wayne R. Austerman, Program 437: The Air Force’s First 

Antisatellite System (Peterson AFB, CO: Office of History, 1991); Dwayne A. Day, “Arming the 

High Frontier,” Spaceflight 46 (2004): 467-471. For organizational histories, see Harold M. Sapolsky, 

Science and the Navy: The History of the Offe of Naval Research (Princeton: Princeton University 

Press, 1990); David N. Spires, Beyond Horizons: A Hagcentury $Air Force Space Leadership (Peterson 

AFB: Air Force Space Command, 1997); James Bamford, Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret 

National Security Agency (New York: Anchor Books, 2001); Jeffrey T. Richelson, The Wizards of 

Langley: Inside the CIA’S Directorate of Science and Technology (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2001). 

For command and control, see David C. Arnold, Spying from Space: Constructing America’s Satellite 

Command and Control Systems (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2005). 

43. Day has published a series of articles on these topics. For geodetic projects, see “Mapping the 

Dark Side ofthe World: Part 1: The KH-5 ARGON Geodetic Satellite” and “Mapping the Dark Side 

ofthe World: Part 2: Secret Geodetic Programmes after ARGON,” both in Spaceflight 40 (1998): 264- 

269 and 303-310, respectively. For signals intelligence satellites, see “Tinker, Tailor, Radar, Spy: Early 

American Ferret and Radar Satellites,” Spaceflight 43 (2001): 288-293; “Ferrets Above: American 

Signals intelligence Satellites During the 1960s,” Internationaljournal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence 

17, no. 3 (2004): 449-467. For photoreconnaissance, see “A Sheep in Wolf‘s Clothing: The Samos 

E-5 Recoverable Satellite, Part 1,” Spaceflight 44 (2002): 424-431; “A Square Peg in a Cone-Shaped 

Hole: The Samos E-5 Recoverable Satellite, Part 2,” Spaceflight 45 (2003): 71-79; “From Cameras to 

Monkeys to Men: The Samos E-5 Recoverable Satellite, Part 3,” Spaceflight 45 (2003): 380-389. 

44. Day, “From Cameras to Monkeys to Men.” 

45. Dwayne A. Day and Asif A. Siddiqi, “The Moon in the Crosshairs: CIA Intelligence on 

the Soviet Manned Lunar Programme,” Spaceflight 45 (2003): 466-475 and 46 (2004): 112-125; 

Dwayne A. Day, “From the Shadows to the Stars: James Webb’s Use of Intelligence Data in the 

Race to the Moon,” Air Power History 51, no. 4 (winter 2004): 30-39. See also Roger D. Launius, 

“NASA Looks to the East: American Intelligence Estimates of Soviet Capabilities and Project 

Apollo,” Air Power History (fall 2001): 5-15. 
448 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

an intricate story ofvarious projects that “represented a quantum leap in U.S. 

intelligence capabilities,” he locates the development of these systems in a 

broader context involving relationships with influential scientists outside the 

agency, the necessity to fill gaps in intelligence collection, and the connections between satellite development and intelligence 

The two most important works on CORONA, Day et al.’s Eye in the Sky 

and McDonald’s CORONA, included contributions from individuals who 

participated in CORONA development in the late 1950s and early 1960s; as 

such, they can be characterized as semiofficial histories.47 Both unequivocally 

extolled the technological, managerial, and operational successes of the project. Its history was framed as part of a singularly powerful story about the effcacy of good management and high technology to benefit the national interest 

of the United States, which was synonymous with engendering peace and 

freedom abroad. Writing about CORONA’S use in monitoring compliance 

with arms control agreements, historian Ernest R. May concluded his essay by 

suggesting that “probably . . . the best one-line epitaph for CORONA would 

read: ‘It helped keep peace in the nuclear age’.’Y8 

The end of the Cold War-specifically the collapse of the Soviet 

empire-validated, to some degree, the moral ground for historians writing 

of American military space programs. The writing on CORONA echoed 

a powerful strand of post-1991 historiography of the Cold War in general, 

which celebrated American motives over ideologically and morally suspect 

Soviet intentions. The post-Cold War self-congratulatory climate insulated 

the history of CORONA or other U.S. military space programs from critiques of their relationship to the Cold War military-industrial complex or 

46. Richelson, Wtzards of Langley, p. 287. For a poor example of the “new” history-on the 

understudied topic of intelligence analysis-see David T. Lindgren, Trust But Vertfy: Imagery Analysis 

zn the Cold War (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2000). For civil-military interactions, see 

John Cloud, “Imaging the World in a Barrel: CORONA and the Clandestine Convergence of the 

Earth Sciences,” Social Studies of Science 31, no. 2 (2001): 231-251; John Cloud, “Re-Viewing the 

Earth: Remote Sensing and Cold War Clandestine Knowledge Production,” Quest: The History 

of Spaceflight Quarterly 8, no. 2 (2001): 4-16; Ronald E. Doel, “Constituting the Postwar Earth 

Sciences: The Military’s Influence on the Environmental Sciences in USA After 1945,” Social 

Studies ofscience 33, no. 5 (2003): 635-666. 

47. Day et al., Eye in the Sky; Robert McDonald, ed., CORONA: Between the Sun G the Earth: The 

First NRO Reconnaissance Eye in Space (Bethesda, MD: American Society for Photogrammetry and 

Remote Sensing, 1997). FrJr derivative works based on the above, see Curtis Peebles, The Corona 

Project: America’s First Spy Satelhtes (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1997); Philip Taubman, 

Secret Empire: Eisenhower, the CIA, and the Hidden Story of America’s Space Espionage (New York: 

Simon & Schuster, 2003). For an overview of the literature on CORONA, see Dwayne A. Day, 

“Rashomon in Space: A Short Review of Official Spy Satellite Histories,” Quest: The History of 

Spaceflight Quarterly 8, no. 2 (2000): 45-53. 

48. Ernest R. May, “Strategic Intelligence and U.S. Security: The Contributions of CORONA,” 

in Eye in the Sky, p. 28. 
AMERICAN SPACE HISTORY LEGACIES, QUESTIONS.. . 449 

as part of American interventionist aims in global conflicts played out in the 

developing world (in, for example, Southeast Asia and Central America) .49 

While the contextual touchstone of U.S. military space history is the 

Cold War, the literature has remained woefully disconnected from many of 

the broader intellectual debates that have characterized the historiography 

of the Cold War through the past 40 years and now in the post-Cold War 

era. Beginning with the historians who defended the policy of containment 

against expansionist Soviet intentions, to the generation of revisionists who 

argued the left-liberal position that American economic interests on a global 

level contributed to the Cold War, to the postrevisionists who emphasized 

misperception and misunderstanding to explain much of the Cold War, the 

canon has passed through many transformation^.^^ From the 1980s, and especially in the post-Cold War period, several new threads emerged as diplomatic, social, and cultural historians contributed richly to understanding not 

only international relations, but also domestic American cultural currents that 

formed part of the mosaic of the country’s trajectory through the Cold War. 

For example, a new generation of historians is now looking at how domestic 

culture affected foreign policy.51 

In terms of international competition-the principal context for the origins of the American space program-the biggest public splash was made by 

John Lewis Gaddis’s We Know Now: Rethinking Cold War Histovy (1997), which 

harked back to the original view that Stalin’s personality, Soviet authoritarianism, and communist ideology were principal reasons for the Cold War.52 

49. For a rare example on the strategic dimension ofspace support during wartlme, see Henry W. 

Brandli, “The Use of Meteorological Satellites in Southeast Asia Operations,” Aerospace Historian 

29, no. 3 (1982): 172-175. 

50. For useful summaries of the enormous transformations in Cold War hlstoriography, see 

Melvyn P. Leffler, “The Cold War: What Do ‘We Know NOW’?’’ American Historical Review 104, 

no. 2 (1999): 501-524; Timothy J. White, “Cold War Historiography ew Evidence Behind 

Traditional Typographies,” International Social Science Review 1, no. 1 (fall-winter 2000). 

51. David Campbell, Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity 

(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992); Brenda Gayle Plummer, Rising Wind: Black 

Americans and U.S. Foreign Affairs, 1935-2960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 

1996); Akira Iriye, Cultural Internationalism and World Order (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1997); 

Frank Costigliola, ‘“Unceasing Pressure for Penetration’: Gender, Pathology, and Emotion in 

George Kennan’s Formation of the Cold War,”Journal of American History 84 (1997): 1309-1339; 

Robert D. Dean, “Masculinity as Ideology,” Diplomatic History 22 (1998): 29-62. 

52.John Lewis Gaddis, We Know Now: Rethinking Cold War History (Oxford Clarendon Press, 1997). 

See also Gaddq “Rethinking Cold War History: A Roundtable Discussion,” in At the End of the 

American Century: America’s Role in the Post-Cold War World, ed. Robert L. Hutchins (Baltnnore: Johns 

Hopkins, 1998), pp. 52-66; Douglas J. Macdonald,“Commumst Bloc Expansion in the Early ColdWar: 

Challenging Realism, Refuting Revisionism,” International Security 20 (1995-1996): 152-188. For sirmlar perspectives on the Soviet side, seeVladislav Zubok and Constantine Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin’s 

Cold War: From Stalin to Khrushchw (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996);Vojtech Mastny, 

The Cold War and Soviet Insecurity:The Stalin Years (NewYork: Oxford Umversity Press, 1996). 
450 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

Gaddis’s arguments were countered by many who emphasized and explored 

ideology on both sides, the organization of overseas propaganda by both 

governments, transnational global relations, the relationship between military capabilities and diplomatic policies, the end of colonialism, and conflicts 

played out between “strong” and “weak” powers.53 Military space historians 

whose objects of study are firmly embedded in the Cold War have yet to 

evolve through these larger debates. The recent works on CORONA, for 

example, implicitly and closely follow the “Gaddis school,” remaining disconnected from equally compelling but entirely different narratives of the history 

of the Cold War.54 In The Devil We Knew: Aweticans and the Cold War (1993), 

respected diplomatic historian H. W. Brands argued that the battle with the 

Soviet Union served a spectrum of psychological, economic, strategic, and 

political imperatives. He claimed that the United States subverted some of the 

nation’s best principles to win the Cold War. Thus any proclaimed victory 

was, at best, ambigu~us.~~ How does the success of CORONA fit into such 

thinking? We may have much to learn from an exploration of this question. 

ARTIFACTUAL AND PROGRAMMATIC HISTORIES 

Beyond exploration and competition, a third large body of space history 

represents history centered on artifacts and/or programs. Willy Ley’s early 

works-as well as those of David Lasser, Chas G. Philp, and P. E. Cleatorpioneered the artifact-centered history by merging the canon ofpopular science 

with popular history.56 This school focused mainly on explaining how particu53. See for example, Thomas Borstelmann, Apartheid’s Reluctant Uncle: The United States 

and Southern Afica in the Early Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Robert 

J. McMahon, The Cold War on the Periphery: The United States, India, and Pakistan (New York: 

Columbia University Press, 1994); David Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb: The Soviet Union and 

Atomic Energy, 1939-1954 (New Haven, CT Yale University Press, 1994); Thomas Risse-Kappen, 

Cooperation Among Democracies: The European Influence on U.S. Foreign Policy (Princeton, NJ: 

Princeton University Press, 1995); Ilya Gaiduk, The Soviet Union and the Vietnam War (Chicago: I. 

R. Dee, 1996); Steven J. Zaloga, The Kremlin’s Nuclear Sword: The Rise and Fall ofRussia’s Strategic 

Nuclear Forces, 1945-2000 (Washington, mithsonian Institution Press, 2002). 

54. For a balanced view of America ary space policy within the broader international 

context, see Michael E. O’Hanlon, Neither Star Wars nor Sanctuary: Constraining the Military Uses 

of Space (Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, 2004). The few explicit critiques of the 

U.S. military space program, unfortunately, have been shrill and largely without value. See, for 

example, Jack Manno, Arming the Heavens: The Hidden Military Agenda for Space, 1945-1995 (New 

York: Dodd, Mead, & Co., 1984); Loring Wirbel, Star Wars: US Tools of Space Supremacy (London: 

Pluto Press, 2004). 

55. H. W. Brands, The Devil We Knew: Americans and the Cold War (New York: Oxford University 

Press, 1993). 

56. David Lasser, The Conquest of Space (New York The Penguin Press, 1931); Chas G. Philp, 

Stratosphere and Rocket Flight (Astronautics) (London: Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons, Ltd., 1935); P. E. Cleator, 

Rockets Through Space:The Dawn of Interplanetary Travel (New York Simon & Schuster, 1936). 
AMERICAN SPACE HISTORY: LEGACIES, QUESTIONS.. . 45 1 

lar technologies worked, how they were developed, how they were tested, and 

finally, how they behaved during operational flights. De Witt Douglas Kilgore, 

in his recent Astrojuturism: Science, Race, and Visions of Utopia in Space (2003), 

calls the authors of this subgenre “scientists, engineers, and writers [who were] 

public apologists for the value of science.”57 Their works, grounded in scientific 

laws and mathematics, were not only accounts of past technological developments, but also contained narratives about the immense potential of engineers 

and managers to solve engineering problems; on a fundamental level, they are 

narratives about the “myth of [technological] progress.”58 

The programmatic histories typically encompass an arc from the conception of the project (the first chapter) to the final successful mission (the 

last) while maintaining a perspective that renders extraprogrammatic perspectives invisible. By rejecting contingency and context and embracing narratives 

of chronology and progress, they represent the distillation of teleology and 

Whiggish notions in space history.59 The central actors in programmatic histories have typically been the artifact-the rocket engine, the launch vehicle, 

the spacecraft, and the ground complex. Such a focus reflects the organizational approach of the early American space program, where any new space 

technologies-such as liquid-hydrogen propulsion technology, for examplewere developed under discrete NASA programs (in this case, Centaur).60 As 

a result, programmatic histories have been frequently indistinguishable from 

artifactual histories. 

Building on the tradition of Ley, Lasser, and others, beginning in the 

1960s and continuing to the present, the NASA History Office has produced 

a series of works that have focused on particular programs. Although these 

studies were largely divorced from broader political, social, or cultural concerns, they served as important foundations for future historians to study 

how and why particular technologies emerged and how states and institutions 

arbitrate over questions of technology and management. An exemplary and 

excelIent first step in the field was The History of Rocket Technology: Essays on 

Research, Development, and Utility (1964), a collection of essays on the development of ballistic missiles and spacecraft by a number of important architects 

57. De Witt Douglas Kilgore, Astrofuturtsm: Science, Race, and Visions of Utopia in Space 

(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003). 

58. For a critique of the “myth of progress” in the history of technology, see John Staudenmaier, 

Technology’s Storytellers: Reweaving the Human Fabric (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985). 

59. The term “Whig history” originally comes from Herbert Butterfield’s The Whig Interpretation 

ofHistory (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1931), where, in his examination of British constitutional 

history, he found a historical canon that framed history from a presentist stance without taking into 

account the viewpoints prevailing during the times of the figures under study. His was also an early 

critique of narratives centered on the “march of progress.” 

60. For Centaur, see Virginia P. Dawson and Mark D. Bowles, Taming Liquid Hydrogen: The 

Centaur Upper Stage Rocket, 1958-2002 (Washington, DC: NASA SP-2004-4230,2004). 
452 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

of the U.S. rocketry and space program, including Walter R. Dornberger, 

Frank J. Malina, and Wernher von Braun. In his preface, then-NASA Chief 

Historian Eugene M. Emme argued that rocket technology was of fundamental importance to Western society, in effect restating the Cold War paradigm but linking it to the development of modern science and technology: 

“The eminence of Western science and technology-and all that this means, 

including but also beyond the connotations of national power-is not a little 

dependent upon the short and long-term success of technological progress in 

rocketry and astronautics.”61 All of these essays reflected prevailing interpretive trends in the relatively new field of history of technology, whose practitioners were fascinated with inventors, their inventions, and the effect of these 

inventions on society. In other words, these histories approached technology 

through deterministic and unidirectional perspectives where technology had 

profoundly impacted societies; the possibility of a reverse relationship was left 

unexplored. In his introduction to the 1964 volume, Emme encapsulated this 

view, suggesting that “rocketry has influenced the entire structure and conduct of national and international politics and economics.”62 

Since the Emme volume, NASA has sponsored numerous works in the 

canon, many of which have contributed to recording and chronicling important aspects of the country’s efforts to explore space. The biggest subgroupon human spaceflight-includes Swenson, Grimwood, and Alexander’s This 

New Ocean: A History of Project Mercury (1966); Hacker and Grimwood’s On 

the Shoulders of Titans: A History of Project Gemini (1977); Benson and Faherty’s 

Moonport: A History of Apollo Launch Fac es and Operations (1978); Brooks, 

Grimwood, and Swenson’s Chariots for Apollo: A History of Manned Lunar 

Spacecraft (1979); Compton and Benson’s Living and Working in Space: A History 

of Skylab (1983); and Compton’s Where No Man Has Gone Before: A History of 

Apollo Lunar Exploration Missions (1989) .63 Other NASA or NASA-sponsored 

books have focused on robotic missions, including NASA’s extraordinarily successful and impressive deep space and interplanetary programs.64 A recent work, 

-~ 

61. Eugene M. Emme, ed., The History of Rocket Technology: Essays on Research, Development, and 

62. Emme, History of Rocket Technology, p. 1. 

63. Loyd S. Swenson, Jr., et al., This New 0cean:A History of Project Mercury (Washington, DC: NASA 

SP-4201, 1966); Barton C. Hacker and James C. Grimwood, On the Shoulders $Titans: A History $ 

Project Gemini (Washmgton, DC: NASA SP-4203, 1977); Charles D. Benson and W&am Barnahy 

Faherty, Moonport:A History ofApollo Launch Fac es and Operations (Washington, DC: NASA SP-4204, 

1978); Courtney G. Brooks et al., Chariots forAp01lo:A History $Manned Lunar Spacecraft (Washmgton, 

DC: NASA SP-4205,1979);W. David Compton and Charles D. Benson, Living and Working in Space:A 

History $Skylab (Washington, DC: NASA SP-4208,1983); Compton, Where No Man Has Gone Bejore. 

64. Richard Fimmel et al., Pioneer Odyssey (Washington, DC: NASA SP-394/396, 1977); 

Henry C. Dethloff and Ronald A. Schorn, Voyager’s Grand Tour: To The Outer Planets and Beyond 

(Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2003). 

Utility (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1964), p. 1. 
AMERICAN SPACE HISTORY LEGACIES, QUESTIONS.. . 453 

No aspect of space travel is more exciting or has received greater historical attention 

than the human component. Too many observers, however, are too enthralled with 

the spectacle of flight to probe the history of the activity deeply. Here IS the Return 

to Flight launch of Space Shuttle Discoveryand its five-man crew from Pad 395 at 

11:37 a.m., 29 September 1988, as Discoveryembarked on a mission of 4 days and 1 

hour. (NASA image no. 88PC-1001) 

To Reach the High Frontier: The History of U.S. Launch Vehicles (2002), updated 

Emme’s earlier seminal work by adding a number of essays on the technological development of the major American satellite launchers derived from Cold 

War-era warhorses such as the Atlas and Titan ICBMs.65 The book was a timely 

update on the history of efforts to develop efficient access to space. 

Beyond NASA, unofficial historians have devoted an enormous amount 

of ink and paper to the early American human spaceflight program. These 

works, which exploded in number in the late 1990s and the first decade of the 

21st century, represent the perfectly idealized form of the programmatic and 

artifactual history. Many of the artifactual histories, such as Dennis Jenkins’s 

65. Roger D. Launius and Dennis R. Jenkins, eds., To Reach the High Frontier: A History of 

U.S. Launch Vehicles (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2002). See also the essays on 

launch vehicles and access to space in John M. Logsdon et al., eds., Exploring the Unknown: Selected 

Documents in the History .f the U.S. Civil Space Program, vol. 4, Accessing Space (Washington, DC: 

NASA SP-4407, 1999). 
454 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

Space Shuttle: The History ofthe National Space Transportation System: The First 100 

Missions (2001), comprise extremely thorough and informative narratives, providing an engineer’s perspective on the many technical decisions during design, 

testing, and operations of particular projects.66 Because of their distance from 

the original events, the prevailing context of a directionless American space 

program, and perceptions of American greatness compromised by liberals and 

social programs, these works communicate not only nostalgia, but also regret.67 

In Leaving Earth (2003), Robert Zimmerman notes, “Can we no longer imagine a future where humanity goes out and settles the far-flung stars? Have we 

become so small-minded that we cannot envision a tomorrow as idealistic and 

hopeful as that imagined by men like Ley, Korolev, and von Braun?”68 

Histories of robotic exploration have been less mired in the betrayal of the 

post-Apollo times. Like their human spaceflight counterparts, they are coherent and useful accounts of humanity’s first efforts to probe beyond circumterrestrial space. There exist comprehensive and technically detailed histories of 

Voyager, Galileo, Ulysses, and Mars Pathfinder, as well as broader histories of 

lunar and planetary e~ploration.~~ As part of its Exploring the Unknown series, 

NASA has also sponsored studies on scientific research by robotic probes.’’ 

The study of applications satellites (communications, weather, remote sensing, etc.) remains relatively neglected within the space history community, 

because it lacks the cachet of both human and deep space exploration, in part 

66. Dennis R. Jenkins, Space Shuttle: The History of the National Space Transportation System: The 

First 100 Missions (Cape Canaveral, FL: D. R. Jenkins, 2001). See also Richard S. Lewis, The 

Voyages of Columbia: The First True Spaceship (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984). 

67. See, for example, Robert Zimmerman, Genesis: The Story of Apollo 8: The First Manned Fllght 

to Another World (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1998); Harland, Exploring the Moon; John 

Catchpole, Project Mercury: NASA’s First Manned Space Programme (London: Springer, 2001); David 

Shayler, Gemini: Steps to the Moon (London: Springer, 2001); David Shayler, Skylab: America’s Space 

Station (London: Springer, 2001); David Shayler, Apollo: The Lost and Forgotten Missions (London: 

Springer, 2002); Reynolds, Apollo; Reginald Turnill, The Moonlandings: An Eyewitness Account 

(Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 

68. Zimmerman, Leaving Earth, p. 463. 

69. Henry S. F. Cooper, Jr.. Imaging Saturn: The Voyager Flights to Saturn (New York: Holt, 

Rinehart, and Winston, 1982); Murray, Journey into Space; Burrows, Exploring Space; Robert 

Reeves, The Superpower Space Race: An Explosive Rivalry Through the Solar System (New York: Plenum 

Press, 1994); Donna Shirley and Danelle Morton, Managing Martians (New York: Broadway Books, 

1998); Robert S. Kraemer, Beyond the Moon: A Golden Age of Planetary Exploration, 1971-1978 

(Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2000); David M. Harland, Jupiter Odyssey: The 

Story of NASA’s Galileo Mission (London: Springer, 2000); Judith Reeves-Stevens et al., Going to 

Mars: The Untold Story of Mars Pathfnder and NASA’s Bold New Missions for the 2Zst Century (New 

York: Pocket Books, 2000); David M. Harland, Mission to Saturn: Cassini and the Huygens Probe 

(London: Springer, 2002); Andrew Mishkin, Sojourner: An Insider’s View of the Pathfnder Mission 

(New York: Berkeley Books, 2003); Paolo Ulivi, Lunar Exploration: Human Pioneers and Robotic 

Surveyors (London: Springer-Verlag, 2003); Ben Evans with David M. Harland, NASA’s Voyager 

Missions: Exploring the Outer Solar System and Beyond (London: Springer, 2004). 

70. Logsdon et al., Exploring the Unknown, vol. 5. 
AMERICAN SPACE HISTORY LEGACIES, QUESTIONS.. . 455 

because these satellites carry no people and go nowhere. In contrast to human 

and deep space robotic spaceflight, the services offered by applications satellite systems deeply shape social, political, and cultural dimensions of societies. 

The objectives, capabilities, and design of such systems are in turn profoundly 

shaped by social, political, and cultural needs. Although many such “civilian” 

technological systems developed from firm connections with military projects, few historians have produced scholarship on their origins, performance, 

and ramifications.7l 

A number of historians and journalists have explored aspects of the many 

large-scale technological systems that were part of the American space program. These include management-focused histories such as Arnold s. Levine’s 

Managing NASA in the Apollo Era (1982) and Stephen B. Johnson’s The Secret 

ofApollo: Systems Management in American and European Space Programs (2002)? 

Two biographical works have enriched our understanding of the success of 

Apollo: Henry W. Lambright’s Powering Apol1o:James E. Webb ofNASA (1995) 

and Robert C. Seamans’s Aiming at Targets: The Autobiography of Robert C. 

Seamans (1996).73 Both Webb and Seamans played critical roles in facilitating 

one of the most impressive and largest technological systems in 20th-century 

America. Their own words will be crucial for future historians interested in 

relocating Apollo in the same kind of social, political, and cultural context 

that Thomas P. Hughes did for electrical systems in his landmark Networks of 

Power (1983) ?4 

T. A. Heppenheimer’s multivolume history of the Space Shuttle is an 

important contribution to the programmatic space history genre. Although it 

71. For the few works on applications projects, see Pamela E. Mack, Viewing the Earth: The Social 

Construction ofthe Landsat System (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990); David J. Whalen, The Origins 

of Satellite Communications, 1945-1965 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2002); 

Donald H. Martin, Communications Satellites, 4th ed. (El Segundo, CA: Aerospace Press, 2000); 

Donna A. Demac, ed., Tracing New Orbits: Cooperation and Competition in Global Satellite Development 

(New York: Columbia University Press, 1986); P. Krishna Rao, Evolution of the Weather Satellite 

Program in the U.S. Department ofCommerce: A Brief Outline (Washington, DC: NOAA, 2001); James 

M. Allen and Shanaka de Silva, “Landsat: An Integrated History,” Quest: The History of Spacefight 

Quarterly 12, no. 1 (2005): 6-22. See also the essays on satellite communications and remote sensing 

in John M. Logsdon et al., Exploring the Unknown: Selected Documents in the History ofthe U.S. Civilian 

Space Program, vol. 3, Using Space (Washington, DC: NASA SP-4407, 1998). 

72. Arnold S. Levine, Managing NASA in the Apollo Era (Washington, DC: NASA SP-4102, 

1982); Stephen B. Johnson, The Secret ofApollo: Systems Management in American and European Space 

Programs (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins, 2002). 

73. Henry W. Lambright, Powering Apollo:James E. Webb of NASA (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins, 

1995); Robert C. Seamans, Aiming at Targets: The Autobiography of Robert C. Seamans (Washington, DC: 

NASA SP-4106, 1996). See also the essays by Seamans, Webb, and other Apollo-era NASA managers, including Robert R. Gilruth, Wernher von Braun, George M. Low, Rocco A. Petrone, Samuel C. 

Phillips, and George E. Mueller, in Apollo Expeditions to the Moon, ed. Cortright. 

74. Thomas P. Hughes, Networks ofPower: Electr$cation in Western Society, 1880-2930 (Baltimore: 

Johns Hopkins, 1983). 
456 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

skirts social issues and references no literature from the academic historiography of American technology, it represents a fleshed-out narrative that expertly 

describes the interplay between politics and technology that affected key milestones in the Shuttle program, including the requirements for such a system 

and how those requirements evolved over time depending on claims made 

by constituencies within NASA and the Department of Defen~e.7~ Similarly, 

Roger D. Launius’s Space Stations: Base Camps to the Stars (2003) looks thematically at the historical development of space stations and their central role 

in the evolution of both prescriptive and practical plans for the exploration 

of space, entrenched partly by what Dwayne A. Day has called the dominant 

“von Braun” paradigm of space 

NOSE CONE HISTORY 

The astronaut memoir (or, more broadly, the astronaut-centered history) 

constitutes one of the largest historical subgenres in the field of space history. I 

call these works “nose cone histories” since they describe a narrowly circumscribed circle of events visible only to the astronauts and in which only the 

astronauts were visible. For the millions who followed the space program in 

the 1960s, astronauts-not engineers nor servicepersons nor managers-were 

the most visible human representations of the technological accomplishments 

of the early Space Age. Our natural urge to distill all the meaning of the 

space program-in particular its avatar Apollo-was embodied potently by 

the astronauts. As Tom Wolfe described in The Right Stuff(1979), these young, 

able, athletic, and short-haired men each seemed an idealized version of an 

American everyman, with a wife, a picket fence, a shiny car-and yet simultaneously wrapped in myth and mystery?’ 

Some of the nose cone histories have added important dimensions of 

the story of the American human spaceflight program. For example, Apollo 

11 astronaut Michael Collins, in his fascinating memoir Carrying the Fire: As 

Astronaut’s Journeys (1974), shows a deep empathy and understanding of the 

role of astronauts in the halcyon days leading up to the epic Moon landing 

in 1969. Collins’s narrative provided the first glimpse behind the iconogra75. T. A. Heppenheimer, The Space Shuttle Decision: NASA’s Search for a Reusable Space Vehicle 

(Washington, DC: NASA SP-4221, 1999); Heppenheimer, Development of the Space Shuttle, 1972- 

1981 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2002). 

76. Launius, Space Stations. See also the equally fine Giovanni Caprara, Living in Space: From Science 

Fiction to the International Space Station (Willowdale, Ontario: Firefly Books, 2000). Less successful is 

Zimmerman’s Leaving Earth, which is a sprawling and flawed attempt to locate the development of 

space stations in domestic and international politics. For the “von Braun paradigm,” see Dwayne A. 

Day, “The Von Braun Paradigm,” Space Times 33 (November-December 1994): 12-15. 

77. Tom Wolfe, The Right StuJ(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979). 
AMERICAN SPACE HISTORY LEGACIES, QUESTIONS 457 

phy of the astronaut-as-unidimensional-hero of popular American culture, 

a self-sustaining myth given birth after the “original seven” Mercury astronauts were presented to the American media in 1959.78 Collins described his 

colleagues as a complex group with diverse personality traits spanning the 

whole gamut: overachieving, academic, adventurous, risk-averse, emotionally distant, publicity-seeking, insecure, and brilliant. All were fully ready 

to do the job they were given. Further astronaut memoirs, particularly Walt 

Cunningham’s All-American Boys (1977) and Gene Cernan’s The Last Man on 

the Moon (1999), were, like Collins’s pioneering work, candid about the singularly unique experiences of the NASA astronauts of the 1960s, especially their 

relationship to top management, their competitiveness among themselves, 

and their often complicated private li~es.7~ Astronaut Donald “Deke” Slayton, 

the man responsible for selecting every American space crew between 1965 

and 1975, added important historical details to how astronaut crews were 

picked-including Armstrong and Aldrin for the first lunar landing-in his 

posthumously published memoir, Deke! An Autobiography (1995) .80 

Fully fleshed, well-researched, and contextual biographies can say something profound not just about an individual, but also the period under study; 

yet most nose cone space histories have been narrow, hagiographic, or selfserving. They reinforce rather than explore the mythmaking associated with 

the astronaut as icon. They also continue to marginalize the many thousands 

who also worked on the space program; in other words, fetishization of the 

astronaut has been a potent barrier against a social history of the space program 

since, in the popular consciousness, the history of the American space program remains inseparable from the biographies and heroism of astronauts.81 

78. Michael Collins, Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut’s journeys (New York: Farrar, Straus and 

Giroux, 1974). Soon after their selection in 1959, the original seven astronauts signed deals with 

Lrfe magazine for exclusive rights to bring their lives to the public. Apart from the many L$e stories, 

one major output of this agreement was the very clinical book by W. Scott Carpenter et al., We 

Seven, By the Astronauts Themselves (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1962). 

79. Walt Cunningham with Mickey Herskowitz, The All-American Boys (New York: Macmillan, 

1977); Eugene A. Cernan and Donald A. Davis, The Last Man on the Moon: Astronaut Eugene Cernan 

and America’s Race in Space (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999). 

80. Donald K. “Deke” Slayton and Michael Cassutt, Deke! An Autobiography (New York: St. 

Martin’s Press, 1995). See also Joseph D. Atkinson, Jr., and Jay M. Shafritz’s The Real St@: A 

History of NASA? Astronaut Recruitment Program (New York: Praeger, 1985) for a more academic 

perspective on astronaut selection. 

81. Important exceptions to the bland astronaut-centered histories include two works by Henry 

S. F. Cooper: Before L$t& The Making of a Space Shuttle Crew (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1987) and 

A House in Space (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1976). The former is an excellent study 

on the dynamics of forming and training crews for human spaceflight, while the latter explores the 

interactions of crew members on the long-duration Skylab missions. Jim Hansen’s biography of Neil 

Armstrong, First Man: The Liji ofNeil A. Armstrong (New York: Simon & Schuster, forthcoming) 

also promises to be an important contribution to the field 
458 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

A new generation of space enthusiasts (affectionately called “space cadets” 

by some) has taken up the job of producing a slew of astronaut biographies. 

The first few published in the 1980s and 1990s provided unique viewpoints 

to the history of the American human space program, but by the early 2000s, 

their utility as history texts has diminished.82 Many astronauts continue to 

write their own memoirs, usually ghost-written with others. The memoirs of 

some would suggest that travel through space engendered profound spiritual 

transformations-or often crises of the spirit-that led them to unexpected 

pathways.83 The ones who achieved important management or advisory positions in the space program-such as Gemini and Apollo astronaut Thomas 

P. Stafford-have more to say than others. But all ponder, explore, and frequently advocate specific policies to give direction to a space program evidently lacking one since the golden age of Apol10.~~ 

NEW HISTORY 

In an article in 2000, then-NASA Chief Historian Roger D. Launius 

identified a “New Aerospace History” that emerged in the 1980s that was 

82. See, for example, Colin Foale, Waystation to the Stars: The Story of Mir, Michael, and Me 

(London: Headline, 1999); Evelyn Husband with Donna Van Liere, High Calling: The Courageous 

L@ and Faith of Space Shuttle Commander Rick Husband (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2003); 

Colin Burgess et al., Fallen Astronauts: Heroes Who Died Reaching the Moon (Lincoln: University 

of Nebraska Press, 2003); Ray E. Boomhower, Gus Grissom: The Lost Astronaut (Indianapolis: 

Indiana Historical Society Press, 2004); Neal Thompson, Light This Candle: The L@ G Times of 

Alan Shepard-America’s First Spaceman (New York: Crown Publishers, 2004); Leon Wagener, One 

Giant Leap: Neil Armstrong’s Stellar American]ourney (New York: Forge, 2004); Nancy Conrad and 

Howie Klausner, Rocketman: Astronaut Pete Conrad’s Incredible Ride to the Moon and Beyond (New 

York: New American Library, 2005). 

83. Edwin E. Aldrin, Jr., with Wayne Warga, Return to Earth (New York: Random House, 

1973); James Irwin and Williams Emerson Irwin, To Rule the Night (Philadelphia: A. J. Holman, 

1973); Kathleen Maughn Lind, Don Lind: Mormon Astronaut (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1985); 

Charlie Duke and Dotty Duke, Moonwalker (Nashville: Oliver-Nelson Books, 1990); Edgar D. 

Mitchell, The Way of the Explorer: An Apollo Astronaut’sjourney Through the Material and Mystical 

Worlds (New York G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1996); Gordon Cooper and Bruce Henderson, Leap of 

Faith: An Astronaut’sJourney into the Unknown (New York: Harper Collins, 2000). 

84. Armstrong et al., First on the Moon; Frank Borman with Robert J. Serling, Countdown: An 

Autobiography (New York: W. Morrow, 1988); Wally Schirra and Richard N. Billings, Schirra’s 

Space (Boston: Quinlan Press, 1988); Jim Love11 and Kluger Jeffrey, Lost Moon: The Perilous Voyage 

of Apollo 23 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1994); Mike R. Mullane, LiJtoff! An Astronaut’s Dream 

(Parsippany, NJ: Silver Burdett Press, 1995); Bill Nelson with Jamie Buckingham, Mission: An 

American Congressman’s Voyage to Space (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988); Alan Bean 

with Andrew Chaikin, Apollo: An Eyewitness Account by an Astronaut (Shelton, CT Greenwich 

Workshop Press, 1998); John Glenn and Nick Taylor,]ohn Glenn: A Memoir (New York: Bantam 

Books, 1999); Jerry Linenger, Offthe Planet: Surviving Five Perilous Months Aboard the Space Station Mir 

(New York: McGraw-Hill, 2000); Scott Carpenter, For Spacious Skies: The UncommonJourney of a 

Mercury Astronaut (Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 2002); Thomas P. Stafford and Michael Cassutt, We Have 

Capture: Tom Stafford and the Space Race (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2002). 
AMERICAN SPACE HISTORY: LEGACIES, QUESTIONS . . . 459 

“intrinsically committed to relating the subject to larger issues of society, 

politics, and culture and taking a more sophisticated view,” a history that 

“move [d] beyond a fetish for the artifact.”85 More generally, Launius characterized these works as being in the middle ground between critique and 

celebration of the space program. I would modify Launius’s typology by 

expanding the parameters to include a wider range of intellectual inquiry 

that often includes both critiques and celebration of the space program. They 

are, however, distinguished from the more traditional canon in two important ways: first, they do not rely on singular approaches to interpreting the 

history of space exploration, such as exploration, competition, technology, 

and astronauts. Instead, these works combine different elements of each and 

firmly locate their narratives in broader political, social, technological, and/or 

cultural contexts; i.e., they function as political, social, technological, and/or 

cultural histories. Second, they attempt to link to other historical subdisciplines such as the history of the Cold War, diplomatic history, and the history 

of science and technology. 

In analyzing the new history, I describe important examples from each 

of four categories of new history-political, social, technological, and cultural 

history-and summarize opportunities for future research in each subgenre. 

Political History 

In the new history, political history has led the way in important reevaluations of the American space program. Walter A. McDougall’s Pulitzer 

Prize-winning . . . The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space 

Age (1985) remains the most important and influential work in the genre. 

The book contributed to relocating the early years of the American space 

program in the broader context of postwar American politics. McDougall’s 

main argument was that after World War 11, and especially after Sputnik, the 

U.S. government marshaled resources on an unprecedented scale to promote 

advancements in science and technology, in effect, transforming the country 

into a new kind of 20th-century state, the technocracy. He noted: 

In those years [of the Sputnik challenge] the fundamental 

relationship between the government and new technology 

changed as never before in history. No longer did state and 

society react to new tools and methods, adjusting, regulating, 

or encouraging their spontaneous development. Rather, states 

took upon themselves the primary responsibility for generating 

new technology. This has meant that to the extent revolution85. Launius, “The Historical Dimension of Space Exploration,” p. 23. 
460 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

ary technologies have profound second-order consequences in 

the domestic life of societies, by forcing new technologies, all 

governments have become revolutionary, whatever their reasons or ideological pretensions.86 

In McDougall’s formulation, the rise of a postwar technocracy was inseparable from the rise of the national security state, since federal policies on 

science and technology-especially after Sputnik-were closely related to 

countering the perceived intellectual and military power of the Soviet Union. 

McDougall’s overarching thesis substantively redefined the way in which historians viewed the space program. If they had previously resorted to invoking 

the “natural” human urge to explore, technological fetishization, or international competition, his work redirected attention to a magnitude of changes 

on the domestic political and institutional stage associated with the origins of 

the space program. 

McDougall also argued that the Eisenhower administration’s concerns 

over establishing a “freedom of space” rationale guided its initial formulations 

of American space policy. According to McDougall, neither the White House 

nor the Department of Defense emphasized a policy of being first to launch 

an artificial satellite of the Earth; instead, national security considerationssuch as establishing the “freedom of space” precedent, developing a military 

space program under the cover of a civilian one, and not diverting resources 

from the concurrent ICBM program-trumped any drive to beat the Soviets. 

McDougall’s work challenged readers to reevaluate the ingrained notion of 

the Eisenhower administration’s space policy as confused and ineffectual.” 

Besides facilitating a shift in the tone of historical scholarship on American 

space exploration, . . . The Heavens and the Earth’s Pulitzer Prize validated historical scholarship on the space program as worthy of serious academic study. 

86. Walter A. McDougall, The Heavens and the Earth. A Political History ofthe Space Age (New 

York: Basic Books, 1985), pp. 6-7, emphasis in original. 

87. Stephen E. Ambrose, in his multivolume biography of President Eisenhower, was the first 

to reframe the Eisenhower administration’s role in the origins of the U.S. space program, but 

McDougall fully developed the idea. See Stephen E. Ambrose, Eisenhower, vol. 2, The President 

(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983). The reevaluation of the Eisenhower administration’s role 

in early U.S. space policy was fleshed out further in Rip Bulkeley, The Sputniks Crisis and Early 

United States Policy. A Critique ofthe Historiography of Space (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 

1991). For pathbreaking research on the “freedom of space” issue, see also Dwayne A. Day, “New 

Revelations about the American Satellite Programme Before Sputnik,” SpaceJtght 36 (1994): 372- 

373; R. Cargill Hall, “Origins of U.S. Space Policy: Eisenhower, Open Skies, and Freedom of 

Space,” in Exploring The Unknown: Selected Documents in the History ofthe U.S. Civil Space Program, 

ed. John M. Logsdon et al., vol. 1, Ovganizingfor Exploration (Washington, DC: NASA SP-4407, 

1995), pp. 213-229; Dwayne A. Day, “Cover Stories and Hidden Agendas: Early American Space 

and National Security Policy,” in Reconsidering Sputnik: Forty Years Since the Soviet Satellite, ed. 

Roger D. Launius et al. (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 2000), pp. 161-195. 
AMERICAN SPACE HISTORY: LEGACIES, QUESTIONS.. . 46 3 

Following in the footsteps of. . . The Heavens and the Earth, innovative 

scholarship by space policy scholar Howard E. McCurdy and historian Roger 

D. Launius advanced a reinterpretation of the “golden age” of Apollo at a 1993 

symposium on presidential leadership and its influence on U.S. space policy. 

Instead of seeing Apollo as a “normal” stage in the evolution of American 

space policy, several historians argued that “the Apollo decision was . . . an 

anomaly in the history of the U.S. space program.”88 The implication was 

that policy-makers of the future could not use Apollo as a model of how to 

explore space since Apollo was intrinsically a unique product of its time that 

existed only because of exceptional circumstances, primarily national prestige 

and Cold War competition. Although this was not a new viewpoint, for the 

first time, space historians placed this notion as the key to understanding the 

early direction of American space exploration. In the conference proceedings, 

published as Spacejlight and the Myth of Presidential Leadership (1997), historians also argued that the role of presidential leadership in general may have 

been overestimated by advocates of space exploration after the Kennedy era. 

Recent reexaminations of Kennedy’s historical 1961 decision to go to the 

Moon bolstered such a contrasting per~pective.~~ 

A 1997 conference on the 40th anniversary of Sputnik provided an 

opportunity for new and exciting scholarship on the origins and repercussions 

of the early American and Soviet space programs. Using recently declassified 

documents, historians amplified a number of important topics, including the 

“freedom of space” rationale for the beginning of the American space program, the selection of the Vanguard satellite project as the first civilian program, the formulation of the National Aeronautics and Space Act that led to 

the formation of NASA, and the effects of the National Defense Education 

Act that fundamentally altered the role of science and engineering in higher 

education in the United States. The collected papers from this conference, 

published as Reconsidering Sputnik: Forty Years Since the Soviet Satellite (2000), 

remain the most important set of intellectual inquiries into the origins of 

the American space program, complementing Robert Divine’s systematic 

study of the Eisenhower administration’s response to Sputnik, The Sputnik 

88. Roger D. Launius and Howard E. McCurdy, eds., Spacejight and the Myth .f Presidential 

Leadership (Urbana: University ofIllinois Press, 1997), p. 9. See also W. D. Kay, Can Democracies Fly 

in Space? The Challenge ofRevitalizing the U.S. Space Program (Westport, CT Praeger, 1995). 

89. See also James L. Kauffman, Selling Outer Space: Kennedy, the Media, and Fundingfor Project Apollo, 

1961-1963 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1994); Michael R. Beschloss, “Kennedy and 

the Decision to Go to the Moon” in Spacefright and the Myth of Presidential Leadership, pp. 51-67; 

Stephen J. Garber, “Multiple Means to an End: A Reexamination of President Kennedy’s Decision 

to Go to the Moon,” Quest: The History .fSpacej?ight Quarterly 7, no. 2 (1999): 5-17; Andrew 

Chaikin, “White House Tapes Shed Light on JFK Space Race Legend,” Space.com, 22 August 

2001, http://www.space.com/news/kennedy~tapes~O10822.html; Roger D. Launms, “Kennedy’s Space 

Policy Reconsidered: A Post-Cold War Perspective,” Air Power History 50, no. 4 (2003): 16-29. 
462 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

Chullenge (1993) ?O Similar reevaluations have been focused on other presidential administrations and their positions on initiatives within the civilian 

space program?’ 

The new political history suggests six broad areas ripe for future scholarship. These include the following: 

Revisiting the early American space program in light of the complex 

debates within the canon of Cold War history, including studies of the 

space program as an adjunct for the less savory dimensions ofAmerican 

foreign policy; additionally, historians could explore not only how 

the Cold War shaped the contours of the civilian and military space 

programs, but also how the latter shaped aspects of the former; Giles 

Alston’s dissertation on the influence of Apollo on international relations points to further avenues of research?2 

2) Further study ofthe ways in which different administrations have used 

specific initiatives and programs as part of political agendas unrelated 

to the stated goals of the initiatives or programs;93 surprisingly, there 

exist no systematic studies of the Nixon or Reagan administration’s 

stance towards civilian and military space policy. 

90. Launius et al., Reconsidering Sputnik; Robert A. Divine, The Sputnik Challenge: Eisenhower’s 

Response to the Soviet Satellite (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Lafayette P. Temple 111, 

“Organizing Space: The Political-Bureaucratic Dynamics Through 1961” (Ph.D. diss., George 

Washington University, 1999). See also Matt Bilk and Erika Lishock, The First Space Race: Launching 

the World’s First Satellites (College Station: Texas A&M University, 2004), which assembled all the 

new research into a single volume; Roger D. Launius, “Eisenhower, Sputnik, and the Creation 

of NASA: Technological Elites and Public Policy Agenda,” Prologue 28 (summer 1996): 127-143; 

Peter J. Roman, Eisenhower and the Missile Gap (Ithaca, NY: Cornel1 University Press, 1995). 

91. McCurdy, The Space Station Decision; Mark Damohn, Back Down to Earth; Krug, Presidential 

Perspectives on Space Exploration; Thor Nels Hogan, “Mars Wars: A Case History of Agenda Setting 

and Alternative Generation in the American Space Program” (Ph.D. diss., Public Policy and Public 

Administration Department, George Washington University, 2004). In addition, Launius and 

McCurdy’s Spaceflight and the Myth of Presidential Leadership includes a number of important essays 

on Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Reagan, and George H. W. Bush. 

92. Giles Alston, “International Prestige and the American Space Programme” (Ph.D. diss., 

Queen’s University of Belfast, 1989). 

93. For some examples, see Dwayne A. Day, “Space Policy-Making in the White House: The 

Early Years of the National Aeronautics and Space Council,” in Organizing for the Use of Space, ed. 

Launius, pp. 117-154; Joan Hoff, “The Presidency, Congress, and the Deceleration of the U.S. 

Space Program in the 1970s,” and Robert H. Ferrell, “Presidential Leadership and International 

Aspects ofthe Space Program,” both in Spaceflight and the Myth of Presidential Leadership, ed. Launius 

and McCurdy, pp. 92-132 and 172-204, respectively. For a comparative study of NASA under 

two different administrations, see John D. Kelley, “An Organizational History of the National 

Aeronautics and Space Administration: A Critical Comparison of Administrative Decision Making 

in Two Pivotal Eras” (Ph.D. diss., University of Southern California, 2002). 
AMERICAN SPACE HISTORY LEGACIES, QUESTIONS.. . 463 

3) The relationship, exchanges, and competition between the civilian 

and militaryhntelligence space programs, in terms of intelligence, 

hardware, and managerial and engineering expertise;94 for example, 

how does the movement of high administrators (such as Dan Goldin 

and Michael Griffin) from one sector affect NASA policies? 

4) The connections between foreign policy and domestic space policy, a 

vast topic which has been studied piecemeal, but not in any systematic 

and long duvde approach. 

5) The relationship between domestic political transactions (congressional politics, redistricting, lobbying, policy papers, advisory boards, 

etc.) and the making of space policy. 

6) The role of institutions in the making of civilian and military space 

policy; the scholarship would encompass the study of why certain 

institutions are created, others are dissolved, what kind of inertia they 

carry through their history, and the ways in which particular institutions relate to others. 

History of Technology 

The second broad field of new history has emerged from within the 

bounds of the history of technology. Most artifactual histories of space programs tend to accept implicitly notions of technological determinism, especially that the space program exists as autonomous technology, affecting society 

around it but not being affected by it. There have been many works on the 

societal impacts of space e~ploration;~~ the field of space exploration has, however, largely been insulated from the paradigmatic revolution in the history of 

94. For general perspectives, see Dwayne A. Day, “Invitation to Struggle: The History of 

Civilian-Military Relations in Space,” in Exploring the Unknown: Selected Documents in the History 

ofthe U.S. Civil Space Program, ed. John M. Logsdon, vol. 2, External Relations (Washington, DC: 

NASA SP-4407, 1996), pp. 233-270; Mark A. Erickson, “The Evolution of the NASA-DoD 

Relationship from Sputnik to the Lunar Landing” (Ph.D. diss., George Washington University, 

1997). For exchanges of hardware between “black” and civilian space projects, see Dwayne A. 

Day’s “Not So Black and White: the Military and the Hubble Space Telescope,” Space Times 34 

(March-April 1995): 20-21, and “From Above the Iron Curtain to Around the Moon,” Spacefight 

47 (2005): 66-71. For an excellent work on the relationships between private industry, governmentfunded intelligence satellite programs, and technological innovation, see Jonathan E. Lewis, Spy 

Capitalism: Itek and the CIA (New Haven, CT Yale University Press, 2002). 

95. See, for example, Lillian A. Levy, ed., Space, Its Impact on Man and Society (New York: Norton, 

1965); Raymond A. Bauer et al., Second-Order Consequences: A Methodological Essay on the Impact of 

Technology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1969); Charles P. Boyle, Space Among Us: Some Effects of 

Space Research on Society (Washington, DC: AIAA, 1974); Tim Greve et al., eds., The Impact of Space 

Science on Mankind (New York: Plenum Press, 1976). 
464 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

technology in the 1980s that redirected focus from technological determinism to the social construction of technology (and technological systems)?6 A 

few notable exceptions include Pamela E. Mack’s Viewing the Earth: The Social 

Construction of the Landsat System (1990) and Donald A. Mackenzie’s Inventing 

Accuracy: A Historical Sociology OfiVuclear Missile Guidance (1990)?’ In the latter, 

Mackenzie argued that missile accuracy was not an inevitable consequence of 

technical change, but rather part of a process involving negotiation between a 

wide range of actors. His use of missile guidance as a window into exploring 

how accuracy was socially constructed suggests important future avenues of 

further research on the space program, including studies of the ways in which 

crew safety, mission success, or risk assessments in the human space program 

have been negotiated and socially constructed. 

The social constructivist approach is to some degree related to the influential shift in the literature on technological systems. In moving the study 

of the history of technology from artifacts to systems, historian Thomas P. 

Hughes’s work fundamentally altered the ways in which historians conceived 

of the relationship between technology and society?’ Tentative steps towards 

a view of space projects as large-scale technological systems were taken in 

important works such as R. Cargill Hall’s Lunar Impact: A History OfProject 

Ranger (1977) and Roger E. Bilstein’s Stages to Saturn: A Technological History 

of the Apollo/Saturn Launch Vehicles (1980)?9 Similarly, Charles Murray and 

Catherine Bly Cox’s excellent Apollo: The Race to the Moon (1989) describes 

the Apollo project as a system whose primary actors were managers, engineers, 

politicians, and organizations rather than astronauts. Based on documentation 

and interviews with the remaining living actors of the endeavor, their reconstruction of the Apollo project as a milestone in the history of management 

makes it probably the single best historical overview of Apollo.”’ 

Beyond social constructivism, others have begun the work of looking at 

the space program as a case study in technological culture. In Goals in Space: 

96. For seminal early works on the social construction of technology, see Wiebe J. Bilker et 

al., eds., The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of 

Technology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987); Wiebe J. Bijker, Of Bicycles, Bakelrtes, and Bulbs: 

Toward a Theory ofsociotechnical Change (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995); Merritt Roe Smith and 

Leo Marx, eds., Does Technology Drive History? The Dilemma ofTechnologica1 Determinism (Cambridge, 

MA: MIT Press, 1994). 

97. Mack, Viewing the Earth; Donald A. Mackenzie, Inventing Accuracy: A Historical Sociology of 

Nuclear Missile Guidance (Cambridge, MA: NIT Press, 1990). 

98. Hughes, Networks of Power; Thomas P. Hughes, Rescuing Prometheus (New York: Pantheon 

Books, 1998). 

99. R. Cargill Hall, Lunar Impact: A History of Project Ranger (Washington, DC: NASA SP-4210, 

1977); Roger E. Bilstein, Stages to Saturn: A Technological History ofthe Apollo/Saturn Launch Vehicles 

(Washington, DC: NASA SP-4206, 1980). 

100. Charles Murray and Catherine Bly Cox, Apollo: Race to the Moon (New York: Simon & 

Schuster, 1989). 
AMERICAN SPACE HISTORY LEGACIES, QUESTIONS.. . 465 

American Values and the Future of Technology (1991), William Sims Bainbridge 

used sociological methods to investigate how actors in American culture 

have used language in popular discussions on space exploration. On the institutional and organizational side, Diane Vaughan, in The Challenger Launch 

Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA (1996), used interdisciplinary approaches derived from sociology and communications theory 

to analyze the culture of NASA in the 1980~.~’~ Her research illustrates the 

ways in which organizations develop their own culture that, depending on 

the scarcity of resources, fosters an environment that finds high risk acceptable 

without breaking any major rules. Her conception of the “normalization of 

deviance” suggests important avenues of further research, especially for studying space projects that did not achieve any significant successes.1o2 

Others have explored more esoteric approaches to the technological history ofthe space program. In The Religion ofTechnology (1997), David F. Noble 

investigates the role of scripture and definable Christian symbolism in the 

“dreaming” for space exploration in the pre-Sputnik days and the invocation 

of God as a transcendental element in the rhetoric of modern-day managers, 

activists, and a~tronauts.’’~ Ifnot all of his ruminations are convincing, his 

findings on the prehistory of space travel suggest as-yet-unexplored opportunities for scholarship on the relationship between religion and spaceflight in 

the early 20th century, furthered recently by Roger D. Launius in a meditation on utopianism and space advo~acy.’’~ David E. Nye, in his essay “Don’t 

Fly Me to the Moon: The Public and the Apollo Space Program,” also contributes to the move away from technological determinism. He challenges the 

near-sacred notions among the “space cadet” community that the history of 

space exploration was of any significance in the history of humanity; he also 

questions the notion that “experiencing outer space transformed inner consciousness,” a claim which hinged on the images of a fragile Earth as seen from 

deep space by the Apollo astronauts. He concludes that retrospect has made 

Apollo a unifying memory when in reality, during its execution, the polity 

and populace remained fractured over its symbolic and material benefits. He 

concludes, “Just as all Americans revere their Revolution, even though less 

than half the population actively supported it in 1776, the Apollo Program 

appears to be gaining sanctity in retr~spect.”~’~ 

101. Diane Vaughan, Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA 

102. Vaughan’s analysis, of course, also influenced the work of the Columbia Accident 

103. David F. Noble, The Religion of’l’echnology: The Divinity ofMan and the Spirit oflnvention (New 

104. Launius, “Perfect Worlds, Perfect Societies.” 

105. David E. Nye, Narratives and Spaces: Technology and the Construction ofAmerican Culture (New 

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 

Investigation Board. 

York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), pp. 115-142. 

York: Columbia University Press, 1997), p. 160. 
466 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

Robotic spaceflight has yielded significant new understandings about the solar 

system. This is the first contiguous, uniform, 360-degree color panorama taken by the 

Imager for Mars Pathfinder (IMP) over the course of sols 8, 9, and 10 (Martian days) 

in 1997. Different regions were imaged at different times over the three Martian days 

These new works underscore that, collectively, historians need to move 

beyond methodological approaches that embrace technological determinism, 

Whiggish history, and program-centered histories. They suggest six areas for 

further research: 

1) Despite nearly 40 years of writing space history, we still do not have a 

substantive history of space technology, work focused not on programs 

but on the technologies that constitute a complete system capable of 

spaceflight, including rocket engines, solar cells, fuel cells, communications equipment, thermal protection, guidance systems, materials, 

etc.lo6 We need histories that are neither programmatic nor artifactcentered; for example, a history of satellite-based optical systems 

(cameras, lenses, mirrors, data recovery, etc.) could shed light on the 

relationship between a particular technology, commercial industry, or 

the military and the way in which consumers can shape technologies. 

2) An important but unexplored aspect of the space industry is the 

economic history of space manufacturing-in particular of rockets, 

engines, and satellites, which would illuminate issues of government-industry relations, quality control, and labor practices; it is also 

106. For works on discrete technologies, see Ldlian D. Kozloski, US. Space Gear: Outfitting the 

Astronaut (Washington, DC. Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993); Eldon C. Hall,Journey to the A4oon:The 

History of the Apollo Guidance Computer (Reston, VA AIAA, 1996); Gary L. Harris, The Origins and 

Technology oftheAdvanced Extravehicular Space Suit (San Diego, CA: Univelt, 2001); James A. Dewar, To the 

End ofthe Solar System:The Story ofthe Nuclear Rocket (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2004). 
AMERICAN SPACE HISTORY LEGACIES, QUESTIONS.. . 467 

to acquire consistent lighting and shadow conditions for all areas of the panorama. 

At left is a lander petal and a metallic mast that is a portion of the low-gain antenna. 

Deflated air bags are visible at the perimeters of all three lander petals. INASA image 

no. PIAOO752) 

necessary to locate this history within the broader history of mass 

production in America.lo7 

3) Journalists have devoted much attention to the various disasters of the 

Space Age, but besides one significant exception-David Shayler’s 

Disasters in Manned Spacejlight (2000)-they have been focused narrowly on particular incidents.”* Because the literature on space history has had a triumphalist arc (introduction, plot thickens, crisis, 

triumph over adversity), it has ignored accounts of long-range technological failures, which can also shed light on abandoned lineages 

of technologies and the contingencies that shaped our adoption of 

certain systems over other^.'^' 

107. For mass production in general, see David A. Hounshell’s seminal From the American System 

to Mass Production (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1984). For a brief essay on the economics ofthe space 

program, see Henry R. Hertzfeld, “Space as an Investment in Economic Growth,” in Exploring the 

Unknown, ed. Logsdon, vol. 3, pp. 385-400. 

108. David Shayler, Disasters and Accidents in Manned Spacefight (New York: Springer, 2000). 

For various disaster-focused works, see Henry S. F. Cooper, Thirteen, the Flight That Failed (New 

York: Dial Press, 1972); Malcolm McConnell, Challenger: A Major Malfcrnction (Garden City, NY 

Doubleday, 1987); Joseph Trento, Prescription for Disaster (New York: Crown, 1987); Richard S. 

Lewis, Challenger: The Final Voyage (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988); Claw Jensen 

and Barbara Haveland, No Downlink: A Dramatic Narrative about the Challenger Accident and Our Time 

(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996); Michael Cabbage and William Harwood, Comm 

Check: The Final Flight ofShuttle Columbia (New York: Free Press, 2004). 

109. For technological failure, see Neil Schlager, ed., When Technology Fails: Signijcunt Technological 

Disasters, Accidents and Failures of the Twentieth Century (Detroit: Gale Research, 1994); Azriel Lorber, 

Misguided Weapons: Technological Failure and Surprise on the Battlefield (Washington, DC: Brasseys, 

2002). 
468 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

4) The social constructivist approach remains a powerful methodological 

tool for in-depth studies of any number of rocket and spaceflight systems, including, for example, the Space Shuttle, which is an excellent 

case for studying how different actors can shape the form and function 

of a technological system; such an approach would help to avoid the 

deterministic historical narratives that assume, for example, that the 

liquid-propellant rocket was the obvious method to reach space without questioning the social and cultural forces that led Tsiolkovskiy, 

Goddard, Oberth, and others to arrive at the rocket as the propulsive 

force for access to space. 

5) A relatively unexplored area is the social construction of risk in space 

technological systems; for example, we know little in a systematic 

way about the manner in which risk has been constructed, defined, 

and invoked in human versus robotic systems, in different human 

spaceflight programs, among engineers and flight directors, etc. An 

important unexplored question remains the historical evolution of 

what it means to “man-rate’’ a vehicle. 

6) We still do not have well-researched histories on the continuing 

tension between robotic and human spaceflight; specific areas of 

inquiry could include the interplay between technology, policy, 

and organizational culture in determining choices for robotic versus 

human spaceflight; what role economics plays in these choices; and 

the ways in which we measure “output” for given space projects 

(whether human or robotic) and how these evaluations may or may 

not be contingent upon premiums placed upon human or robotic 

spaceflight. Finally, a useful avenue of research may be to explore why 

and how, during the early space era (especially in the pre-Sputnik 

years), policy-makers overwhelmingly emphasized human spaceflight 

in their public advocacy. 

Social History 

Beyond political history, several historians and sociologists have taken up 

the job of moving beyond nose cone history into broader social themes. An 

early progenitor of this subgenre was William S. Bainbridge’s The Spaceflight 

Revolution: A Sociological Study (1976). Although his focus was primarily on 

spaceflight visionaries from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Bainbridge 

argued that the advancement of technology was not necessarily deterministic. 

In fact, in cases of revolutionary technology such as the rocket, the principal 

actors (such as von Braun) maneuvered the government and military into 

facilitating resources to implement their goals of spaceflight. Thus, instead of 
AMERICAN SPACE HISTORY: LEGACIES, QUESTIONS.. . 469 

being co-opted by the state, scientists and engineers opportunistically took 

advantage of the state.”O 

Historians have also investigated a number of methodological issues 

related to the study of the early space program, including the problem of doing 

contemporary or near-contemporary history. Because of the recent nature of 

the history of space exploration, participants can play a large role in the way 

space history is chronicled. Participants provide evidence for historians, write 

history books, and sometimes dismiss nonparticipant history with a “youweren’t-there” rationale; historians respond by condescending to the participants by invoking “that noble dream” of objectivity and distance.”’ Space 

historians must explicitly address these methodological concerns if their goal 

is to produce history without baggage. 

Beyond methodological concerns, an important aspect of the social 

dimension of spaceflight has been the relationship between public opinion and 

the space program. Mark E. Byrnes, in his Politics and Space: Image Making by 

NASA (1994), traced the effects of NASA’s image-building policy on popular perceptions of the organization as well as broader support for the cause of 

space travel. He argued that NASA primarily used three images-nationalism, romanticism, and pragmatism-to create and consolidate political support 

across the nation for its major endeavors in space.”’ Similar work by others has 

helped to challenge many accepted notions about public advocacy for the space 

program. Using quantitative data, for example, Herbert E. Krugman found 

that “given the extensive media coverage of the space events throughout [the 

Apollo program], favorable publicity did not seem to have generated equally 

favorable public support for the Apollo pr~gram.””~ Roger D. Launius found 

that popular support for the space program remained at the same relative level 

both during and after the Apollo program, undercutting the received notion 

110. William S. Bainbridge, The Spaceflight Revolution: A Sociological Study (New York: Wiley, 

1976). 

111. For a history of the search for objectivity in the discipline of history in American academia, 

see Peter Novick’s That Noble Dream: The ‘Objectivity Question’ and the American Historical Profession 

(Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1988). For some of the methodological considerations in writing space history, see Joseph N. Tatarewicz, “Writing the History of Space Science 

and Technology: Multiple Audiences with Divergent Goals and Standards,” in The Historiography 

of Contemporary Science and Technology, ed. Thomas Soderqvist (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic 

Publishers, 1997), pp. 71-89. 

112. Mark E. Byrnes, Politics and Space: Image Making by NASA (Westport, CT Praeger, 

1994). See also James L. Kauffman, Selling Outer Space: Kennedy, the Media, and Funding for Project 

Apollo, 2962-2963 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1994); Lynn Marie Disbrow, “A 

Metaphorical Analysis of the Evolution of NASA’s Public Image, 1962-1986” (Ph.D. diss., Wayne 

State University, 1989). 

113. Herbert E. Krugman, “Public Attitudes Toward the Apollo Space Program, 1965-1975,” 

Journal of Communication 27, no. 4 (1977): 87-93. 
470 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

of a “golden age” of mass support for the space pr~gram.”~ Expanding the 

frontier on social histories of the Space Age, recent studies have also focused 

on hitherto unexplored but crucial elements of the history of spaceflight such 

as the pro-space movement, the impact of the space program on geographical 

locales, and engineers as a mass dem~graphic.”~ 

Beyond these important exceptions, social history, which revolutionized 

mainstream American history beginning in the 1960s, has not made many 

inroads into space history. I identify five areas for further study concerning the 

relationship between society and space: 

1) The history of the space program remains incomplete unless we 

explore the lived experiences and backgrounds of large demographic 

groups such as engineers, servicemen and -women, military and intelligence personnel involved in programs, launch personnel, staff workers, spouses and families of engineers in both the civilian and military 

space programs, etc. 

2) Further exploration is necessary on the relationship between public 

advocacy and political commitment in the context of the space program, extending the work already done; such approaches would require 

explorations of the efficacy of formal and informal lobby groups. 

3) In the past few years, a number of historians have taken steps into 

exploring the place of gender in the history of the space program; 

all of the work so far has focused on early women contenders for 

the astronaut corps, the so-called FLATs (First Lady Astronaut 

Trainees); most of these are narrow “surgical” histories that say little 

beyond recounting their life histories. The one exception, Margaret 

Weitekamp’s superb Right Stuff; Wrong Sex: Americu’s First Women in 

Spuce Program (2004), uses the FLATs story to revisit the social and 

cultural codes that guided broader American views on women, technology, and exploration in late-20th-century America.l16 Yet these 

114. Roger D. Launius, “Public opinion polls and perceptions of US human spaceflight,” Space 

Policy 19 (2003): 163-175. 

115. Michael A. G. Michaud, Reaching for the High Frontier: The American Pro-Space Movement, 

1972-84 (New York: Praeger, 1986); William Barnaby Faherty, Florida’s Space Coast: The Impact of 

NASA on the Sunshine State (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002); Sylvia D. Fries, NASA 

Engineers and the Age of Apollo (Washington, DC: NASA SP-4104, 1992). 

116. Margaret A. Weitekamp, Right Stu& Wrong Sex: America’s First Women in Space Program 

(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 2004). See also Bernice Trimble Steadman with Jody M. Clark, 

Tethered Mercury: A Pilot’s Memoir: The Right StuJ-but the Wrong Sex (Traverse City, MI: Aviation 

continued on the next page 
AMERICAN SPACE HISTORY LEGACIES, QUESTIONS.. . 47 1 

works still leave much to be done since we still do not have any systematic studies of the role of women in much larger demographics 

who participated in the space program-in engineering, medicine, 

administration, and staff positions, as well as the thousands who were 

spouses in a predominantly male-dominated pr~ject;"~ we also need 

histories of women astronauts who actually flew in space, as opposed 

to those who never did. 

4) We need more studies of how the growth of the space industry has 

affected particular geographical locales, particularly Texas, Alabama, 

California, and Florida; space historians need to rise up to the challenge to link subdisciplines such as urban history to space history by 

chronicling, for example, the transformation of urban sites through 

development and abandonment cycles or the motivations of many young 

scientists and engineers to pursue a career in the space program."' 

5) The American space program was most identified with a White male 

demographic which reflects the natural distribution of those who 

managed and participated in the endeavor, yet it is important that 

we have a good understanding of the role and place of the space program demographic through broader-and, in some ways, cataclysmic-changes in the social fabric of American society from the 1960s 

to the 1990s in terms of racial relations and immigration."' 

continued from the previous page 

Press, 2001); Pamela Freni, Spacefor Women: A History $Women with the Right Stuff(Santa Ana, CA: 

Seven Locks Press, 2002); Stephanie Nolen, Promised the Moon: The Untold Story of the First Women 

in Space Race (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 2003); Bettyann Kevles, Almost Heaven: The 

Story of Women in Space (New York: Basic Books, 2003); Martha Ackmann, The Mercury 13: The 

Untold Story of 13 American Women and the Dream ofspaceflight (New York: Random House, 2003). 

117. For recent autobiographical works that touch on broader issues of the role of women engineers in the American space program, see Shirley and Morton, Managing Martians; M. G. Lord, 

Astro Tuvf: The Private Li@ ofRocket Science (New York: Walker & Co., 2004). See also the piece 

on women who worked at Australia's Woomera Rocket Range: Kerrie Dougherty, ''Calculatlng 

Women: A Brief History of the LRWEIWRE Computing Team," Quest: The History ofSpacefriBht 

Quarterly 9, no. 4 (2002): 31-39. 

118. A recent pathbreaking article on the influence of postwar suburbanization on physicists' selection of professional topics is exemplary of the kinds of new work in other fields. See David Kaiser,"The 

Postwar Suburbanization ofAmerican Physics," American Studies 56, no. 4 (2004): 851-888. 

119. Like the gender issue, the role of race in the American space program has been explored 

only through the focus of astronauts. See for example, J. Alfred Phelps, They Had A Dream: The 

Story ofAfn'can-American Astronauts (Novato, CA: Presidio, 1994); Stanley P. Jones, African-American 

Astronauts (Mankato, MN: Capstone High/Low Books, 1998); Mae Jemison, Find Where the Wind 

Goes: Moments From My Lqe (New York: Scholastic, 2001); Betty Kaplan Gubert et al., Distinguished 

African Americans in Aviation and Space Science (Westport, CT Oryx Press, 2002). There is also a 

large canon ofjuvenile literature on African American astronauts. 
472 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

Cultural History 

The cultural history of spaceflight is the most recent subgenre in the field 

and also the most heterogeneous. A survey of the key works shows deep and 

broad work encompassing everything from relatively orthodox studies of the 

place of spaceflight in American culture to more postmodern meditations on 

modernity, masculinity, and machines. Perhaps the earliest work in the field 

was Norman Mailer’s Ofa Fire on the Moon (1969), which, coming as it did in 

the year ofApollo 11, contrasted sharply with other contemporary accounts of 

Apollo.lZ0 Using field research, Mailer constructed a narrative that illustrated 

the clash-and sometimes rapprochement-between the young counterculture of the late 1960s and the pseudomilitary culture of NASA. Mailer implicitly critiqued what he believed was the militarized and regimented culture of 

NASA, with its middle-class values that cherished patriotism and encouraged 

unquestioned adherence to the dominant political culture. 

A few authors have explored how the space program has resonated in 

modern literature. In the insightful Seeing Earth: Literary Responses to Space 

Exploration (1985), Ronald Weber deconstructed many of the attendant metaphors that cultural commentators-writers, poets, scholars, philosophers, 

theologians, astronauts, and others-have used to invoke, explain, extol, and 

critique the American space program, locating their meditations between the 

broad themes of “liberating leap into a mysterious future” and a new appreciation of the Earth itself.lZ1 William D. Atwill, in Fire and Power: The American 

Space Program as Postmodern Narrative (1994), adopts a similar methodological 

approach but takes a more critical stance towards the American space program, specifically Apollo. His thought-provoking explorations, which touch 

on domestic shocks of the Vietnam War, try to unpack “the difficulty so many 

writers had telling [the] story of a technocratic enterprise simultaneously central and antithetical to the time and place that produced it.”lZ2 

Dale A. Carter also referenced American literature-in his case, Thomas 

Pynchon’s classic novel Gravity’s Rainbow (1973)-but had a more ambi120. Norman Mailer, Ofa Fire on the Moon (New York: New American Library, 1969). See also 

W. David Lewis, “Buzz Aldrin’s Return to Earth: The Astronaut and Social Values in Apollo Era 

America,” Quest: The History ofSpacefight Quarterly 6, no. 1 (1998): 40-43. 

121. Ronald Weber, Seeing Earth: Literary Responses to Space Exploration (Athens: Ohio University 

Press, 1985). For other, similar explorations, see Laurence Goldstein, The Flying Machine and Modern 

Literature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986); George Held, “Men on the Moon: 

American Novelists Explore Lunar Space,” Michigan Quarterly Review 18 (spring 1979): 318-342; 

Laurence Goldstein, ‘“The End of All Our Exploring’: The Moon Landing and Modern Poetry,” 

Michigan Quarterly Review 18 (spring 1979): 192-217. For a look at space and the visual medium, 

see Laura M. Andre, “Lunar Nation: The Moon and American Visual Culture, 1957-1972” (Ph.D. 

diss., University of North Carolina, 2002). 

122. William D. Atwill, Fire and Power: The American Space Program as Postmodern Narrative 

(Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1994), p. 11. 
AMERICAN SPACE HISTORY: LEGACIES, QUESTIONS.. . 473 

tious goal: to rewrite the postwar history of the American space program as 

a critique of American expansionist military and economic aims. In Carter’s 

worldview, the American space program represented a “Rocket State,” a confluence of civilian and military interests with little or no moral code. The 

book remains one of the most important synthetic cultural histories of the 

American space program.’23 Other, similar critiques of the American space 

program have emerged from the new cultural history and include David 

Lavery’s Latefor the Sky: The Mentality of the Space Age (1992), which rejects 

one of the most fundamental assumptions of space mythology, taken as gospel 

by other cultural commentators such as Wyn Wachhorst, that humans are 

propelled by unknown and innate forces to explore space.’24 

New work has also focused on popular culture. While not strictly a cultural history, Howard E. McCurdy’s Space and the American Imagination (1997) 

remains one of the most powerful studies on how popular conceptions of 

space exploration in American culture helped to shape national space policy.’25 

The iconography of space exploration in the 1950s, McCurdy argued, tapped 

deeply into some of America’s most entrenched cultural ideals such as the 

“limitless frontier,” the “heroic explorer,” the romance of aviation through 

Lindbergh and Earhart, and ultimately the utopian ideal of progress through 

technology.’26 Space enthusiasts and advocates such as Wernher von Braun 

used many of the same cultural representations in their lobbying but added 

the fear of the Soviet threat during the Cold Wzr. By invoking the specter of 

world domination in the late 1950s and early 1960s, they were able to influence major policy decisions, including Kennedy’s historic decision to go to 

the Moon in 1961.12’ Marina Benjamin’s eloquent Rocket Dreams: How the 

Space Age Shaped Our View and the Future of Technology (2003) is the view from 

the other side, i.e., how the space program has affected popular culture. Her 

exploration of how popular culture has relegated the “space age” to a cultural 

123. Dale Carter, The Final Frontier: The Rise and Fall of the American Rocket State (London: Verso, 

1988). 

124. David Lavery, Late for the Sky: The Mentality of the Space Age (Carbondale: Southern Illinois 

University Press, 1992); Wyn Wachhorst, The Dream of Spaceflight: Essays on the Near Edge of Infinity 

(New York: Basic Books, 2000). 

125. Howard E. McCurdy, Space and the American Imagination (Washington, DC: Smithsonian 

Institution Press, 1997). 

126. See also James A. Spiller, “Constructing America at the Peripheries: The Cultural Politics of 

United States Science and Exploration in Outer Space and Antarctica, 1950s-1990s” (Ph.D. diss., 

University of Wisconsin, 1999); Susan L. Mangus, “Conestoga Wagons to the Moon: The Frontier, 

the American Space Program, and National Identity” (Ph.D. diss., Ohio State University, 1999). 

127. See also Mike Wright, “The Disney-Von Braun Collaboration and Its Influence on Space 

Exploration,” in Inner Space/Onter Space: Humanities, Technology and the Post-Modern World, ed. 

Daniel Schenker, Craig Hanks, and Susan Kray (Huntsville, AL: Southern Humanities Press, 

1993), pp. 151-160. 
474 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

hinterland in the post-Apollo era is a powerful investigation into why the 

Along with the works of McCurdy and Benjamin, De Witt Douglas 

Kilgore’s Astvofutuvism (2003) represents one of the three most important 

books on the cultural history of spaceflight to appear thus far.Iz9 Marshaling 

an impressive array of source material, Kilgore investigates the conflicting 

ideals embedded in America’s vision of the future as represented in intellectual, scientific, artistic, and political discourse of the late 20th century. 

The power of Kilgore’s work lies not only in his explication of how and why 

a whole progress-oriented and futuristic space discourse resonated with so 

many in American culture, but also why Americans have found certain values 

in knowledge, politics, and art so desirable. The work depicts the history of 

futures propagated, struggled over, and, in some cases, lost.’30 

These recent works point to six different areas within the cultural history 

of spaceflight fertile for future scholarship: 

space age” resonated in the first place to so many.Iz8 (6 

1) The role of memory, myth, and nostalgia in shaping current understanding of the history of spaceflight remains unexplored; deconstructing the Apollo myth in popular discourse-particularly its resale 

as cultural cachet via what Michael L. Smith has called “commodity 

scientism”-may deepen our understanding of why Apollo retains 

such a grip on the collective memory.I3l 

2) Going beyond hagiographical treatments of astronauts, cultural historians should devote attention to the complex role astronauts play 

as part of the iconography of heroism in American culture; further 

exploring the groundwork laid by Tom Wolfe in his seminal The Right 

Stufi(1979) as well as focusing on astronauts in the post-Apollo era 

128. Marina Benjamin, Rocket Dreams: How the Space Age Shaped Our Vision ofa World Beyond 

(New York: Free Press, 2003). See also Paul Levinson, Realspace: The Fate ofPhysical Presence in the 

Digital Age, On and Offthe Planet (London: Routledge, 2003), a similar meditation on the ways in 

which the digital age may have dampened humanity’s urge to explore space. 

129. Kilgore, Asfrofuturism. See also his “Engineers’ Dreams: Wernher von Braun, Willy Ley, and 

Astrofuturism in the 1950s,” Canadian Review ofAmerican Studies 27, no. 2 (1997): 103-131. 

130. See also Roger D. Launius, “Perceptions of Apollo: Myth, Nostalgia, Memory, or All of 

the Above?” Space Policy 21 (May 2005): 129-139; Roger D. Launius and Howard E. McCurdy, 

Imagining Space: Achievements, Predictions, Possibilities, 1950-2050 (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 

2001); Bruce Horrigan, “Popular Culture and Visions of the Future in Space, 1901-2001,” in 

New Perspectives on Technology and American Culture, ed. Bruce Sinclair (Philadelphia: American 

Philosophical Society, 1986), pp. 49-67. 

131. Michael L. Smith, “Selling the Moon: The U.S. Manned Space Program and the Triumph 

of Commodity Scientism,” in The Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in American History, 2880- 

1980, ed. Richard Wrightman Fox and T. J. Jackson Lears (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983), 

pp. 175-209. ’ 
AMERICAN SPACE HISTORY LEGACIES, QUESTIONS.. . 475 

would add significantly to understanding the shaping and evolution 

of the astronaut icon from hero and explorer in the 1960s to mechanic 

and experimenter in the 21st century.’32 Susan Faludi’s Stged: The 

Betrayal ofthe American Man (1999), where she argues that the emasculation of the astronaut in the post-Apollo era in part contributed the 

“betrayal” of the “American Man,” suggests that the fall of the astronaut icon was as salient as its rise, but the extant scholarship remains 

woefully in~omp1ete.l~~ 

3) A cultural history of the Space Age would be incomplete without 

fully researched scholarship on the rituals that have shaped the lives 

of not only participants in the space program but also those who witnessed it as viewers;’34 similarly, we need to revisit the history of space 

travel through the lens of popular scientific ~u1ture.l~~ An area ripe 

for investigation is the ways in which popular space culture shaped 

the lives of adolescents in the 1960s through science fiction, popular 

magazines, toys, models, and ~1ubs.l~~ 

4) The recent graphic anthology 2001: Building For Space Travel (2001) 

was an important step in connecting space culture with the history of 

the built environment on Earth, particularly ar~hitecture;’~~ there still 

remains much to be done in terms of connecting the history of space 

exploration with the history of material culture-automobiles, toys, 

home appliances-to name only a few examples. 

5) Essential for studying the history of space exploration is the role of 

particular ideologies-whether utopian, spiritual, millenarian, excep132. Wolfe, The Right Stufi 

133. Susan Faludi, StiJied: The Betrayal of the American Man (New York: William Morrow & Co., 

1999). See also Debra Benita Shaw, “Bodies Out of this World: The Space Suit as Cultural Icon,” 

Science as Culture 13 (March 2004): 123-144. 

134. For early explorations on this field, see several articles by Colin Fries in Quest: The History of 

SpacefZight Quarterly: ”Space Age Legends: Urban Folk Tales Collected by the NASA Headquarters 

History Office” (vol. 8, no. 1 [2000]: 18-23), “Flying for Us: Space Age Milestones Celebrated in 

Music” (vol. 9, no. 3 [2002]: 30-36), “Sports Milestones in Space” (vol. 10, no. 2 [2003]: 37-40), 

and “Traditions of the Space Age” (vol. 11, no. 1 [2004]: 31-39). 

135. For a notable exception, which primarily covers the media of TV and film, see Robert A. 

Jones, “They Came in Peace for all Mankind: Popular Culture as a Reflection of Public Attitudes 

to Space,” Space Policy 20 (2004): 45-48. 

136. For a brieflook at the relationship between the proliferation ofscience fiction and the cause 

of spaceflight in the U.S., see the essay “Rockets to the Moon, 1919-1944: A Debate Between 

Reality and Fiction,” in Paul A. Carter, Politics, Religion, and Rockets: Essays in Twentieth Century 

American History (Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 1991), pp. 181-195. 

137. John Zukowsky, ed., 2001: Buildingfor Space Travel (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2001). 
476 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

tionalist, modernist, humanist, atheistic, technological, environmental, or other-that motivated advocates, critics, and participants 

(direct and vicarious) of spaceflight in the 20th century.138 

6) A few have begun to revisit the history of space exploration through 

the theoretical framework of feminist studies, some through a reading 

of such sources as female-written “slasher” novels. Constance Penley’s 

NASA/TREK: Popular Science and Sex in America (1997) critically 

tackles, among many topics, the role of sexuality in spaceflight culture and also discusses NASA’s “inability to manage the meanings of 

women in additionally, Yaakov Jerome Garb’s ecofeminist 

approach to reevaluating the famous photograph of the whole Earth 

from lunar distance focused not on the epiphany of (re)discovering 

“one world” for all of humanity, but rather on how that iconic image 

of the Earth helped to entrench a more negative view, one of the 

dispassionate gaze of omniscient science as a masculine epistemology controlling all of nature, knowledge, and h~manity.’~’ Finally, 

in Cosmodolphins: Feminist Cultural Studies of Technology, Animals and 

the Sacred (2000), authors Mette Bryld and Nina Lykke used a critical 

feminist approach to unpack the relationships between the Space Age, 

the “New Age,” and the ecological symbolism of nature (represented 

through the icon of the dolphin). In taking a feminist approach to 

rewriting the master narratives of spaceflight, they identified what 

I believe is an important topic for future historians, the relationship 

between national identity and the making of history. They write: 

The early space race was, amongst other things, a discursive battle over entitlement to represent Universal Man in 

the biggest story told in modern times. Who was going 

to be the script writer and the protagonist of the master 

narrative of mankind’s cosmic exodus? This was and is a 

138. For an unusual look at space culture through “posthuman theory,” see Melanie A. R. 

Brown, “Posthumanity’s Manifest Destiny: NASA, Its Contradictory Image and Promises, and 

Popufar Culture” (Ph.D. diss., University of Central Florida, 2004). 

139. Constance Penley, NASA/TREK: Popular Science and Sex in America (New York: Verso, 

1997), p. 3. 

140. Yaakov Jerome Garb, “The Use and Misuse ofthe Whole Earth Image,” Whole Earth Review 

no. 45 (March 1985): 18-25, and “Perspective or Escape? Ecofeminist Musings on Contemporary 

Earth Imagery,” in Reweaving the World: The Emergence of Ecofeminism, ed. Irene Diamond and 

Gloria Feman Orenstein (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1990), pp. 264-278. See also Jonathan 

Bordo, “Ecological Peril, Modern Technology and the (Post)Modern Sublime,” in Shadow ofSpirit: 

Postmodernism and Religion, eds. Phillipa Berry and Andrew Wernick (New York: Routledge, 1992), 

pp. 165-178. 
AMERICAN SPACE HISTORY LEGACIES, QUESTIONS.. . 477 

question that matters a great deal when the official story of 

spaceflight is retold [separately in the U.S. and Russia] .I4* 

Their conclusions hint at further opportunities for research on national claims 

for the history of space travel: which was more “important” in the history of 

space exploration, the first time a human left the planet Earth (Yuri Gagarin) 

or the first time a human set foot on another celestial body (Neil Armstrong)? 

Ask a Russian and then an American, and one would get different responses. In 

both cases, historians use extraordinary metaphors to imbue them with gravity, comparisons that typically center on the movement of Earthly life from 

the oceans to land. The parallel narratives are contradictory but exist simultaneously in multiple national discourses, buttressed by masculine notions of 

rationalism, exploration, and evolution. In some sense, space historians need 

to question how “thematic consensus” in space historiography was shaped by 

national identity. 

CONCLUSIONS 

The flavor of American space history has also been profoundly shaped 

by the location and sponsorship of its primary practitioners. In other words, 

American space history largely remains “court history.” For the past 40 years, 

it has been predominantly sponsored, written, and issued as a result of funding 

from sources who direct and operate the space program, i.e., the U.S. government (through NASA, the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, 

and the Department of Defense) or major corporations. Because there has 

been no vibrant nongovernmental or noncorporate space history community 

(in academia, public history positions, or elsewhere), American space history 

has been much more conservative than other historical subdisciplines. The 

field has typically had a romance with the power and progress inherent in 

technology; it eulogizes and deifies a few important men; and it eschews any 

position that would criticize celebratory, jingoistic, or militaristic elements of 

the space program. The works of those who have broken this mold despite 

their connections to official organizations-Launius, Logsdon, McCurdy, and 

Neufeld, for example-collectively represent an important and positive, albeit 

minority, trend in the field of space hi~t0ry.l~~ 

141. Mette Marle Bryld and Nina Lykke, Cosmodolphins: Feminist Cultural Studies of Technology, 

Animals and the Sacred (London: Zed Books, 2000). 

142. Michael J. Neufeld’s work, particularly his seminal The Rocket and the Rei& Peenemunde and 

the Coming ofthe Ballistic Missile Era (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), revolutionized the history of the wartime German ballistic missile program by providing a balanced treatment 

of the development of the V-2 that did not gloss over the terrible human costs of its development. 
478 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

The mainstream academic community has devoted very little attention 

to the space program, partly because academics tend to be narrowly focused 

on topics such as race, ethnicity, and gender. Typically, academics have had 

a condescending attitude towards fields such as the history of technology or 

space history, partly because they see in these fields little of interest to such 

contemporary conceptual lenses such as poststructuralism; postcolonial studies; feminist studies; and issues revolving around gender, ethnicity, power, 

transnationalism, and sexuality. Academics have often refused to see the complexities of the space program, relying instead on unidimensional, weak, and 

often lazy interpretations of the space program as a bankrupt and militaristic 

element of American society. 

The publication of syntheses can say much about a particular discipline. 

On the one hand, in a field that is very young, one might expect most works 

to be somewhat of a synthesis given the paucity of subject matter. On the 

other hand, maturity and longevity of a discipline and its attendant accumulation of source material might also engender the writing of syntheses. Since the 

beginnings of the field of space history, journalists and historians have tackled the problem of the synthesis with various degrees of success. Von Braun 

and Ordway’s History ofRocketry and Space Travel (1966) was an early attempt 

that emphasized some of the key motifs of Cold War historiography such as 

exploration, competition, and the social welfare of all humankind. The work 

focused on great figures, civilian space exploration, and the potential benefits of the ~r0ject.l~~ More comprehensive works appeared in the 1980s and 

1990s that benefited from post-Cold War revelations. T. A. Heppenheimer’s 

Countdown: A History of Spaceflight (1997) traced the evolution of rocketry 

from pioneering theoreticians in the late 19th century to the mid-1990s. 

Heppenheimer’s marshaling of information is masterful, and his use of inspiring language complements his view that Apollo was “a drive toward a new 

human Tom Crouch’s Aimingfor the Stars: The Dreamers and Doers .f 

the Space Age (1999) is an eloquent exegesis on innovators in the 20th century 

who tried to translate their visions of space exploration-both successfully 

and unsuccessfully-into reality.’45 Although focused on great men and great 

technology, Heppenheimer’s and Crouch’s works remain the most successful 

syntheses in the traditional style of space hi~t0ry.l~~ 

143. Von Braun and Ordway, History of Rocketry and Space Travel. The monograph was published 

in several updated versions up to 1985. 

144. T. A. Heppenheimer, Countdown: A History ofspacefight (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 

1997), p. 2. 

145. Tom D. Crouch, Aimingfor the Stars: The Dreamers and Doers ofthe Space Age (Washington, 

DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1999). 

146. For other syntheses, see Andrew Wilson, The Eagle Has Wings: The Story of American Space 

Exploration, 1945-1975 (London: British Interplanetary Society, 1982); David Baker, The History 

continued on the next page 
AMERICAN SPACE HISTORY: LEGACIES, QUESTIONS.. . 479 

Other recent syntheses remain flawed by their dated interpretations. 

William E. Burrows, in his This New Ocean: The Story of the First Space Age 

(1998), used an array of recently declassified material from both the United 

States and former Soviet Union to produce an otherwise eloquent narrative 

of the entire Space Age.14’ Burrows’s work, however, derives solidly from the 

Cold War framework of space exploration as a battle of noble proportions 

against a morally untrustable adversary. In demonizing communism as “more 

insidious” than Nazism, he describes the former as a “cancer, a disease that 

surreptitiously rode the bloodstream of the world, attacking and devouring 

every healthy organism in its path and growing bigger and more dangerous 

as it did By dismissing all of Soviet society as cancerous yet eulogizing 

such men as Sergei Korolev, such works inevitably end up in contradictions 

since we are left with no insight into how the former managed to produce the 

likes of the latter. Similarly, Mike Gruntman, in Blazing the Trail: The Early 

History .f SpaCecr.fr and Rocketry (2004), provides a well-researched and comprehensive tale of the history of rocketry and spaceflight, with lucid explanations of technologies, but does Burrows one better by repeatedly denigrating 

not only the Russians but also American and Western liberals who questioned 

the American space program.’49 

With the rise of the new history, two threads of historiography now 

exist. One remains celebratory and internalist and the other questioning and 

externalist. Although there has been spillover from the former to the latter, 

the reverse, as evident in the works of Burrows and Gruntman, has been less 

common. It is clear, though, that both traditions have very important contributions to make. The old internalist history, focused on important men and 

singular artifacts, provided the backbone of our conception ofthe history ofthe 

space program. The new externalist history contributes the rationale, explication-and the critiques-that make the old history meaningful. Despite the 

large canon of space history, those who have written syntheses have not mancontinued from the previous page 

ofManued Spaceflight, 2nd ed. (New York: Crown Publishers, 1985); Michael Collins, Lijios The 

Story of America’s Adventure in Space (New York: Grove Press, 1988); H. P. Arnold, ed., Man in 

Space: An Illustrated History ofSpacefight (New York: Smithmark, 1993); Roger D. Launius, NASA: 

A History of the U.S. Civil Space Program (Malabar, FL: Krieger Publishing Company, 1994); Helen 

Gavaghan, Something New Under the Sun: Satellites and the Beginning of the Space Age (New York: 

Copernicus, 1998). 

147. William E. Burrows, This New Ocean: The Story ofthe First Space Age (New York Random 

House, 1998). 

148. Ibid., p. 148. 

149. In describing the development of the Woomera missile test range in Australia in the 1960s, 

for example, Gruntman notes that “pacifists and communists tried to interfere with the construction, as their counterparts invariably did with defense initiatives in other countries of the free 

world, thus serving willingly or unwittingly as a Soviet fifth column” (Mike Gruntman, Blazing the 

Trail: The Early History of Spacecraft and Rocketry [Reston, VA: AIAA, 20041, p. 425). 
480 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

aged to combine the two in any coherent fashion. One way to engender such 

a union would be for historians of spaceflight to engage much more actively 

with the mainstream American history c~mmunity.’~~ Unlike the literature 

on American history, the writing on American space history is very young, 

but by engaging with a bigger audience-not only the broader public but 

also the academic history community-we might benefit from a rich vista of 

viewpoints that would move us forward from a fledgling subdiscipline to one 

that is vibrant, mature, and complex. And with maturity, we might yet see a 

powerful work that brings together the dictates of policy, the forces of society, 

and the nuances of culture into a grand narrative that chronicles the romance 

and the reality of this country’s efforts to explore space. 

150. It is of some importance that in the “list of upcoming meetings” section of the past four 

issues of News G Notes-the regular newsletter issued to the aerospace history community by the 

NASA History Office-one would find announcements for the many meetings of professional 

aerospace organizations but none for the annual meetings of the American Historical Association 

(AHA) or the Organization of American Historians (OAH). See the last four newsletters: NASA 

History Office, News 6 Notes 21, nos. 1-4 (2004). 
CHAPTER 15 

THE HISTORY AND HISTORIOGRAPHY OF 

NATIONAL SECURITY SPACE’ 

Stephen B. Johnson 

e intent of this essay is to provide space historians with an overview of Th. the issues and sources of national security space so as to identify those 

areas that have been underserved. Frequently, ballistic missiles are left out of 

space history, as they only pass through space instead of remaining in space 

like satellites. I include ballistic missiles for several reasons, not the least of 

which is that they pass through space en route to their targets. 

Space programs originated in the national security (NS) arena, and except 

for a roughly 15-year period from the early 1960s through the mid-l970s, NS 

space expenditures in the United States (U.S.), let alone the Union of Soviet 

Socialist Republics (USSR), have equaled or exceeded those of civilian programs. Despite this reality, the public nature of government-dominated civilian programs and issues of security classifications have kept NS space out of 

the limelight. The recent declassification of the early history of the National 

Reconnaissance Office (NRO) and the demise of the Soviet Union have led 

to a recent spate of publications that have uncovered much of the “secret 

history” of the early Cold War. Nonetheless, much of NS space history has 

received little attention from historians. 

One feature of military organizations that is of great value for historians 

is their penchant to document their histories, and space organizations are 

no exception. Most military organizations have historians assigned to them, 

with professional historians at many of the positions documenting events as 

they occur. 

Unfortunately, this very positive feature is countered by the requirements of secrecy and classification (and, in the case of the Naval Research 

Laboratory, the loss of its archives by fire). It is unfortunately true that much 

of this treasure trove of documentation created by historians within space 

organizations will remain classified for years to come. Some of the earlier 

1. Many thanks to David Arnold, Donald Baucom, Matt Bille, Dwayne Day, Steve Dick, R. 

Cargill Hall, and Rick Sturdevant, all of whom provided many useful comments and provided me 

with many more sources than I would ever have been able to find on my own. 
482 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

material is being declassified now or could be declassified if someone would 

request it and if sufficient priority were assigned to the task. This is a field 

where outsiders can be of great service. 

To exploit the mass of documents that exist requires that historians have 

a basic grasp of the subject, what has been published to date, and what is yet to 

be done. This article aims to perform these functions by surveying the various 

military space programs and issues, giving a very brief sketch of their histories, 

and identifying the main sources that historians have created and used. 

OVERVIEW SOURCES 

While there is no single comprehensive overview history of NS space, 

several works cover a variety of areas. Walter McDougall’s Pulitzer Prizewinning . . . The Heavens and the Earth, written in 1985, thoroughly discussed 

the NS aspects of the space race; it is getting dated but remains useful for an 

introduction to the politics of the 1950s and 1960~.~ William Burrows’s This 

New Ocean integrates NS space issues nicely into his acclaimed overview space 

hi~tory.~ Mike Gruntman’s Blazing the Trail is an overview history of space 

technology, accounting for military contribution^.^ So, too, does Asif Siddiqi’s 

authoritative Challenge to Apollo for the Soviet program up to the mid-l970s, 

which also has a fine essay on Soviet space history source^.^ Peter Hays6 and 

Dwayne Day7 provide overviews of military and intelligence space, respectively, in Eligar Sadeh’s Space Politics and Policy. 

An earlier, short review of the state of national security space research 

is provided by Day’s 1997 article, which focuses on issues as opposed to a 

bibliographic treatment.* Day provided an overview of U.S. military space 

2. Walter McDougall, . . . The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History ofthe Space Age (New 

3. William E. Burrows, This New Ocean: The Story ofthe First Space Age (New York: The Modern 

4. Mike Gruntman, Blazing the Trail: The Early History of Spacecraft and Rocketry (Reston, VA: 

5. AsifA. Siddiqi, Challenge to Apollo: The Soviet Union and the Space Race, 1945-1974 (Washington, 

6. Peter L. Hays, “Space and the Military,” in Space Politics and Policy, an Evolutionary Perspective, 

ed. Eligar Sadeh (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002), pp. 335-370. 

7. Dwayne A. Day, “Intelligence Space Program,” in Space Politics and Policy, an Evolutionary 

Perspective, ed. Sadeh, pp. 371-388. 

8. Dwayne A. Day, “The State of Historical Research on Military Space,”Journal ofthe British 

Interplanetary Society 50 (1997): 203-206. See also Roger D. Launius, “The Military in Space: 

Policy-Making and Operations in a New Environment,” in A Guide to the Sources of United States 

Military History: Supplement Ir/: ed. Robin Higham and Donald J. Mrozek (North Haven, CT 

Archon Books, 1998), pp. 488-522. 

York: Basic Books, 1985). 

Library, 1998). 

American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, 2004). 

DC: NASA SP-2000-4408,2000). 
THE HISTORY AND HISTORIOGRAPHY OF NATIONAL SECURITY SPACE 483 

operations from 1987 to 1995 in Journal of the British Interplanetary Society in 

December 1993, as well as an updated and extended version of the article in 

Countdown? Cargill Hall and Jacob Neufeld wrote an early work that gives a 

flavor of USAF activities.1° David Spires’s overview history of the USAF in 

space is the best single place to start for the USAF portion of NS space history.” Curtis Peebles’s High Frontier is a much shorter introduction to USAF 

space history.12 USAF Space Command recently published a two-volume set 

of basic documents that are of great value to military space hi~t0rians.l~ 

Steven Zaloga’s The Kremlin’s Nuclear Sword is the best overview of Soviet 

control of and defense against nuclear forces.I4 Nicholas Daniloff‘s 1972 The 

Kremlin and the Cosmos is an early but important source on the Soviet program,” as is Christian Lardier’s LHstronautique Sovidtique,“ which is excellent 

for the technical aspects of Soviet space systems. Gerald Borrowman wrote a 

short overview of Soviet military space activities in 1982.17 Nicholas Johnson 

created yearly assessments of the Soviet space program, some of which are 

summarized in Soviet Space Programs, 1980-1985.18 His 1987 Soviet Military 

Strategy in Space was also a major work at the time.’’ Finally, Johnson’s books 

Europe and Asia in Space: 1993-1994 and Europe and Asia in Space: 1991-1992 

are outstanding sources for those two regions.” 

9. Dwayne A. Day, “A Review of Recent American Space Operations,” journal of the British 

lnterplanetary Society 46, no. 12 (1993): 459-470; Dwayne A. Day, “Capturing the High Ground: 

The U.S. Military in Space, 1987-1995, Part 1,” Countdown 13, no. 1 (1995): 30-45; Dwayne A. 

Day, “Capturing the High Ground: The U.S. Military in Space, 1987-1995, Part 2,” Countdown 

13, no. 3 (1995): 17-31. 

10. R. Cargill Hall and Jacob Neufeld, The U.S. Air Force in Space: 1945 to the 21st Century 

(Washington, DC: USAF History and Museums Program, 1998). 

11. David N. Spires, Beyond Horizons: A HalfCentury of Air Force Space Leadership (Peterson AFB, 

60: Air Force Space Command, 1997). 

12. Curtis Peebles, Hkh Frontier: The United States Air Force and the Military Space Program 

(Washington, DC: Air Force History and Museums Program, 1997). 

13. David N. Spires, Orbital Futures: Selected Documents in Air Force Space History, vol. 1 (Peterson 

AFB, CO: Air Force Space Command, 2004); David N. Spires, Orbital Futures: Selected Documents 

in Air Force Space History, vol. 2 (Peterson AFB, CO: Air Force Space Command, 2004). 

14. Steven J. Zaloga, The Kremlin’s Nuclear Sword: The Rise and Fall of Russia’s Strategic Nuclear 

Forces, 1945-2000 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2002). 

15. Nicholas Daniloff, The Kremlin and the Cosmos (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972). 

16. Christian Lardier, L’Astronautique Soviktique (Paris: Armand Colin, 1992). 

17. Gerald L. Borrowman, “Soviet Military Activities in Space,”journal of the British Interplanetary 

18. Nicholas L. Johnson, Soviet Space Programs, 1980-1985 (San Diego: Univelt Press, 1987). 

19. Nicholas L. Johnson, Soviet Military Strategy in Space (Coulsdon, U.K.: Jane’s Information 

Group, 1987). 

20. Nicholas L. Johnson, Europe and Asia in Space: 1993-1994 (Kirtland AFB, NM: USAF 

Phillips Laboratory, 1995; Colorado Springs, GO: Kaman Sciences Corporation, 1995); Nicholas 

L. Johnson, Europe and Asia in Space: 1991-1992 (Kirtland AFB, NM: USAF Phillips Laboratory, 

1993; Colorado Springs, CO: Kaman Sciences Corporation, 1993). 

Society 35, no. 2 (1982): 86-92. 
484 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

Some encyclopedic sources are useful. The latest Cambridge Encyclopedia of 

Space has significant information about military space, particularly in providing summaries of all programs and launches up to 2000.21 Shirley Thomas’s 

eight-volume Men of Space from the 1960s remains a useful source.22 The 

forthcoming space history encyclopedia Space Exploration and Humanity will 

have a major section on NS space history.23 

Samuel Miller’s An Aerospace Bibliography is a good starting point to search 

for space history articles prior to 1978,24 as is John Looney’s 1979 bibliography for NASA.25 So, too, is the Smithsonian bibliography edited by Dominic 

Pisano and Cathleen Lewis, Air and Space History: An Annotated Bibliography, 

which takes researchers up to 1988.26 Jeffrey Richelson edited Military Uses of 

Space, 1946-1991, a useful bibliographic ~ource.~’ 

With the explosion of the World Wide Web in the 1990s, no discussion 

of sources can avoid online sources. An excellent online source for aerospace 

history, including defense space matters, is the government site for the U.S. 

Centennial of Flight Commission. This contains a plethora of short essays on 

a variety of aerospace history topics.28 The NASA History Division also has 

an excellent site with many online publications, including many that involve 

NASA-DOD relations. The Air War College Gateway is another excellent 

resource of past and current military space activitiesz9 Other credible sites 

include those for USAF Space Command, the National Security Archives of 

George Washington University, and the Federation of American Scientists. 

Several declassified USAF works are now online.30 Mark Wade’s online 

21. Fernand Verger, Isabelle Sourbks-Verger, and Raymond Ghirardi, with contributions by 

Xavier Pasco, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Space (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 

2003). 

22. Shirley Thomas, Men of Space: Profiles of the Leaders in Space Research, Development, and 

Exploration, 8 vols. (Philadelphia: Chilton Company, 1960-68). 

23. Stephen B. Johnson et al., eds., Space Exploration and Humanity: A Historical Encyclopedia (Santa 

Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, forthcoming, expected publication 2006-07). 

24. Samuel Duncan Miller, An Aerospace Bibliography (Washington, DC: Office of Air Force 

History, USAF, 1986). 

25. John J. Looney, Bibliography of Space Books and Articles from Non-AerospaceJournals, 1957-1977 

(Washington, DC: NASA History Office, 1979). 

26. Dominick A. Pisano and Cathleen S. Lewis, eds., Air and Space History: An Annotated 

Bibliography (New York: Garland Publishing, 1988). 

27. Jeffrey Richelson, ed., U.S. Military Uses of Space, 1945-1991: Index and Guide (Washington, 

DC: The National Security Archive; Alexandria, VA: Chadwyck-Healey, Inc., 1991). 

28. United States government, Centennial of Flight Web site, http://www.centennialof$zght.gov. 

29. Air War College Gateway to Space Operations and Resources, http://www.au.af:mil/au/awc/ 

awcgate/awc-spc. htm. 

30. Mark C. Cleary, The 6555th: Missile and Space Launches through 1970 (Patrick AFB, FL: 45th 

Space Wing, 1991); Mark C. Cleary, The Cape: Military Space Operations, 1971-1992 (Patrick AFB, 

FL: 45th Space Wing, 1994); Harry Waldron, Historical Overview of the Space and Missile Systems 

Center, 1954-2003 (Los Angeles AFB, CA: Space and Missile Systems Center, 2003). 
THE HISTORY AND HISTORIOGRAPHY OF NATIONAL SECURITY SPACE 485 

Encyclopedia Astronauticu has become a popular Internet source for space history. Unfortunately, while it contains a great deal of information, not all of 

it is correct. Space historians have noticed a variety of factual problems, and 

unfortunately these problems have not been consistently repaired. Since this 

is not a peer-reviewed source and historical errors have not always been fixed, 

this cannot be considered a reliable source, despite its impressive appearance. 

Many other online sources have the same problem^.^' 

Since reactions to the launch of Sputnik encompassed a variety of areas 

and actions, it is appropriate to mention a few key sources about that event 

and its ramifications here. The best recent overview is Roger Launius, John 

Logsdon, and Robert Smith’s Reconsidering Sputnik3’ Important earlier works 

on the topic include those by Robert Divine33 and Rip B~lkeley.~~ 

BALLISTIC MISSILES AND MILITARY SPACE LAUNCHERS 

Ballistic missiles originated from the rocketry experiments of amateurs in 

the 1920s and 1930s, which then gained the interest of military organizations, 

particularly in Germany, the Soviet Union, and the United States. These stories have been described in a variety of books and articles through the years, 

as they account for the origins of space programs around the world. 

The story of the German V-2 project is perhaps the best known, both 

because it led to the world’s first operational ballistic missile and because of 

its leader, Wernher von Braun, who became famous in the United States after 

World War 11. American forces captured most of von Braun’s team at the end 

of World War 11, along with parts and plans to rebuild the Nazi program on 

American soil. Most of the team came to the United States, where they assisted 

American contractors and the U.S. military to develop their own ballistic missile 

capabilities. The United States already had its own rocketry programs, with the 

Navy working with physicist Robert Goddard and members of the American 

Rocket Society, and the Army funding the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Missile 

efforts proliferated after the war but did not gain priority until the early 1950s. 

Only then did the Air Force’s Atlas ICBM project, soon followed by the Thor, 

Titan, and other ballistic missile programs, push forward at a rapid pace. These 

liquid-propellant rockets were soon displaced as weapons by solid-propellant 

31. Encyclopedia Astronautica is available online at http://www.astronautix.com/. 

32. Roger D. Launius, John M. Logsdon, and Robert W. Smith, eds., Reconsidering Sputnik: Forty 

Years Since the Soviet Satellite (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 2000). 

33. Robert A. Divine, The Sputnik Challenge: Eisenhower’s Response to the Soviet Satellite (Oxford: 

Oxford University Press, 1993). 

34. Rip Bulkeley, The Sputniks Crisis and Early United States Space Policy (Bloomington: Indiana 

University Press, 1991). 
486 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

ballistic missiles such as Minuteman and Polaris, which were much more useful militarily because they did not require a time-consuming and dangerous 

liquid fueling process. Once the Cold War ended, ballistic missile forces in the 

United States shrank rapidly along with the Soviet threat. Other nations each 

developed their own nuclear and ballistic missile programs. 

Ballistic missiles were the technical progenitors of the first-generation 

space launchers. The Atlas, Titan, and Thor missiles led to the Atlas, Titan, 

and Delta families of launchers, while the R7 became the Soyuz launcher. 

Similarly, early Chinese ballistic missile programs derived from the Nazi V-2 

through the Soviet R1 and R2 programs evolved into the Long March series 

used for military and civilian launches. 

Finally, the military also developed hypersonic technologies from the 

1950s to the present, some of which evolved into craft capable of going into 

space. The X-series aircraft went faster and higher, culminating in the X15 and X-20 Dyna-Soar programs of the early 1960s. Later efforts included 

the X-24, involvement with the Space Shuttle program, and the National 

Aerospace Plane, and they continue today with a variety of studies and tests. 

The early history of ballistic missile programs in Germany, the United 

States, and the Soviet Union is well documented. Nazi efforts on the V-2 program are the subject of many books with a variety of perspectives. The single 

best volume on the V-2 development program is Michael Neufeld’s The Rocket 

and the Rei~h,~~ thoroughly researched from the German-language original 

documents. Overview space histories, such as Burrows’s This New Ocean and 

Heppenheimer’s Countdown, also provide good descriptions of the V-2 project, as well as both Soviet and American ballistic missile programs through 

the 1950~~~ Older histories stemmed mainly from von Braun supporters, such 

as Frederick Ordway’s The Rocket Team and Walter Dornberger’s V-2: The 

Nazi Rocket We~pon.~’ Less well known is the actual V-2 rocket campaign 

against Britain and British countermeasures, well documented in King and 

Kutta’s Impact: The History of Germany’s V- Weapons in World War IL3’ R. V. 

Jones’s The Wizard War gives an earlier description of British espionage efforts 

in World War 11, including against the V-2 offensive.39 Revisionist histories 

35. Michael J. Neufeld, The Rocket and the Reich: Peenemunde and the Coming ofthe Ballistic Missile 

Era (New York: The Free Press, 1995). 

36. Burrows, This New Ocean; T. A. Heppenheimer, Countdown: A History of Space Flight (New 

York: John Wiley & Sons, 1997). 

37. Walter Dornberger, V-2: The Nazi Rocket Weapon, trans. James Cleugh and Geoffrey Halliday 

(New York: Viking, 1954); Frederick I. Ordway 111 and M. Sharpe, The Rocket Team: From the V-2 

to the Saturn Moon Rocket (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1979). 

38. Benjamin King and Timothy Kutta, Impact: The History oJGermany’s V- Weapons in World War 

II (Rockville Centre, NY Sarpedon, 1998). 

39. R. V. Jones, The Wizard War: British Scientific Intelligence, 1939-1945 (New York: Coward, 

McCann, and Geoghegan, 1978). 
THE HISTORY AND HISTORIOGRAPHY OF NATIONAL SECURITY SPACE 487 

looking skeptically at von Braun and at the use of slave labor in World War 

I1 began to appear in the late 1990s. The two best of these sources are Andre 

Sellier’s A History of the Dora Camp and Jean Michel’s DoY~.~O Others include 

Yves Beon’s Planet Dora and Dennis Piszkiewicz’s Wevnher von Braun: The Man 

Who Sold the Moon.4’ The journey of von Braun’s team to the United States 

and other nations is the subject of a variety of literature, including works by 

Huzel, Lasby, Bower, Freeman, and Vilain.42 

Early overviews of rocketry, which unavoidably discuss military involvement, include Zim’s Rockets andjets; Vaeth’s 200 Miles Up; Caidin’s Rockets and 

Missiles; Emme’s edited History of Rocket Technology; Baker’s The Rocket; von 

Braun, Ordway, and Dooling’s History of Rocketry and Space Travel; Winter’s 

Rockets into Space; and Alway’s Rockets of the World. 43 

The origins of American rocket and ballistic missile programs are well 

documented. The best overview of the early USAF missile programs remains 

Jacob Neufeld’s internal Air Force history, Ballistic Missiles in the United States 

Air Force, 1945-1960. Older works also discuss the early ballistic missile programs, such as Schwiebert’s A History of the U.S. Air Force Ballistic Missiles, 

Bergaust’s Rockets of the Armed Forces, Neal’s popular work on Minuteman, 

Chapman’s early history of Atlas, Rosen’s narrative of the Navy’s Viking, 

Green and Lomask’s history of Vanguard, and Hartt’s story of the Thor missile. Thor and Atlas are described by Wambolt. Martin’s series on Atlas is 

informative. A more recent work is Stine’s 1991 ICBM. Greene’s early internal 

history of Titan is still valuable. The most detailed recent historical study of 

a single program is Stumpf‘s Titan II. Titan’s evolution is also described by 

40. Andre Sellier, A History ofthe Dora Camp (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2003); Jean Michel, Dora 

(New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1980). 

41. Yves BCon, Planet Dora: A Memoir of the Holocaust and the Birth of the Space Age (Boulder, 

CO: Westview Press, 1998); Dennis Piszkiewicz, Wernher von Braun: The Man Who Sold the Moon 

(Westport, CT Praeger Publishers, 1998). 

42. D. K. Huzel, Peenemunde to Canaveral (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1962); Clarence 

G. Lasby, Project Paperclip: German Scientists and the Cold War (New York: Atheneum, 1971); Tom 

Bower, The Paper Clip Conspiracy (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1987); Marsha Freeman, 

How We Got to the Moon: The Story of the German Space Pioneers (Washington, DC: 21st Century 

Associates, 1993); J. Vilain, “France and the Peenemunde Legacy,” in History of Rocketry and 

Astronautics, ed. P. Jung, American Astronautical Society History Series, vol. 21 (San Diego: 

Univelt Press, 1997), pp. 119-161. 

43. Herbert H. Zim, Rockets andjets (New York Harcourt Brace & Company, 1945); J. Gordon 

Vaeth, 200 Miles Up: The Conquest ofthe Upper Air (New York: The Ronald Press Company, 1951); 

Martin Caidin, Rockets and Missiles: Past and Future (New York: The McBride Company, 1954); 

Eugene Emrne, ed., The History of Rocket Technology (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1964); 

David Baker, The Rocket: The History and Development of Rocket and Missile Technology (New York: 

Crown Books, 1978); Wernher von Braun, Frederick I. Ordway 111, and Dave Dooling, History 

ofRocketry and Space Travel (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1986); Frank H. Winter, Rockets into 

Space (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990); Peter Alway, Rockets ofthe World (Ann 

Arbor, MI: Saturn Press, 1992). 
488 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

Falconer, as well as Richards and Powell. Reed’s dissertation is an outstanding study of Minuteman. The Navaho, although a cruise missile, was crucial 

for rocket engine technology and is analyzed by Gibson. Two early works 

focused on ballistic missile operations are by Hunter, and Baar and Howard. 

Powell describes Blue Scout, a military research vehicle, Project Farside, an 

early USAF balloon rocket program, and the obscure Draco launcher. The 

Association of Air Force Missileers publishes a newsletter and has a Web site 

that frequently contains missile stories and historical inf~rmation.~~ 

Older political studies started analytical assessments of ballistic missiles 

and remain useful, such as the works of Armacost, Beard, and Sapolsky4’ on 

the 1950s American intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM), ICBM, and 

submarine-launched ballistic missile programs. Reed’s dissertation on the politics of Minuteman is valuable.46 Lonnquest and Winkler coauthored To Defend 

44. Jacob Neufeld, Ballistic Missrles rn the United States Air Force, 1945-1960 (Washington, DC: 

Office of Air Force History, USAF, 1990); Ernest G. Schwiebert, A Htstory ofthe U.S. Au Force 

Balli~trc Missiles (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1964); Erik Bergaust, Rockets of the Armed Forces 

(New York Putnam, 1966); Roy Neal, Ace in the Hole: The Story ofthe Minuteman Missile (Garden 

City, NY Doubleday, 1962); John L. Chapman, Atlas: The Story ofa Missile (New York: Harper 

81 Brothers, 1960); Milton Rosen, The Viking Rocket Story (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1955); 

Constance McLaughlin Green and Milton Lomask, Vanguard: A History (Washington, DC: NASA 

SP-4202, 1970); Julian Hartt, The Mighty Thor (New York: Duell, Sloan, and Pearce, 1961); Joseph F. 

Wambolt, “Medium Launch Vehicles for Satellite Delivery,” Crosslrnk 4, no. 1 (winter 2002/2003): 

26-31; Richard E. Martin, “A Brief History of the Atlas Rocket Vehicle, Part 1,” Quest: The History 

of Spacefght Quarterly 8, no. 2 (2000): 54-61; Richard E. Martin, “A Brief History of the Atlas 

Rocket Vehicle, Part 2,” Quest: The History ofSpacefight Quarterly 8, no. 3 (2000): 40-45; Richard 

E. Martin, “A Brief History of the Atlas Rocket Vehicle, Part 3,” Quest: The History ojspacefght 

Quarterly 8, no. 4 (2000): 46-51; G. Harry Stine, ICBM: The Making ofthe Weapon that Changed the 

World (New York: Orion Books, 1991); W. E. Greene, The Development ofthe SM-68 Titan, AFSC 

Historical Publications Series 62-23-1 (Wright-Patterson AFB, OH: Air Force Systems Command, 

1962); David K. Stump( Titan 11: A History of a Cold War Missile Program (Fayetteville: The University 

ofArkansas Press, 2000); Art Falconer, “Epic Proportions: The Titan Launch Vehicle,” Crosslrnk 4, no. 

1 (winter 2002/2003): 32-37; G. R. Richards and J. W. Powell, “Titan 3 and Titan 4 Space Launch 

Vehicles,”Journal ofthe British Interplanetary Society 46, no. 4 (1993): 123-144; George A. Reed, “U.S. 

Defense Policy, U.S. Air Force Doctrine and Strategic Nuclear Weapon Systems, 1958-1964: The 

Case of the Minuteman ICBM’ (Ph.D. diss., Duke University, 1986); James N. Gibson, The Navaho 

Missile Project: The Story ofthe “Know-How” Missile ofAmerican Rocketry (Atglen, PA: Schiffer Military/ 

Aviation History, 1996); Me1 Hunter, The Mrssilemen (Garden City, NY Doubleday, 1960); James 

J. Baar and William E. Howard, Combat Missilemen (New York: Harcourt, 1961); Joel Powell, “Blue 

Scout-Military Research Rocket,”Journal ofthe British Interplanetary Society 35, no. 1 (1982): 22-30; 

Joel W. Powell, “Project Farside, America’s First Space Venture,” Journal of the British Interplanetary 

Society 35, no. 10 (1982): 462-466; Joel W. Powell, “The Curious Case of Draco and the ‘Secret’ 

Cape Canaveral Launches of 1959,” Quest: The History ofSpacefight Quarterly 6, no. 1 (1998): 44-46. 

45. Michael H. Armacost, The Politics of Weapons Innovation: The Thorgupiter Controversy (New 

York: Columbia University Press, 1969); Edmund Beard, Developing the ICBM: A Study in 

Bureaucratic Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976); Harvey M. Sapolsky, The Polaris 

System Development: Bureaucratic and Programmatic Success in Government (Cambridge, MA: Harvard 

University Press, 1972). 

46. Reed, “U.S. Defense Pohcy.” 
THE HISTORY AND HISTORIOGRAPHY OF NATIONAL SECURITY SPACE 489 

and which provides technical details and overviews of all major U.S. 

programs. Lonnquest’s dissertation was a focused study on General Bernard 

Schriever’s role in Atlas.48 Koppes’s history of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory 

(JPL) remains a good introduction to its Army-funded rocketry and ballistic 

missile programs.49 Spinardi provides an overview of the U.S. Navy’s submarine-based ballistic missile program^,^' as does Fuhrman.’l Friedman’s The 

Evolution of Nuclear Strategy remains a valuable work about nuclear warfare in 

general,52 as is Kaplan’s The Wizards ~fArmageddon.~~ There are no major publications on recent U.S. ballistic missile history beyond 1970, although there 

are many political science and politically motivated studies of arms control 

and disarmament. 

Soviet ballistic missile history has gotten a major boost since the end of 

the Cold War. The foremost work is currently Zaloga’s outstanding study, The 

Kremlin’s Nuclear Sword,54 which provides an overview of Soviet nuclear forces 

from 1945 to 2000. Zaloga’s earlier study Target America also remains useful.55 

Also useful is Podvig’s Russian Strategic Nuclear Forces. 56 Siddiqi’s Challenge to 

Apollo, originally published by NASA and now published commercially, covers in depth the early ballistic missile development of Korolev’s design bureau 

from the R1 to the R7.57 Siddiqi also covers the development and deployment of a Soviet Fractional Orbiting Bombardment System (FOBS) .58 The 

Yangel design bureau was selected to build the R-36-0 FOBS over competing proposals by the Korolev and Chelomey design bureaus. This system, 

which deployed 18 missiles from 1971 to 1983, placed a nuclear warhead in 

47. John C. Lonnquest and David F. Winkler, To Defend and Deter: The Legacy ofthe United 

States Cold War Missile Program, Special Report 97/01 (Champaign, IL: U.S. Army Construction 

Engineering Research Laboratories, 1996). 

48. John Lonnquest, “The Face ofAtlas: General Bernard Schriever and the Development ofthe 

Atlas Intercontinental Ballistic Missile, 1953-1960” (Ph.D. diss., Duke University, 1996). 

49. Clayton R. Koppes,]PL and the American Space Program: A History oftheJet Propnlsion Laboratory 

(New Haven, CT Yale University Press, 1982). 

50. Graham Spinardi, From Polaris to Trident: The Development of U.S. Fleet Ballistic Missile 

Technology (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 

51. R. A. Fuhrman, “The Fleet Ballistic Missile System: Polaris to Trident,”]ournal of Spacecraft 

15, no. 5 (1978): 265-286. 

52. Lawrence Friedman, The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983). 

53. Fred Kaplan, The Wizards ofArmageddon (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1983). 

54. Steven Zaloga, The Kremlin’s Nuclear Sword: The Rise and Fall ofRussia’s Strategic Nuclear Forces, 

55. Steven J. Zaloga, Target America: The Soviet Union and the Strategic Arms Race, 1945-1994 

56. P. Podvig, Russian Strategic Nuclear Forces (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001). 

57.AsifA. Siddiqi, Sputnik and the Soviet Space Challenge (Gainesdle: University of Florida Press, 2003); 

58. Asif A. Siddiqi, “The Soviet Fractional Orbiting Bombardment System (FOBS): A Short 

1945-2000 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian, 2002). 

(Novato, CA: Presidio, 1993). 

AsiiA. Siddiqi, The Soviet Space Race with Apollo (Gainesville: Umversity of Florida Press, 2003). 

Technical History,” Quest: The History of Spacefight Quarterly 7, no. 4 (1999): 22-33. 
490 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

temporary orbit, going over the South Pole to evade American early-warning 

radars and then deorbiting quickly to hit the United States. Harford’s Korolev 

also has a significant amount of information about the early ballistic missile programs.59 Barry’s Ph.D. dissertation, “The Missile Design Bureaux and 

Soviet Piloted Space Policy,” describes some political aspects of early design 

bureaus.60 Zak wrote a short piece on the origins of the Cosmos launcher.61 

China’s early ballistic missile program is tied to the story of Tsien HsueShen, which is chronicled in Chang’s Thread of the Silkworm.62 Harvey’s The 

Chinese Space Programme provides an overview of ballistic missile and launcher 

 development^.^^ Lewis also describes the Chinese ballistic missile programs.64 

Histories of other nations’ ballistic missile programs and their transformation to launchers remain far less documented. The British program is the 

one major exception, with Morton’s Fire across the Desert, Twigge’s The Early 

Development of Guided Weapons in the United Kingdom, 1940-1960, Hill’s A 

Vertical Empire, and Martin’s De Havilland Blue Streak.65 A recent article on 

early French missile and launcher efforts is by Huwart.66 

The single best source for the history of U.S. space launchers is Launius and 

Jenkins’s e&ted work, To Reach the High Frontier, which has articles on all major 

American launch programs6’ This work also has an overview of the evolution 

of the Minuteman ICBM program by Hunley. Isakowitz is now up to the fourth 

edition of his International Reference Guide to Space Launch Systems; tracing the 

evolution of these editions provides historians with a thorough grounding in the 

technical aspects of the subject.68 Hall provides an overview of the military ori59. James Harford, Korolev: How One Man Masterminded the Soviet Drive to Beat America to the Moon 

60. William P. Barry, “The Missile Design Bureaux and Soviet Piloted Space Policy, 1953-1974” 

61. Anatoly Zak, “Cosmos Launcher: The Story of the Soviets’ Space Workhorse,” Spacefight 38, 

62. Iris Chang, Thread ofthe Silkworm (New York: Basic Books, 1995). 

63. Brian Harvey, The Chinese Space Programme: From Conception to Future Capab 

64. J. D. Lewis and H. Di, “China’s Ballistic Missile Programs,” International Security 17, no. 2 

65. Peter Morton, Fire across the Desert: Woomera and the Anglo-Australian Joint Project, 1946-1980 

(Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Services, 1989); Stephen Robert Twigge, The Early 

Development of Guided Weapons in the United Kingdom, 1940-1960 (Chur, Switzerland: Harwood 

Academic Publishers, 1993); C. N. Hill, A Vertical Empire: The History ofthe UK Rocket and Space 

Programme, 1950-1971 (London: Imperial College, World Scientific, 2001); Charles H. Martin, De 

Havilland Blue Streak: An Illustrated Story (London: British Interplanetary Society, 2002). 

66. Olivier Huwart, “Du V-2 i Veronique: Les Premi6res Recherches Spatiales Militaires 

FranGaises,” Review Historiques des Armies 3 (1997): 113-126. 

67. Roger D. Launius and Dennis R. Jenkins, eds., To Reach the High Frontier: A History 4U.S. 

Launch Vehicles (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2002). 

68. Steven J. Isakowitz, Joshua B. Hopkins, and Joseph P. Hopkins, Jr., International Reference 

Guide to Space Launch Systems, 4th ed. (Reston, VA: AIAA, 2004). 

(New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1997). 

(Ph.D. diss., University of Oxford, 1995). 

no. 12 (1996): 416-418. 

John Wiley & Sons, 1998). 

(1992): 5-40. 
THE HISTORY AND HISTORIOGRAPHY OF NATIONAL SECURITY SPACE 491 

gins ofAgena in the CORONA program.69 Siddiqi chronicles some of the conversions of Soviet ballistic missiles to launchers in Challenge to Apol10.~~ Harvey’s 

Russia in Space gives a good overview of Russian launch systems.71 Bille and 

Lishock describe early military launchers, including the obscure NOTSNIK, 

a designation combining the acronym for Naval Ordnance Test Station and 

Sputnik.72 NOTSNIK received attention earlier from Pesavento and Powell.” 

Military involvement with space transportation also includes the development of hypersonic and reusable systems. Overviews of hypersonics include 

Caidin’s early Wings into Space, the two volumes of The Hypersonic Revolution, 

and Miller’s The X-Pl~nes.~~ The X-15 story dominates the early history of 

military reusable systems, and has garnered significant attention in the last two 

years. These include works by Jenkins, by Jenkins and Landis, Thompson, the 

reprint of Tregaskis, and God~in.~~ Quest issue 3, number 1, has a number of 

articles on the X-15. 

The Air Force’s abortive Dyna-Soar program, later renamed the X-20, is 

discussed in Spires’s Beyond Horizons and received historical attention in Quest 

issue 3, number 4, with articles by Houchin and Smith.”j Houchin’s work is 

69. R. Cargill Hall, “The Air Force Agena: A Case Study in Early Spacecraft Technology,” in 

Technology and the Air Force: A Retrospective Assessment, ed. Jacob Neufeld, George M. Watson, Jr., and 

David Chenoweth (Washington, DC Air Force History and Museums Program, 1997), pp. 231-244. 

70. Asif A. Siddiqi, Challenge to Apollo. 

71. Brian Harvey, Russia in Space:The Failed Frontier? (Chichester, U.K.: Praxis Pubhshing, 2001). 

72. Matt Bille and Erika Lishock, The First Space Race: Launching the World’s First Satellites (College 

Station: Texas A&M Press, 2004). 

73. Peter Pesavento, “US Navy’s Untold Story of Space-Related Firsts: Space Projects of the 

Naval Ordnance Test Station (NOTs),” Spaceflight 38, no. 7 (1996): 239-243; Peter Pesavento, 

“Secrets Revealed About the Early US Navy Space Programme,” SpacefZight 38, no. 7 (1996): 243- 

245; J. Powell, “The NOTs Air-Launched Satellite Programme,”Journal ofthe British Interplanetary 

Society 50, no. 11 (1997): 433-440. 

74. Martin Caidin, Wings into Space: The History and Future of Winged Space Flight (New York Holt, 

Rinehart, and Winston, 1964); The Hypersonic Revolution: Case Studies in the History of Hypersonic 

Technology, vol. 1, From Max Valier to Project PRIME (1924-2967) (Bolling AFB, Washington, DC: 

USAF History and Museums Program, 1998); The Hypersonic Revolution: Eight Case Studies in the 

History ofHypersonic Technology, vol. 2, From Scramjet to the National Aero-Space Plane (Dayton, OH: 

Special Staff Office, Aeronautical Systems Division, Wright-Patterson AFB, 1987); Jay Miller, The 

X-Planes: X-1 to X-45 (Stillwater, MN: Voyageur Press, 2001). 

75. Dennis R. Jenkins, Hypersonics Before the Shuttle: A Concise History ofthe X-15 Research Airplane 

(Washington, DC: NASA SP-2000-4518, 2000); Dennis R. Jenkins and Tony Landis, Hypersonic: 

The Story of the North American X-25 (North Branch, MN: Specialty Press, 2003); Milton 0. 

Thompson, At the Edge ofspace: The X-15 Flight Program (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution 

Press, 2003); Richard Tregaskis, The X-25 Diary: The Story of America’s First Space Ship (New 

York: Dutton, 1961; reprint, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004); Robert Godwin, X25-The NASA Mission Reports Incorporating Files from the USAF (Burlington, Ontario: Apogee 

Books, 2000). 

76. Roy F. Houchin 11, “Why the Air Force Proposed the Dyna-Soar X-20 Program,” Quest: The 

History of Spaceflight Magazine 3, no. 4 (winter 1994): 5-12; Roy F. Houchin 11, “Why the Dynacontinued on the next page 
492 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

based on his dissertation, and he also has a more recent article on Dyna-Soar 

in the Journal of the British Interplanetary S0ciety.7~ Strom has a short introduction to Dyna-Soar in Crosslink.’8 Apogee’s series of historic space document 

publications includes Godwin’s collection for Dyna-S0ar.7~ 

Russell Hannigan’s Spacejight in the Era $Aero-Space Planes was the first 

general work on the topic.80 Reed and Thompson both describe USAF involvement with lifting-body research.81 Schweikart describes the USAF’s efforts for 

an orbital reusable system in his Questfor the Orbital Jet.82 Butrica documents 

later military efforts to build reusable systems in his Single Stage to O~bit.’~ It 

is also important to note the military’s involvement with the Space Shuttle 

program, both in its design and in its operations. These are currently best 

documented in T. A. Heppenheimer’s two recent volumes and are also noted 

in David Spires’s overview of the U.S. Air Force in space, Beyond Horizons.84 

Tomei discusses the USAF Space Shuttle pr~gram.~’ The Inertial Upper Stage, 

developed to support the Space Shuttle program, is described by Dunn.86 

The military was also crucial in the development of the various technologies of rocketry. Military funding of liquid-propellant and solid-propellant 

engines was the starting point for rocketry. The various stories of rocket piocontinuedfrom the previous page 

Soar X-20 Program was Cancelled,” Quest: The History of Spacefght Magazine 3, no. 4 (winter 1994): 

35-37; Terry Smith, “The Dyna-Soar X-20: A Historical Overview,” Quest: The History ofspacefght 

Magazine 3, no. 4 (winter 1994): 13-18; Terry Smith, “Dyna-Soar X-20: A Look at Hardware and 

Technology,” Quest: The History of Spacefght Magazine 3, no. 4 (winter 1994): 23-28. 

77. Roy Franklin Houchin 11, “The Rise and Fall ofDyna-Soar: A History ofAir Force Hypersonic 

R&D, 194441963’’ (Ph.D. diss., Auburn University, 1995); Roy F. Houchin 11, “Air Force-Office 

of the Secretary of Defense Rivalry: The Pressure of the Political Affairs in the Dyna-Soar (X-20) 

Program, 1957-1963,”]ournal of the British Interplanetary Society 50 (May 1997): 162-168. 

78. Steven R. Strom, “Jurassic Technology: The History of the Dyna-Soar,” Crosslink 5, no. 1 

(winter 2003/2004): 6-9. 

79. Robert Godwin, Dyna-Soar: Hypersonic Strategic Weapon System (Burlington, Ontario: Apogee 

Books, 2001). 

80. Russell J. Hannigan, Spaceflght in the Era ofAero-Space Planes (Malabar, FL: Krieger Publishing, 

1994). 

81. R. Dale Reed with Darlene Lister, Wingless Flght: The Lgting Body Story (Washington, DC: 

NASA SP-4220, 1997); Milton 0. Thompson and Curtis Peebles, Flying Without Wings: NASA L$ing 

Bodies and the Birth ofthe Space Shuttle (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1999). 

82. Larry Schweikart, The Quest for the Orbitaljet (Washington, DC: USAF History and Museums 

Program, 1998). 

83. Andrew J. Butrica, Single Stage to Orbit: Politics, Space Technology, and the Quest for Reusable 

Rocketry (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins, 2003). 

84. T. A. Heppenheimer, The Space Shuttle Decision: NASA’s Search for a Reusable Space Vehicle 

(Washington, DC: NASA SP-4221, 1999); T. A. Heppenheimer, Development of the Space Shuttle, 

1972-2981: History of the Space Shuttle, vol. 2 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 

2002); Spires, Beyond Horizons. 

85. E. J. Tomei, “The Air Force Space Shuttle Program: A Brief History,” Crosslink 4, no. 1 

(winter 2002/2003): 22-25. 

86. W. Paul Dunn, “The Evolution of the Inertial Upper Stage,” Crosslink 4, no. 1 (winter 

2002/2003): 38-42. 
THE HISTORY AND HISTORIOGRAPHY OF NATIONAL SECURITY SPACE 493 

neers (not repeated here), who were mostly funded by the military, invariably 

describe the early travails in the development of liquid and solid propellants. 

Volume 13 in the AAS History Series, edited by Doyle, provides a number of 

papers on the history of liquid-propellant rocketry.87 Heppenheimer describes 

the key role of the Navaho program in American liquid-propellant rocketry.88 

The best work on solid-propellant rocketry in the United States has been 

done by H~nley.’~ McKenzie’s sociological study of nuclear missile guidance, 

Inventing Accuracy, remains the best study of this aspect of ballistic missiles?’ 

Martin describes the development of the balloon tank structure of Atlas?’ The 

evolution of reentry systems is described by Hartunian?2 

Cleary provides two volumes on military operations at Cape Cana~eral.~~ 

Guillemette describes the history of Space Launch Complex 6 at Vandenberg 

AFB.94 Day provides an unusual look at the archaeology ofvandenberg Air Force 

Base in a two-part series in Spa~gight.~~ Powell and Scala tell story of White Sands 

Missile Range, and Powell describes its Green River Annex.96 With the end of 

the Cold War, there have been a number of Historic American Engineering 

Record surveys of US. missile and space sites, such as Lauber and Hess’s survey 

of the Denver Titan site.97 Boxx describes the development of W~omera.~’ 

87. S. E. Doyle, ed., History of Liquid Rocket Engine Development in the United States: 1955-1980, 

American Astronautical Society History Series, vol. 13 (San Diego: Univelt Press, 1992). 

88. Thomas A. Heppenheimer, “The Navaho Program and the Main Line of American Liquid 

Rocketry,” Air Power History 44, no. 2 (1997): 4-17. 

89. J. D. Hunley, “The Evolution ofLarge Solid Propellant Rocketry in the United States,” Quest: 

The History of Spacejight Quarterly 6, no. 1 (1998): 22-39. See also Hunley’s article on Minuteman 

in Launius and Jenkins, To Reach the Hgh Frontier. 

90. Donald McKenzie, Inventing Accuracy: A Historical Sociology of Nuclear Missile Guidance 

(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990). 

91. R. E. Martin, “The Atlas and Centaur ‘Steel Balloon’ Tanks. A Legacy of Karel Bossart,” 

IAA Paper 82-738 (40th Congress of International Astronautical Federation, Malaga, Spain, 7-12 

October 1989). 

92. Richard A. Hartunian, “Ballistic Missiles and Reentry Systems: The Critical Years,” Crosslink 

4, no. 1 (winter 2002/2003): 5-9. 

93. Cleary, The 6555th; Cleary, The Cape. 

94. Roger Guillemette,“Vandenberg: Space Shuttle Launch and Landing Site, Part 1, Construction of 

Shuttle Launch Facilities,” Spacgight 36, no. 10 (1994): 354-357; Roger Guillemette, “Vandenberg: 

Space Shuttle Launch and Landing Site, Part 2, Abandoned in Place,” Spacejight 36, no. 11 (1994): 

95. Dwayne A. Day, “Relics of the Space Race: Space Archeology at Vandenberg Air Force Base, 

Part 1,” Spacejight 42, no. 2 (2000): 59-62; Dwayne A. Day, “Relics of the Space Race: Space 

Archeology at Vandenberg Air Force Base, Part 11,” Spacejight 42, no. 3 (March 2000): 120-122. 

96. J. W. Powell and K. J. Scala, “Historic White Sands Missile Range,” Journal ofthe British 

Interplanetary Society 47, no. 3 (1994): 83-98; Joel W. Powell, “Green River, Utah: a Forgotten 

Annex of White Sands Missile Range,” Spacejight 43, no. 3 (2001): 123-125. 

Denver, CoIorado, Historic American Engineering Record (HAER) #CO-75 (Minneapolis, MN: 

Hess, Roice and Company, December 1993). 

98. Isaac G. Boxx, “Woomera, Part 1,” Spacejight 37, no. 6 (1995): 200-202; Isaac G. Boxx, 

“Woomera, Part 2,” Spacejight 37, no. 7 (1995): 243-247. 

378-381. 

97. John F. Lauber and Jeffrey A. Hess, GIenn L. Martin Company Titan Missile Test Fac 
494 CRITICAL ISSUES INTHE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

EARLY WARNING AND SPACE SURVEILLANCE 

Response to an attack by ballistic missiles first requires warning that an 

attack is under way and the ability to discriminate between these and other 

natural or humanmade objects that reenter the atmosphere. Given that the 

flight time of intercontinental ballistic missiles from the U.S. to the USSR 

and vice versa is about 30 minutes and that defenses against missiles have 

remained extremely difficult, the main purpose of these systems was to send 

warning to the political and military leaders to command a retaliatory strike. 

In practice, this meant launching ballistic missiles, getting bombers into the 

air, and sending signals to submarine forces. Both the United States and Soviet 

Union developed ground-based and space-based systems for these purposes at 

the same time as ballistic missiles became viable as operational weapons. 

During World War 11, radar systems in the United States were developed 

mainly at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) Radiation Laboratory, 

which developed a variety of ground-, ship-, and aircraft-based radar systems to 

detect enemy aircraft and submarines and also to aid strategic bombing. After 

the war, the threat of Soviet nuclear-armed bombers spurred the creation of 

progressively more powerful radar systems, along with the need to connect the 

many radar systems together across increasingly larger regions, eventually to 

protect the entire North American continent. The problem of rapidly correlating these data as aircraft speeds increased led researchers at the MIT Radiation 

Laboratory and at the University of Michigan to develop computer-based technologies to integrate the variety of data for each air defense sector. The USAF 

ultimately selected MIT’s system, which became known as the Semi-Automatic 

Ground Environment (SAGE) system. SAGE became the most expensive computer and largest software programming effort of the 1950s. Unfortunately, the 

Soviet Union quickly made it obsolete by creating ballistic missiles. 

To detect ballistic missiles, the SAGE system was inadequate. What the 

United States needed was a large, over-the-horizon radar that could pick up 

ballistic missile launches as early as possible in their flight trajectories. The new 

system, called the Ballistic Missile Early Warning System (BMEWS), whose 

first radar system in Thule, Greenland, began operation on 31 December 1960, 

could detect ballistic missiles launched from the Soviet Union 15 minutes prior 

to impact. This provided a bare minimum of time for the United States to 

retaliate by getting its bombers and ballistic missiles into the air before impact. 

Phased-array radar systems, including the PAVE PAWS and COBRA DANE 

systems of the 1970s and 1980s, were later implemented to improve capabilities 

to track multiple objects and to detect submarine-launched ballistic missiles. 

Such a short response time was problematic, and the USAF sought any 

means to extend it. By the late 1950s, satellites beckoned as a possibility. Building 

off of infrared sensor technologies developed in Nazi Germany, Lockheed 
THE HISTORY AND HISTORIOGRAPHY OF NATIONAL SECURITY SPACE 495 

An Agena A spacecraft for an early MIDAS launch undergoes a weight test in 1960 

at Lockheed’s plant in Sunnyvale, California, before shipment to Cape Canaveral for 

launch. (Official USAFphoto. Air Force Space Command, Office of History) 

Corporation proposed a variant of its military satellite project, Weapon System 

117L (WS-l17L), that could detect the infrared signature of a ballistic missile’s 

rocket exhaust plume in the first few minutes of flight. This experimental project, called the Missile Defense Alarm System (MIDAS), placed infrared detectors on polar-orbiting satellites. Despite many failures, to the surprise of its 
496 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

many skeptics, MIDAS proved that the technology was viable. Improvements 

in the detector technologies allowed the USAF to put out requests for an operational geosynchronous system of three satellites that could monitor the entire 

globe. Eventually called the Defense Support Program (DSP), this program 

has gone through several upgrades since the early 1970s and remains functional 

today. DSP gained notoriety during the Gulf War of 1991 when it detected 

Iraqi short-range ballistic missile launches. Based on this experience, DSP has 

been tied more closely to tactical users, as shown in the Iraq War of 2003, when 

it relayed missile launch data to U.S. Central Command. It is currently to be 

replaced in the late 2000s by the Space-Based Infrared System (SBIRS). 

The Soviet Union went through a similar evolution from local to continental radars for air defense, and then ballistic missile detection, and finally to 

space-based systems. In the 1960s, the Soviets developed the Dnestr and Dnepr 

systems. The late 1970s and 1980s saw the deployment of the more powerful 

Daryal radars into operation, one of which was the Krasnoyarsk system that 

became a focus of controversy when the United States accused the Soviet Union 

of violating the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty by aiming this radar east across 

Siberia instead of across national borders as the treaty required. The Soviets 

also deployed three powerful over-the-horizon Duga-2 systems in the 1970s. 

Finally, the Lavotchkin design bureau developed early-warning satellites, first 

a constellation of Molniya orbit satellites called Oko, in the 1970s, and a geosynchronous system called Prognoz, first deployed in the 1980s. Oko deployed 

a nine-satellite constellation with its apogee above North America and Europe 

to ensure satellites were deployed over these regions at all times. The fall of 

the Soviet Union has caused major problems with the early-warning system, as 

some of the ground-based radar sites were located in newly independent Baltic 

States that refused to operate them. In addition, the financial crises associated 

with the fall of the communist empire meant that the Oko and Prognoz constellations have not been fully maintained. The combination of these problems 

means that the now-Russian system has significant gaps in coverage. 

The American and Soviet navies both came to rely on space-based surveillance of the oceans to identify the location of each other’s fleets for both strategic and tactical purposes. Significantly outgunned by the U.S. Navy, the Soviet 

Union relied far more on submarines and ground-based aircraft for its naval 

goals and developed naval surveillance satellites to augment these capabilities. 

Its US-A (active radar-RORSAT, Radar Ocean Reconnaissance Satellite) and 

US-I? (passive radar-EORSAT, Electronic Intelligence Ocean Reconnaissance 

Satellite) systems, designed by Vladimir Chelomey’s OKB-52, were deployed 

in the 1970s. The United States also saw the utility in a naval satellite system, 

also developing and deploying its White Cloud satellites in the 1970s. White 

Cloud, US-P, and their descendants remain active in the early 21st century, but 

US-A’s last launch was in 1988, and the program is now defunct. 
THE HISTORY AND HISTORIOGRAPHY OF NATIONAL SECURITY SPACE 497 

Both the United States and the Soviet Union also had to distinguish 

between ballistic missiles and natural or artificial debris reentering the atmosphere. Neither side desired to launch a nuclear strike to retaliate against a 

meteor or old spacecraft burning up in the atmosphere. Starting in the late 

1950s, both sides began to develop space surveillance networks that used combinations of active radar and passive optical and electronic sensors to monitor 

the trajectories of Earth-orbiting satellites and associated debris. 

Early-warning systems are most frequently encountered in books with 

larger goals. The best starting point to understand radar’s development from 

prior to World War I1 into the early Cold War is Buderi’s The Invention that 

Changed the W0rld.9~ The best source for an overview of the U.S. systems is 

Spires’s Beyond Horizons,loo which contains descriptions of the USAF groundand space-based early-warning systems. Schaffel’s The Emerging Shield gives 

the prehistory of the air defense systems from the end of World War I1 to 

1960, including the various radar systems.I0’ Winkler gives an overview of 

both air defense and missile warning radar systems.lo2 Needell’s biography 

of Lloyd Berkner contains a chapter on his role in the development of the 

Distant Early Warning (DEW) line in the Klass was among the 

first to discuss MIDAS in his Secret Sentries in Space in 1971.1°4 Sprague’s 1985 

study of MIDAS at Air University is another early work.’OS The National 

Reconnaissance Office recently declassified Hall’s history of MIDAS, originally written in 1989, but which was publicly published in 1999 both by the 

NRO and in Qzkest.lo6 N. W. Watkins published a short history of MIDAS after 

Hall’s work was written but before it was publicly released.’” Day published a 

three-part series on DSP in 1996.’” Richelson’s America’s Space Sentinels is one 

99. Robert Buderi, The Invention that Changed the World (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996). 

100. Spires, Beyond Horizons. 

101. Kenneth Schaffel, The Emerging Shield: The Air Force and the Evolution of Continental Air 

102. David F. Winkler, Searching the Skies: The Legacy of the United States Cold War Defense Radar 

103. Allan A. Needeli, Science, Cold War and the American State: Lloyd I.: Berkner and the Balance of 

104. Philip J. Klass, Secret Sentries in Space (New York: Random House, 1971). 

105. Major Barkley G. Sprague, Evolution ofthe Missile Defense Alarm System, 1955-2982 (Maxwell 

AFB, AL: Air Command and Staff College, Air University, 1985). 

106. R. Cargd Hall, Missile DefenseAlarm:The Genesis of Space-Based Injared Early Warning (Washmgton, 

DC: NRO History Office, July 1988); R. Cargdl Hall, “Missile Defense Alarm:The Genesis of Spacebased Infiared Early Warning,” Quest:The History of Spaceflight Quarterly 7, no. 1 (spring 1999): 5-17. 

107. N. W. Watkins, “The MIDAS Project Part 1: Strategic and Technical Origins and Political 

Evolution, 1955-1963,”]ournal of the British Interplanetary Society 50, no. 6 (1997): 215-224. 

108. Dwayne A. Day,“Top Cover:The Origins and Evoluhon of the Defense Support Program, Part 

1,” Spaceflight aanuary 1996): 22-26; Dwayne A. Day, “Top Cover:The Origms and Evolution of the 

Defense Support Program, Part 2,” Spaceflight (February 1996): 59-63; Dwayne A. Day, “Top Cover: 

The Origins and Evolution of the Defense Support Program, Part 3,” Spaceflight (March 1996): 95-99. 

Defense, 1945-1960 (Washington, DC: Office of Air Force History, 1991). 

Program (Langley AFB, VA: HQ Air Combat Command, 1997). 

Professional Ideals (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 2000), chap. 9. 
498 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

of the few books devoted to the topic, in this case to the genesis and evolution 

of American early-warning systems, starting with MIDAS, but focusing on 

the DSP ~ystern.’’~ Since DSP had a ground control center in Australia, Ball’s 

Basefor Debate was an early monograph that described DSP, among other 

systems.”’ An obscure but useful source produced when the Woomera DSP 

facility was closed is Erickson’s The History of theJDFN (Joint Defence Facility 

Nurrungar).”’ Rosolanka created a short pictorial history of DSP.’12 

The best source for the Soviet and Russian program is Zaloga’s The 

Kremlin’s Nuclear Sword, which contains descriptions and development history 

of all Soviet and Russian ground- and space-based early-warning system^."^ 

Another good overview is part 2 of Whitmare’s “Red Bear on the Pr~wl.””~ 

Harvey’s Russia in Space provides a brief description of Oko and Prognoz.’l5 

Kagan also describes Soviet early-warning satellites, as does Forden.”‘ A 

description of the various post-Cold War gaps in the Russian system is given 

in Forden, Podvig, and Postol’s “False Alarm, Nuclear Danger””’ and in 

Clark’s “Decline of the Russian Early Warning System.”’1s 

United States and Soviet/Russian naval surveillance satellites are discussed, 

along with their implications for naval strategy and tactics, in Friedman’s dense 

and informative Seapower and Space.119 Siddiqi discusses the Soviet programs 

in a 1999 article in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society.12’ Muse provides another recent treatment of RORSAT.12’ Teal Ruby, the failed Defense 

109. Jeffrey T. Richelson, America’s Space Sentinels: DSP Satellites and National Security (Lawrence: 

110. Desmond Ball, A Basefor Debate: The U.S. Satellite Station at Nurrungar (North Sydney: 

111. Mark Erickson, ed., The History of the JDFN (Joint Defence Facility Nurrungar), 1970-1999 

112. James J. Rosolanka, The Defense Support Program (DSP): A Pictorial Chronology, 1970-1998 

113. Zaloga, The Kremlin’s Nuclear Sword. 

114. Paul H. Whitmore, “Red Bear on the Prowl: Strategic Warning in the Soviet Union, Part 

115. Harvey, Russia in Space: The Failed Frontier? 

116. Boris Kagan, Soviet ABM Early Warning System: Satellite-Based Project M (Falls Church, VA: 

Delphic, 1991); Geoffrey Forden, “Russia’s Early Warning System: Which Came First, Technology 

or Doctrine?” Breakthroughs 10, no. 1 (spring 2001): 9-16. 

117. Geoffrey Forden, Pave1 Podvig, and Theodore A. Postol, “False Alarm, Nuclear Danger,” 

Spectrum 37, no. 3 (March 2000): 31-39. 

118. Phillip Clark, “Gecline of the Russian Early Warning System,” Jane’s Intelligence Review 

(‘January 2001). 

119. Norman Friedman, Seapowerand Space: From the Dawn of the Missile Age to Net-Centric Wagare 

(Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2000). 

120. AsifSiddiqi, “Staring at the Sea-The Soviet RORSAT and EORSAT Programme,”Journal 

ofthe British Interplanetary Society 52 (1999): 397-416. 

121. Fritz Muse, “RORSATS: The Veiled Threat,”Journal of the British Interplanetary Society 57, 

supplement 1 (2004): 42-49. 

University Press of Kansas, 1999). 

Unwin Hymna, 1988). 

(Woomera, Australia: 5th Space Warning Squadron and No. 1 Joint Communications Unit, 1999). 

(Los Angeles AFB, CA: SBIRS System Program Office, 1998). 

2,” Quest: The History of Spacefight Quarterly 10, no. 1 (2003): 54-62. 
THE HISTORY AND HISTORIOGRAPHY OF NATIONAL SECURITY SPACE 499 

Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)-USAF effort to develop a 

satellite to monitor aircraft flight, is discussed by Day.’22 

There is no comprehensive published history of space surveillance, either 

American or Russian. Some early histories by Hayes, Thomas, and Engle and 

Drummond are now quite dated but describe passive satellite tracking in the 

early 1960~’~~ They also include a substantial amount on satellite command 

and control as it existed at the time. More recent information can be found in 

Jane’s Space Directo~ry.’~~ An unpublished independent study project by Evans at 

the University of North Dakota used these sources and a few others to provide 

an overview history of the U.S. Space Surveillance Net~0rk.l~~ Spires’s Beyond 

Horizons provides some information on the history of the Space Surveillance 

Network as Powell describes the Ground-Based Electro-Optical Deep 

Space Surveillance (GEODSS) ~ystem.’~’ The evolution of space surveillance 

into asteroid detection after the collision of Shoemaker-Levy 9 with Jupiter 

in 1994 is narrated by Mesco.’28 The history of the Soviet/Russian system 

remains undocumented, with only a couple of brief papers in English describing the system and even briefer mentions of its history.lZ9 An interesting case 

study of academic participation in space tracking is presented by Wikles and 

Gledit~ch.’~~ Another specific case study is the tracking of Cosmos 954, which 

fell on Canada in 1978.13’ 

122. Dwayne A. Day, “Jewel in the Sky: The US Military Satellite that Never Made It,” SpaceJllight 

47, no. 4 (2005): 147-154. 

123. Eugene Hayes, The Smithsonian’s Satellite Tracking Program: Its History and Ovganiration 

(Washington, DC: Smithsonian, 1962); Shirley Thomas, Satellite Tracking Facilities: Their History 

and Operation (New York: Holt, 1963); Eloise Engle and Kenneth H. Drummond, Sky Rangers: 

Satellite Tracking Around the World (New York: John Day Co., 1965). 

124.Jane’s Space Directory (Alexandria, VA: Jane’s Information Group, annual). 

125. Brad M. Evans, “The History of the Space Surveillance Network and its Capabilities” 

(unpublished Independent Study Project, Department of Space Studies, University of North 

Dakota, summer 2003). 

126. Spires, Beyond Horizons. 

127. Joel Powell, “Satellite Tracking with GEODSS,” SpaceJlight 27, no. 3 (1985): 129-130. 

128. James C. Mesco, “Watch the Skies,” Quest: The History of Spaceflight Quarterly 6, no. 4 

129. G. Batyr, S. Veniaminov, V. Dicky, V. Yurasov, A. Menshicov, Z. Khotorovsky, “The 

Current State of Russian Space Surveillance System and its Capability in Surveying Space Debris,” 

paper no. ESA SD-01 in Proceedings ofthe First European Confrence on Space Debris (held in Darmstadt, 

Germany, 5-7 April 1993, European Space Agency); Z. N. Khutorovsky, “Low-Perigee Satellite 

Catalog Maintenance: Issues of Methodology” (paper presented at the Second European Congress 

on Space Debris, Darmstadt, Germany, 17-19 March 1997). 

130. Owen Wilkes and Nlls Petter Gleditsch,“Optical Satellite Trackmg: A Case Study in University 

Participation in Preparation for Space Warfare,”Journal of Peace Research 15, no. 3 (1978): 205-225. 

131. Leo Heaps, Operation Morning Light: Terror in Our Skies, The Story of Cosmos 954 (London: 

Paddington Press, 1978). 

(1998): 35-40. 
500 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

COMMAND AND CONTROL 

Relaying data to and from space systems and ground centers in order to 

control these devices and to initiate and control military responses to strategic 

and tactical events is crucial to both nuclear and conventional warfare. With 

each generation and type of space vehicle, and in many cases with each specific project, are built operations control centers and mechanisms to integrate 

and analyze the data and to distribute the data coming from the space systems 

to appropriate people and groups on the ground. Despite the unquestioned 

fact that all space systems require ground control, this topic has received, with 

a few notable exceptions, remarkably little attention from historians or other 

scholars. Most studies focus on the devices that go into space, to the detriment 

of what happens on the ground to control them. 

There are at least two types of ground control systems. The first type 

includes systems that directly control the operations of spacecraft. To do this, 

the engineering and sensor data are sent to the Earth (downlinked) from the 

spacecraft and distributed to a mission operations team, which then sends 

commands up (uplinked) to the spacecraft to control its operation. The second 

type includes systems that take the sensor data from spacecraft and then operate on and distribute those data for other functions. The best U.S. example of 

the former is the satellite command and control complexes at Schriever AFB 

near Colorado Springs, Colorado, the Air Force Satellite Control Facility. The 

best example of the latter are the military command and control facilities of 

the Cheyenne Mountain Complex, also near Colorado Springs, which receive 

sensor data from all around the world, combine them into an integrated picture of air and space threats to the North American continent, and then use 

and send those integrated data to decision-makers who must determine how 

to respond to any perceived threats. 

The stories of the two types of ground control systems appear in different kinds of histories. The histories of ground control systems that operate 

spacecraft are, to the extent they exist at all, usually tied to the history of the 

projects and spacecraft for which they were built. Thus, in most cases, one finds 

the ground control story in the general histories of the projects for which they 

were created. In some cases, these ground control systems are modified to also 

control other spacecraft, in which case they take on lives of their own, partially 

separated from the specific systems they control. Such is the story of the Air 

Force Satellite Control Facility, which began as the facility that controlled the 

CORONA sateIIites but later expanded to control other spacecraft as well. 

The histories of classical command and control systems such as those 

residing in Cheyenne Mountain are usually separate from the specific systems 

that contribute data because the point of these systems is to combine data from 

different systems and assemble it into formats usable to decision-makers. Thus 
THE HISTORY AND HISTORIOGRAPHY OF NATIONAL SECURITY SPACE 501 

Space Defense Center inside Cheyenne Mountain, June 1984. (Official USAF photo. 

Air Force Space Command, Office of History) 

the histories depend on sensor systems and higher level political and operational decisions as well as the specifics of the “combination” of the data. 

The origins of the North American command and control system start 

with the early-warning systems described in the previous section. As various 

radar systems were developed and deployed around the northern periphery 

of the continent, the United States developed the first real-time computer to 

automate the translation of radar data into a “user-friendly” graphical interface that would allow Air Force enlisted personnel to identify incoming Soviet 

bombers and direct U.S. fighters and missiles to intercept them. This system, 

called the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment, or SAGE, was a major milestone in the development of computing hardware and software. Developed by 

the Lincoln Laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of technology, SAGE 

led to the creation of the Air Force-funded, nonprofit MITRE Corporation 

to complete its development, and also the System Development Corporation, 

which spun off from RAND Corporation to create SAGE’S software. 

In 1957, Canada and the United States formed North American Air 

Defense Command, or NORAD, to jointly protect the continent, given that 

the radar systems needed to detect Soviet bombers were located on both U.S. 

and Canadian soil. The central command center was established at Ent Air 

Force Base in Colorado Springs, Colorado, that same year. In 1959, the U.S. 
502 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

Joint Chiefs of Staff selected Cheyenne Mountain, just southwest of Colorado 

Springs, to be the location of an underground, nuclear-hardened facility to 

house NORAD. Into the tunnels of Cheyenne Mountain, which was completed in 1965, went the command facilities for the SAGE air defense network, 

the Ballistic Missile Early Warning System (BMEWS), and what became the 

Space Surveillance Network. Tying these three separate systems together into 

a single command center was the 4251, Command Operations Center computing and display system, which used Philco 2000 computers. On 1 January 

1966, Air Force Systems Command handed over operations to NORAD, 

whose commander, by treaty, was always an American, and whose deputy 

commander was always a Canadian. The NORAD Combat Operations 

Center became operational in February 1967 when the Space Defense Center 

system, 496L, was completed. Data from NORAD were fed to the American 

and Canadian national authorities. 

Increases in Soviet threats and in corresponding American detection systems such as phased-array radars led to the Cheyenne Mountain Improvement 

Program, called 427M. This new system would have to integrate with a global 

command and control system, known as the World-Wide Military Command 

and Control System (WWMCCS), which used Honeywell Information System 

6060 computers. Philco-Ford won a contract for system integration and testing, and the communications gear, while System Development Corporation 

won the contract for the Space Computation Center software and displays. 

The system also eventually included UNIVAC 1100/42 systems for satellite 

early warning. NORAD itself developed much of the system software. 427M 

was finally completed in 1979 but suffered some false nuclear attack warnings, 

which led quickly to studies and investigations as to the cause, which turned 

out to be faulty computer chips. 

The 427M program was a set of largely disjointed “stovepipe” projects, 

which were combined later into the next major upgrade, which became known 

as the Cheyenne Mountain Upgrade Program.This program came to include a 

variety of backup systems, both electronic and physical. The USAF developed 

backup facilities at Offutt AFB near Omaha, Nebraska (the home of Strategic 

Air Command), and at Peterson AFB in Colorado Springs, along with an existing NORAD backup facility at Malmstrom AFB near Great Falls, Montana.The 

various upgrades, like their predecessors, ran into cost overruns and schedule 

slips that accompanied their technical problems. Again came a variety of investigations, which again pointed to problems with systems integration of the many 

sensors, computers, and facilities. The Cheyenne Mountain Upgrade program 

finally reached full operational capability (FOC) in October 1998. 

In the 1991 Gulf War, Defense Support Program data on Iraqi ballistic missile launches fed into NORAD and then to military units in the 

Gulf. From that time forward, the military has taken a variety of measures to 
THE HISTORY AND HISTORIOGRAPHY OF NATIONAL SECURITY SPACE 503 

improve speed and accuracy of ballistic missile and other data from “strategic” 

sources such as NORAD to tactical units in wartime. By the early 21st century, another series of upgrades were under way, this time to take advantage 

of technical improvements in computer workstations and computer networks 

such as the Internet and World Wide Web. 

Information from NORAD feeds into the highest level political and military authorities so as to determine, in the worst case, whether a nuclear counterstrike should be launched or whether any other measures are required. With 

the advent of ballistic missiles, the time available for the nuclear “go code” 

decision from detection of the ballistic missiles from space and from groundbased radar shrank from hours down to 15 to 30 minutes. Furthermore, hydrogen bombs in space or the upper atmosphere would disrupt the ionosphere, 

thereby disrupting most long-range radio communications, and destroy 

ground-based wire communication systems near nuclear impact points. One 

space-based solution to this problem in the 1960s and 1970s was the creation 

of the Emergency Rocket Communications System, which would launch Blue 

Scout (1963-1967) or Minuteman (after 1967) rockets from Wallops Island, 

Virginia, to high altitude, from where it would send an Emergency Action 

Message such as the nuclear go-code by radio, thus bypassing ionospheric 

disruptions. In the 1980s, the Reagan administration approved creation of the 

Milstar satellite communications system, which was nuclear-hardened so as to 

send the Emergency Action Message to American nuclear forces around the 

world during a nuclear war. The end of the Cold War reduced, but did not 

eliminate, threats to the U.S. command and control system. 

The Soviet Union faced similar problems, compounded by the political 

control of nuclear weapons by the Soviet secret police, the KGB. By the late 

1960s, the Soviets created the Signal system, which could detect an attempt 

by a crew to perform an unauthorized ballistic missile launch. In the 1970s, 

the Molniya satellite communications system enhanced Soviet command and 

control, although these satellites were vulnerable to nuclear attack in space. By 

the 1980s, the Soviets created an automatic nuclear response system known 

as Perimetr, much like the hypothetical “doomsday machine” satirized in the 

early 1960s film Dr. Stvungelove. This system, deployed in 1985, would automatically authorize nuclear retaliation even if the national authorities were dead. 

The Soviets also developed their own ballistic-missile-based communications 

system like the American Emergency Rocket Communications System. 

There are two recentworks onsatellite missioncontrolsystems. Mudgway’s 

Uplink-Downlink describes the evolution of Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Deep 

Space Net~0rk.l~~ This is almost entirely a civilian story, but the military 

132. Douglas J. Mudgway, Uplink-Downlink: A History of the Deep Space Network, 1957-1997 

(Washington, DC: NASA SP-2001-4227,2001). 
504 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

origins of the program are detailed in chapter 2. Arnold’s Spyingfvom Space is 

the first major published study of a military satellite control system, the Air 

Force Satellite Control Fa~i1ity.l~~ Spires’s Beyond Horizons also has discussions 

of satellite control in the USAF among its many other t0pi~s.l~~ 

The SAGE system has a small but significant literature in the history of computing. The foremost reference is Redmond and Smith’s tome, From Whirlwind 

to MITRE.135 Jacobs’s The SAGE Air Defense System gives an anecdotal account 

of SAGE? deve10pment.l~~ Edwards’s eclectic The Closed World put SAGE into a 

broader Cold War context through a postmodern discourse ana1y~is.l~’ In1983, 

the Annals ofthe History of Computing published a SAGE special issue that included 

a collection of articles on various facets of the computer system.’38 Two institutional histories link SAGE to broader issues in command and control: MITRE 

Corporation’s corporate history and Baum’s history of System Development 

C~rporation.’~~ Hughes’s Rescuing Prometheus also has a chapter on SAGE.’40 

Dyer and Dennis produced a new history of MITRE in 1998.14’ 

Larger scale command and control systems and their ties to the national 

command authorities, such as NORAD and WWMCCS, have a surprisingly limited literature, given the importance of the subject for the survival 

of the United States in wartime. An early external description of NORAD 

is in DeVere and J0hns0n.l~~ Chapman provides a full history of NORAD’s 

Cheyenne Mountain Complex up to 1989 in Legacy ofPeea~e.’~~ The history of 

WWMCCS is told in Pearson, The World Wide Military Command and Control 

Control of British and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) 

nuclear forces to the mid-1960s is discussed in Twigge and Scott’s Planning 

133. David Christopher Arnold, Spying from Space: Constructing America’s Satellite Command and 

134. Spires, Beyond Horizons. 

135. Kent C. Redmond and Thomas A. Smith, From Whirlwind to MITRE: The R&D Story of the 

136. John F. Jacobs, The SAGE Air Defense System: A Personal History (Bedford, MA: MITRE 

137. Paul N. Edwards, The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America 

138. Annals of the History of Computing 5, no. 4 (October 1983). 

139. MITRE: The First Twenty Bars (Bedford, MA: MITRE Corporatlon, 1979); Claude Baum, The 

System Builders: The Story cf SDC (Santa Monica, CA System Development Corporation, 1981). 

140. Thomas P. Hughes, Rescuing Prometheus (New York: Pantheon Books, 1998), chap. 2. 

141. Davis Dyer and Michael Aaron Dennis, Architects of Information Advantage: The MITRE 

142. G. T. DeVere and N. L. Johnson, “The NORAD Space Network,” Spaceflight 27, nos. 7-8 

143. Richard G. Chapman, Jr., Legacy of Peace: Mountain with a Mission, NORAD’s Cheyenne 

Mountain Combat Operations Center, The Cold War Years: 1946-1989 (Colorado Springs, CO: 

Mountain Express Printing, 1989). 

144. David E. Pearson, The World Wide Military Command and Control System: Evolution and 

Effectiveness (Maxwell AFB, AL: Air University Press, 2000). 

Control Systems (College Station: Texas A&M Press University, 2005). 

SAGE Air Defense Computer (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000). 

Corporation, 1986). 

(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996). 

Corporation Since 1958 (Montgomery, AL: Community Communications, 1998). 

(1985): 306-309. 
THE HISTORY AND HISTORIOGRAPHY OF NATIONAL SECURITY SPACE 505 

Arm~geddon.’~~ Blair’s Strategic Command and Control from 1985 remains a valuable source on the overall control of nuclear forces,’46 as is Bracken’s 1983 

Command and Control of Nuclear Forces.’47 For the Soviet Union and Russia, 

Zaloga’s The Kremlin’s Nuclear Sword is the best introduction, with information 

on Signal, Perimetr, et^.'^^ 

COMMUNICATIONS 

Separate from the issue of warfare are everyday military communications for logistics, as well as tactical communications for conventional force 

operations. The United States has particular need for worldwide communications due to the distribution of American military forces around the globe 

during and after the Cold War. The first communications satellite experiment was Project SCORE (Signal Communication by Orbiting Relay 

Equipment), which used a modified Atlas ICBM to broadcast a taped message 

from President Eisenhower in 1958. The Army Signal Corps launched the 

first repeater satellite, Courier, in 1960, while working on a more sophisticated satellite known as Advent. Advent was too ambitious and was canceled 

in 1962, but in 1964, the Department of Defense created the Initial Defense 

Communications Satellite Program (IDCSP), managed by the Defense 

Communications Agency. The Air Force built the satellites, while the Army 

Satellite Communications Agency handled the ground segment. IDCSP consisted of a constellation of simple Philco satellites in medium-Earth orbit, the 

first seven of which were launched in 1966. The military, from that time to 

the present, also leased transponders on commercial communications satellites 

for less sensitive logistical and other information. 

The second generation of military satellites was known as the Defense 

Satellite Communications System 11, or DSCS (pronounced “discus”) 11. Built 

by TRW, the first pair of these much more capable satellites were launched 

in 1971. Whereas IDCSP satellites could each handle 11 tactical-quality voice 

circuits, DSCS I1 satellites each had capacity for 1,300 voice channels and 

could communicate with much smaller antennas on the ground. DSCS I11 

satellites, built by General Electric and first launched in 1982, were even more 

capable, with antijamming capabilities and spot beams. DSCS I11 satellites 

continue to operate into the 21st century. 

145. Stephen Twigge and Len Scott, Planning Armageddon: Britain, the United States and the Command 

146. Bruce G. Blair, Strategic Command and Control: Redefining the Nuclear Threat (Washington, 

147. Paul Bracken, The Command and Control ofNudear Forces (New Haven, CT Yale University 

148. Zaloga, The Kremlin’s Nuclear Sword. 

of Western Nuclear Forces, 1945-1964 (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 2000). 

DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1985). 

Press, 1983). 
506 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

In the meantime, the Navy wanted its own system for mobile fleet communications. The Lincoln Laboratory of MIT, with funding from all of the 

services, created a series of experimental satellites to test a variety of frequency ranges and capabilities. The first military satellites operated in Super 

High Frequency (SHF), which required very large ground antennas. Mobile 

communications required smaller ground antennas, often using Ultra-High 

Frequencies (UHF). Lincoln Experimental Satellites 3-6 tested these capabilities, leading to the Hughes-built Tacsat, which conclusively proved the utility 

of UHF communications for the U.S. Navy in particular. The Navy then 

funded development of the Fleet Satellite Communications (FLTSATCOM) 

system in the 1970s, but development delays led to purchase of the so-called 

“Gapfiller” satellites, also built by Hughes. Gapfiller and FLTSATCOM were 

both used in 1980s, with two FLTSATCOM satellites, controlled from Point 

Mugu, California, remaining in operation as of February 2005. 

The USAF originally developed the Milstar communications satellites 

in the 1980s for low-rate, nuclear-hardened communications capabilities to 

ensure the nuclear “go-code’’ could be sent in nuclear war. When the Cold 

War ended, the remaining Milstar satellites were modified for higher-rate 

communication capabilities for tactical purposes. Since the 1970s, the increasing use of imagery for strategic and tactical purposes has driven the development of satellite communication capabilities towards ever greater speeds. 

The KH-11 reconnaissance satellites, which were the first to use radio signals to send imagery, required communications satellites such as the Satellite 

Data System to relay the data. Later systems, such as the Lacrosse radar-based 

reconnaissance satellite, used the Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System 

also used by NASA. The Ultra-High Frequency Follow-On system, first 

launched in 1993, is the replacement for the aging FLTSATCOM design. 

With ever greater demand for communications bandwidth largely driven by 

sending digital imagery, the U.S. military began leasing significant amounts 

of time and transponders from commercial carriers, including its 2000 deal 

with Iridium Satellite LLC to lease the Iridium global satellite constellation 

that had gone bankrupt. 

The Soviet Union likewise developed military communications systems, 

starting with the well-known Molniya satellites in 1965. Because of the far 

northern latitudes of the Soviet Union, the Soviets have predominantly used 

medium-Earth-orbit systems to ensure coverage over the Poles. Later, the 

Soviets combined communications with navigational capabilities with the 

Tsiklon (first launched 1967) and later Tsiklon M system (first launched 1974). 

The Kristal and Strela satellite constellations were also developed, along with 

the geosynchronous Raduga communications system. 

Military satellite communications have also been crucial to other countries, starting with the United Kingdom for the Royal Navy, which developed 
THE HISTORY AND HISTORIOGRAPHY OF NATIONAL SECURITY SPACE 507 

and operated its Skynet system starting in 1969, and to NATO, which since the 

1970s has had its own series of satellites. China developed its Dong Fang Hong 

communications satellites starting in 1984. Many other countries have military 

satellite communication capabilities through their own domestic communications satellites. These satellites are generally mixed military-civilian systems. 

No comprehensive history of satellite communications, or of military satellite communications, exists. However, some historical research has begun. 

The origin of satellite communications is best told in Whalen’s The Origins 

of Satellite Communications, including the relationships between the military, 

NASA, and industry in its formative period in the 1950s and early 196Os.l4’ 

Butrica’s edited Beyond the Ionosphere contains a collection of historical papers 

on a variety of communications satellite topics, including military efforts of 

the USAF, Navy, and MIT’s Lincoln Laborat~ries.”~ Martin’s Communication 

Satellites, now in its fourth edition, is an essential reference, providing a brief 

overview of all communications satellites up to its publication date, including source information on where to get further data.’51 Spires and Sturdevant 

provide an overview of USAF military satellite communications, which is 

reproduced in Beyond the Iono~phere.’~~ Van Trees et al. provide an overview 

of satellite communications in a 2004 arti~1e.l~~ Lee’s History of the Defeense 

Satellite Communications System is one of the few works devoted exclusively 

to military space communication^.^^^ Davis described Project SCORE in a 

1999 arti~1e.l~~ Richelson describes the Satellite Data System (SDS) in a 1982 

article in the Journal of the British Interplanetary S0~iety.I~~ Day’s 1999 Spacejlight 

article discusses SDS and its three launches from the Space Sh~tt1e.l~’ The U.S. 

and Soviet navies’ use of communications satellites is well told in Friedman’s 

149. David J. Whalen, The Origins of Satellite Communications, 1945-1965 (Washington, DC: 

150. Andrew J. Butrica, ed., Beyond the Ionosphere: F$y Years of Satellite Communications 

151. Donald H. Martin, Communications Satellites, 4th ed. (Reston, VA: AIAA, 2000). 

152. David N. Spires and Rick W. Sturdevant, “From Advent to Milstar: The U.S. Air Force and 

the Challenges of Military Satellite Communications,”]ournal ofthe British Interplanetary Society 50, 

no. 6 (1997): 207-214. 

153. Harry L. Van Trees, Harry D. Raduege, Rick W. Sturdevant, and Ronald E. Thompson, 

“Military Satellite Communications: From Concept to Reality,” in The Limitless Sky: Air Force 

Science and Technology Contributions to the Nation, ed. Alexander H. Levis (Washington, DC: Air 

Force History and Museums Program, 2004), pp. 175-209. 

154. Major Robert E. Lee, History of the Defense Satellite Communications System (19641986), Air 

Command and S& College Report No. 87-1545 (Maxwell AFB,AL:Ar Umversity Press, 1987). 

155. Deane Davis, “The Talking Satellite: A Reminiscence of Project SCORE,”Journal of the 

British Interplanetary Society 52 (1999): 239-258. 

156. Jeffrey Richelson, “The Satellite Data System,”]ournal ofthe British Interplanetary Society 37, 

no. 5 (1984): 226-228. 

157. Dwayne A. Day, “Out of the Shadows: The Shuttle’s Secret Payloads,” Spacejight 41, no. 2 

(February 1999): 78-84. 

Smithsonian Institution Press, 2002). 

(Washington, DC: NASA SP-4217, 1997). 
508 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

Seapower and Space.158 Getting describes early military communications programs in his a~tobiography.’~~ Recent issues and options for leasing commercial systems are discussed in a RAND study by Bonds et a1.16’ 

Harvey’s Russia in Space has an overview of Soviet and Russian communications systems.161 Hendrickx describes the early Molniya program.’62 

The Chinese program, including its communications satellites, is discussed in 

Clark’s overview in the Journal of the British Interplanetary S0~iety.I~~ Harvey also 

gives some attention to the Dong Fang Hong satellites in his The Chinese Space 

Prog~arnrne.’~~ Harris describes the British Skynet program.’65 

BALLISTIC MISSILE DEFENSE 

Unlike most other areas of military space, defense against intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) is a subject that has spawned great public interest 

in the United States, with high-profile political debates highlighting the subject from its inception in the 1960s, and particularly in the mid-1980s with the 

initiation of Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), which critics 

called “Star Wars” after the 1977 film of that name. In turn, these political 

debates have led to a minor industry of polemical works both for and against 

ballistic missile defense and its alleged impact on international political and 

military stability. Amazingly, despite the thousands of pages and dozens of 

works on the subject, there is no comprehensive history of the actual ballistic 

missile defense systems and programs. In fact, there are no comprehensive 

public histories of any of the ballistic missile defense systems that have actually 

been deployed, the SDI program itself, or its Soviet counterparts. 

From the moment that Nazi Germany began firing V-2s at London, British 

and American soldiers, scientists, and engineers began searching for ways to 

counter these apparently unstoppable weapons. During World War 11, the only 

counter was to attack launch sites and logistics for the V-2. Once in flight, there 

was nothing that could stop them, due to their extremely high speed. After 

158. Norman Friedman, Seapower and Space: From the Dawn ofthe Missile Age to Net-Centric War$are 

159. Ivan A. Getting, All in a Lij2time: Science in the Defense ofDemocracy (NewYork:Vantage Press, 1989). 

160. Tim Bonds, Michale G. Mattock, Thomas Hamilton, Carl Rhodes, Michael Scheiern, Philip 

M. Feldman, David R. Frelinger, and Robert Uy, Employing Commercial Satellite Communications: 

Wideband Investment Optionsfor the Department ofDefense (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2000). 

(Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2000). 

161. Harvey, Russia in Space: The Failed Frontier? 

162. Bart Hendrickx, “The Early Years of the Molniya Program,” Quest: The History ofspaceflight 

163. Phillip Clark, “Review of the Chinese Space Programme,”]ournal ofthe British Interplanetary 

164. Harvey, The Chinese Space Programme: From Conception to Future Capabilities. 

165. R. L. “Dick” Harris, “Military Satellite Communication in the UK,” Spaceflight 37, no. 10 

Quarterly 6, no. 3 (1998): 28-36. 

Society 52 no. 9/10 (1999): 350-376. 

(1995): 348-352. 
THE HISTORY AND HISTORIOGRAPHY OF NATIONAL SECURITY SPACE 509 

the war, the U.S. Army developed its Nike-Ajax surface-to-air missiles, and 

the Army Air Forces contracted Project THUMPER with General Electric 

and the University of Michigan for Project WIZARD to investigate using 

missiles to destroy incoming ballistic missiles. In 1955, the Army contracted 

with Western Electric to create an antiballistic missile system, which led ultimately to the Nike-Zeus antiballistic missile. In 1958, the Air Force’s Project 

WIZARD was reduced to research on radar and command and control, and 

the Army gained control of the antiballistic missile program. The Advanced 

Research Projects Agency (ARPA) developed an idea in July 1960 for a spacebased system called Ballistic Missile Boost Intercept, or BAMBI. Nike-Zeus 

successfully intercepted an Atlas ICBM in 1962 but remained in research and 

development. Instead, the system’s capabilities were developed further to the 

Nike-X, which used an upgraded Nike-Zeus missile known as Spartan. 

In 1967, President Lyndon Johnson approved development and deployment 

of the SENTINEL system, which was to be a national ballistic missile defense 

system with 18 missile sites. However, with the growth of the antiwar movement resulting fi-om theVietnam War, support for SENTINEL shrank, and it was 

scaled back to the smaller SAFEGUARD system, which was barely approved in 

1969. Congress funded only 2 of the 12 proposed sites, which soon shrank to 

only 1 site north of Grand Forks, North Dakota, to protect a Minuteman ICBM 

field. President Richard Nixon used the antiballistic missile (ABM) system as a 

bargaining chip with the Soviet Union, leading to the signing of the ABM Treaty 

in 1972, which with a further protocol in 1974 allowed the United States and 

Soviet Union one missile site each.The system itself, which used new phasedarray radars, deployed the long-range Spartan and the short-range Sprint missiles, 

each tipped with nuclear warheads. In September 1975, the system became fblly 

operational, but the next month, Congress terminated its funding.The next year, 

the Army began deactivation, and by 1977, the site was in “caretaker status,” with 

only its Perimeter Acquisition Radar remaining functional. 

The Soviet Union also began development of its own ABM systems in 

the late 1950s. Initial testing occurred at Sary Shagan in 1956 and led to 

the creation of the Anti-Missile Defense Forces in 1958. The first successful 

ballistic missile interception occurred in 1960, with the actual destruction 

of a test missile in 1961 using conventional explosives. Nuclear testing followed shortly thereafter. After an abortive attempt to deploy a system around 

Leningrad in the early 1960s, the Soviets deployed their first system, the A-35, 

around Moscow beginning in 1967. A series of upgrades followed both with 

the radar and missile systems. The upgraded system, the A-135, became fully 

operational only in the mid-l990s, with its new missiles, the SH-08 Gazelle 

and the SH-11 Gorgon, functioning like the American Sprint and Spartan for 

a layered defense. Thus the Soviet Union, unlike the United States, has kept 

an operational ABM system in place continuously since the late 1960s. 
510 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

Even though the United States dismantled its ABM system in the mid1970s, research and development continued on the relevant technologies. A 

revival came in March 1983 when President Ronald Reagan announced the 

Strategic Defense 1nitiative.Mter his landslide reelection in 1984, Reagan pushed 

major funding increases for strategic defense and created the Strategic Defense 

Initiative Organization (SDIO). SDIO investigated a variety of approaches to 

ballistic missile defense, including space-based lasers and kinetic kill vehicles, 

along with a variety of Earth-based approaches. With the end of the Reagan 

administration, SDI did not die, but it was scaled back, refocused on research, and 

renamed several times. The possibility of antiballistic missile systems got a boost 

during the GulfWar of 1991 when Patriot batteries intercepted some Iraqi Scud 

missiles over Israel and Saudi Arabia. When Pakistan and Iran tested mediumrange ballistic missiles in 1998 and North Korea attempted to put a satelhte in 

orbit, the debate over ABM systems heated up again. Accelerated development 

followed but did not lead to a deployed system, partly due to technical issues. 

Through 2004, testing ofABM technologies continued with mixed success. 

Chun’s 2003 articles in Quest are a good starting point for the history of 

Nike-Zeus.’@ These articles rely on the Army’s Missiles Handbook, published 

annually in the late 1950s and early 1960~’~~ Lonnquest andwinkler’s Defend and 

Deter provides an overview of Cold War missile systems, inclulng Nike-Zeus 

and SAFEGUARD.I6* Bowen’s 2005 Quest article provides a short overview 

of SAFEGUARD,’69 drawing significantly from three internal Army sources.17o 

Walker et al. provide a historical site asse~sment.’~~ Bruce-Briggs provides an 

overview of ABM systems through the early SDI ~r0gram.l~~ 

166. Clayton K. S. Chun, “Defending Against Hitler’s Vengeance: The U.S. Army and the V-2,” 

Quest: The History $Spaceflight Quarterly 10, no. 2 (2003): 45-52; Clayton K. S. Chun, “Nike-Zeus’ 

Thunder and Lightning: From Antiballistic Missile to Antisatellite Interceptor,” Quest: The History 

$Spaceflight Quarterly 10, no. 4 (2003): 40-47. 

167. OfJice Directorate $ Progress and Statistical Reporting U.S. Army Missiles Handbook (U) 

(Washington, DC: Department ofthe Army, 1959-61). These documents, from 1959 to 1961, have 

been declassified. 

168. John C. Lonnquest and David F. Winkler, To Defend and Deter, USACERL Special Report 

97/01 (Champaign, IL: U.S. Army Construction Engineering Research Laboratories, 1996). 

169. Gregory S. Bowen, “SAFEGUARD: North Dakota’s Front Line in the Cold War,” Quest: 

The History ofSpacefllight Quarterly 12, no. 1 (2005) 

170. Bell Laboratories, ABM Project History (Wh : U.S. Army Ballistic Missile Defense 

Command, 1975); James H. Kitchens 111, A History ofthe Huntsville Division: US Army Corps of 

Engineers: 1967-1976 (Huntsville, AL: U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, 1978); James A. Walker, 

Frances Martin, and Sharon S. Watkins, Strategic Defnse: Four Decades of Progress (Washington, DC: 

Historical Office, U.S. Army Space and Strategic Defense Command, 1995). 

171. James A. Walker et al., compilers, Historic American Engineering Record Documentation for the 

Stanley R. Mickelson Safeguard Complex, vol. 1, Historical Context, and vol. 2, Architectural Data G 

Photographs, HAER #ND-9 (Huntsville, AL: U.S. Army Space and Strategic Defense Command, 

September 1996). 

172. B. Bruce-Briggs, The Shield ofFaith (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988). 
THE HISTORY AND HISTORIOGRAPHY OF NATIONAL SECURITY SPACE 511 

The history of the Soviet Union’s ABM systems are described in Zaloga’s 

The Kremlin’s Nuclear Sword, and also in Whitmore’s Quest articles in 2002- 

2003.’73 Mathers discusses Soviet ballistic missile defense (BMD) during the 

Khrushchev era.174 The Federation of American Scientists also provides good 

material on Soviet ABM systems.’75 Siddiqi’s 1998 Spaceflight article describes 

the Soviet ground- and space-based laser programs FON and P01yus.’~~ 

Newhouse’s Cold Dawn is the classic introduction to the history ofSALT negotiation~.’~~ Hays provides a good overview of the Strategic Arms Reduction 

Treaties (START I and START II).’78 

The best starting point to understand SDI’s beginnings is Baucom’s The 

Origins ~fSD1.l~~ Baucom also provides an overview of SDI’s organization, as 

does Mary FitzGerald.lS0 To date, there are no published overview technical 

histories of SDI and its descendants. However, Frances Fitzgerald provides 

an overview of SDI politics during the Reagan administration, and Graham 

does the same for the later Clinton and early G. W. Bush administrations.lS1 

Simmons and Bythrow describe Delta Star, an SDI Organization experiment to track launchers from space.ls2 Lagrasse and Farmin narrate the TSX-5 

experiment for the Ballistic Missile Defense 0rgani~ation.l~~ 

173. Zaloga, The Kremlin’s Nuclear Sword; Paul Whitmore, “Red Bear on the Prowl: Spacerelated Strategic Defense in the Soviet Union, Part I,” Quest: The History of Spaceftght Quarterly 9, 

no. 4 (2002): 22-30. 

174. Jennifer G. Mathers, “A Fly in Outer Space: Soviet Ballistic Missile Defence During the 

Khrushchev Period,”Joumal of Strategic Studies 21, no. 2 (1998): 31-59. 

175. A. Karpenko, “ABM and Space Defense,” Federation ofAmerican Scientists Web site, 1999, 

http://wwwLfas,oug/spp/starwars/program/soviet/990600- bmd-rus.htm. 

176. Asif A. Siddiqi, “Cold War in Space: A Look Back at the Soviet Union,” Spacefight 40, no. 

2 (February 1998): 63-68. 

177. John Newhouse, Cold Dawn: The Story of SALT (New York Holt, knehart, and Winston, 

1973). 

178. Peter L. Hays, United States Military Space: Into the Twenty-First Century, INSS Occasional 

Paper 42 (USAF Academy, CO, and Maxwell AFB, AL: USAF Institute for National Security 

Studies and Air University Press, 2002). 

179. Donald Baucom, The Origins ofSDI, 1944-1983 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1993). 

180. Donald R. Baucom, “Developing a Management Structure for the Strategic Defense 

Initiative,” in Organizingfor the Use of Space: Historical Perspectives on a Persistent Issue, ed. Roger 

D. Launius, vol. 18 (San Diego, CA: Univelt, 1995), pp. 187-215; Mary C. FitzGerald, The New 

Revolution in Russian Military Aflairs, Whitehall paper series, no. 26 (London: Royal United Services 

Institute for Defence Studies, 1994). 

181. Frances Fitzgerald, Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars and the End of the Cold War 

(New York: Touchstone Books, 2001); Bradley Graham, Hit to Kill: The New Battle Over Shielding 

America from Missile Attack (New York PublicAffairs, 2001). 

182. Frederick Simmons and Peter Bythrow, “Delta Star: an SDIO Space Experiment,” Crosslink 

2, no. 2 (summer 2001): 23-29. 

183. Michael L. La Grassa and James R. Farmin, “TSX-5: Another Step Forward for SpaceBased Research,” Crosslink 2, no. 2 (summer 2001): 30-37. 
512 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

SPACE INTELLIGENCE AND RECONNAISSANCE 

Using space systems to divine the intentions and capabilities of other 

nations is a crucial aspect of military space, with a significant and growing 

historical literature. The use of satellites for reconnaissance was presented in 

RAND’S initial study of artificial satellites in 1946. The U.S. government 

was desperate for information about secretive Soviet efforts, particularly with 

respect to nuclear and ballistic missile capabilities. In the 1950s, the United 

States, with cooperation from Great Britain and others, used a variety ofmeans 

to gather both photographic and electronic intelligence information, including balloon and aircraft overflights. These culminated with the U-2 program, 

which had its first mission over the Soviet Union in 1956. American officials 

realized that sooner or later, the Soviets would develop an antiaircraft missile 

that could shoot down U-2s, an event that transpired in 1960. In.the meantime, the United States began development of a satellite that could replace 

the U-2. Reconnaissance satellites became a top priority of the military and 

intelligence communities at this time and have remained so to the present day. 

A major priority for the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations was the 

establishment of the principle of “freedom of space,” so as to allow American 

reconnaissance satellites to gather intelligence of the Communist bloc. 

The U.S. reconnaissance satellite effort began as the USAFS Project WS117L in the mid-1950s. It led to the CORONA and Samos programs for 

reconnaissance and MIDAS for early warning. The USAF-funded Samos program intended to provide real-time intelligence data by sending images from 

on-board film readout to the ground by radio. Unfortunately, the technology 

to acquire high-resolution digital imagery was not yet mature, and after 11 

test flights with mixed results, the program was canceled. In the meantime, 

the CIA, with the Eisenhower administration’s encouragement, developed the 

CORONA film-return system. Under the public name of Discoverer, which 

was proclaimed to launch life science and engineering technology experiments, the CIA began test flights. After 12 consecutive failures, in August 

1960 the first CORONA capsule returned successfully from space. The next 

flight, Discoverer 14, put a camera in orbit and photographed more of the 

Soviet Union than all previous air overflights combined. 

The CORONA program operated until 1972, by which time it orbited 

a variety of cameras, improving ground resolution from about 40 feet to 6 

feet. Various CORONA missions also incorporated stereo cameras, two film 

buckets to increase mission length, and mapping cameras for military targeting. Some also carried subsatellites that separated from the main satellite once 

in orbit, generally for electronics and signals intelligence gathering. Shortly 

after the first successful flight in 1960, the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations created, in secret, the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) to 
THE HISTORY AND HISTORIOGRAPHY OF NATIONAL SECURITY SPACE 513 

manage CORONA and other space intelligence assets. To handle the massive flow of imagery, the U.S. government created the National Photographic 

Interpretation Center. 

CORONA and its successors were crucial to maintaining peace during 

the Cold War, as first the U.S. and shortly thereafter the Soviet Union monitored each other’s nuclear capabilities. This mutual ability and its high value 

to each side made it possible to sign treaties banning weapons of mass destruction from space, to limit ballistic missile defenses, and to allow the signing of 

verifiable arms control treaties starting in the 1970s. CORONA proved in the 

early 1960s that American fears that the Soviets were ahead in the development and deployment of ICBMs were unfounded. In fact, the “missile gap” 

was massively in favor of the United States. This information allowed the 

Kennedy and later administrations to scale back nuclear missile deployments 

and to stand firm against Soviet threats. 

A variety of successor systems for optical reconnaissance followed 

CORONA, starting with the KH-9 Hexagon in the early 1970s and the KH11 Kennan real-time optical reconnaissance system. While the KH-9 provided higher resolution using film-return methods, the KH-11 fulfilled the 

USAF’s dream of a real-time optical reconnaissance system, which allowed 

much faster return of data than the slow film-bucket capability. In parallel, 

the United States also developed a variety of signals and electronic intelligence systems, under a variety of code names such as Rhyolite, Canyon, and 

Magnum, and eventually an active radar-imaging satellite known as Lacrosse 

that allowed spy satellites to “see” through clouds and at night. The Advanced 

KH-11, Lacrosse, and a variety of signals and electronics intelligence satellites 

continue to operate today. 

The Soviet Union initially objected to U.S. reconnaissance systems, but 

only until it orbited its own systems, at which point Soviet leaders quietly 

dropped their objections to these highly useful devices. Korolev’s OKB-1 

developed the first Soviet reconnaissance system, known as Zenit, from the 

Vostok capsule used to orbit humans, by replacing the human gear with camera systems. Like the United States, the Soviets then developed a variety of 

improved optical systems, along with their own electronics and signals intelligence satellites. Improved optical satellites, under the name Yantar, first flew 

in 1974, with the real-time digital Yantar Terilen system first flying in 1982. 

New systems, known as Orlets and Arkon, are also currently flying. 

China, France, Israel, and Japan have also developed space photoreconnaissance capabilities. China’s Fanhui Shi Yao Gang Weixing satellites, first 

successfully launched in 1975, are recoverable optical imaging satellites, probably at least in part for military purposes. France, Italy, and Spain collaborated 

to develop the Helios reconnaissance satellites, first launched in 1995. A second Helios was launched in 1999, and the second-generation Helios 2A was 
514 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

placed in orbit in December 2004. Israel’s Ofeq series of military imaging 

satellites, first launched in 1988, are now up to Ofeq-5. Japan launched its first 

pair of Information Gathering Satellites in March 2003 in response to North 

Korea’s attempt to put a satellite in orbit with its Taepodong rocket launch in 

1998. A variety of other systems are in development in a number of nations. 

The 1990s saw a boom in histories of space intelligence, mainly due to 

the declassifications and the opening of some former Soviet archives. The 

NRO’s existence was revealed in 1992, in the first Bush admini~tration.”~ 

In May 1995, a public conference heralded the declassification of CORONA 

materials, while in August 2002, the National Imagery and Mapping Agency 

declassified imagery from the KH-7 and KH-9 Mapping Camera.18’ Prior to 

1992, Cold War-era attempts to tell the story of space reconnaissance and 

intelligence systems were necessarily based on many obscure clues with little 

direct hard evidence. Klass, Kenden, Borrowman, Richelson, Peebles, and 

Burrows each attempted this prodigious task, with varying degrees of success.lS6 Their efforts for CORONA are now outdated but remain valuable for 

electronics intelligence (ELINT) and signals intelligence (SIGINT) and for 

optical reconnaissance after CORONA. For signals intelligence, Bamford’s 

recent book on the National Security Agency is a good place to start, although 

it focuses mainly on nonsatellite programs.lS7 McDowell gives an overview 

of U.S. spy satellite programs, with each satellite’s launch date.la8 While significant progress has been made to untangle these programs, many issues and 

facts will no doubt remain unresolved for decades to come until the relevant 

sources are declassified. 

184. Bill Gertz, “The Secret Mission of the NRO,” Air Force Magazine 76 (‘June 1993): 60-63. 

185. Dwayne A. Day, “US Government Declassifies Reconnaissance Satellites Information,” 

Spaceflight 45, no. 3 (2003): 116-117. 

186. Philip J. Klass, Secret Sentries in Space (New York: Random House, 1971); Anthony Kenden, 

“U.S. Reconnaissance Satellite Programme,” Spacejight (July 1978); Anthony Kenden, “Recent 

Developments in U.S. Reconnaissance Satellite Programmes,” journal of the British Interplanetary 

Society 35, no. 1 (1982): 31-44; Anthony Kenden, “A New Military Space Mission,”jonrnal ofthe 

British Interplanetary Society 35, no. 10 (1982): 441-444; Gerald L. Borrowman, “Recent Trends 

in Orbital Reconnaissance,” Spaceflight 24, no. 1 (1982): 10-13; Jeffrey Richelson, United States 

Strategic Reconnaissance, ACIS Working Paper (Los Angeles: Center for International and Strategic 

Affairs, University of California, Los Angeles, 1983); Jeffrey T. Richelson, America’s Secret Eyes in 

Space (New York: Harper & Row, 1990); Curtis Peebles, Guardians-Secret Reconnaissance Satellites 

(Novato, CA: Presidio Press, 1987); William E. Burrows, Deep Black: Space Espionage and National 

Security (New York: Berkley Books, 1988). 

187. James Bamford, Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency (New 

York: Anchor Books, 2001). 

188. Jonathan McDowell, “US Reconnaissance Satellite Program Part I: Imaging Satellites,” 

Quest: The History of Spaceflight Magazine 4, no. 2 (1995): 22-33; Jonathan McDowell, “U.S. 

Reconnaissance Satellite Programs Part 2: Beyond Imaging,” Quest: 772e History of Spaceflight 

Magazine 4, no. 4 (1995): 40-45. 
THE HISTORY AND HISTORIOGRAPHY OF NATIONAL SECURITY SPACE 515 

In 1995, the rush of works on the CORONA project based on declassified sources started with a public conference whose proceedings resulted in 

an edited work by R~ffner.’~~ That same conference led also to Day et al., 

Eye in the Sky, which provides a number of excellent articles by historians and 

participants on CORONA.19’ Day also wrote an early, concise overview of 

CORONA in two Quest issue^.'^' Day also followed with articles on other articles on various aspects of the CORONA program and its various camera system~,~~~ as well as a variety of other reconnaissance and intelligence ~r0grams.l~~ 

McDonald also wrote an early work on CORONA.194 Not surprisingly, those 

best able to take advantage of the now-opened archives included those who 

had written on the subjects before. Peebles soon published an overview history of CORONA.’95 Richelson used these new sources, along with others, 

to publish a work on the Central Intelligence Agency’s Directorate of Science 

and Te~hnology.’~~ Burrows’s This New Oceun, which attempted a comprehen189. Kevin C. Ruffner, ed., Corona: America’s First Satellite Program (Washington, DC: CIA 

History Staff, Center for the Study of Intelligence, 1995). 

190. Dwayne A. Day, John M. Logsdon, and Brian Latell, eds., Eye in the Sky: The Story .f the 

Corona Spy Satellites (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1998). 

191. Dwayne A. Day, “CORONA: America’s First Spy Satellite Program,” Quest: The History 

of Spacefight Magazine 4, no. 2 (1995): 4-21; Dwayne A. Day, “CORONA: America’s First Spy 

Satellite Program Part 11,” Quest: The History ofSpacefight Magazine 4, no. 3 (1995): 28-36. 

192. Dwayne A. Day, “A Failed Phoenix: The KH-6 LANYARD Reconnaissance Satellite,” 

Spacefight 39, no. 5 (May 1997): 170-174; Dwayne A. Day, “Mapping the Dark Side of the World 

Part 1: The KH-5 ARGON Geodetic Satellite,” Spacefight 40, no. 7 (July 1998): 264-269; 

Dwayne A. Day, “Mapping the Dark Side of the World-Part 2: Secret Geodetic Programmes 

after ARGON,” Spacefight 40, no. 8 (August 1998): 303-310; Dwayne A. Day, “Falling Star,” 

Spacefight 40, no. 11 (1998): 442-445; Dwayne A. Day, “Lucky Number 13: The First Success of 

the CORONA Reconnaissance Satellite Program,” Spacefight 46, no. 4 (2004): 165-169; Dwayne 

A. Day, “First Light: The First Reconnaissance Satellite,” Spacefight 46, no. 8 (2004): 327-331. 

193. Dwayne A. Day, “Recon for the Rising Sun,” Spacefight 41, no. 10 (1999): 420-423; 

Dwayne A. Day, “Medium Metal-The NRO’s Smaller Satellites,” Spacefight 42, no. 1 (2000): 

32-40; Dwayne A. Day, “Early American Ferret and Radar Satellites,” Spacefight 43, no. 7 (2001): 

288-293; Dwayne A. Day, “Single Orbit Darts and Mercury Eyeballs: Early Unbuilt Strategic 

Reconnaissance Platforms,” Spaceflight 43, no. 11 (2001): 468-470; Dwayne A. Day, “The ArmyAir Force Space Race,” Spacefight 44, no. 7 (2002): 300-306; Dwayne A. Day, “Ferrets of the 

High Frontier: U.S. Air Force Ferret and Heavy Ferret Satellites of the Cold War,” Spacefight 46, 

no. 2 (2004): 74-81; Dwayne A. Day, “Pushing Iron: On-Orbit Support for Heavy Intelligence 

Satellites,” Spacefight 46, no. 7 (2004): 289-293. 

194. Robert A. McDonald, Corona Between the Sun and the Earth: The First NRO Eye in Space 

(Annapolis Junction, MD: American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, 1997); 

Robert A. McDonald, “CORONA: A Success for Space Reconnaissance, a Look into the Cold 

War, and a Revolution for Intelligence,” Photogrammetric Engineering and Remote Sensing 51, no. 6 

195. Curtis Peebles, The CORONA Project: America’s First Spy Satellites (Annapolis, MD: Naval 

196. Jeffrey T. Richelson, The Wizards of Langley: Inside the CIA’S Directorate of Science and 

(1995): 689-720. 

Institute Press, 1997). 

Technology (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2001). 
516 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

sive history of the “First Space Age,” used the new CORONA materials as 

~e1l.l~’ Taubman’s Secret Empire is a more recent take on Eisenhower’s support 

of CORONA and its predecessors.198 Arnold’s Spying from Space focuses on the 

command and control (C2) system set up for CORONA and deals with much 

of CORONA’S early history as a re~u1t.I~~ Temple’s 2004 book Shades of Grey is 

another solid contribution to space reconnaissance history.200 Day has a series 

of articles about the Samos prograrn.”l Hall describes the transfer of its camera 

technology to NASA’s Lunar Orbiter, as does Day.2o2 

RAND’s part in the development of satellite reconnaissance is described 

in Davies and Harris, RAND’s Role in the Evolution of Balloon and Satellite 

Observations Systems and Related U. S. Space Technology.203 Peebles wrote about 

the balloon projects in The Moby Dick Project.204 Hall sets the stage for satellite 

reconnaissance with a history of aerial overflights of the Soviet U.S. 

Air Force Project 117L, which gave rise to CORONA as well as MIDAS, is 

discussed in Coolbaugh’s 1998 article and in Perry’s, as well as in Bowen’s 

overviews of the genesis of military space efforts.206 Other CORONA-related 

works include McDonald’s edited CORONA: Between the Sun and the Earth, 

197. Burrows, This New Ocean. 

198. Philip Taubman, Secret Empire: Eisenhower, the CIA, and the Hidden Story ofAmerica’s Space 

Espionage (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003). 

199. David Christopher Arnold, Spying From Space: Constructing America’s Satellite Command and 

Control Networks (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2005). 

200. L. Parker Temple, Shades of Grey: National Security and the Evolution of Space Reconnaissance 

(Reston, VA: AIAA, 2004). 

201. Dwayne A. Day, “A Sheep in Wolf‘s Clothing: The Samos E-5 Recoverable Satellite-Part 

One,” SpaceJght 44, no. 10 (2002): 424-431; Dwayne A. Day, “A Square Peg in a Cone-Shaped 

Hole: The Samos E-5 Recoverable Satellite-Part Two,” SpaceJight 45, no. 2 (2003): 71-79; 

Dwayne A. Day, “From Cameras to Monkeys to Men: The Samos E-5 Recoverable Satellite-Part 

Three,” Spaceflight 45, no. 9 (2003): 380-389. 

202. R. Cargill Hall, SAMOS to the Moon: The Clandestine Tranger of Reconnaissance Technology 

Between Federal Agencies (Chantilly, VA: NRO History Office, October 2001); Dwayne A. Day, 

“From Above the Iron Curtain to Around the Moon: Lunar Orbiter and the Samos Spy Satellite,” 

Spaceflight 47, no. 2 (2005): 66-71. 

203. Merton E. Davies and William R. Harris, RAND’S Role in the Evolution of Balloon and 

Satellite Observation Systems and Related U.S. Space Technology (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 1988). 

204. Curtis Peebles, The Moby Dick Project: Reconnaissance Balloons Over Russia (Washington, DC: 

Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991). 

205. R. Cargill Hall, “The Truth about Overflights: Military Reconnaissance over Russia before 

the U-2, One of the Cold War’s Best-Kept Secrets,” MHQ: The Quarterly Journal ofMilitary History 

9, no. 3 (1997): 25-39. 

206. J. S. Coolbaugh, “Genesis of the USAF’s First Satellite Programme,”Journal of the British 

Interplanetary Society 51, no. 8 (1998): 283-300; R. L. Perry, Orgins of the USAF Space Program, 

1945-1956, vol. 5, History of DCAS, 1961, Air Force Systems Command Historical Publications 

Series 62-24-10 (Los Angeles, CA: Air Force Systems Command, Space Systems Division, 1961); 

Lee Bowen, The Threshold of Space: The Air Force in the National Space Program, 1945-1959 (WrightPatterson AFB, OH: USAF Historical Division Liaison Office, 1960). 
THE HISTORY AND HISTORIOGRAPHY OF NATIONAL SECURITY SPACE 517 

Oder et al.’s The CORONA Story, and Lindgren’s Trust but Ver$y.’07 There 

have been concerns about errors in Lindgren’s work.’O* Institutional works on 

the NRO I discuss later in this essay. 

The politics of the freedom of space has been the focus of a number 

of historians. Stephen Ambrose, in his research on Dwight Eisenhower, was 

among the first to note the importance ofthe issue in 1981.209 Rostow analyzed 

the Open Skies policy one year later.’l0 McDougall’s . . . The Heavens und the 

Eurth provided the first full-length analysis of the issues involved.’” Hall, with 

deeper archival research and materials available, revisited the topic in 1995.’” 

Day followed with his assessment in 1998.’13 Neufeld revisited the issue in 

2000.’14 The most recent assessment is by Bille and Lishock in 2004.215 

Other relevant materials include McElheny’s biography of Eastman 

Kodak’s influential Edwin Land, as well as autobiographies of Richard Bissell 

and George Kistiakowsky.216 Ranelagh’s overview of the CIA, The Agency, 

contains some information on spy satellite programs.217 The GRAB SIGINT 

satellite is described by a 1997 Naval Research Laboratory publication and 

207. Robert A. McDonald, ed., CORONA: Between the Sun and the Earth: The First NRO 

Reconnaissance Eye in Space (Bethesda, MD: American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote 

Sensing, 1997); Frederic C. E. Oder, James C. Fitzpatrick, and Paul E. Worthman, The CORONA 

Story (Washington, DC: National Reconnaissance Office, 1997); David T. Lindgren, Trust but 

Verlfy: Imagery Analysis in the Cold War (Annapolic, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2000). 

208. Dwayne A. Day, “Trust but Verlfy: Imagery Analysis in the Cold War, Review,” Technology and 

Culture 42, no. 4 (2001): 822-823. 

209. Stephen E. Ambrose, Ike’s Spies: Eisenhower and the Espionage Establishment (Garden City, 

NY Doubleday & Co., 1981). 

210. W. W. Rostow, Open Skies: Eisenhower? Proposal ofJuly 21, 1955 (Austin: University ofTexas 

Press, 1982). 

211. McDougall, . . . The Heavens and the Earth. 

212. R. Cargill Hall, “Origins of U.S. Space Policy: Eisenhower, Open Skies, and Freedom of 

Space,” in Exploring the Unknown: Selected Documents in the History ofthe U.S. Civil Space Program, ed. 

John M. Logsdon, vol. 1, Organizingfor Exploration (Washington, DC: NASA SP-4218, 1995), pp. 

213-229; R. Cargill Hall, “The Eisenhower Administration and the Cold War: Framing American 

Astronautics to Serve National Security,” Prologue 27, no. 1 (spring 1995): 59-72. 

213. Dwayne A. Day, “A Strategy for Reconnaissance: Dwight D. Eisenhower and Freedom of 

Space,” in Eye in the Sky, ed. Day, Logsdon, and Latell, pp. 119-142. 

214. Michael J. Neufeld, “Orbiter, Overflight, and the First Satellite: New Light on the Vanguard 

Decision,” in Reconsidering Sputnik: Forty Years Since the Soviet Satellite, ed. Roger D. Launius, John 

M. Logsdon, and Robert W. Smith (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 2000). 

215. Matt Bille and Erika Lishock, The First Space Race: Launching the World? First Satellites 

(College Station: Texas A&M Press, 2004), chap. 4. 

216. Victor K. McElheny, Insisting on the Impossible: The L$e of Edwin Land, Inventor of Instant 

Photography (Readmg,MA: Perseus Books, 1998); kchard M. Bissell with Jonathan E. Lewis and Francis 

T. Pudlo, Refections ofa Cold Warrior: From Yalta to the Bay ofPigs (New Haven, CT Yale University Press, 

1996); George htiakowsky, A Scientist at the White Honse: The Private Diary of President Eisenhower’s 

Specla1 Assistant for Science and Technology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976). 

217. John Ranelagh, The Agency: The Rise and Decline of the CIA, from Wild Bill Donovan to William 

Casey (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986). 
518 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

in Day’s “Listening from Above.”’18 Ball’s Pine Gap provides information 

on U.S. signals intelligence, as do Pike’s “CANYON, RHYOLITE, and 

AQUACADE” and Day’s “Ferrets Above.”’19 Bamford’s 1982 The Puzzle 

Palace, 2002 Body of Secrets, and Lindsey’s popular book The Falcon and the 

Snowman also provide information on spy satellites, in particular from the 

Boyce and Lee spy case.’” An unusual and insightful look at a company’s role 

is found in Lewis’s Spy Capitalism, which discusses Itek Corporation.’” Day 

provided a recent overview of the intelligence space program in 2002.’” 

Non-U.S. reconnaissance systems have significantly less literature. What 

exists is mostly concerned with the Soviet Union and Russia. Harvey’s Russia 

in Space provides an ~verview.”~ Gorin describes Soviet and Russian optical 

reconnaissance systems articles in the Journal ofthe British Interplanetary Society, 

as does Clark.224 Clark also describes Chinese recoverable satellites, which are 

probably partly military in nature, in a 1998 Quest arti~le.”~ Zorn has a short 

article on the development of the Israeli satellite intelligence program.’’6 A 

flavor of the interactions between military and civilian systems can be seen in 

Baker et al., Steinberg, and Dehqanzada and Fl~rini.”~ There are no histories 

218. GRAB: Galactic Radiation and Background (Washington, DC: Naval Research Laboratory, 

1997); Dwayne A. Day, “Listening from Above: The First Signals Intelligence Satellite,” Spacejlght 

41, no. 8 (August 1999): 338-346. 

219. Desmond Ball, Pine Gap: Australia and the U.S. Geostationary Sgnals Intelligence Satellite 

Program (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1988); Christopher Anson Pike, “CANYON, RHYOLITE, 

and AQUACADE,” Spacefiight 37, no. 11 (November 1995): 381-383; Dwayne A. Day, “Ferrets 

Above: American Signals Intelligence Satellites During the 1960s,” InternationalJournal ofIntelligence 

and Counterintelligence 17, no. 3 (2004): 449-467. 

220. James Bamford, The Puzzle Palace: A Report on NSA, America’s Most Secret Agency (Boston: 

Houghton Mifflin, 1982); James Bamford, Body of Secrets: Anatomy ofthe Ultra-Secret National Security 

Agency (New York: Anchor, 2002); Robert Lindsey, The Falcon and the Snowman: A True Story of 

Friendship and Espionage (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979). 

221. Jonathan E. Lewis, Spy Capitalism: ITEK and the CIA (New Haven, CT: Yale University 

Press, 2002). 

222. Day, “Intelligence Space Program,” pp. 371-388. 

223. Harvey, Russia in Space: The Failed Frontier? 

224. Peter Gorin, “Zenit-the First Soviet Photoreconnaissance Satellite,” Jolrmal of the British 

Interplanetary Society 50, no. 11 (1997): 441-448; Peter Gorin, “Black Amber-Russian YantarClass Optical Reconnaissance Satellites,”_lournal ofthe British Interplanetary Society 51 (1998): 309- 

320; P. S. Clark, “Russian Fifth Generation Photoreconnaissance Satellites,” Journal .f the British 

Interplanetary Society 52 (1999): 133-150. 

225. Phillip S. Clark, “Development of China’s Recoverable Satellites,” Quest: The History .f 

Spacejlight Quarterly 6, no. 2 (1998): 36-43. 

226. E. L. Zorn, “Israel’s Quest for Satellite Intelligence,” Studies in Intelligence 10 (winter-spring 

227. John C. Baker, Kevin M. O’ConneU, and Ray A. Wdliamson, e&., Commercial Observation 

Satellites: At the Leading Edge of Global Transparency (Santa Monica, CA: RAND and ASPRS, 2001); 

Gerald M. Steinherg, Commercial Observation Satellites in the Middle East and Persian GnlJ(Santa Momca, 

CA: RAND, 2001);Yahya A. Dehqanzada and Ann M. Florini, Secretsfar Sale: How Commercial Satellite 

Imagery Will Change the World (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2000). 

2001): 33-38. 
THE HISTORY AND HISTORIOGRAPHY OF NATIONAL SECURITY SPACE 519 

yet of European, Japanese, or other military space reconnaissance systems, 

but some information on these can be found at the Federation of American 

Scientists Web sitezz8 and Internet searches of newspapers and blogs. 

Finally, an area garnering recent attention is the use of satellite reconnaissance data for a variety of intelligence purposes. This is shown by a recent 

spate of work on American assessment (largely based on satellite imagery) of 

the Soviet manned lunar program in the 1960s. The best research on this so far 

is a two-part series, “The Moon in the Crosshairs,” by Day and Siddiqi in 2003 

and 2004.229 Day has followed this with several other articles.230 Pesavento and 

Vick have also ventured into this territory, although some of their claims have 

been challenged.231 

MILITARY HUMAN SPACEFLIGHT 

The American and Soviet military services have been involved with 

human spaceflight programs from the late 1950s to the present, starting with 

supplying astronauts and cosmonauts to the fledgling human flight programs, 

moving on to studies and designs for piloted space reconnaissance and bombing vehicles, and then designing and operating manned military space stations. While most people realize that many astronauts and cosmonauts have 

been military pilots, few have pondered why the military lent many of its 

top personnel to civilian spaceflight programs. Even fewer people realize that 

the U.S. and USSR have had manned military space programs and that the 

Soviets even operated manned military space stations in the 1970s. 

Eugen Sanger developed the idea of a manned space bomber in the 1940s 

and studied the concept in World War I1 Nazi Germany. This “Silver Bird” 

vehicle would drop a bomb on New York, skip off the atmosphere, and return 

to Germany. Walter Dornberger, who headed the German Army’s ballistic missile efforts in World War 11, brought the idea to the Bell Aircraft Corporation 

228. See http: //www.Jas. oy. 

229. Dwayne A. Day and Asif Siddiqi, “The Moon in the Crosshairs: CIA Intelligence on the 

Soviet Manned Lunar Programme, Part 1-Launch Complex J,” Spaceflight 45, no. 11 (2003): 

466-475; Dwayne A. Day and Asif Siddiqi, “The Moon in the Crosshairs: CIA Intelligence on 

the Soviet Manned Lunar Programme, Part 2-The J Vehicle,” SpaceJiight 46, no. 3 (2004): 10-11, 

230. Dwayne A. Day, “The Secret of Complex J,” Air Force 87, no. 7 (July 2004): 72-76; Dwayne 

A. Day, “In the Shadows of the Moon Race,” Spacefight 46, no. 11 (2004): 436-440; Dwayne A. 

Day, “From the Shadows to the Stars: James Webb’s Use of Intelligence Data in the Race to the 

Moon,” Air Power History 51, no. 4 (winter 2004). 

231. Peter Pesavento and Charles P. Vick, “The Moon Race ‘End Game’: A New Assessment 

of Soviet Crewed Lunar Aspirations-Part 1,” Quest: The History .f SpaceJiight Quarterly 11, no. 

1 (2004): 6-30; Peter Pesavento and Charles P. Vick, “The Moon Race ‘End Game’: A New 

Assessment of Soviet Crewed Lunar Aspirations-Part 2,” Quest: The History of Spaceflight Quarterly 

11, no. 2 (2004): 6-57. 

114-1 25. 
520 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

in the United States, which in 1952 proposed to study the concept further with 

USAF funding. The Bell study, along with the USAF’s preference for manned 

bombers over missile systems, resulted in the USAF issuing requirements for 

a hypersonic strategic bombardment system in 1955. Several feasibility studies 

were consolidated in October 1957 into the Dyna-Soar program, which would 

initially design a hypersonic manned research vehicle. By late 1961, with the 

mass of Dyna-Soar growing and Soviet competition increasing with Gagarin’s 

flight, the USAF dropped suborbital tests and approved the development of the 

powerful Titan I11 launcher to put Dyna-Soar into space. However, the success of CORONA and the Soviet Zenit systems ensured that priority for both 

nations’ military space efforts went to reconnaissance satellites. By 1963, each 

side was willing to tolerate each other’s reconnaissance satellites, and threats 

to this toleration such as potential antisatellite systems like Dyna-Soar were 

unwelcome. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, who was skeptical of its 

mission, canceled it in December 1963. 

However, McNamara agreed that piloted reconnaissance platforms 

had military potential, so at the same time that he canceled Dyna-Soar, he 

approved the Manned Orbiting Laboratory (MOL) program to investigate. 

MOL‘S immediate lineage included ideas to modify the Gemini capsulethe so-called “Blue Gemini” program-as part of a military space station 

program called the “Manned Orbital Development System.” When the 

DOD began to consider taking over Gemini, NASA objected vociferously, 

and the DOD backed down. Ultimately, the USAF decided to modify the 

Gemini capsule to transport astronauts to the MOL, which would be carried behind the capsule on a Titan I11 launcher. As MOL’s schedule slipped 

and its cost grew, NASA pushed its Apollo Applications Program (soon to 

become Skylab) and the Vietnam War intensified, increasing pressure to cancel MOL. The success of CORONA and the need for funds to develop its 

successor robotic reconnaissance craft (the KH-9 Hexagon) led to MOL’s 

cancellation in June 1969. 

Human military spaceflight did not end with MOL, as the military considered its participation in NASA’s Space Shuttle program. The military’s 

requirements significantly influenced the Shuttle’s design, and in the late 

1970s, the USAF prepared to fly Shuttle missions by building its own operations center and launch facility, as well as training military astronauts for 

classified missions. In the 1980s, U.S. military men flew a number of classified missions on the Space Shuttle, the details of which generally remain 

hidden from the public. One of the missions is known to have deployed two 

Defense Satellite Communications System I11 satellites. Others were most 

likely National Reconnaissance Office missions to deploy various reconnaissance systems. However, the Challenger accident of 1986 and the resulting new 

priorities for the Shuttle soon ended military Shuttle missions. 
THE HISTORY AND HISTORIOGRAPHY OF NATIONAL SECURITY SPACE 521 

Similar aspirations for human military missions also spurred the Soviets 

to develop programs. A “Raketoplan” explored concepts similar to DynaSoar. The Soviets also undertook a military space station program. Officially 

called Salyut, the second, third, and fifth were all Almaz military stations, 

launched in 1973, 1974, and 1976. Soyuz missions 14, 15, 21, 23, and 24 were 

all military missions to the Sulyut 3 and 5 stations, performing a variety of 

military tasks, mostly to determine the value of using cosmonauts for reconnaissance. After these missions, the Soviets concluded that automated satellites 

were more effective than humans in space, as the humans had limited amounts 

of time available for observations, as they had to eat, sleep, and maintain the 

station. This, combined with the much higher costs of human flights, ended 

human military missions. 

Both American and Soviet armed forces also lent military pilots to their 

respective civilian space programs. From World War I1 to the early 1960s, 

military test pilots aimed to go higher and faster, and their efforts, along with 

the medical experiments, observations, and flight suits made along the way, 

paved the way for civilian space missions. In the 1950s and 1960s, the relatively high prestige of spaceflight and the potential for human military missions in space made this a reasonable proposition for the armed forces. Before 

NASA’s creation, the military controlled the space program by default. The 

Army and Air Force competed in early studies and proposals to put humans 

in space, including the Army’s Project Adam and Project Horizon and the 

Air Force’s “Man-In-Space-Soonest,’’ which had one of the worst acronyms 

possible, MISS. 

With NASA’s creation, the military’s role changed from one of leadership and control to one of support. Over time, as human-piloted missions and 

crewed space stations faded from military viability in the 1970s and 1980s, 

the number of military personnel becoming astronauts and cosmonauts has 

decreased somewhat. The military rationales for the continued movement 

of military pilots into civilian space programs have become less clear and, to 

date, have not been investigated by historians. Also, the military continues 

to support human flight programs with launch range support and a variety of 

other capabilities. These have declined over time as the civilian programs have 

frequently developed their own capabilities for astronaut testing, etc. 

Myhra describes Sanger’s early orbital bomber program in Nazi Germany.232 

Killebrew gives a history of the USAF’s efforts to find a role for military men 

in space.233 A short history of Dyna-Soar can be found in Quest issue 3, num232. David Myhra, Sanger: Germany’s Orbital Rocket Bomber in World War II (Atglen, PA: Schiffer, 

233. Major Timothy D. Killebrew, Military Man in Space: A History ofAir Force Efforts to Find a 

Manned Space Mission, Air Command and Staff College Report No. 87-1425 (Maxwell AFB, AL: 

Air University Press, 1987). 

2002). 
522 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

ber 4, which has a number of articles on the program, particularly those by 

Houchin and by Smith.234 Houchin’s 1997 Journal of the British Interplanetary 

Society article is also Godwin’s recent book on Dyna-Soar is a 

compilation of original documents.236 MOL’S history is also relatively obscure. 

Both Peeble~~~~ and Pealei13* created three-part series on the project. Houchin’s 

1995 article investigates the question ofNASA’s relationship to MOL.239 Spires’s 

Beyond Horizons also describes these programs, along with earlier efforts, such 

as MISS.240 Strom provides a brief history of MOL.241 Jenkins’s Space Shuttle 

describes its first hundred missions, a number of which were classified military 

missions.242 Day provides an overview of NASA-DOD relations in an overview article in Exploring the Unknown.243 Powell and Day describe military 

Shuttle missions.244 

Siddiqi covers the 1960s development of the Soviet Raketoplan and 

Spiral, along with the 1960s development of Almaz, in Chullenge to Ap0ll0.~~~ 

He also describes the military Almaz program and consequent Soyuz flights 

to the military stations in two articles in the journal of the British Interplanetary 

234. Roy F. Houchin 11, “Why the Air Force Proposed the Dyna-Soar X-20 Program,” Quest: 

The History of Spacefight Magazine 3, no. 4 (1994): 5-12; Terry Smith, “The Dyna-Soar X-20: A 

Historical Overview,” Quest: The History of Spacefight Magazine 3, no. 4 (1994): 13-18; Roy F. 

Houchin 11, “Why the Dyna-Soar X-20 Program Was Cancelled,” Quest: The History of Spaceflight 

Magaa’ne 3, no. 4 (1994): 35-37. 

235. Roy F. Houchin 11, “Air Force-Office of the Secretary of Defense Rivalry.” 

236. Robert, Godwin, ed., Dyna-Soar Hypersonic Strategic Weapons System (Burlington, Ontario: 

Apogee, 2003). 

237. Curtis Peebles, “The Manned Orbiting Laboratory-Part 1,” Spacefight 22, no. 4 (1980): 

155-160; Curtis Peebles, “The Manned Orbiting Laboratory-Part 2,” Spacefight 22, nos. 7-8 

(1980): 270-272; Curtis Peebles, “The Manned Orbiting Laboratory-Part 3,” Spacefight 24, no. 

238. Donald Pealer, “Manned Orbiting Laboratory (MOL) Part I,” Quest: The History ofSpaceflight 

Magazine 4, no. 3 (1995): 4-17; Donald Pealer, “Manned Orbiting Laboratory (MOL) Part 11,” 

Quest: The History of Spaceflight Magazine 4, no. 4 (1995): 28-35; Donald Pealer, “Manned Orbiting 

Laboratory (MOL) Part 3,” Quest: The Magazine ofspacefight 5, no. 2 (1996): 16-23. 

239. Roy F. Houchin 11, “Interagency Rivalry, NASA, The Air Force, and MOL,” Quest: The 

History $Spacefight Quarterly 4, no. 4 (1995): 36-39. 

240. Spires, Beyond Horizons. 

241. Steven R. Strom, “The Best Laid Plans: A History of the Manned Orbiting Laboratory,” 

Crosslink 5, no. 2 (summer 2004): 11-15. 

242. Dennis R. Jenkins, Space Shuttle: The History of the National Space Transportation System: The 

First 100 Missions (Stillwater, MN: Voyageur Press, 2001). 

243. Dwayne A. Day, “Invitation to Struggle: The History of Civilian-Military Relations in 

Space,” in Exploring the Unknown: Selected Documents in the History ofthe U.S. Civilian Space Program, 

ed. John M. Logsdon, vol. 2, External Relationships (Washington, DC: NASA SP-4407, 1996), pp. 

244. Joel W. Powell, “‘Secret’ Shuttle Payloads Revealed,” Spacefight 35, no. 5 (1993): 152-154; 

245. Siddiqi, Challenge to Apollo. 

6 (1982): 274-277. 

233-270. 

Dwayne A. Day, “Secret Shuttle Mission Revealed,” Spacefight 40, no. 7 (1998): 256-257. 
* THE HISTORY AND HISTORIOGRAPHY OF NATIONAL SECURITY SPACE 523 

Lantratov describes the early Soyuz manned reconnaissance 

designs.247 Zimmerman’s recent history of space stations also briefly discusses 

the Soviet military missions.248 Pe~avento~~~ describes the Russian shuttle projects, as does Garber.250 

The military’s ballooning experiments at extreme altitudes are described 

in Ryan’s The Pre-Astronauts, as well as DeVorkin’s Race to the Stratosphere.251 

Gantz provides a late-1950s view of USAF astronaut training, and Erickson’s 

dissertation looks at this as one aspect of a larger NASA-DOD relationship.252 

Military involvement with the development of spacesuits is described in 

Harris’s The Origins and Technology of the Advanced Extra- Vehicular Spacesuit.253 

Mallan, De Monchaux, and Kozloski also have monographs on the history of 

spacesuits, including their military origins.254 There are no published overview histories of military test-pilot training, aerospace medicine, creation 

of launch facilities and range support, etc. On aerospace medicine, the best 

source so far is Mackowski’s 2002 dissertation.255 Important early sources 

include Armstrong’s Aerospace Medicine and Campbell’s Earthman/Spacernan/ 

246. Asif A. Siddiqi, “The Almaz Space Station Complex: A History, 1964-1992, Part 1: 1964- 

1976,”Journal of the British Interplanetary Society 52, no. 11/12 (2001): 389-416; AsifA. Siddiqi, “The 

Almaz Space Station Complex: A History, 1964-1992, Part 2: 1976-1992,” Journal of the British 

Interplanetary Society 55, no. 1/2 (2002): 35-67. 

247. Konstantin Lantratov, “Soyuz-Based Manned Reconnaissance Spacecraft,” trans. Bart 

Hendrickx, Quest: The History ofSpacefight Quarterly 6, no. 1 (1998): 5-21. 

248. Robert Zimmerman, Leaving Earth: Space Stations, Rival Superpowers, and the Quest for 

Interplanetary Travel (Washington, DC: Joseph Henry Press, 2003). 

249. Peter Pesavento, “Russian Space Shuttle Projects, 1957-1994, Part 1,” Spacefight 37, no. 5 

(1995): 158-164; Peter Pesavento, “Russian Space Shuttle Projects, 1957-1994, Part 2,” Spacefight 

37, no. 6 (1995): 192-199; Peter Pesavento, “Russian Space Shuttle Projects, 1957-1994, Part 3,” 

Spacefight 37, no. 7 (1995): 226-233; Peter Pesavento, “Russian Space Shuttle Projects, 1957-1994, 

Part 4,” Spacefght 37, no. 8 (1995): 264-266. 

250. Steve Garber, “A Cold Snow Falls: The Soviet Buran Space Shuttle,” Quest: The History of 

Spacefight Quarterly 9, no. 5 (2002): 42-51. 

251. Craig Ryan, The Pre-Astronauts: Manned Ballooning on the Edge of Space (Annapolis, MD: 

Naval Institute Press, 1995); David H. DeVorkin, Race to the Stratosphere: Manned Scientijc Ballooning 

in America (New York Springer-Verlag, 1989). 

252. Kenneth F. Gantz, ed., Men in Space: The United States Air Force Program for Developing 

the Spacecraft Crew (New York: Duell, 1959); Mark A. Erickson, “The Evolution of the NASADoD Relationship from Sputnik to the Lunar Landing” (Ph.D. diss., The George Washington 

University, 1997). 

253. Gary L. Harris, The Origins and Technology of the Advanced Extra- Vehicular Spacesuit, AAS 

History Series, no. 24 (San Diego: Univelt, 2001). 

254. Lloyd Mallan, Suiting Up for Space: The Evolution of the Space Suit (New York: John Day 

Company, 1971); Nicholas De Monchaux, Space Suit (New York: Springer Verlag, 2002); Lillian 

D. Kozloski, U.S. Space Gear: Outfitting the Astronaut (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution 

Press, 2000). 

255. Maura Phillips Mackowski, “Human Factors: Aerospace Medicine and the Origins of 

Manned Space Flight in the United States” (Ph.D. diss., Arizona State University, 2002). 
524 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

UNIVERSAL MAN.256 Early studies of USAF experiments related to human 

spaceflight can be found in Mallan and Meeter.257 Information on military 

astronauts and their training can be found indirectly through numerous astronaut biographies and autobiographies, which I will not list here. Also, Swenson 

et al.’s early history of Mercury, This New Ocean, discusses some of the early 

military-based astronaut training and selection.258 Siddiqi’s Challenge to Apollo 

describes similar military origins for 

In 1959, Singer discussed the potential of military Moon bases.26” Springer 

describes the U.S. Army’s Project Adam in a 1994 Quest article and the Army’s 

Project Horizon Moon base study in his 1999 “Securing the High Ground.”261 

Burrows and Richelson also discuss military Moon base efforts.262 Stoff 

describes plans for a military version of the Apollo Lunar 

WEATHER AND SCIENCE 

The military has funded and developed a variety of experiments and 

systems to understand space and atmospheric environments and to support 

space operations. This intersects with literature in the history of science in the 

development of space science and meteorology. Prior to NASA’s existence, 

space science was almost exclusively funded by the military. The military has 

had scientific advisers ever since World War I1 to help guide its technology 

and scientific programs. The Office of Naval Research became a “protoNational Science Foundation” in the late 1940s and 1950s, funding a variety 

of research, while the USAF established a Scientific Advisory Board that periodically provided studies and advice, as well as a Chief Scientist’s Office to 

coordinate with academic advisers. The military as a whole used the Research 

256. Harry G. Armstrong, Aerospace Medicine (Baltimore, MD: Williams & Wilkins, 1961); Paul 

A. Campbell, Earthman/Spaceman/UNIVERSAL MAN? (New York: Pageant Press, 1965). 

257. Lloyd Mallan, Men, Rockets, and Space Rats (New York: Messner, 1961); George F. Meeter, 

The Holloman Story: Eyewitness Accounts of Space Age Research (Albuquerque: University of New 

Mexico Press, 1967). 

258. Loyd S. Swenson, Jr., James M. Grimwood, and Charles C. Alexander, This New Ocean: A 

History ofproject Mercury (Washington, DC: NASA SP-4201, 1966). 

259. Siddiqi, Challenge to Apollo. 

260. Lieutenant Colonel S. E. Singer, “The Military Potential of the Moon,” Air University 

Quarterly Review 11 (summer 1959): 31-53. 

261. Anthony M. Springer, “PROJECT ADAM, The Army’s Man in Space Program,” Quest: 

The History of Spaceflight Magazine 3, nos. 2-3 (1994): 46-47; Anthony M. Springer, “Securing the 

High Ground: The Army’s Quest for the Moon,” Quest: The History of Spacejight Quarterly 7, no. 

262. William E. Burrows, “Securing the High Ground,” Air 6 Space Smithsonian 8 (December 

1993/January 1994): 64-69; Jeffrey T. Richelson, “Shootin’ for the Moon,” Bulletin ofthe Atomic 

Scientists (September/October 2000). 

263. Joshua Stoff, “The Lunar Module’s Evil Twin,” Air and Space (OctobedNovember 2000). 

2 (1999): 34-39. 
THE HISTORY AND HISTORIOGRAPHY OF NATIONAL SECURITY SPACE 525 

Technicians check out DMSP Block 5D-3 satellite, late 1990s. (Official USAF photo. 

Air Force Space Command, Office of History) 
526 CRITICAL ISSUES INTHE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

and Development Board, which was to help coordinate academic efforts for 

science and technology development after World War I1 and into the 1950s. 

Science experiments aboard American V-2 rocket firings in the late 1940s 

and early 1950s were coordinated by the Naval Research Laboratory. These 

military-supported experiments, along with a variety of ground-based studies 

of the upper atmosphere, were the training ground for many of NASA's early 

space scientists. Similarly, all of the early space science experiments placed on 

board pre-NASA Explorer and Pioneer missions were military-funded. 

The U.S. Army developed the initial Television and Infrared Observation 

System (TIROS) weather satellite program, which it turned over to NASA 

in 1958. The military continued funding certain aspects of space science even 

after NASA's arrival on the scene in late 1958 and created its own operational programs to monitor Earth and space weather due to their impact on a 

variety of military operations. The National Reconnaissance Office modified 

the TIROS design to create the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program 

(DMSP), which was to ensure that CORONA photography over the Soviet 

Union took pictures of the ground instead of cloud tops. DMSP continued 

under USAF control until 1998, supporting a variety of tactical as well as strategic uses. In May 1998, operational responsibility for DMSP transferred to the 

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) . Interestingly, 

the National Weather Service used the DMSP as the basis for its operational 

satellites in the 1960s instead of NASA's Nimbus. In the early 21st century, 

military and civilian needs are to be met with the National Polar-Orbiting 

Environmental Satellite System (NPOESS). 

As the impact of solar storms on radio communication became increasingly apparent, both civilian and military groups established groups to monitor space weather and issue warnings and advisories to satellite operators. In 

the 1980s and 1990s, the military's desire to test ABM technologies in space 

without violating the ABM Treaty led to the Clementine program, which 

found surprising evidence for water on the Moon. In the Soviet Union, the 

Meteor weather satellite program was a military-civilian system from the start, 

with military specifications provided by the Third Directorate of the Chief 

Directorate of Reactive Armaments (GURVO) and the design handled by the 

All-Union Scientific Research Institute of Electromechanics (VNIIEM) . 

Another major scientific and application initiative was the development of 

geodesy. This was crucial for military operations planning, both for airborne 

and ballistic missile strikes from the U.S. to the USSR and vice versa. In the 

1950s, knowledge of the exact size and shape of the Earth was insufficient 

for ballistic missile targeting, as the uncertainty in the distance from North 

American to Asia was in error between 20 to 30 miles. In addition, the Earth's 

shape influences the gravity field, which affects ballistic missile trajectories. 

Thorough mapping of the Earth's surface was essential and was advocated by 
THE HISTORY AND HISTORIOGRAPHY OF NATIONAL SECURITY SPACE 527 

Amrom Katz of RAND Corporation in the late 1950s. Development work 

began on mapping cameras for the USAF Samos program. However, mapping 

from space began in earnest with the U.S. Army in 1959, when it started the 

Argon program, which put the KH-5 mapping camera on board CORONA 

spacecraft. Other mapping cameras were also developed and integrated with 

the CORONA program. 

The other aspect to geodesy was the study of the Earth’s gravitational 

field through experimental satellites. Scientists developed several techniques. 

One was to measure a satellite’s position in orbit through visual sightings at 

different points on the Earth, such as occurred with the 1960s American Echo 

1 and PAGEOS (Passive Geodetic Earth Orbiting Satellite) satellites. Another 

method was to have a satellite send two radio signals at differing wavelengths 

and then observe the Doppler-effect frequency shifts from the ground. The 

U.S. Transit system, as well as the French Diapason and Diademe satellites of 

the 1960s, operated with this principle. Passive satellites with mirrors that can 

reflect laser beams from Earth have also been launched, such as the French 

Starlette. Military geodetic satellites have generally predated civilian systems, and civilian geodetic experiments have been among the first satellites 

of nations with ballistic missiles, such as France and China. The U.S. military 

began its Anna 1A and 1B optical ranging satellites in 1962, followed quickly 

by the Gravity Gradient Stabilization Experiment satellites, the Sequential 

Collation of Range satellites, and the Geodetic Earth Orbiting Satellite. The 

Soviets started their geodesy experiments with the Sfera series in 1968, followed by the Musson series beginning in 1980. The U.S. Global Positioning 

System is also used for geodetic purposes. 

Sapolsky’s history of the Office of Naval Research is a good introduction 

to the role of ONR.264Van Keuren narrates the scientific cover for intelligence 

gathering by the Naval Research Laboratory, while McDowell provides an 

overview of its satellites.265 Leslie’s The Cold War and American Science describes 

military interactions with MIT and Stanford, including some related to space.266 

The role of Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory is told 

by Klingaman.267 Sturm describes the creation and evolution of the USAFS 

264. Harvey M. Sapolsky, Science and the Navy: The Hi5tory of the Ofice ofNaval Research (Princeton: 

Princeton University Press, 1990). 

265. D. K. Van Keuren, “Cold War Science in Black and White: US Intelligence Gathering and 

Its Scientific Cover at the Naval Research Laboratory, 1948-62,” Social Studies ofscience 31, no. 2 

(2001): 207-229; Jonathan McDowell, “Naval Research Laboratory Satellites 60-89,”JournaI ofthe 

British Interplanetary Society 50, no. 11 (1997): 427-432. 

266. Stuart W. Leslie, The Cold War and American Science: The Military-Indnstrial-Academic Complex 

at MIT and Stanford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). 

267. William K. Klingaman, APL-Fijy Years of Service to a Nation: A History of the Johns Hopkins 

University Applied Physics Laboratory (Laurel, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics 

Laboratory, 1993). 
528 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

Scientific Advisory Board (SAB) up to 1964.268 Gorn’s Harnessing the Genie also 

discusses the SAB in its relation to technology f~recasting.’~~ Komons describes 

the history of the USAF Office of Scientific Research up to the early 1960~.’~~ 

Day’s Lightning Rod narrates the history of the USAF Office of Chief Scientist.’” 

Liebowitz’s chronology provides information on the Cambridge Field Station 

and its evolution to the Air Force Geophysics Laboratory.’” 

Dick describes the long history of the U.S. Naval Observatory and 

its relationship to astronomy and space science.273 Doel’s general history of 

pre-Space Age planetary science contains important information about the 

military’s role in its creation.274 The history of the American V-2 experiments 

is told in DeVorkin’s Science with a Vengean~e.’~~ Bille and Lishock’s The First 

Space Race describes the military’s role in launching the first satellites, including scientific aspects.276 Needell’s Science, Cold War and the American State 

portrays military-science relationships through the life of Lloyd Berkner, a 

leader of early Cold War atmospheric and space ~cience.”~ Newell’s Beyond 

the Atmosphere and Butrica’s To See the Unseen both begin with descriptions of 

military-funded or -approved space science prior to the founding of NASA.2i8 

Vanguard, along with its Navy origins and science, is described in Green’s early 

NASA history.279 Paulikas and Strom describe The Aerospace Corporation’s 

early efforts in understanding the space environment.280 Hendrickx narrates 

268. Thomas A. Sturm, The USAF Scientific Advisory Board: Its First Twenty Years, 1944-1964 

(Washington, DC: Office of Air Force History, 1986). 

269. Michael H. Gorn, Harnessing the Genie: Science and Technology Forecasting for the Air Force, 

1944-1986 (Washington, DC: Office of Air Force History, 1988). 

270. Nick A. Komons, Science and the Air Force: A History ofthe Air Force Office of Scientific Research 

(Arlington, VA: Historical Division, Office of Information, Office of Aerospace Research, 1966). 

271. Dwayne A. Day, Lightning Rod: A History ofthe Air Force ChieJScientist Ofice (Washington, 

DC: JSAF Chief Scientist’s Office, 20001. 

272. Ruth P. Liebowitz, Chronology: From the Cambridge Field Station to the Air Force Geophysics 

Laboratory, 1945-1985 (Hanscom AFB, MA: AF Geophysics Laboratory, 1985). 

273. Steven J. Dick, Sky and OceanJoined: The U.S. Naval Observatory, 1830-2000 (New York: 

Cambridge University Press, 2002). 

274. Ronald E. Doel, Solar System Astronomy in America: Communities, Patronage, and Interdisciplinary 

Research, 1920-1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 

275. David H. DeVorkin, Science with a Vengeance: How the Military Created the US Space Sciences 

after World War II (New York: Springer-VerIag, 1992). 

276. Bille and Lishock, The First Space Race. 

277. Allan A. Needell, Science, Cold War and the American State: Lloyd V. Berkner and the Balance .f 

Professional Ideals (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 2000). 

278. Homer E. Newell, Beyond the Atmosphere: Early Years of Space Science (Washington, DC: 

NASA SP-4211, 1980); Andrew J. Butrica, To See the Unseen: A History of Planetary Radar Astronomy 

(Washington, DC: NASA SP-4218, 1996). 

279. Green and Lomask, Vanguard: A History. 

280. George A. Paulikas and Steven R. Strom, “A Decade of Space Observations: The Early 

Years of the Space Physics Laboratory,” Crosslink 4, no. 2 (2003): 6-9. 
THE HISTORY AND HISTORIOGRAPHY OF NATIONAL SECURITY SPACE 529 

the story of the Soviet Elektron program, which was a scientific response to 

U.S. discoveries with Explorer.281 

Day describes the Argon system and other mapping programs linked to 

CORONA.2s2 Geodesy and its links to military space have become topics for 

recent research, particularly a series of articles by Warnerzs3 and another series 

by Clo~d.”~ The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Space has a good introduction to 

geodesy that describes the various geodesy missions.2s5 Doel has recently ventured into the military’s influence on Earth science as Cloud looks at 

the links between the intelligence and civilian remote sensing prograrn~.’~~ 

The best overview of the origins of the Defense Meteorological Satellite 

Program is Hall’s recently declassified article.’” This same 2002 Quest issue 

also contains an informative interview with the program’s first manager, 

Thomas Haig.289 Abel gives a history of DMSP up to 1982; Brandli shows how 

DMSP was used in Southeast Asia in the 1960s and 1970s; and Day provides 

a short history on the origins of the pr~grarn.’~’ Bates and Fuller give a gen281. Bart Hendrickx, “Elektron: The Soviet Response to Explorer,” Quest: The Histouy of 

Spacefght Quarterly 8, no. 1 (2000): 37-45. 

282. Day, “Mapping the Dark Side ofthe World Part 1,” pp. 264-269; Day, “Mapping the Dark 

Side of the World Part 2,” pp. 303-310. 

283. Deborah Jean Warner, “Political Geodesy: The Army, the Air Force, and the World 

Geodetic System of 1960,” Annals of Science 59, no. 4 (2002): 363-389; Deborah Jean Warner, 

“From Tallahassee to Timbuktu: Cold War Efforts to Measure Intercontinental Distances,” 

Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 30, no. 2 (2000): 393-415. 

284. John Cloud, “Crossing the Olentangy River: The Figure of the Earth and the MilitaryIndustrial-Academic Complex, 1947-1972,” Studies in the History and Philosophy .f Modern Physics 

31B, no. 3 (2000): 371-404; John Cloud, “Imaging the World in a Barrel: CORONA and the 

Clandestine Convergence of the Earth Sciences,” Social Studies of Science 31, no. 2 (2001): 231-251; 

John Cloud, “Hidden in Plain Sight: The CORONA Reconnaissance Satellite Programme and 

Clandestine Cold War Science,” Annals of Science 58, no. 2 (2001): 203-209; John Cloud, “Reviewing the Earth: Remote Sensing and Cold War Clandestine Knowledge Production,” Quest: 

The History ofspaceflight Quarterly 8, no. 3 (2001): 4-16. 

285. Fernand Verger, Isabelle S0urbt.s-Verger, and Reymond Ghirardi, with contributions by 

Xavier Pasco, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Space: Missions, Applications, and Exploration (Cambridge: 

Cambridge University Press, 2003). 

286. Ronald E. Doel, “Constltuting the Postwar Earth Sciences: The Mhtary’s Influence on the 

Environmental Sciences in the USA after 1945,” Social Studies of Science 33, no. 5 (2003): 635-666. 

287. Cloud, “Reviewing the Earth.” 

288. R. Cargill Hall, “A History of the Military Polar Orbiting Meteorological Satellite 

Program,” Quest: The History ofSpacefight Quarterly 9, no. 2 (2002): 4-25. 

289. David Arnold, “An Interview with Colonel Thomas 0. Haig,” Quest: The History of 

Spaceflight Quarterly 9, no. 2 (2002): 53-61. 

290. Major Michael D. Abel, History of the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program: Origin 

Through 2982, Air Command and Staff College Report No. 87-0020 (Maxwell AFB, AL: Air 

University Press, 1987); Henry W. Brandli, “The Use of Meteorological Satellites in Southeast 

Asia Operations,” Aerospace Historian 29, no. 3 (September 1982): 172-175; Dwayne A. Day, “Dark 

Clouds: The Classified Origins of the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program,” Spacefzght 43, 

no. 9 (2001): 382-385. 
530 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

era1 history of military weather forecasting, while Nebeker provides a general 

history of which the military is a part.291 Gavaghan discusses the military origins of TIROS and early weather satellites in Something New Under the Sun, 

based largely on interviews with Verner S~omi.~~~ Hendrickx’s 2004 history of 

Meteor is the best source for the Soviet and Russian weather satellites.293 

Space weather and its relationship to the Sun have received little hstorical 

attention. Hufbauer’s Exploring the Sun describes some USAF efforts in solar and 

space weather observations. Myers wrote a study of space weather operations.294 

NAVIGATION 

Developed initially for nuclear warfare, space-based navigation has 

become a worldwide commercial and civilian utility, as well as a major contributor to conventional warfare. Space-based navigation developed from ideas 

generated from tracking the first satellites from Earth. Scientists worked out 

the nuances of determining precise satellite positions and orbital trajectories. 

Once they determined the orbital positions and parameters with precision, 

scientists at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory realized 

that it was possible to reverse the procedure. Knowing precise positions in 

orbit, one can use satellites to determine precise positions on Earth. This 

would be extremely useful for ships, which had to calculate their positions 

on featureless oceans. Thus was born the Transit program, which used the 

Doppler effect from satellite radio signals to determine ship and submarine 

positions. The U.S. Navy was particularly interested, because it needed precise position measurements for its Polaris submarines to determine the initial 

firing positions of submarine-launched ballistic missiles. 

Transit worked well for ships but was inadequate for aircraft, because its 

signals were useful in only two dimensions and there were not enough Transit 

satellites to ensure that there were enough signals to triangulate positions at 

all times. The U.S. Army, Navy, and Air Force all experimented in the 1960s 

with technologies to improve upon Transit, but each had different capabilities. In 1973, the Secretary of Defense ordered the combination of the various 

programs and technologies into the Navstar Global Positioning System (GPS) 

291. Charles C. Bates and John F. Fuller, America’s Weather Warriors: 1814-1985 (College Station: 

Texas A&M University Press, 1986); Frederik Nebeker, Calculating the Weather: Meteorology in the 

20th Century (New York: Academic Press, 1995). 

292. Helen Gavaghan, Something New Under the Sun: Satellites and the Beginning ofthe Space Age 

(New York: Springer-Verlag, 1998). 

293. Bart Hendrickx, “A History of Soviet/Russian Meteorologlcal Satellites,” Journal of the 

British Interplanetary Society 57, supplement 1, Space Chronicle (2004): 56-102. 

294. Master Sergeant Gary P. Myers, “A Portrait of the 4000th Satellite Operations Group” 

(internal report, 1983). 
THE HISTORY AND HISTORIOGRAPHY OF NATIONAL SECURITY SPACE 531 

program. The first test satellites were put in orbit in 1978, but not until 1993 

was a full constellation of 24 satellites in place. GPS proved its worth in the 

1991 Gulf War as it helped guide Army units over the faceless desert, Navy 

ships around Iraqi minefields, Air Force aircraft to precise target points, and 

precision weaponry fired from Navy and Air Force units. Since that time, the 

U.S. military has converted more and more of its munitions to GPS-based 

precision munitions, since these proved vastly more effective than conventional ordnance. The use of GPS is now tightly woven with virtually all U.S. 

military operations. In addition, GPS has spawned a vast commercial market, 

which greatly exceeds the military’s use in terms of receivers sold. GPS has 

become a global utility, which complicates U.S. military plans. Politically, it 

can no longer simply shut down civilian access to high-precision signals, even 

though it had originally intended to do so in wartime. 

The Soviet Union was not far behind in the development of its own 

navigational systems. The Soviets first tested the Tsiklon communications 

and navigation satellite in 1967, and it became formally operational in 1971. 

Like Transit, it was used primarily for naval navigation. An improved version, 

Parus, was first tested in 1974 and operational in 1977. The Soviets next fielded 

an all-service geodetic and navigational system known as Kristal, which was 

tested for the Soviet Navy in 1971, and the all-service version in 1984. The 

Global Navigation Satellite System (GLONASS), the equivalent to GPS, first 

flew in 1982, but since the fall of the USSR, Russia has been unable to maintain the full constellation. 

After 2000, China and Japan flew their first navigational satellites, and 

Europe, in partnership with China, India, and other nations, is beginning its 

Galileo program, which will sell its services to ditary as well as civilian users. 

Historical information on navigational satellites remains surprisingly 

limited. For a longer view of U.S. navigation since the 19th century up to 

GPS, and also because the U.S. Naval Observatory provides the time for GPS, 

see Dick’s Sky and Ocean Joined.295 Gavaghan discusses the early work of John 

Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory in the creation of Transit,296 

as do Dan~hik’~~ and Guier and Weiffenba~h.’~~ Qualkinbush gives an overview of Transit.299 Friedman provides details of the U.S. and Soviet navigational systems in terms of their utility for naval operations, including Transit, 

295. Steven J. Dick, Sky and Oceanjoined. 

296. Gavaghan, Something New Under the Sun. 

297. Robert J. Danchik, “An Overview of Transit Development,”Johns Hopkins APL Technical 

298. William H. Guier and George C. Weiffenbach, “Genesis of Satellite Navigation,” Johns 

299. Robert Qualkinbush, “Transit: The US Navy Pioneer Navigation Satellite,” journal of the 

Digest 19, no. 1 (1998): 18-26. 

Hopkins APL Technical Digest 19, no. 1 (1998): 14-17. 

British Interplanetary Society 50, no. 11 (1997): 403-426. 
532 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

GPS, Tsiklon, Parus, and Kri~tal.~OO The GPS story is extremely important but 

as yet has no full history. Alford provides a history up to 1985.301 Bradley has a 

few papers on the subject.302 Two articles in Quest 11, number 3, provide good 

overviews of the development of GPS: a historical overview by Banther and an 

interview of Bradford Parkinson, one of the program’s founders.303 Parkinson 

has written three historical articles on GPS.304 Chapter 28 in Getting’s All in 

a Lijztime discusses his role in early navigation at The Aerospace Corporation, 

as does his short paper in IEEE Spectrum.305 Rip and Hasik’s recent book, The 

Precision Revolution, is an outstanding look at the impact of space-based navigation on ~ar-fighting.~’~ Harvey provides a brief overview of Russian navigational satellites.307 Forden analyzes the functions of China’s Beidou regional 

navigational satellite system.308 

ANTISATELLITES AND SPACE WARFARE 

Both the United States and Russia have had the capability to destroy each 

other’s satellites from the 1960s, with both sides deploying systems. In the 

United States, antisatellite weapons have been politically sensitive. Because 

the United States placed such high value on its space reconnaissance capabilities, political leaders have been wary about creating provocative antisatellite 

300. Friedman, Seapower and Space. 

301. Major Dennis L. Alford, History ofthe NAVSTAR Global Positioning System (1963-1985), Air 

Command and Staff College Report No. 86-0050 (Maxwell AFB,AL:Air University Press, 1986). 

302. George W. Bradley 111, “Historical Origins of the Global Positioning System” (prepared 

for the History of Technology Conference, Andrews AFB, MD, 24 October 1995); George W. 

Bradley 111, “NAVSTAR Global Positioning System Decision” (prepared for the CAMP Military 

History Symposium, Rapid City, SD, 11 May 2001); George W. Bradley 111, “Origins ofthe Global 

Positioning System,” in Technology and the Air Force: A Retrospective Assessment, ed. Jacob Neufeld, 

George M. Watson, Jr., and David Chenoweth (Washington, DC: Air Force History and Museums 

Program, 1997), pp. 245-254. 

303. Chris Banther, “A Look into the History of American Satellite Navigation,” Quest: The 

History ofSpacefllght Quarterly 11, no. 3 (2004): 40-48; Steven R. Strom, “An Interview with Dr. 

Bradford Parkinson,” Quest: The History of Spacefight Quarterly 11, no. 3 (2004): 49-59. 

304. Bradford W. Parkinson et al., “A History of Satellite Navigation,” Naugatron:journal of the 

Institute ofNauigation 42, no. 1, special issue (1995): 109-164; Bradford W. Parkinson and Stephen W. 

Gilbert, “NAVSTAR Global Positioning System-Ten Years Later,” Proceedings ofthe IEEE 71, no. 

1 (October 1983): 1177-1186; Bradford W. Parkinson, “Introduction and Heritage of NAVSTAR, 

the Global Positioning System,” in Global Posittoning System: Theory and Applicattons, ed. Bradford 

W. Parkinson and James J. Spiker, Jr., vol. 1 (Washington, DC: AIAA, 1996). 

305. Ivan A. Getting, All in a Llfetime: Science in the Defense ofDemocracy (New York: Vantage 

Press, 1989); Ivan A. Getting, “The Global Positioning System,” IEEE Spectrum (December 1993): 

36-38,43-47. 

306. Michael Russell Rip and James M. Hasik, The Precision Revolution: GPS and the Future of 

307. Harvey, Russia tu Space: The Failed Frontier? 

308. Geoffrey Forden, “China’s Satellite-Based Navigation System: Implications for Conventional 

Aerial War$& (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2002). 

and Strategic Forces,” Breakthroughs 13, no. 1 (spring 2004): 19-28. 
THE HISTORY AND HISTORIOGRAPHY OF NATIONAL SECURITY SPACE 533 

(ASAT) weapons, for fear of provoking the Soviet Union into developing 

the capability. Despite (or regardless of) American fears or sensitivities, the 

Soviets developed their own ASAT systems. 

American antisatellite capabilities were generally direct spinoffs from 

other technologies and systems. Dyna-Soar, discussed earlier, was to have a 

satellite inspection and destruction capability. Ballistic missile defense systems, 

whether Earth- or space-based, were easily modified to attack satellites as well 

as missiles, at least in low-Earth orbit. Finally, ballistic missiles provided the 

orbital boost capabilities to launch antisatellite weapons. All that was really 

needed was to wait for the satellite to get within range of the booster and then 

fire it with precise timing. 

Early ASAT weapons depended on whether nuclear detonations in space 

could disable satellites. The first American in-space nuclear test occurred with 

Project Argus, which was launched in August 1958 and detonated a 2-kiloton 

weapon, while the Explorer IV satellite measured the resulting change in 

radiation. Further tests, culminating in the much larger 1962 Starfish Prime 

nuclear tests in space over Johnston Island in the Pacific Ocean, confirmed 

that in-space nuclear explosions created radiation intensities that were deadly 

to both friendly and enemy satellites, as well as knocking out electrical power 

in the Hawaiian Islands hundreds of miles distant. The data from these tests 

confirmed that nuclear weapons could destroy satellites, but also that they 

were indiscriminate in their effects, which led shortly thereafter to the U.S. 

and USSR agreeing to ban nuclear tests in space. 

American ASAT testing began seriously in October 1959, when the 

USAF’s project Bold Orion used a B-47 bomber to air-launch a Martin 

Corporation missile, which came within 4 miles of the Explorer VI satellite. 

The Navy explored ship- and air-launched ASAT systems, culminating in two 

air-launched tests in 1962. In the meantime, the USAF was developing the larger 

scale SAINT, or Satellite Inspector for Space Defense, which started with a 

General Operational Requirement to develop a satellite defense system in June 

1958. The USAF-managed program was contracted to Radio Corporation of 

America, which designed a rendezvous-capable vehicle with on-board radar to 

be launched with an Atlas-Agena. As it became clear that SAINT could not 

intercept some targets of interest, such as Fractional Orbit Bombardment systems, the USAF canceled it, and its mission migrated to Dyna-Soar. 

In parallel, the U.S. Army was extending the capability of its Nike-Zeus 

ballistic missile defense system to have low-Earth-orbit ASAT functions. This 

became Program 505 Mudflap, which was the first U.S. operational ASAT system, deployed at Kwajalein Atoll fiom 1963 to 1967. Replacing it was the USAFS 

Program 437, which used Thor launchers with nuclear warheads launched from 

Johnston Island to intercept Soviet satellites. It was operational from 1964 to 

1970, when it went on standby status before being terminated in 1975. 
534 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

The Chelomey design bureau, OKB-52, designed the Soviet Istrebitel 

Sputnikov (IS) co-orbital ASAT satellite, which first flew in November 1963. 

A series of tests of the system continued through 1971, including operational 

tests in 1968 in which the IS satellite successfully exploded near its target satellite. After halting for a few years, the Soviets restarted ASAT tests in 1976, 

which spurred the Ford administration to restart an American ASAT program, 

the Miniature Homing Vehicle, an air-launched system that used the fourth 

stage from a Scout launch vehicle to boost it to space. The United States also 

funded particle beam and laser beam research programs for potential ASAT 

and BMD applications, as did the Soviet Union. Since the mid-l980s, U.S. 

ASAT research, if it continues, appears to have been folded into the Strategic 

Defense Initiative, and later the Ballistic Missile Defense and National Missile 

Defense programs. Russian ASAT research remains cloaked, but no space tests 

appear to have occurred since the demise of the Soviet Union. Nonetheless, 

both nations, as well as China, have the capability to build ASATs. 

Although published in 1985, Stares’s The Militarization of Space remains 

a good starting reference for antisatellite systems, describing the politics and 

basic programs of both U.S. and Soviet systems.309 Manno provides similar inf~rrnation.~~’ Kilgo’s 2004 Quest article provides an overview of U.S. 

ASAT programs.311 Chun has written a number of recent articles on the history of U.S. ASAT systems. He describes SAINT in his “A Falling Star.”312 In 

a later article, “Nike-Zeus’ Thunder and Lightning,” he narrates the genesis 

of the Army’s Program 505.313 The story of the USAF’s Program 437 is told in 

Shooting Down a “Star. This work draws from Austerman’s Program 437.315 

The Miniature Homing Vehicle program is described in Stares’s book, in 

Day’s “Arming the High Frontier,” and in Spires’s Beyond Ho~izons.~~~ Siddiqi 

309. Paul B. Stares, The Militarization of Space: U.S. Policy, 1945-1984 (Ithaca, NY. Cornel1 

University Press, 1985). 

310. Jack Manno, Arming the Heavens: The Hidden Military Agenda for Space, 1945-1995 (New 

York: Dodd, Mead, & Co., 1984). 

311. Robert Kilgo, “The History of the United States Anti-Satellite Program and the Evolution 

to Space Control and Offensive and Defensive Counterspace,” Quest: The History of .Space@# 

Quarterly 11, no. 3 (2004): 30-39. 

312. Clayton K. S. Chun, “A Falling Star: SAINT, America’s First Antisatellite System,” Quest: 

The History ofSpaceflight Quarterly 6, no. 2 (1998): 44-48. 

313. Clayton K. S. Chun, “Nike-Zeus’ Thunder and Lightning: From Antiballistic Missile to 

Antisatellite Interceptor,” Quest: The History of Spaceflight Quarterly 10, no. 4 (2003): 40-47. 

314. Clayton K. S. Chun, Shooting Down a “Star”: Program 437, the US Nuclear ASAT System 

and Present-Day Copycat Killers, CADRE Paper No. 6 (Maxwell AFB, AL: Air University Press, 

315. Wayne R. Austerman, Program 437: The Air Force’s First Antisatellite System (Peterson AFB, 

316. Dwayne A. Day, “Arming the High Frontier: A Brief History of the F-15 Anti-Satellite 

2000). 

CO: Office offiistory, 1991). 

Weapon,” Spaceflight 46, no. 12 (2004): 467-471; Spires, Beyond Horizons. 
THE HISTORY AND HISTORIOGRAPHY OF NATIONAL SECURITY SPACE 535 

narrates the history of the Chelomey ASAT system in an article in journal of 

the British Interplanetary Society.317 Onkst describes CIA and NRO responses to 

Soviet antisatellite systems between 1962 and 1971.318 

ORGANIZATION, MANAGEMENT, AND ACQUISITION 

The history of human activities in space is intimately tied to the development of sophisticated technologies. In military terms, the research and development leading to the creation of these technologies is called “acquisition.” 

The unique characteristics of the space environment drove the creation of 

new managerial methods for military technology acquisition called “systems 

management.” Space systems are also operated differently from most Earthbased systems, leading to unique operational processes as well. These developmental and operational differences have also led to the creation of new 

organizations within the services that handle these unique acquisition and 

operations processes. 

In the late 1940s through the early 1960s, the military services competed for “roles and missions” related to nuclear weapons, ballistic missiles, 

and finally space systems. The novelty of nuclear weapons and of the space 

environment meant that none of the services had a clear-cut, unchallengeable 

claim to these technologies or to space. The Army saw ballistic missiles as 

extensions to its classical artillery. The USAF saw space as a natural extension of flying. The Navy believed space had unique characteristics crucial for 

its mission on and in the oceans and did not want either the Army or the Air 

Force to monopolize space. 

Army Ordnance handled the bulk of the Army’s missile efforts, controlling von Braun’s Army Ballistic Missile Agency and funding Jet Propulsion 

Laboratory (JPL) to develop the Corporal ballistic missile. Early Air Force 

missile efforts were managed by Air Research and Development Command 

and Air Materiel Command, which themselves battled over who controlled 

what portions of the development process. The Navy’s efforts were concentrated in the Naval Research Laboratory, with some programs in the Office 

of Naval Research. 

Sputnik highlighted American space deficiencies, leading to a variety of 

changes. The Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) was formed to 

coordinate military space activities. However, it was unsuccessful in this role, 

317. Siddiqi, Challenge to Apollo; Asif A. Siddiqi, “The Soviet Co-Orbital Antisatellite System: A 

Synopsis,”Journal ofthe British Interplanetary Society 50, no. 6 (1997): 225-240. 

318. D. H. Onkst, “Check and Counter-Check: The CIA’S and NRO’s Response to Soviet AntiSatellite Systems, 1962-1971,” Journal OJ the British Interplanetary Society 51, no. 8 (August 1998): 

301-308. 
536 CRITICAL ISSUES INTHE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

and the services pushed ARPA aside to instead focus on advanced research in 

which the services were not immediately interested. Space was too important 

to be left to a separate agency. The DOD also created the Deputy Secretary 

of Defense for Research and Engineering (DDR&E) to coordinate and control military research, while the Secretary of Defense was given more budget 

authority, which Robert McNamara in the 1960s used to exert control over 

the services. By the end of the 1950s, the Army had mostly lost the battle for 

space, relinquishing JPL and ABMA to NASA. However, it retained programs in ballistic missile defense, playing the leading role for BMD and for the 

Program 505 Mudflap antisatellite system. The Navy successfully prevented 

an Air Force monopoly, retaining operational control of satellites intended for 

naval support such as Transit. 

The Air Force won the majority of the turf battles, partially assisted by 

its concept of “aerospace,” the “indivisible medium” of air and space that the 

Air Force claimed could not be separated and was the natural single medium 

for operations above the Earth’s surface. In 1961, the USAF reorganized its 

research and development activities, creating Air Force Systems Command for 

the acquisition of all major programs. Since all space programs were, in the 

early days, development programs, this centralized the management of many 

NS space systems. McNamara rewarded the USAF by officially awarding it 

the bulk of the “space mission.” 

However, this was only a partial bureaucratic victory, because other 

organizations gained or retained influence over certain aspects of NS space. 

This included the National Reconnaissance Office, which forced the USAF to 

share responsibility for reconnaissance satellites with the Central Intelligence 

Agency, and the Defense Communications Agency, which exerted control 

over various aspects of communications satellites and ground systems. Other 

organizations that remained involved with military space included Lincoln 

Laboratory, which was funded by all three services, and the National Security 

Agency, which operated ground stations that received and interpreted signals 

intelligence data. 

The next major changes to the organization of American NS space 

occurred in the early 1980s, due to two major spurs: the Space Shuttle and 

Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative. By the late 1970s, the USAF was building new facilities to handle Space Shuttle military operations, including a 

launch pad at Vandenberg AFB, a new control facility in Colorado Springs, 

as well as classified facilities at NASA’s Johnson Space Center near Houston. 

The question of what organization would handle Shuttle operations, as well 

as Reagan administration concerns about the USAF’s fractured space operations, led the USAF to centralize its satellite operations into a new major 

command, USAF Space Command, based in Colorado Springs. The Army 

and Navy followed suit, creating Army Space Command and Naval Space 
THE HISTORY AND HISTORIOGRAPHY OF NATIONAL SECURITY SPACE 537 

Command, respectively. The next step was to create a single unified command, called United States Space Command, to centralize operational control 

of all military space assets. Space Command eventually wrested control of 

launch operations from Systems Command, and Systems Command itself was 

soon deactivated, with its functions handed to a newly created Air Materiel 

Command, which brought USAF organizational changes full circle, almost 

identical to its late-1940s form. In the early 2000s, after the 11 September 

2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, U.S. 

Space Command was deactivated and its functions split between Strategic 

Command and a new Northern Command that concentrated on defense of 

the North American continent. 

In the Soviet Union, ballistic missile and space forces evolved differently. 

Initially, ballistic missiles and the early space programs were coordinated 

among several research institutes and design bureaus but organized by Sergei 

Korolev’s Special Design Bureau-1 (OKB-1) in Kaliningrad near Moscow. 

The Soviet leadership soon fomented internal competition for ballistic missiles 

by giving responsibility for some of these systems to Mikhail Yangel’s OKB586 in Dnepropetrovsk, which soon moved into spacecraft design as well. A 

third design bureau, Vladimir Chelomey’s OKB-52 in Reutov, gained strength 

during Nikita Khrushchev’s reign, influenced by the fact that Chelomey hired 

Khrushchev’s son, Sergei. Chelomey developed ballistic missiles, as well as 

antisatellite systems and the Almaz manned reconnaissance orbital station. 

While these “big three” design bureaus were the most prominent, many others were involved with specialized aspects of Soviet military space programs, 

from subsystems to specific satellite types, such as Mikoyan’s OKB-155 that 

worked on Spiral, Kozlov’s OKB-1 Branch 3 that focused on reconnaissance, 

Savin’s OKB-41 that worked on EORSAT and RORSAT, etc. 

Most design bureaus reported to the Ministry of Armaments (MV) 

until 1965, when they were transferred to the Ministry of Machine Building 

(MOM) under Dmitry Ustinov. Some design bureaus, such as Mikoyan’s, 

reported to the Ministry of Aviation Industry. In the 1950s and 1960s, the 

Soviets kept design, accomplished in the design bureaus, separate from production, handled in a variety of factories and plants. In the mid-l970s, the 

Soviets combined design bureaus and associated factories into ScientificProduction Associations, or NPOs. Thus OKB-1 and various bureaus combined into NPO Energia, while OKB-52 became NPO Mashinostroyenia 

and OKB-586 became NPO Yuzhnoye. 

System operations were handled through the Ministry of Defense, which 

controlled the Army, Navy, and Air Force. Nikita Khrushchev, wanting to 

emphasize the importance of ballistic missiles, created the Strategic Missile 

Forces (or Missile Forces of Strategic Designation-RVSN), which from 

1959 to 1981 operated ballistic missile and space systems. Air defense sys- 
538 CRITICAL ISSUES INTHE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

tems, which evolved into the ballistic missile defense and warning systems, 

were operated by the Forces of Anti-Missile Defense (V-PRO), formed in 

1958. Soviet military space programs were centralized in 1964 in the Central 

Directorate of Space Systems (TsUKOS) of the RVSN and, in 1970, called the 

Chief Directorate of the Space Systems (GUKOS). In 1981, GUKOS was 

separated from the RVSN and placed directly under the Ministry of Defense. 

Renamed the Directorate of the Space Systems Commander (UNKS) in 

1986, space systems were formed into a separate military service in 1992, the 

Military Space Forces (VKS). Between 1997 and 2001, the military space 

forces were once again subordinated to the RVSN but, in 2001, were once 

again made an independent force, the Space Forces (KVR). In 2000, when 

the National Air Defense service was disbanded, its strategic defense functions 

were transferred to the Space Forces. 

China’s military space program began when Tsien Hsue-Shen, a brilliant 

rocket theorist working for the California Institute of Technology and a founding member of JPL, returned to Communist China from the United States 

in 1955. In January 1956, the government founded the Institute of Mechanics 

in Beijing with Tsien in charge. By October, the government heeded Tsien’s 

proposal to develop rockets, creating the Fifth Academy of the Ministry 

of National Defense, with Tsien at its head. The Fifth Academy acquired 

Soviet R1 and R2 missiles, along with Soviet technicians and blueprints. The 

Chinese satellite program began on a small scale when engineers from the 

Shanghai Institute of Machine and Electrical Design went to Beijing to work 

with Tsien. They returned to Shanghai and started to work, but not until 

1965 did the Shanghai institute, under the authority of the Seventh Ministry 

of Machine Building (the Fifth Academy’s new designation) and with assistance from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, get authorization to work with 

local factories to build satellites. The Shanghai group eventually became the 

Shanghai Academy of Spaceflight Technology. In 1982, the Seventh Ministry 

became the Ministry of Space Industry (MASI), which had several academies 

under it developing various systems and subsystems. Information on other 

military space organizations exists through primary sources, but there has 

been little historical work published in open literature. 

The evolving organizational structures reflect a deeper set of evolving 

managerial and engineering processes that were also created along with space 

systems. Ballistic missile and space systems both require levels of reliability 

significantly higher than most typical Earth-bound technologies. Neither ballistic missiles nor space systems (with a few exceptions like the Shuttle orbiter) 

return once placed in space; therefore, components, except for software, cannot be replaced. Rocket engines are extremely dangerous and have extreme 

temperatures and pressures. The space environment also has extremes of temperature along with radiation, while the lack of air confounds conventional 
THE HISTORY AND HISTORIOGRAPHY OF NATIONAL SECURITY SPACE 539 

heating and cooling methods. Finally, ballistic missiles and space systems are 

composed of a multiplicity of individually complex technologies, connected 

in complex ways. . 

The combination of these factors led designers to create systems engineering, which is the set of methods to coordinate the organizational communication and complexity of space systems. These methods, which include 

environmental and systems testing, quality control, change control, design 

reviews, and configuration control, came to symbolize the extremes of preplanning, controlled manufacturing, and rigorous testing that characterized 

the space industry. They went hand in hand with managerial innovations 

such as project management, configuration boards, matrix management, 

network scheduling tools, and program control rooms. Starting with ballistic missile programs of the U.S. Army, Navy, and Air Force, these methods 

formed through the mutual interactions of government, industry, and academia and led also to the creation of nonprofit organizations such as RAND 

Corporation, The Aerospace Corporation, and MITRE Corporation to help 

the government analyze and coordinate complex technological systems. By 

the mid-l960s, the bulk of these processes and institutions were in place, as 

the DOD instituted systems management across all of the services. Since that 

time, a variety of managerial reforms have been attempted, which somewhat 

modify these techniques or allow flexibility for program managers to select 

from a menu of the systems management tools. However, at the start of the 

21st century, the core of these methods remained in place for space systems 

and ballistic missiles. 

Virtually all military organizations have institutional histories, and thus 

there are a host of internal studies that either have been or someday will be 

declassified. These generally provide a solid base for institutional and managerial histories. I will not attempt to describe them all here. The best procedure 

for historians is to consult the military organization (or its successor) in which 

they are interested and request access to the appropriate institutional histories, 

as well as starting with the regular publications described below. 

Spires’s Beyond Horizons is the best starting point for the USAF’s space 

organization and executive management. Neufeld’s Ballistic Missiles in the 

USAF provides a similar basis for ballistic missiles,319 as does Schaffel’s The 

Emevging Shield for continental defense. Waldron provides an overview of 

the Space and Missile Systems Center.320 No such overview works exist for 

the U.S. Army’s space efforts, or for the U.S. Navy, ARPA, or the Strategic 

Defense Initiative Organization and its successors. A few lower-level monographs and articles exist. Neufeld’s Research and Development in the United States 

319. Neufeld, Ballistic Missiles in the United States Air Force. 

320. Waldron, Historical Overview ofthe Space and Missile Systems Center. 
540 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

Air Force is an interview with key actors: Bernard Schriever, James Doolittle, 

Samuel Phillips, Robert Marsh, and Ivan Getting.321 Tunyavongs describes 

the politics of the foundation of Air Force Space Command.322 Sapolsky’s 

Science and the Navy narrates the history of ONR, while McDowell describes 

a variety of Naval Research Laboratory satellite projects.323 Sigethy’s 1980 dissertation on the organization of USAF basic research is a good stating point for 

that area.324 Lambeth’s short 2004 article in Air Force Magazine describes some 

of the politics of military space.325 

Institutional histories of the intelligence space organizations exist, but 

most remain classified. However, some of these histories have become available over time. The National Security Archive at George Washington 

University has a variety of original documents, many of which are posted 

online, regarding the intelligence space programs, in particular those of the 

CIA, NRO, and NSA.326 Richelson’s “Undercover in Outer Space” provides 

an overview of the NR0.327 Perry’s declassified history, Management of the 

National Reconnaissance Program, 1960-1965, is an outstanding early work on 

the organizational problems of reconnai~sance.~~~ Laurie reviews the relationship of the NRO and Congress.329 Other points of view of the NRO include 

the CIA’S Ofice ofspecial Projects, 1965-1970 and CORONA Program History.330 

Day describes the relationships between some of these various histories in his 

2000 “Rashomon in Space.”331 

U.S. military-funded nonprofits and academically managed organizations have received their share of historical work, both from the nonprofits 

321. Jacob Neufeld, ed., Research and Development in the United States Air Force (Washington, DC: 

322. T. Tony Tunyavongs, “A Politlcal History of the Estabhshment of Air Force Space Command,” 

323. Sapolsky, Sctence and the Navy; McDowell, “Naval Research Laboratory Satellites 60-89,” 

324. Robert Sigethy, “The Air Force Organization for Basic Research, 1945-1970: A Study in 

325. Benjamin S. Lambeth, “A Short History of Military Space,” Air Force Magazine 87, no. 12 

326. George Washington university, The National Security Archive, http://www.gwu. edu /-nsarchiv/ 

index. html. 

327. Jeffrey T. Richelson, “Undercover in Outer Space. The Creation and Evolution of the 

NRO,” International]ournal of Intelligence and CounterIntelltgence 13, no. 3 (fall 2000): 301-344. 

328. Robert Perry, A History of Satellite Reconnaissance, vol. 5, Management of the National 

Reconnaissance Program, 1960-2965 (Washington, DC: NRO, 1969). 

329. Clayton D. Laurie, Congress and the National Reconnaissance Ofjce (Washington, DC: Office 

of the Historian, NRO, June 2001). 

330. Ofjce .f Special Projects, 1965-1970, vol. 1 (Washington, DC: CIA, 1973), chaps. 1-11; 

Directorate of Science and Technology, CIA, “CORONA Program History, vol. 2, Governmental 

Activities” (internal document, 19 May 1976). 

331. Dwayne A. Day, “Rashomon in Space: A Short Review ofofficial Spy Satellite Histories,” 

Quest: The History of Spaceftght Quarterly 8, no. 2 (2000): 45-53. 

Center for Air Force History, 1993). 

Quest: The History of Spaceftght Quarterly 9, no. 1 (2001): 31-43. 

pp. 427-432. 

Change” (Ph.D. diss., The American University, 1980). 

(2004): 60-64. 
THE HISTORY AND HISTORIOGRAPHY OF NATIONAL SECURITY SPACE 541 

themselves and from scholars. Mark and Levine provide an overview of these 

institutions.332 RAND Corporation is the most famous of these organizations, 

whose history is described in an early book by Smith, in Jardini’s dissertation, 

and, most recently, by Collins.333 Baum describes the RAND spinoff for air 

defense, System Development Corporation.334 Freeman describes MIT’s 

Lincoln Laboratory, also initially established for air defense, as was the MITRE 

Corporation, which wrote its own internal history, with a more recent history 

by Dyer and Dennis.335 The Aerospace Corporation did its own internal histories up to 1980 and had a couple of other student thesis histories written 

about it in the early 1970~.~~~ Koppes provides an excellent history of JPL 

through 1980, including its military roots.337 

The history of the U.S. aerospace industry from the standpoint of businesses, which are contracted by the military, is best overviewed in Bilstein’s 

The American Aerospace Markusen et al. perform a series of local 

economic impact studies of military contracting and influences, which include 

the space sector, in The Rise Ofthe G~nbelt.~~~ Similar studies for Colorado 

are Sturdevant and Spires’s “Mile-High Ventures” and Spires’s “Walter Orr 

Roberts.”340 Baker and Baker provide a similar story for the foundation of the 

332. Hans Mark and Arnold Levine, The Management $Research Institutions: A Look at Government 

Laboratories (Washington, DC: NASA SP-481, 1984). 

333. Bruce L. R. Smith, The RAND Corporation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 

1966); David Jardini, “Out of the Blue Yonder: The RAND Corporation’s Diversification into 

Social Welfare Research, 1946-1968” (Ph.D. diss., Carnegie Mellon University, 1996); Martin J. 

Collins, Cold War Laboratory: RAND, the Air Force, and the American State, 1945-1950 (Washmgton, 

DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2002). 

334. Claude Baum, The System Builders: The Story ofSDC(Santa Monica, CA: System Development 

Corporation, 1981). 

335. Eva C. Freeman, ed., MIT Lincoln Laboratory: Technology in the National Interest (Lexington, 

MA: Lincoln Laboratory, MIT, 1995); MITRE Corporation, MITRE: The First Twenty Years, A 

History ofMITRE Corporation, 1958-1978 (Bedford, MA: The MITRE Corporation, 1979); Dyer 

and Dennis, Architects of Information Advantage. 

336. The Aerospace Corporation: Its Work, 1960-1980 (El Segundo, CA: The Aerospace 

Corporation, 1980); The Aerospace Corporation: Its People, 1980 (El Segundo, CA: The Aerospace 

Corporation, 1980); The Aerospace Corporation, 1960-1970, Serving America (El Segundo, CA: 

The Aerospace Corporation, 1970); James Franklin Wheeler, “The Aerospace Corporation, Past, 

Present, and Future” (master’s thesis, Air Force Institute of Technology, Air University, 1973); 

Harold P. Wheeler, “The Aerospace Corporation, Then and Now,” Air War College Research 

Report no. 4474 (Maxwell AFB, AL: Air University, 1971). 

337. Koppes, JPL and the American Space Program. 

338. Roger E. Bilstein, The American Aerospace Industry: From Workshop to Global Enterprise (New 

York: Twayne Publishers, 1996). 

339. Ann Markusen, Scott Campbell, Peter Hall, and Sabina Deitrick, The Rise of the Gunbelt: 

The Military Remapping oflndustrial America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). 

340. Rick W. Sturdevant and David N. Spires, “Mile-High Ventures: Highlights from Colorado 

Aerospace History, 1923-1997,” Journal ofthe West 36, no. 3 (July 1997): 67-77; David N. Spires, 

“Walter Orr Roberts and the Development of Boulder’s Aerospace Community,” Quest: The 

History ofSpaceJight Quarterly 6, no. 4 (winter 1998): 5-14. 
542 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

space community in Utah.341 Commercial space systems have had an increasing impact on military space. An overview of these issues is found in Klotz 

and in Logsdon and A~ker.~~’ 

There are a number of works about various aerospace companies, including their contracts and relations with the military. These include Aer~jet,~~~ 

B~eing,~~~ C~nvair,~~~ General Dynamics,346 General Electric’s Aerospace 

Group,347 Itek,348 L~ckheed,~~~ McDonnell Douglas,350 Martin Marietta,351 

Reaction Motors,352 R~cketdyne,~~~ Thiok01,~~~ and TRW.355 

Siddiqi’s Challenge to Apollo is the best starting point for the institutional 

history of the Soviet ballistic missile and space programs,356 along with his 

1997 SpacefEight article that he later put into an appendix in Challenge to Apollo. 

The other essential reference is Zaloga’s The Kremlin’s Nuclear Sword.357 A simple introduction to the organizational evolution of the Soviet and Russian 

341. Doran J. Baker and Kay D. Baker, “Outer Space Exploration from Utah: Leon Linford and 

Rocket Science,” Quest: The History of Spacejight Quarterly 12, no. 3 (2005): 6-15. 

342. Frank G. Klotz, Space, Commerce, and National Security (New York: Council on Foreign 

Relations Press, 1998); John M. Logsdon and Russell J. Acker, eds., Merchants and Guardians: 

Balancing U.S. Interests in Global Space Commerce (Washington, DC: Space Policy Institute, George 

Washington University, May 1999). 

343. The Aerojet: The Creative Company (Los Angeles: Stewart F. Cooper Company, 1995). 

344. Eugene E. Bauer, Boeing in Peace and War (Enumclaw,WATaba Pubhcations, 1991); Guy Norris 

and Mark Wagner, Boeing (Osceola, WI: MBI Publishing, 1998); T. M. Sell, Wings of Power: Boeing and 

the Politics of Growth in the Northwest (Seattle: University ofWashmgton Press, 2001); Robert J. Serhng, 

Legend and Legacy:The Story ofBoeing and Its People (NewYork: St. Marhn’s Press, 1992). 

345. Bill Yenne, Into the Sunset: The Convair Story (Lyme, CT Greenwich Pub. Group, 1995). 

346. Roger Franklin, The Defender: The Story of General Dynamics (New York: Harper & Row, 

1986); Jacob Goodwin, Brotherhood of Arms: General Dynamics and the Business of Defending America 

(New York: Times Books, 1985). 

347. Major A. Johnson, Progress in Defense and Space: A History of the Aerospace Group of the General 

Electric Company (Major A. Johnson, 1993). 

348. Jonathan Lewis, Spy Capitalism: ITEK and the CIA (New Haven, CT Yale University Press, 

349.Walter Boyne, Beyond the Horizons, The Lockheed Story (NewYork: St. Martin’s Press, 1998). 

350. Douglas J. Ingells, The McDonnell Douglas Story (Fallbrook, CA: Aero Publishers, 1979); Bill 

Yenne, McDonnell Douglas: A Tale of Two Giants (London: Arms and Armour, 1985). 

351. William B. Harwood, Raise Heaven and Earth: The Story of Martin Marietta People and Their 

Pioneering Accomplishments (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993). 

352. Frederick I. Ordway 111 and Frank H. Winter, “Reaction Motors Inc.: A Corporate 

History,” AIAA Paper 82-277, 1982. 

353. Thirty Years of Rocketdyne (Canoga Park, CA: Rocketdyne Division, Rockwell International 

Corporation, 1985). 

354. E. S. Sutton, “From Polymers to Propellants to Rockets-A History of Thiokol,” AIAA 

Paper 99-2929 (35th AIAA/American Society of Mechanical EngineedSociety of Automotive 

Engineers/American Society for Engineering Education Joint Propulsion Conference and Exhibit, 

Los Angeles, CA, June 1999). 

355. Davis Dyer, TR W: Pioneering Technology and Innovation Since 1900 (Boston: Harvard Business 

School Press, 1998). 

356. Siddiqi, Challenge to Apollo. 

357. Zaloga, The Kremlin’s Nuclear Sword. 

2002). 
THE HISTORY AND HISTORIOGRAPHY OF NATIONAL SECURITY SPACE 543 

military space forces is provided in Gorin’s “Russian Space Forces” article 

in the forthcoming ABC-CLIO space history encyclopedia, Space Exploration 

and Humanity.358 Berkowitz provided an early look at the organization of the 

USSR‘s space units.359 For a first-person view of the early organization of 

Soviet rocketry, see Chertok’s recently translated memoir.360 Clark provides 

an overview history of Yangel’s design bureau, now Y~zhnoye.~~~ 

For China, Chang’s biography of Tsien Hsue-Shen, Thread ofthe Silkworm, 

is the best starting point.362 Chapter 4 of Johnson-Freese’s The Chinese Space 

Program provides a basic organizational overview and history, as does Harvey’s 

China’s Space Program.363 

On acquisition and management, Lonnquest’s 1996 dissertation, “The 

Face of Atlas,” is an outstanding study of Bernard Schriever’s role in the creation of the Atlas ballistic missile. Johnson’s The United States Air Force and the 

Culture of Innovation investigates the development of management and systems 

engineering of USAF ballistic missile and air defense programs in the 1950s, 

while The Secret of Apollo contains a shorter version of the ballistic missile 

story but adds JPL, the NASA manned space program, and the early European 

space programs.364 Hughes also tackles these topics in Rescuing Prometheu~.~~~ 

A short overview of USAF acquisition is provided by Ben~on.~~~ All of these 

works draw from Gorn’s outstanding study, Vulcan’s York’s 1970 book 

explains his role in the organization of NS space in Race to Oblivion.368 A critical but historical assessment of USAF acquisition by a key early participant 

358. Peter A. Gorin, “Russian Space Forces,” in Space Exploration and Humanity: A Historical 

Encyclopedia, ed. Stephen B. Johnson et al. (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, forthcoming, expected 

publication 2007). 

359. M. J. Berkowitz, “To Lift the Veil of Secrecy: USSR Ministry of Defence Space Units,” 

Journal ofthe British Interplanetary Society 46, no. 5 (1993): 191-198. 

360. Boris Chertok, Rockets and People, vol. 1 (Washington, DC: NASA SP-2005-4110, 2005). 

361. Phillip S. Clark, “The History and Projects of the Yuzhnoye Design Bureau,”Journal ofthe 

362. Chang, Thread of the Silkworm. 

363. John Johnson-Freese, The Chinese Space Program: A Mystery Within a Maze (Malabar, FL: 

Krieger Publishing Company, 1998); Brian Harvey, China’s Space Program: From Conception to 

Manned Spaceflight (Chichester, U.K.: Springer-Praxis, 2004). 

364. Stephen B. Johnson, The United States Air Force and the Culture of Innovation, 1945-1965 

(Washington, DC: USAF History and Museums Program, 2002); Stephen B. Johnson, The Secret 

of Apollo: Systems Management in American and European Space Programs (Baltimore, MD: Johns 

Hopkins, 2002). 

British Interplanetary Society 49, no. 7 (1996): 267-276. 

365. Thomas P. Hughes, Rescuing Prometheus (New York: Pantheon, 1998). 

366. Lawrence R. Benson, Acquisition Management in the United States Air Force and Its Predecessors 

(Washington, DC: Air Force History and Museums Program, 1997). 

367. Michael H. Gorn, Vulcan’s Forge: The Making of an Air Force Command for Weapon Acquisition 

(1950-1985), vol. 1, Narrative (Andrews AFB, MD: History Office, HQ Air Force Systems 

Command, 1985). 

368. Herbert F. York, Race to Oblivion: A Participant’s View ofthe Arms Race (New York: Simon 

& Schuster, 1970). 
544 CRITICAL ISSUE5 IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

can be found in Hall’s The Art of Destructive Management.369 Finally, there is 

currently ongoing a project by the Department of Defense called the Defense 

Acquisition History Project, which is to produce a six-volume series on the 

subject in 2007 and 2008. 

SPACE POWER THEORY 

To date, there is no dedicated monograph on the history of military space 

doctrine and space power theory, perhaps because there is no single work that 

commands doctrinal allegiance. Over the centuries, but particularly since the 

Napoleonic era, military commanders and thinkers have developed a variety 

of theories and doctrines on the nature of war. As warfare expanded from the 

land to the sea and to the air, major thinkers for each, which include Sun Tzu, 

Jomini, and Clausewitz for land warfare; Mahan and Corbett for naval warfare; and Douhet, Mitchell, and Warden for air warfare, developed theories 

and doctrines that have become the basis for understanding conflict in these 

domains ever since. To date, no such comprehensive, fundamental theory has 

been developed for space. 

The first attempts to understand the implications of space were reactions 

to the Nazi V-2 project, such as the 1946 RAND study, which discussed the 

potential for space assets to enhance certain military activities, such as reconnaissance and weather prediction. RAND also noted the potential political 

prestige effects of launching the first artificial satellite. In the 1950s, Strategic 

Air Command’s ability to deliver nuclear weapons in a devastating strategic 

bombing campaign was at the forefront of doctrine, and ballistic missiles were 

seen as an alternative means to deliver nuclear weapons. Defense-oriented 

activities, such as early-warning systems, were of distinctly lesser importance. 

With the launch of Sputnik in 1957 and the consequent reaction in the 

United States to launch satellites and to organizationally control space activities, the USAF ultimately won the lion’s share of military space programs. 

General Thomas White defined and propagated the term “aerospace” in 1959 

to press the USAF’s claim that air and space were a continuous medium with 

no definite boundary, and hence that it was natural for the Air Force to control operations in this single environment. This claim is debatable at best, but 

it aided the USAF’s bureaucratic cause, as the Kennedy administration in 1961 

awarded the USAF the largest share of military space projects and functions. 

The next major spur to space power theorizing came in the 1980s, as 

a theoretical counterpart to the formation of USAF, Army, Navy, and U.S. 

Space Commands and Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative. By the late 1980s, 

369. Edward N. Hall, The Art of Destructive Management: What Hath Man Wrought? (New York: 

Vantage Press, 1984). 
THE HISTORY AND HISTORIOGRAPHY OF NATIONAL SECURITY SPACE 545 

Lupton formulated his four-part conceptual division of space doctrines: sanctuary, survivability, control, and high ground. At the same time, the USAF 

created a four-part division of its activities, which remain its major means of 

categorizing its activities: space support, force enhancement, space control, and 

force application. These two conceptualizations remain the basic frameworks 

for discussion in the early 21st century, although others have been postulated, 

the most significant of which is probably the extrapolation from Warden’s 

theory of airpower to postulate space as an economic center of gravity. 

Serious theorizing continued into the 1990s and into the first decade of 

the 21st century, but as yet, no comprehensive theory of space warfare has 

emerged. A number of recent authors, including Dolman, Hays, Lambakis, 

Preston, Watts, Gray, Sheldon, and others, have continued the debate. 

Specific histories of space power and doctrine are few. Futrell’s authoritative Ideas, Concepts, Doctrine volumes are the starting point for understanding 

the history of USAF theories and doctrine, including the intrusion of space 

into the service.370 Equally authoritative on the political aspects of the military 

and some of the debates is McDougall’s . . . The Heavens and the Earth.371 Hays’s 

dissertation investigates the relationship between space programs and attempts 

to create a military space doctrine.372 

The term “aerospace,” along with its evolution and influence, has caught 

some attention. In two articles, Terry narrates the formulation of the aerospace doctrine in the late 1950s, during the formative years of the space program.373 Jennings focuses on the conflict over the term “aerospace” itself and 

its use in doctrine.374 Rothstein investigates the evolution of the concept from 

airpower theory.375 Houchin reviews the impact of hypersonic technologies 

on aerospace doctrine.376 

Given the relative paucity of historical work, historians will need to 

read the major proponents directly. Lupton’s On Space Warfre is often consid370. Robert Frank Futrell, Ideas, Concepts, Doctrine: Basic Thinking in the United States Air Force, 

1907-1960, vol. 1 (Maxwell AFB, AL: Air University Press, 1989); Robert Frank Futrell, Ideas, 

Concepts, Doctrine: Basic Thinking in the United States Air Force, 1961-1984, vol. 2 (Maxwell AFB, 

AL: Air University Press, 1989). 

371. McDougall, . . . The Heavens and the Earth. 

372. Peter Lang Hays, “Struggling Towards Space Doctrine: U.S. Military Space Plans, Programs, 

and Perspectives During the Cold War” (Ph.D. diss., Tufts University, 1994). 

373. Michael R. Terry, “Formulation of Aerospace Doctrine from 1955-1959,” Air Power History 

38, no. 1 (1991): 47-54; Michael Terry, “The Icarus Paradox: Air Force Doctrine and Space 

Technology,” Quest: The History ofspacefight Quarterly 6, no. 3 (1998): 37-43. 

374. Frank W. Jennings, “Doctrinal Conflict Over the Word Aerospace,” Airpower Journal 4 

375. Stephen M. Rothstein, “Dead on Arrival? The Development of the Aerospace Concept, 

1944-1958” (master’s thesis, School of Advanced Airpower Studies, Maxwell AFB, AL: Air 

University Press, 2001). 

376. Roy F. Houchin 11, “Hypersonic Technology and Aerospace Doctrine,” Air Power History 

46, no. 3 (1999): 4-17. 

(1990): 46-58. 
546 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

ered the starting point for space power theory.377 Mantz developed his own 

theory of space combat in The New Dolman’s Astropolitik provides 

another important view on the political aspects of space power.379 Lambakis’s 

On the Edge of Earth is a good overview of current ideas.380 Preston et al.’s 

Space Weapons, Earth Wars focuses on the political and technical issues of space 

weapons.381 Oberg provides an overview of the USAF’s official doctrine at 

the end of the 20th ~entury.~” Watts provides an informed analysis of trends 

relevant for military space.383 Shaw attempts to mirror Alfred Thayer Mahan’s 

influence on history.384 Two other important recent works on space power 

theory are by Smith385 and Lambeth.386 

Hays et al.5 Spacepowerfora New Millennium is a compilation ofrecent papers on 

U.S. military space,a number ofwhich relate to theoretical aspects.387 DeBlois’s 1999 

Beyond the Paths ofHeaven is a compendium of papers on space power tho~ght.~” 

Lambright’s collection on space policy contains some theoretical papers.389 Air G 

Space Power Journal (and its predecessor, Aerospace Power Journal, which went by 

other names earlier) often has papers on dtary space doctrinal issues. 

Although typical for other military functions, there are few works that 

focus on space systems in combat, for the simple reason that only recently 

have they been in combat. The First Persian Gulf War of 1991 was the first 

war in which space systems played an important role, which is documented by 

Kutyna, Campen, and Berkowit~.~~’ 

377. David E. Lupton, On Space Wavfare: A Space Power Doctrine (Maxwell AFB, AL: Air 

378. Michael R. Mantz, The New Sword: A Theory of Space Combat Power (Maxwell AFB, AL: Air 

379. Everett C. Dolman, Astropolitik: Classical Geopolitics in the Space Age (London: Frank Cass, 2002). 

380. Steven Lambakis, On the Edge of Earth: The Future of American Space Power (Lexington: 

381. Robert Preston, Dana J. Johnson, Sean Edwards, and Michael Miller, Space Weapons, Earth 

382. James Oberg, Space Power Theory (Washington, DC: GPO, 1999). 

383. Barry D. Watts, The Military Use of Space: A Diagnostic Asressment (Washington, DC: Center 

384. John E. Shaw, “The Influence of Space Power Upon History, 1944-1998,” Air Power History 

385. M.V. Smith, Ten Propositions Regarding Spacepower (Maxwell AFB, AL: Air Umversity Press, 2002). 

386. Benjamin S. Lambeth, Mastering the Ultimate High Ground: Next Steps in the Military Uses .f 

387. Peter L. Hays, James M. Smith, Alan R. Van Tassel, and Guy M. Walsh, eds., Spacepowerfor 

388. Bruce M. DeBlois, ed., Beyond the Paths of Heaven: The Emergence of Space Power Thought 

389.W. Henry Lambright, ed., Space Policy in the 21st Century (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins, 2003). 

390. Donald J. Kutyna, “Indispensable: Space Systems in the Persian Gulf War,” Air Power History 

46, no. 1 (1999): 28-43; Alan D. Campen, ed., The First Information War: The Story of Communications, 

continued on the next page 

University Press, 1988). 

University Press, 1995). 

University Press of Kentucky, 2001). 

Wars, MR-1209-AF (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2002). 

for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, February 2001). 

46, no. 4 (1999): 20-29. 

Space (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2003). 

a New Millennium: Space and U.S. National Security (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2000). 

(Maxwell AFB, AL: Air University Press, 1999). 
THE HISTORY AND HISTORIOGRAPHY OF NATIONAL SECURITY SPACE 547 

CONCLUSION-HOLES IN THE LITERATURE 

What can we observe from the rather lengthy treatise on sources provided above? First and foremost, there is no area of military space that has a 

comprehensive treatment with both in-depth analysis and crosscutting synthesis. Some sectors, such as launcher and ballistic missiles, as well as robotic 

intelligence and reconnaissance, have an extensive literature. Others, such as 

command and control, communications, navigation, and space power theory, 

have received very little historical attention. The remainder have had some 

historical research done but remain significantly underdeveloped early-warning 

and space surveillance; ballistic missile defense; human flight; weather and 

science; antisatellite systems; and organization, management, and acquisition. 

Needless to say, this leaves the overall state of military space history as significantly underdeveloped, with a few pockets of significant work and a few areas 

almost completely blank. 

Even in areas that have extensive literature, there remain gaping holes. 

In those sectors with virtually no historical research, almost the entire sector 

is a historical blank slate. I give my thumbnail assessment of missing research 

for each sector below. 

Holes in the Research 

* Ballistic missiles and launch vehicles: synthetic overview, U.S. ballistic missiles after 1965, ballistic missiles outside the United States and 

Russia/USSR, nuclear warfare strategies after 1960s, effect of the end 

of the Cold War. 

0 Early warning and space surveillance: synthetic overview, U.S. overview, space surveillance, Cold War radar systems history. 

* Command and control: synthetic overview, U.S. /Canada relationship 

with NORAD, system-of-systems history, conventional versus nuclear 

command and control, C2 computing after SAGE, C2 and human factors research. 

* Ballistic missile defense: synthetic overview, U.S. overview, project histories, SDI and later programs, unbiased political and arms control studies, 

strategic versus theater missile defense, technical history of BMD. 

continued from the previous page 

Computers, and Intelligence Systems in the Persian GugWur (Fairfax, VA. Armed Forces Communications 

and Electronics Association International Press, 1992); Bruce D. Berkowitz, The New Face of War: 

How War Will Be Fought in the 21rt Century (New York: Free Press, 2003). 
548 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

Robotic intelligence and reconnaissance: synthetic overview, non-U.S. 

reconnaissance, post-CORONA reconnaissance, politics of commercial remote sensing, uses of satellite intelligence, economics of sector. 

* Military human flight: synthetic overview, military-civilian relationships with astronauts, aerospace medicine, hypersonic technologies 

overview, Space Shuttle and Buran military aspects, Raketoplad 

Spiral, technical program histories, MOL versus Almaz. 

Weather and science: synthetic overview, Clementine, military-civilian 

weather political interactions, project histories, institutions and institutional relationships. 

Navigation: synthetic overview, full project histories, non-U. S. navigation systems, strategic to tactical and commercial applications, politics and economics of navigation. 

Antisatellite systems and space warfare: synthetic overview, full-length 

project studies (both U.S. and USSR), relationship to BMD and space 

warfare, new political history (beyond Stares). 

Organization, management, and acquisition: synthetic overview; Army, 

Navy, DOD, Missile Defense Agency space institutional histories; 

1970s-present acquisition; comparative studies to other types of systems (aircraft, C2, naval, etc.). 

0 Space power theory: synthetic overview; relationships of theory to 

doctrine and practice; studies of theorists and their theories; relation to 

other military theories; connections to political, technical, and institutional changes. 

There would be great value to the militaries of spacefaring nations, governmental leaders and managers, and the general public to have histories of the 

many areas that remain underdeveloped. Given that the existence of military 

space activities is no longer classified, and given the changing world since 

the demise of the Soviet Union and the rise of global terrorism, broader and 

deeper knowledge of the actual uses of space will be of great benefit. More 

research, both from the military itself and from external scholars, will be necessary to make the history of national security space as informed and thorough 

as the great and growing importance of these activities deserves. 
CHAPTER 16 

CRITICAL THEORY AS A TOOLBOX: 

SUGGESTIONS FOR SPACE HISTORY’S RELATIONSHIP 

TO THE HISTORY SUBDISCIPLINES 

Margaret A. Weitekamp 

fter the loss of the Space Shuttle Columbia in February 2003, I spoke on A a number of radio programs. In the days after the accident, I had written a newspaper editorial reflecting on my fellowship year at the National 

Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Headquarters History Office 

in 1997-1998. As a result, the small upstate New York college where I was 

teaching put my name on its Web site as a local space expert. Busy with 

classes, I accepted the invitations that fit most easily into my schedule. All 

but one went smoothly. Too late to cancel, I realized that I had agreed to be 

the guest for a Las Vegas radio personality whose regional following loved 

him for his right-wing political opinions and his penchant for controversy. 

Halfway through the hour-long program, a loyal listener began his question 

with an apology. He had missed my introduction at the beginning of the 

hour: “I’m sorry,” he asked me, “I didn’t hear . . . . Are you a NASA critic or 

a NASA apologist?” 

His question took me aback. I did not consider myself to be either. As an 

historian of 20th-century America, I studied space history because it allowed 

me to investigate the intersections of many different themes-politics, society, 

culture, science, technology, gender, and race-all in one subject. Although 

historians’ conclusions certainly support or criticize particular policy decisions, I saw doing space history as investigating what spaceflight efforts could 

reveal about a particular time and place: how specific historical contexts shaped 

which projects were pursued, why historical actors made particular decisions, 

and how spaceflight technologies have been embedded in their cultural contexts. Regrouping, I tried to explain the role of the professional historian to 

the listener. 

For many years, the caller’s assessment of space experts as entrenched 

in one camp or the other-as either boosters/apologists or critics/exposers-would not have been wrong. In a 2000 Space Policy article, Roger D. 

Launius, then the NASA Chief Historian, argued that space history could be 

categorized into three parts, including two categories that were more sophis- 
550 CRITICAL ISSUES INTHE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

ticated but not altogether different than the caller’s binary options. The first, 

the “historiography of expectation” (my caller’s ‘‘apologists”), is, according 

to Launius, “unabashedly celebratory and includes not only the so-called 

‘Huntsville School’ of writing but also those fascinated with the machinery 

and those who use space history to promulgate the space exploration agenda 

for the future.” The second group, the expos&, used space history to question 

the validity of space exploration efforts at all. Finally, Launius outlined a third 

category of scholarship that he called the New Aerospace History: “professionally-trained scholars of differing ideologies and prerogatives who concentrate on questions other than whether or not space exploration is justifiable.”’ 

Launius’s choice of name for this school of historiography, the “New 

Aerospace History,” self-consciously positioned the newest space history scholarship as descended from the New Social History advanced beginning in the 

1960s and 1970s. By doing so, he emphasized the active engagement of the 

New Aerospace History with recent scholarship in the broader field of history. At the same time, he marked the place of space history as a growing 

subdiscipline within a field still shaped by the New Social History. Indeed, 

the very subject of this paper-a study of the relationship of space history to 

the history subdisciplines-reflects the proliferation of subject areas created 

when historians wrestling with questions of race, class, ethnicity, and gender 

challenged the artificial nature of the consensus school’s master narrative. As 

a result, mapping the 50 years of space history’s expansion means surveying it 

against the shifting background of a complex and changing discipline. 

Such a survey requires two different approaches. First, this analysis reviews 

and outlines space history’s evolution since the beginning of the Space Age. 

Because the aim of this piece is to survey the field, the bibliography included 

in the notes offers a sample of relevant works but not a complete accounting 

of any subdivision of the field.2 Second, the paper offers some perspective on 

space history’s current relationship to the rest of the discipline of history as 

practiced in the United States. When examined in these two ways, space history exists both in “relation to” other history subdisciplines (a terminology 

which implies separation from the other subfields and an internal cohesion 

within space history, two points that deserve questioning in their own right) 

and in a continually evolving “relationship with” the rest of the discipline. As 

this essay maps those dynamics, it also offers some suggestions. 

Although the New Aerospace History developed in dialogue with current historical scholarship, the insights of the New Social History have still 

been only incompletely incorporated into space history. This deficit is not 

1. Roger D. Launius, “The Historical Dimension of Space Exploration: Reflections and 

2. Asif Siddiqi’s chapter in this volume offers a more complete current historiography. 

Possibilities,” Space Policy 16 (2000): 23-38. 
CRITICAL THEORY AS A TOOLBOX.. . 551 

attributable to a lack of source material, but rather to a limited perspective on what it would mean to integrate the study of race, class, ethnicity, 

and gender into space history more fully. Bringing the insights of the New 

Social History to space history is not a call for more compensatory histories 

of the still-understudied women in the space field or for separate histories 

of each minority group or ethnicity working in any particular segments of 

space exploration. (Although compensating for past omissions remains a useful contribution to the field, it is just the first step in historical analysis.) If 

the New Social History has taught historians anything, it is that gender, race, 

ethnicity, and class exist in every history-for both privileged and marginalized groups. Gender identity shapes the historical experience of both women 

and men. Racial identity affects the lives of White people just as much as it 

does for people of color. Bringing this perspective into analyses of technologies or politics requires a new set of tools. 

New developments in the humanities-specifically critical theory-offer 

a toolbox of concepts and methods that will allow space history to delve further into questions of identity, power, and point of view. If the tools of critical 

theory can be adapted without straying too far from the narrative tradition of 

historical scholarship (that is, by adopting its principles and insights without 

overreliance on theoretical terminology, which can become opaque jargon), 

the result will bring space history into more fruitful dialogue with the rest 

of the scholarly community while bringing the insights of recent scholarship 

to a wider readership. 

A BRIEF HISTORY OF SPACE HISTORY 

The active study of space history began with the very first successful 

orbital flights in the late 1950s. After the flights of Soviet artificial sateIlites 

Sputniks I and I1 in 1957, spaceflight efforts in the United States generated 

awareness by both participants and observers that these events were historic; 

the participants were “making history.” Because American lawmakers were 

also cognizant of the history-making potential of U.S. space efforts-and of the 

need to publicize American achievements to the rest of the world-the 1958 

National Aeronautics and Space Act included, alongside the directives for the 

creation of a civilian space agency, the mandate that NASA “provide for the 

widest practicable and appropriate dissemination of information concerning 

its activities and the results there~f.”~ In practical terms, this directive provided 

the basis for the creation and maintenance of NASA’s history offices, archives, 

3. “National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958,” Public Law 85-568, in Exploring the Unknown: 

Selected Documents in the History of the U.S. Civil Space Program, vol. 1, Organizing for Exploration, ed. 

John M. Logsdon (Washington, DC: NASA SP-4407, 1995), p. 337. 
552 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

The 1959 NASA Seal. (NASA photo no. GPN-2002-000195/ 

and libraries. The space agency even began a fine arts program, sponsoring 

a still-ongoing effort to commission artists to record NASA’s achievements 

through sketches, paintings, and other art forms.4 

The story of how NASA came to interpret its mandate to include a history program began, at least in part, with Melvin Kranzberg, one of the fathers 

of the history of technology and a key figure in the creation of the NASA 

History Office. Kranzberg was a faculty member at the Case University of 

Technology in Cleveland, Ohio, when Case’s president, T. Keith Glennan, 

was asked by President Dwight D. Eisenhower to become the founding 

Administrator of NASA. In 1958, Kranzberg persuaded Glennan to create a 

history office at the new civilian space agency in the tradition of the successful 

history offices working in the armed forces and in other federal agencies. The 

4. For history and individual artists in the NASA Art Program, see Anne Collins Goodyear, 

“The Relationship of Art to Science and Technology in the United States: Five Case Studies, 

continued on the next page 
CRITICAL THEORY AS A TOOLBOX.. . 553 

founding of the NASA History Office and the beginning of space history as a 

field occurred at the same time that the broader discipline of history began to 

see the development of distinct subfields organized by topic and appr~ach.~ 

Around the same time that his discussions with Glennan were inspiring 

the new NASA History Office, Kranzberg also helped to found the Society 

for the History of Technology (SHOT). Kranzberg saw the history of technology as the latest development in the study of the past: the newest link in 

a chain of histories that offered fresh topics of study and modes of analysis to 

the expanding field. In May 1962, he published an article in Science magazine 

titled “The Newest History: Science and Technology.” In it, he compared the 

history of technology to James Harvey Robinson’s The New History (1912), 

published exactly 50 years earlier. As Kranzberg noted, at the same time that 

Robinson was developing his New History, another historian, George Sarton, 

was also offering the field a groundbreaking new subject for consideration: a 

new history of science. In all three cases, changing world events, social movements, and academic developments inspired historians to rethink their conceptions and interpretations of the past.6 

The development of innovative historical approaches-and thus of new 

historical subfields-drove the central argument of Kranzberg’s Science article. 

For the history of technology, Kranzberg argued, the launch of Sputnik I on 

4 October 1957 marked the beginning of a new era. In response, the United 

States needed not only a technological response in the form of a space program, 

but also a study of “technology and science as essential components of our culture, affected by and affecting every other aspect of society.” Building on the 

tradition of change and growth in the historical field, Kranzberg saw new histories as extending and expanding a vital and changing discipline. In his words, 

“Just as the ‘new’ history triumphed over the ‘old’ but never succeeded in dislodging it completely, so today the ‘new’ history is itself being supplemented 

continued from the previou3 page 

1957-1971” (Ph.D. diss., The University of Texas at Austin, 2002); Anne Collins Goodyear, 

“NASA and the Political Economy of Art, 1962-1974,” in The Political Economy ofArt: Creating the 

Modern Nation of Culture, ed. Julie Codell (Newark University of Delaware Press, forthcoming); 

Anne Collins, “Art, Technology, and the American Space Program, 1962-1972,” Intertexts 3, no. 2 

(fall 1999): 124-146; Anne Collins Goodyear, “On the Threshold of Space: Norman Rockwell’s 

Longest Step,” Architecture and Design for Space: Vision and Reality exhibit catalog (New York: Harry 

N. Abrams, Inc., 2001), pp. 102-107 (exhibit shown at the Art Institute of Chicago, 24 March21 October 2001); “Robert Rauschenberg’s Space-Age Allegory, 1959-1970,” in 1998 National 

Aerospace Conference Proceedings (Dayton, OH: Wright State University, 1999): 82-91. 

5. For Kranzberg’s influence on the creation of NASA’s History Office, see Roger D. Launius, 

“NASA History and the Challenge of Keeping the Contemporary Past,” Public Historian 21 (summer 1999): 63-81. 

6. Margaret Rossiter, ed., Catching Up With the Visions: Essays on the Occasion ofthe 75th Anniversary 

of the Founding of the History of Science Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Book for the History 

of Science Society, 1999), a supplement to Isis 90. 
554 CRITICAL ISSUES INTHE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

by the ‘newest’ history.”’ Kranzberg’s Science article is particularly instructive 

for a discussion of how today’s space history has evolved because his analysis of 

American historiography up to 1962 offers a useful model for thinking about 

how new histories expand the discipline of history. In addition, it points out 

the close link between space history and the history of technology, which continues to be a vital and important subfield for space history. 

If the NASA History Office’s existence can be traced to Glennan and 

Kranzberg, its reputation for scholarly rigor began with the first NASA 

Historian, Eugene “Gene” M. Emme. From the beginning of its life, the 

NASA History Office worked to balance two major charges: collecting and 

archiving the history of U.S. civil space exploration efforts for use by historians, scholars, and the press, and interpreting that material to advise the space 

agency on ongoing decisions. In addition to managing these tasks, Emme 

put the program on the path to real scholarly publishing. He instituted the 

practice of peer review for historical manuscripts published by the NASA 

History Office, a process that parallels the one used by academic presses and 

one which has allowed NASA’s history program to develop into a respected 

site for both research and publishing. As the first in a series of interpretive volumes recording the details of historic space achievements within a narrative 

structure, Swenson, Grimwood, and Alexander’s This New Ocean: A History of 

Project Mercury set the tone for NASA’s authoritative recording of space history. 

Within its first two decades, NASA’s project histories also included books 

on Gemini, Vanguard, and Apollo.8 Within the structures of the U.S. space 

agency, the NASA History Office focused on American space efforts, emphases that also characterized the field of space history generally. 

The NASA History Office also began the ongoing relationship between 

space history and oral history. As a research technique, the tape-recorded 

interview came into its own in the 1940s and became a useful tool for recording histories both “from the bottom up” and “from the top down.”9 By 1966, 

the Oral History Association provided a professional organization for oral historians to share their work while developing and refining the ethical and practical guidelines for productive oral histories. For an endeavor like spaceflight, 

7. Melvin Kranzberg, “The Newest History: Science and Technology,” Science 136, no. 3515 (11 

May 1962): 463-468. 

8. Loyd S. Swenson, Jr., James M. Grimwood, and Charles C. Alexander, This New Ocean: A 

History ofProject Mercury (Washington, DC: NASA SP-4201, 1966); Constance McLaughlin Green 

and Milton Lomask, Vanguard: A History (Washington, DC: NASA SP-4202, 1970); Barton C. 

Hacker and James M. Grimwood, On the Shoulders ofTitans: A History ofProject Gemini (Washington, 

DC: NASA SP-4203, 1977). See also Launius, “NASA History,” pp. 63-81. 

9. Paul Thompson, The Voice ofthe Past: Oral History, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 

2000); Edward D. Ives, The Tape-Recorded Interview: A Manual for Fieldworkers in Folklore and Oral 

History (Knoxville: University ofTennessee Press, 1995). The best practical handbook is Donald A. 

Ritchie, Doing Oral History: A Practical Guide, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 
CRITICAL THEORY AS A TOOLBOX.. . 555 

which required the work of so many different managers, engineers, scientists, 

and pilots, oral history became a key means of recording the full history of 

various space programs, NASA Centers, and historical actors. NASA continues to use oral history as a major tool for collecting, preserving, and disseminating space history.” 

If the early years of space history (and its relationships with the history 

subdisciplines) can largely be traced through a history of the NASA History 

Office, once the field developed into some maturity in the 1980s, the story 

got much more complex. From where it began in the early 1980s, space history underwent dramatic growth and transformation. Because a full analysis 

of that historiography would be too long and involved for this piece (and has 

already been done extraordinarily well elsewhere, as noted above),” an outline 

serves better as a way of noting the relationships between the growing subfield and the changes happening in the discipline of history as a whole. Three 

events mark key points in the evolution of space history: a 1981 Smithsonian 

proseminar, Walter McDougall’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1985 book, and Asif 

Siddiqi’s 2000 history of the Soviet space program, Challenge to Apollo. 

In 1981, a Smithsonian Institution proseminar in space history hosted 

at the National Air and Space Museum marked the emergence of space history as a recognized field. David DeVorkin and Pamela Mack of the thenDepartment of Space Science and Exploration called the meeting to bring 

together scholars working on space history in order to assess the progress 

made over the previous 15 years. The report of the meeting in Isis recorded a 

successful and growing subdiscipline, noting that “the field is already marked 

with a respectable number of books, monographs, dissertations, and worksin-progress.” The questions being asked at this meeting offer a sense of the 

state of development of the field. Three issues dominated discussion: first, “Is 

space history best considered part of the history of science or of the history 

of technology?”; second, “Can space science be considered a coherent discipline?”; and finally, “How should space historians confront the peculiar state 

of sources in this field? ”’’ 

In debating the first question, historians of science and historians of technology who worked on space topics found themselves in active discussion 

about the commonalities and differences between their home subfields. The 

discussion of space history’s place quickly made it clear just how much space 

history required the insights of both subdisciplines. Requiring space history to 

be either one or the other would be insufficient. (The divisions between these 

10. See Roger D. Launius, “We Can Lick Gravity But Sometimes the Paperwork Is Overwhelming: 

NASA, Oral History, and the Contemporary Past,” Oral History Review 30, no. 2 (summer/fall 

2003): 111-128. 

11. Launius, “Historical Dimension,” Space Policy, pp. 23-38. 

12. Richard E Hirsh,“Proseminar on Space History, 22 May 1981,” his 73, no. 266 (1982): 96-97. 
556 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

two subdisciplines and the professional organizations that represent them are 

only just beginning to be healed. The November 2005 joint meeting between 

the Society for the History of Technology and the History of Science Society 

in Minneapolis, Minnesota, marked a renewed attempt to bridge this gap).I3 

As a subject centered on the relationships among science, technology, and the 

state, the history of spaceflight pushed historians to address science and technology as social and political activities. 

Space historians at the 1981 Smithsonian proseminar also shared a common set of anxieties about sources. Many faced significant problems getting 

full access to documentation that was still considered sensitive during the 

renewed Cold War tensions of the early Reagan administration. At the same 

time, massive space projects generated so much paperwork that they became 

difficult to interpret. In the opinions ofthose attending the Smithsonian event, 

government records from active or recently active programs were “abundant but poorly organized.” Again, this recorded discussion provides a useful 

benchmark for assessing space history. Given how much space history would 

expand by the early 1990s, when the end of the Cold War led to an explosion 

of newly available materials, the question of sources provides a striking point 

of compari~on.’~ 

One of the solutions offered for dealing with incomplete or sensitive 

records was oral history. The proseminar’s organizers quickly took up that 

charge. Between 1981 and 1990, the Department of Space History at the 

Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum organized several oral history projects. These included the Space Astronomy Oral History 

Project, the Space Telescope History Project, the Glennan-Webb-Seamans 

Project for Research in Space History, and the RAND History Project. In 

all, the interviews conducted reflected the principal investigators’ interests in 

space science, as well as in management and political themes in space history. 

In the final catalog of these oral histories, the organizers acknowledge that 

their understanding of the interactions between science, technology, and the 

state changed considerably over the course of the oral history projects. This 

insight reflects the scholars’ own intellectual growth during the course of the 

project through the 1980s, but it also reflects the state of the field. In the midst 

of their work, space history underwent an evolutionary leap.” 

13. The organizations had unsuccessful pint meetings in Pittsburgh in 1986 and in Madison, 

WI, in 1991. See Terry S. Reynolds, “From the President’s Desk: ‘Time to Try Again?”’ SHOT 

Newsletter (April 2000), available online at http ~//shot.press~hu.edu/Newsletters/archive/2OOO~Apr1l/ 

presdeskhtm (accessed 21 April 2005). 

14. Hirsh, “Proseminar,” pp. 96-97. 

15. Martin J. Collins withlo Ann Bailey and Patricia Fredericks, “Oral History on Space, Science, 

and Technology: A Catalogue of the Collection of the Department of Space History, National Air 

and Space Museum” (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1993), pp. I-v. 
CRITICAL THEORY AS A TOOLBOX.. . 557 

Walter McDougall began his Pulitzer Prize-winning analysis of space history with a metaphor of evolution: the image of the first fish-turned-amphibian. In that moment, he suggested, biological adaptation jumped forward, not 

in a slow, incremental progression, but in a saltation, an evolutionary leap. 

According to McDougall, this metaphor also described the transformed relationship between the state and research and development (R&D) in the years 

after the Second World War. In many ways, . . . The Heavens and the Earth was 

also a saltation for space history. McDougall’s work was a watershed book for 

its comprehensive consideration of space history as a part of political history.16 

Twenty years later, McDougall’s work remains a required first reference 

on many topics for most space historians (both popular and academic). At a 

1997 40th-anniversary conference commemorating the launch of Sputnik, 

many historians began their analyses with a reference to McDougall’s work.17 

In considering how space history exists both in relation to (that is, standing 

separately) and in active relationship with particular historical subdisciplines, 

however, McDougall’s work solidified a link between space history and political history that remains strong. Few would consider writing a space history 

without some serious consideration of party politics, national legislators, or 

foreign and domestic policy. More so, political historians welcome discussion 

of space history as an avenue into broader topics. 

Just as McDougall’s example required space historians to place space 

history in its political context, so also by the mid-l980s, new developments 

in the history of technology required historians to reconsider how technologies existed as embedded in their social contexts. As a result of the ongoing relationship between space historians and historians of technology (who 

are often one and the same), space history and the history of technology 

grew and broadened in similar ways over the years. In a 1986 Technology 

and Culture article, Kranzberg published his famous “six laws of technology,” 

guiding principles that emphasized the role of technology as an inherently 

human endeavor, embedded in culture. Likewise, space history has deepened 

its understanding of space technologies-and indeed, of space programs-as 

embedded in particular social, political, and cultural contexts. Within the 

Cold War context of the early space race, however, for the first 20 years of 

space history, most U.S. authors focused on American space efforts, in part 

because these stories resonated with the public and in part because the ongo16. Walter McDougall, . . . The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age (New 

York: Basic Books, 1985), p. 3. Because of its length, . . . The Heavens and the Earth is not easily 

assigned in a classroom setting. A digestible history of space exploration that encompasses the 

political and social contexts is still needed. 

17. “Reconsidering Sputnik: 40 Years Since the Soviet Satellite Symposium” (held in Washington, 

DC, 30 September-1 October 1997). 
558 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

ing diplomatic stalemate with the Soviet Union made information about the 

Soviet side of the story all but impossible to access.18 

Another saltation for space history happened at the end of the Cold War, 

when the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 presaged the disintegration of the 

Soviet Union in 1991. Not only did these geopolitical changes have major 

impacts on the way that spaceflight would be conducted from that point 

onward (thus requiring historians to rethink how space history would be 

written from then on), but these changes also created a boom in possibilities 

for space history. New sources emerged, both through the declassification of 

military or other classified space projects in the United States and through the 

release of previously secret sources from the former Soviet Union. 

New sources yielded new histories. One that compares to Walter 

McDougall’s in scope and impact is Asif Siddiqi’s Challenge to Apollo: The 

Soviet Union and the Space Race, 1945-1974. Working in the Russian-language 

documents made newly available by the release of uncensored records after 

1988, Siddiqi reconstructed the history of the Soviet space program from the 

early 1930s Group for the Investigation of Reactive Engines and Reactive 

Flight (GIRD) to the end of the N1L3 program in 1974. Comprehensive, 

detailed, and yet still very readable, his narrative offers new dimensions and 

backstories to known events, revealing details about the people and the decision-making processes that created the Soviet space program. In doing so, the 

book presents a clear look at the history of Soviet space efforts, the outlines of 

which had previously only been gleaned from censored records or American 

intelligence. The result, Siddiqi suggests, sheds new light on human space 

exploration as a whole: “What may be possible now is to take a second look 

not only at the Soviet space program, but also the U.S. space program-that 

is, to reconsider again humanity’s first attempts to take leave of this planet.”” 

In the United States, the end of the Cold War also opened new topics for 

space researchers, permitting histories of previously classified programs (for 

example, the CORONA spy satellites) .20 

Indeed, the number of topics that constitute space history has multiplied 

in recent years. As it now stands, space history encompasses the history of 

human spaceflight, including reevaluations of programs, centers, technologies, 

18. Melvin Kranzberg, “Technology and History: ‘Kranzberg’s Laws,”’ Technology and Culture 

19. AsifA. Siddiqi, Challenge to Apollo: The Soviet Union and the Space Race, 1945-1974 (Washington, 

DC: NASA SP-2000-4408,2000), p. x. Also republished as a two-volume set: AsifA. Siddiqi, The 

Soviet Space Race with Apollo (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003), and Asif A. Siddiqi, 

Sputnik and the Soviet Space Challenge (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003). 

20. Dwayne A. Day, John M. Logsdon, and Brian Latell, eds., Eye in the Sky: The Story Offhe 

Corona Spy Satellites, Smithsonian History of Aviation Series (Washington, DC: Smithsonian 

Institution Press, 1998). 

27 (1986): 544-560. 
CRITICAL THEORY AS A TOOLBOX. . . 559 

events, and people, including both military and civilian spaceflight projects and 

technologies.’l The recent addition of commercial space ventures and a nascent 

space tourism industry should soon join these topics. Human spaceflight makes 

up only a part of the picture, however. Space history must also include satellite programs, launch vehicles, and planetary exploration. The history of space 

science and of astronomy is also a part of space history.” Although most of 

what is written focuses on stories of success, accounts of incomplete, failed, 

or abandoned projects also illuminate the forces that shape space exploration. 

And space history is most decidedly international. As the number of countries 

participating in space efforts has increased, space history reflects an expansion 

beyond the previous U.S.-Soviet/Russian focus. In part, this breadth of topic 

and diversity of approach define the New Aerospace History.23 

THE NEW AEROSPACE HISTORY 

More so, however, the New Aerospace History developed in the 1990s as 

a result of the increasing professionalization of space history. Like other related 

subdisciplines, space history evolved from histories written by participants 

and practitioners into a field being advanced by professionally trained historian~.~~ Roger D. Launius, the NASA Chief Historian in the 1990s, also led 

the push for space history to engage the cutting-edge scholarship in the wider 

discipline. During his tenure leading the NASA Headquarters History Office 

from 1990 through 2002, Launius worked to develop the Agency’s publishing 

efforts as a way of creating opportunities for a rigorous practice of space history. For instance, in addition to commissioning new volumes for the exist21. See, for example, Andrew Chaiken, A Man on the Moon: The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts 

(New York: Viking Press, 1994); Roger D. Launius, “NASA and the Decision to Build the Space 

Shuttle, 1969-72,” The Historian 57 (autumn 1994): 17-34; Robert A. Divine, The Sputnik Challenge: 

Eisenhower’s Response to the Soviet Satellite (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Roger D. 

Launius and Howard E. McCurdy, eds., Spacejlight and the Myth of Presidential Leadership (Urbana: 

University of Illinois Press, 1997); W. Henry Lambright, Powering Apollo:james E. Webb ofNASA 

(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1995); James J. Harford, Korolev: How One Man Masterminded the Soviet 

Drive to Beat America to the Moon (New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1997). 

22. See, for instance, Pamela Mack, ViewingtheEarth: The Social Construction ofLandsat (Cambridge, 

MA: The MIT Press, 1990); “Developing U.S. Launch Capability: The Role of Civil-Military 

Cooperation” (paper presented at the American Association for the Advancement of Science conference, Washington, DC, 5 November 1999); David DeVorkin, Science with a Vengeance: How the 

Military Created the US Space Sciences After World War I1 (New York: Springer, 1993). 

23. See, for instance, Margaret A. Weitekamp, Right StuJ Wrong Sex: American’s First Women in Space 

Program (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 2004); John Krige and Arturo Russo,“Europe in Space, 1960-1973,” 

European Space Agency SP-1172 (Noordwijk, Netherlands: ESA Publications Division, 1994). 

24. Similar trends exist in the history of technology. At the 13 January 2005 meeting of the 

Historical Seminar in Contemporary Science and Technology at the Smithsonian Institution’s 

National Air and Space Museum, a spirited debate arose between those celebrating the prevalence 

of professional historians in the field and those lamenting the absence of trained engineers. 
560 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

ing Special Publications series, Launius also began the NASA Monographs 

in Aerospace History, a series of slim paperback volumes focused on specific 

topics. Throughout his efforts, Launius aimed to bring NASA’s publishing to 

a new level of scholarly excellence, an effort that was recognized by the larger 

history community when the Agency’s history books began to win prizes 

from professional organizations. Through the development of a professionalized history, space history forged new connections with other subdisciplines at 

the same time that it also became a somewhat more coherent ~ubfield.’~ 

As with so many things, the status and standing of space history as a 

subdiscipline can be measured through its funding and visibility. Several significant fellowships exist for emerging and established scholars. The American 

Historical Association (AHA) and NASA have offered a joint full-year predoctoral or postdoctoral aerospace history fellowship each year since 1986. 

And several different fellowships for graduate students (at the master’s, predoctoral, and postdoctoral levels) and senior scholars exist at the Smithsonian 

Institution’s National Air and Space Museum. Space history is also a consistent 

presence at major scholarly conferences including the AHA, the Society for 

the History of Technology (SHOT), the Organization ofAmerican Historians 

(OAH), and the American Studies Association (ASA). 

Space history also has a tradition of gathering scholars and participants 

to celebrate and commemorate major anniversaries in the history of the field. 

Beginning with events and symposia held to mark the first 25 years of the 

Space Age, such conferences have recorded the state of the field at various 

points in its existence. This very volume follows in that tradition. As the 

proceedings of the NASA History Division’s “Critical Issues in the History of 

Spaceflight” symposium, the articles contained here offer a current indicator 

of the subject’s breadth and diversity-and of participants’ sense of the field as 

a coherent enough one to warrant such a meetingz6 

As much as space history has become a more internally coherent field, 

however, its employment opportunities, graduate study, and publishing trends 

reflect its roots in many different subdisciplines. Although dedicated space 

history jobs can be found at NASA (at Headquarters or the Centers), the 

Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, or the Space Policy Institute 

25. For instance, the Organization of American Historians (OAH) awarded its 1998 Richard 

W. Leopold Prize to Andrew Butrica’s To See the Unseen: A History of Planetary Radar Astronomy 

(Washington, DC: NASA SP-4218, 1996). 

26. Allan Needell, ed., The First 25 Years in Space: A Symposium (Washington, DC: Smithsonian 

Institution Press, 1983); Alex Roland, ed., A Spacefaaring People: Perspectives on Early Spacefright 

(Washington, DC: NASA SP-4405, 1985); Martin J. Collins and Sylvia D. Fries, eds., A Spacefaring 

Nation: Perspectives on American Space History and Policy (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution 

Press, 1991); Stephen J. Garber, ed., Looking Forward, Looking Backward: Forty Years of U.S. Human 

Spacefright Symposium (Washington, DC: NASA SP-2002-4107,2002). 
CRITICAL THEORY AS A TOOLBOX.. . 561 

Jan Davis and Mae Jemison on STS-47. (NASA photo no. GPN-2004-00023) 

at George Washington University, most space history experts continue to find 

homes in non-space-specific academic jobs in history or political science. (In 

a rare occurrence, the University of Central Florida offered and filled a fulltime, tenure-track space history position in 2005.) The many intersections of 

space history with the other history subdisciplines offer employment opportunities that are at least as ample as any academic field’s opportunities are. 

Likewise, junior scholars engaged in graduate work have focused on space 

topics while earning degrees in history and political science as well as fields 

as diverse as geography and communication^.^^ Opportunities for publishing 

peer-reviewed articles also reflect the roots of space history as a topic studied 

by many different types of historians. Except for Space Policy, few professional 

journals have space topics as a central focus. 

The inherently interdisciplinary nature of space history can be seen in 

some of its best new works. For instance, Howard McCurdy’s Space and the 

American Imagination combines social and cultural history with public policy 

analysis to show how popular culture influenced policy-making. McCurdy 

analyzes how “space boosters” in the 1950s and 1960s used magazines, television shows, and movies to create the groundswell of support needed to loose 

the massive amounts of public funding required to carry out space exploration initiatives. McCurdy’s detailed analysis persuasively links comics and 

27. Kathy Keltner, for example, is writing a communications Ph.D. dissertation at Ohio University. 
562 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

Congress. What might have seemed like an unlikely junction between unrelated fields is now a connection being followed by other scholars.28 

Some likely connections are only just being explored. Despite what might 

seem like natural areas of overlap, very few scholars have actively pursued work 

at the juncture between environmental history and space history. As areas of 

history that both study the intersections of science, technology, and culture, 

space history and environmental history have much to say to each other. In a 

field that is building on its histories of national parks and natural spaces, environmental history investigates the intersections between nature, technology, 

and public policy. Environmental historians have taken on roads, cars, and 

urban/suburban sprawl as topics but have stopped short of dealing with outer 

space. As much as many environmental historians have not considered outer 

space as “nature” or even as a natural place, neither have space historians looked 

to environmental history for ways to think about space as an environment. 

Environmental history might also offer models for thinking about the Earth 

and low-Earth orbit as “natural.” New work by scholars such as Neil Maher 

demonstrates the extent to which exploring space is less about finding nature in 

outer space than it is about obtaining new perspectives on nature on Earth. In 

the environmental historian’s triad of investigating the intersections between 

nature, technology, and culture, space historians often ignore nature. The need 

for intersection between these subfields is a development being echoed by historians of science and technology. Both the History of Science Society (HSS) 

and SHOT now have environmental history special interest groups (called 

the “Earth and Environment Forum” and “Envirotech,” respectively). Despite 

these forays into interdiscip arity, space history has often lagged behind the 

evolution of the discipline as practiced in the United States.29 

By the 1980s, the New Social History had fundamentally transformed 

the discipline’s practice, becoming formalized through established journals, 

academic appointments, and professional organizations. The rejection of the 

consensus school led to renewed attention to the lives of ordinary people and 

a new set of narratives that challenged the accepted periodization of U.S. and 

world history. Although critics complained that the field ofhistory was becoming fractured or that a common American identity was being lost,30 advocates 

28. Howard McCurdy, Space and the American Imagination (Washington, DC: Smithsonlan 

Institution Press, 1997). 

29. Two examples are Neil Maher, “On Shooting the Moon,” Gallery in Environmental History 

9 (July 2004): 526-531, and Erik M. Conway, “The World According to GARP: Scientific 

Internationalism and the Construction of Global Meteorology, 1961-1980” (paper presented at 

the International Commission on History of Meteorology, Polling, Germany, 5-9 July 2004). 

“Envirotech” was founded at the August 2000 SHOT meeting in Munich, Germany. 

30. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Disuniting ofAmerica: Rejections on a Multicultural Society (New 

York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1998). 
CRITICAL THEORY AS A TOOLBOX. . . 563 

for the New Social History argued that particular attention to women, laborers, people of color, the poor, or people with disabilities revealed aspects of 

the past that had been systematically ignored by the previous, more unified 

narrative. Growing scholarship demonstrated how exclusionary and limited 

the master narrative had needed to be in order to maintain its cohesiveness. 

Through the 1970s and the 1980s, scholars developed subfields with new 

modes of analysis that focused on questions of difference and power. In 1990, 

when Eric Foner edited a new collection of essays for the AHA called The New 

American History, in addition to essays on various periods of U.S. history, the 

volume included attention to six “major themes in the American experience.” 

These included “Social History,” “U.S. Women’s History,” “African-American 

History,” “American Labor History,” “Ethnicity and Immigration,” and diplomatic history. If these topics can be considered a rudimentary breakdown of 

the established subfields in American history and of the concerns of the New 

Social History, then an examination of these areas offers insight into how well 

space history has engaged each of them. In the parlance of many historians, this 

longer list is often simplified to class, race, ethnicity, and gender.31 

Political scientists working on space topics have addressed questions of 

class or labor history in space history through their analyses of NASA as a 

complex organization and NASA’s management culture. Sadly, these subjects 

became all too relevant after the losses of two Space Shuttles, Challenger in 

1986 and Columbia in 2003. Both the Rogers Commission and the Columbia 

Accident Investigation Board diagnosed organizational cultures that had 

become inured to risk. In addition, they found communication and project 

management problems that contributed directly to the loss of the two Shuttle 

crews. As a result, scholars have paid particular attention to NASA’s decision-making culture. Many other aspects of NASA as a labor force remain 

unexamined, however. Although the individual stories of astronauts, flight 

controllers, and rocket scientists have been recorded, the collective stories of 

the thousands of people who made particular space projects work offer many 

opportunities for thinking about the space agency as a ~orkplace.~’ 

Labor practices and environments, including the relationship of the space 

agency with contract work, a key characteristic of NASA’s labor structureand of the larger aerospace industry-remain an underdeveloped topic. For 

instance, the Grumman Corporation, the engineering company that won the 

31. Eric Foner, ed., The NewAmerican History (Phdade1phia:Temple University Press, 1990), p. vi. 

32. Howard McCurdy, Inside NASA: High Technology and Organizational Change in the U.S. Space 

Program (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1993). See also Diane Vaughan, The Challenger Launch Decision: 

Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); 

Joseph J. Trento, Prescription for Disaster: From the Glory of Apollo to the Betrayal of the Shuttle (New 

York: Crown Publishers, Inc., 1987); Greg Klerkk, Lost in Space: The Fall of NASA and the Dream of 

a New Space Age (New York: Pantheon Books, 2004). 
564 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

NASA contract to design and manufacture the Lunar Modules for the Apollo 

Program, never unionized because Grumman self-consciously promoted a 

sense of community at its facilities while discouraging labor organizing. In 

a very different example, engineers working at space work sites like the Jet 

Propulsion Laboratory came to understand that layoffs were a part of the business plan. Aerospace companies hired highly skilled workers when contracts 

began, only to dismiss them when contracts ended. These two stories are 

small pieces of a larger story about how shifting relationships between NASA, 

aerospace contractors, and the larger aerospace industry shaped and reshaped 

what it meant to do space work from the beginning of the Space Age through 

the end of the Cold War.33 Finally, the labor history of the U.S. space program should also include the entire communities that grew up around NASA 

Centers, when long-term projects like Mercury, Gemini, or Apollo required 

entire families to relocate. The transformations of places like Huntsville, 

Alabama, or Cape Canaveral, Florida, or Tysons Corner, Virginia, illustrate 

how the work of science and technology industries transformed landscapes, 

creating new communities and cultures.34 

If the labor history of space has only just begun to be explored, questions 

of race and ethnicity have been almost entirely ignored. Only one book has 

dealt with race or ethnicity as a primary topic. J. Alfred Phelps’s collective 

biography, They Had a Dream: The Story of African-American Astronauts, offers 

chapter-length biographies of African American astronauts as basic compensatory history (adding omitted names and events to the historical record without a broader analysis of their social, political, or cultural context^).^' Such 

work is a necessary beginning, but much more remains to be done. Given the 

sophistication of the analysis in African American history, Asian American 

history, and Native American history, and the emergence of interest in whiteness as a constructed racial category, space history’s lack of analysis of race 

betrays an unspoken but distinct discomfort. The aspect of the New Social 

History that has received the most attention in space history has been women’s 

contributions. In recent years, there has been a sudden flurry of attention to 

women in space. In 1996, when I began my dissertation research on Randy 

Lovelace’s Woman in Space Program, a short-lived and privately funded proj33. M. G. Lord, Astro Tu$ The Private Lqe of Rocket Science (New York: Walker & Company, 

2005). See also Joan Lisa Bromberg, NASA and the Space Industry (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 

1999). Lord’s memoir of her father’s work at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) offers useful insights into JPL as a workplace. Bromberg addresses NASA’s relationship with contracting 

companies as a business history while calling for future scholars to return to this subject through 

primary research. 

34. Paul Ceruzzi, From Tysons Corner to Internet Alley: Hgh Technology in Northern Virginia, 1945- 

2001 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, forthcoming in 2006). 

35. J. Alfred Phelps, They Had a Dream: The Story OfAfrican-American Astronauts (Novato, CA: 

Presidio, 1994). 
CRITICAL THEORY AS A TOOLBOX. . . 565 

ect that tested women pilots for astronaut fitness in the early 1960s, only two 

short pieces and a book chapter had been written about the subject.36 By the 

time my book was published in 2004, however, it counted as the fourth major 

treatment of that specific program in six years.37 In addition, three new books 

have recently been published documenting women’s successes as astronauts 

and cosmona~ts.~~ In all, there are seven new books published since 2002 

about women and space.39 Another dissertation about NASA’s first women 

astronauts connects the question of women astronauts to the literature in the 

history of science and technology.“’ 

This attention reflects the increased visibility of women in the astronaut 

corps, the most visible face of NASA’s programs. Yet, despite the attention 

to the subject, space history can still only be considered as working in relation to women’s history but not in any real dialogue with women’s history or 

women’s studies. Most of the new accounts amount to compensatory history, 

adding women to the historical account with little attempt to contextualize 

the histories by using them to make a broader critique or reassessment of the 

time in which they are set. And little to no work has offered a critical analysis 

of the role of gender (both femininity and masculinity) in a particular time 

or place. Investigating the treatment of women can expand what is known 

about the complex, intersecting, social, cultural, and political contexts of the 

U.S. space program. 

A partial solution for development in the neglected areas may lie in a subfield that has a long relationship with space history: oral history. Oral history 

continues to be a useful tool, technique, and intersecting subfield for space 

36. Joseph D. Atkinson and Jay M. Shafritz, “The First Efforts of Women and Minorities to 

Become Astronauts,” chap. 5 in The Real Stuff: A History ofNASA’s Artronatrt Recruitment Program 

(New York: Praeger, 1985); Sheryll Goecke Powers, Women in Flight Research at NASA Dryden 

Flight Research Centerfvom 2946 to 1995, Monographs in Aerospace History, no. 6 (Washington, 

DC: NASA, 1997); Sylvia D. Fries, “The History of Women in NASA,” NASA TM-108100, 

Women’s Equality Day talk, Marshall Space Flight Center, 23 August 1991. 

37. Leslie Haynesworth and David Toomey, Amelia Earhart’s Daughters: The Wild and Glorious 

Story ofAmerican Women Aviatorsfvom World War II to the Dawn ofthe Space Age (New York: William 

Morrow & Co., 1998); Stephanie Nolen, Promised the Moon: The Untold Story ofthe First Women 

in the Space Race (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 2002); Martha Ackmann, The Mercury 

13: The Untold Story of Thirteen American Women and the Dream ofspace Flight (New York: Random 

House, 2003); Weitekamp, Right Stuff; Wrong Sex. 

38. Pamela Freni, Space for Women: A History .f Women with the Right Stuff (Santa Ana, CA: 

Seven Locks Press, 2002); Laura S. Woodmansee, Women Astronauts (Burlington, Ontario: Apogee 

Books, 2002); Bettyann Holtzmann Kevles, Almost Heaven: The Story of Women in Space (New York: 

Basic Books, 2003). 

39, In addition to those listed above, see also Laura S. Woodmansee, Women of Space: Cool 

Careers on the Final Frontier, Apogee Books Space Series 38 (Burlington, Ontario: Collector’s Guide 

Publishing Inc., 2003). 

40. Amy Foster, “Sex in Space: The Politics and Logistics of Sexually Integratmg NASA’s 

Astronaut Corps” (Ph.D. diss., Auburn University, 2005). 
566 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

historians. In 1996, NASA’s Johnson Space Center History Office initiated an 

oral history project to interview NASA employees and contractors from the 

Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, and Skylab programs, as well as to convert decaying oral history reel-to-reel tapes to more stable media. An analysis and reflection on NASA’s history and continuing work with oral history can be found 

in Roger Launius’s 2003 article in a special issue of the Oral History Review 

about oral history in the federal g~vernment.~’ Aswe continue to lose the 

original participants in early space efforts, the need to preserve space history 

in comprehensive, well-researched, -documented, and -preserved interviews 

is becoming all the more important. Furthermore, the current scholarship in 

oral history demands consideration of what recorded interviews reveal about 

race, class, gender, status, and power. Perhaps a closer relationship between 

oral history and space history, two subdisciplines that have been closely linked 

for some time, could provide one avenue for the New Aerospace History to 

develop in its integration of the insights of the New Social History. 

In 2000, Roger Launius identified a New Aerospace History that seeks 

to engage with the scholarship and insights of the New Social History. And, 

as just outlined, much remains to be done. But in many ways, the scholarly 

world has already moved beyond the ideas of the New Social History. If space 

history is going to engage with the insights provided by the explosion of historical scholarship in the last 20 years, space historians must begin to grapple 

with the influences of critical theory. 

CRITICAL THEORY AS A TOOLBOX 

Critical theory is an umbrella term that encompasses the diverse and 

often divergent theoretical schools of structuralist, poststructuralist, feminist, Marxist, postmodern, and psychoanalytic theory that emerged since the 

1970s in literary and anthropological analysis. Critical theory concerns itself 

with the differences between representations and reality and, in particular, 

the ways in which language constructs what is perceived. One part of this 

analysis is the complex social construction of various identities (race, class, 

gender, sexuality, etc.). Critical theory looks at how cultures and institutions 

construct some identities as privileged while marginalizing or denying others. 

(A similar dynamic also occurs on a national or international level, underlying colonialism and postcolonial relationships between states and peoples.) 

Critical theory questions the seeming obviousness of these categories, pointing out how assumptions about naturalness are part of the construction of 

privilege (and thus also of marginalization). The postmodern component of 

critical theory addresses globalization, consumerism, and the fragmentation 

41. Launius, “We Can Lick Gravity.” 
CRITICAL THEORY AS A TOOLBOX.. . 567 

of authority. Such scholarship often pursues discourse analysis, a study of how 

the way that a topic is discussed shapes its reality. Epistemological questions 

of how meaning is made and how we know what we know also drive this 

analysis. Critical theory thrives on juxtaposing texts (which include not only 

literal, written texts, but also any cultural form that can be read for meaning, 

including images, music, movies, or television). It embraces contradictions, 

often frustrating those who want definitive characterizations. In recent years, 

the exploration of these questions using critical theory has proven to be so 

fruitful that entire new research fields now exist, including cultural studies, 

queer theory, and critical race theory. 

Historians began to engage literary theory in the late 1970s. In fact, by 

the time I entered graduate school in the early 1990s, there was a perceptible 

divide in the history department where I studied at Cornel1 University. On 

the one side, Dominic LaCapra led the School of Criticism and Theory, a 

summer institute begun in 1976 that brought together faculty and graduate 

students for an intensive six-week theory “boot camp” premised on the idea 

that an understanding of theory is fundamental to humanistic studies. On the 

other side, empiricists, including my adviser, taught the intensive study of 

primary documents-not as texts to be juxtaposed at will, but as evidence of 

the reality of the past. 

The theorists argued that overarching concepts of hegemony, power, and 

privilege unlocked the central debates raised by the histories they analyzed. 

They embraced Foucault’s suggestion that all history is really about the present, not the past, and that the “real” or “true” past was unknowable. They 

wrote comfortably for a scholarly audience, preferring analysis to narrative 

(which is all constructed anyway). The empiricists lamented the impenetrability of theoretical jargon and the ahistorical problems of bringing the postmodern European theory of Foucault to bear on czarist Russia, colonial Latin 

America, or premodern China. They believed that sufficient research could 

reveal a past that might not be objectively perceived but that was nonetheless 

real. They believed in the power of history as a tale well told, in the tradition 

ofthe scholar-writer. As I did with the radio caller mentioned at the beginning 

of this piece, I find that I resist fitting neatly into one category or the other. 

Although I completed my Ph.D. as a broadly trained Americanist rooted in 

empirical research, my first job-teaching women’s studies, a very theorycentered field-became an informal three-year postdoc in critical theory. 

Space history, of course, fits both camps. On the one hand, the history 

of spaceflight can easily be told as a modernist narrative of progress achieved 

through rationality and hierarchy. For that matter, space history also fits well 

into American exceptionalism, the model of U.S. history as an example for 

the world. On the other hand, critical theory also applies. National and international space efforts cannot be understood without consideration of the mass 
568 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

media, mass consumption, and the mass production that feeds it. Globalization 

is also a crucial context for space history. 

Indeed, the very topic of this essay, an analysis of the historiography of 

space history and its relationship with the other history subdisciplines, follows 

an epistemological line of inquiry. It seeks to illuminate critical issues in the 

history of spaceflight through an analysis of how the field of space history has 

been constructed and what other fields have been influencing the questions 

asked-at base, investigating how we do what we do, to the end of understanding how we know what we know. Over the last 10 years, critical theory 

has become an entrenched part of scholarly discourse, enabling useful critiques 

of power and difference that bridge national and international studies and bring 

race, gender, and class into the center of political and social analyses. 

For those interested in space history, analyzing the broader cultural settings provides a new way to understand how space efforts resonated. Two 

examples help make the point. In her 1998 book Aliens in America, Jodi Dean 

analyzed the pre-Y2K fascination with aliens and UFOs as a part of the 1990s 

trend of interest in space-themed things. Dean suggests that Ron Howard’s 

1995 film Apollo 13 transformed the story of a 1970 space accident into a 

tale that reflected 1990s American preoccupations with a safe return to home 

that is witnessed through television. Likewise, British scholar Debra Shaw 

analyzed the spacesuit as cultural icon in the context of broader American 

popular culture. In both cases, the authors used space as part of their analyses, 

but neither author is particularly interested in actual spaceflight. A wonderful opportunity exists here for a scholar to work on the cultural imagery of 

space while also taking spaceflight seriously as something real, not merely as 

a convenient text.42 

One of the best examples of a scholar executing sophisticated theoretical analyses in plain language while taking spaceflight seriously is Constance 

Penley’s analysis of NASA in the first half of her book NASA/TREK. Written 

in the wake of the Space Shuttle Challenger’s January 1986 explosion, media 

studies scholar and cultural critic Penley addressed the public’s fixation on 

Christa McAuliffe, the “ordinary citizen”/teacher whose inclusion on the 

flight accounted for the intense media coverage of the much-postponed launch. 

Her analysis revealed how widely circulated sick jokes about the public deaths 

of the Shuttle astronauts betrayed cultural discomfort with women’s presence in the highly technological Space Shuttle. Penley’s arguments are carefully made and easy to read even as they draw on a vast literature in feminist 

theory. Penley moves beyond a simple accounting of women’s or men’s roles 

42. Jodi Dean, Aliens in America: Conspiracy Cultures From Outerspace to Cyberspace (Ithaca, NY 

Cornel1 University Press, 1998); Debra Benita Shaw, “Bodies Out of This World: The Space Suit 

as Cultural Icon,” Science as Culture 13, no. 1 (March 2004): 123-144. 
CRITICAL THEORY AS A TOOLBOX. . . 569 

to consider how ideas about gender are embedded in customs, organizational 

structures, and social practices.43 

The construction of masculinity is just as important as the construction 

of femininity. In Astm tu^ her memoir of her father, a 1960s Jet Propulsion 

Laboratory engineer, M. G. Lord’s deeply personal story also offers a model 

for a nuanced analysis of the constructions of gender at NASA Centers. Lord 

explores the rocket engineer as an archetype of 1960s masculinity, a stereotype 

which she acknowledges “no human person can ever fully embody. The buzzcut cowboys of Mission Control, homogenous as a Rockette kick-line, were 

a cold-war fiction, along the lines of other cold-war fictions-the notion, for 

instance, that hard-drinking, womanizing test pilots, when selected to be astronauts, metamorphosed into temperate family men.” Lord’s reflections demonstrate that a monolithic masculinity did not exist. Rather, different archetypes 

of masculinity existed in flight control, or planetary probe engineering, or the 

astronaut corps: constructions of masculinity that were specific not only to a 

particular time and place, but also to different jobs. More so, she illustrates in 

easily comprehensible prose how abstract constructions of masculinity had real 

effects even though individual men did not conform to the ~tereotypes.4~ 

Analyses of masculinity are also being developed in histories of the 

images of astronauts. Roger Launius’s ongoing reevaluation of the Apollo 

astronauts in myth and memory offers an insightful analysis of the men’s personal backgrounds. With only one exception, NASA’s Apollo astronauts were 

working-class or middle-class men who benefited from military service and 

the GI Bill-a story that mirrored the postwar American dream, the ideal of 

the best that America had to offer. The cultural story told by Apollo’s models 

of masculinity provides a marked contrast with the characterizations observed 

when the nation mourned the Columbia astronauts. In that case, the reaction 

to the Columbia tragedy represented a little-noticed but significant shift in 

the way that astronauts have been depicted. More than just the absence of the 

previously disproportionate attention to the female members of the crew (as 

Penley noted after the Challenger disaster), the aftermath of the Columbia loss 

included a noticeable focus on the male astronauts as husbands and fathers. 

The Columbia coverage revealed a new conceptualization of men as active, 

nurturing parents, not just as “family men” (a term that describes a kind of 

dependability that serves as a workplace asset but which said little about a 

man’s real role as an integral part of his family’s life). In both examples, the 

images of the astronauts reflect the cultural context in which they lived.45 

43. Constance Penley, NASA/TREK: Popular Science and Sex in America (NewYork: Verso, 1997). 

44. M. G. Lord, Astro Turf, p. 16. 

45. Roger D. Launius, “Heroes in a Vacuum: The Apollo Astronaut as Cultural Icon” (presented 

at the Organization of American Historians 2005 Annual Meeting, San Jose, CA, 3 April 2005); 

continued on the next page 
570 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

A practical model for this kind of wide-ranging gender analysis can 

also be found in some recent work in diplomatic history. Frank Costigliola’s 

close reading of George Kennan’s famous long telegram advocating containment noticed that Kennan cast the Soviet Union and the United States 

in gender-laden metaphors. Costigliola argues that Kennan’s appeal to cultural ideas about proper gender roles reinforced his arguments about necessary U.S. action. Likewise, Robert Dean offers a very useful analysis of the 

particular brand of upper-class, White masculinity that defined and drove 

John F. Kennedy and his New Frontiersmen. Examining White House decision-makers throughout the 1960s, Dean points out how gendered metaphors 

of strength and weakness underlay foreign policy-makers’ understanding of 

international situations, specifically the Cold War. Dean shows how the gendered metaphors used to understand foreign policy led to real Cold War decisions, bringing ideas about gender into crucial national actions. In both cases, 

gender does not mean “women” but rather the social construction of both 

masculinity and fern in in it^.^^ 

In much the same way, critical race theory has demonstrated that race also 

requires a more complex treatment than the oversimplified American preoccupation with rigid Black/White racial categories. Critical race theory demonstrates that race is mutable, not biologically determined, and yet nonetheless 

real. Because race categories have been historically constructed and carried 

(and still carry) real consequences for people of all colors, the construction of 

those categories and what they meant at a particular place and time provide 

the best way to analyze their historical influence and multiple meanings. 

The best examples of this kind of work are being carried out in cultural 

studies. In Astrofuturism: Science, Race, and Visions of Utopia in Space, De Witt 

Douglas Kilgore employs well-grounded race analysis as a part of his examination of the connections between space science fiction and utopian visions of 

the future set in space. Another author analyzing race in space-themed popular culture is Daniel Bernardi, whose work on Star Trek investigates how 

America’s obsession with race played out in the multiple incarnations of Gene 

Roddenberry’s cult hit television show and its many spin-offs. For Bernardi, 

“ ‘race’ refers to a multifaceted, omnipresent but utterly historical category of 

meanings.” How these meanings are constructed in particular times and places 

continued from the previous page 

Margaret A. Weitekamp, “Mourning Men and Women: Gender in the Coverage of the Space 

Shuttle Columbia Accident and Other Space Tragedies” (presented at the Organization ofAmerican 

Historians 2005 Annual Meeting, San Jose, CA, 3 April 2005). 

46. Frank Costigliola, “‘Unceasing Pressure for Penetration’: Gender, Pathology, and Emotion in 

George Kennan’s Formation of the Cold War,” Journal ofAmerican History 83, no. 4 (March 1997); 

Robert D. Dean, Imperial Brotherhood: Gender and the Making of Cold War Foreign Policy (Amherst: 

University of Massachusetts Press, 2003). 
CRITICAL THEORY AS A TOOLBOX. . . 571 

informs his work, allowing his analysis to account for changes in race relations 

over time. As a result, Bernardi’s work avoids reinforcing racial categ0ries.4~ 

Having more complex, theoretically grounded conceptions of race also 

allows scholars to examine the social and historical construction of whiteness. In addition to the historians documenting the contested construction of 

White racial identity in the United States, other scholars have been exploring 

the impact of White privilege: the unearned and usually unnoticed advantages 

that accompany being White in America. For space history, an awareness 

of whiteness as a contested identity, which carried real meaning for people’s 

day-to-day lives, opens new topics for investigation. For instance, it would be 

very interesting to examine a place like Huntsville, Alabama, where whiteness took on several different historical meanings. By the 1950s, the Army 

Ballistic Missile Agency in Huntsville welcomed German rocket scientists, 

who had been brought into the U.S. through Project Paperclip. These men 

found themselves living and working in a state just beginning to wrestle with 

the fundamental questions raised by the Civil Rights movement. Little race 

history presents itself to be written when the focus remains narrowed to documenting the historical presence of African American workers. But if one 

considers the multiple and varied meanings of whiteness, this history offers 

intriguing possibilities for reinvestigating a formative site for space history.48 

One of the reasons that space history has not always embraced all of the 

aspects of the New Social History is that many scholars dismiss the focus on 

race, class, ethnicity, and gender as forced or unnecessary due to the lack of 

women or minorities in a field. The previously ignored women’s stories have 

been largely uncovered and already told, the argument goes. Having few people 

of color working in various space programs means that little race history presents itself to be written. Few labor problems beg for a class history analysis. But 

when considering critical theory, the question becomes, not how does one write 

an appropriately attentive history of each race or ethnicity, but rather, how did 

the space program deal with race or ethnicity? Not where are the women, but 

how did the space program deal with gender for both men and women? Not 

where are the gays, but why is the space program so relentlessly straight (and, 

for that matter, so reluctant to broach the topic of sexuality at all)? 

Such questions are relevant even if the identities being analyzed were 

not noticed or commented upon at the time. Indeed, one of the defining 

47. De Witt DouglasKilgore, Astrofuturism: Science, Race, and Visions ofUtopia in Space (Philadelphia: 

University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003); Daniel Leonard Bernardi, Star Trek and History: Race-iilg 

Toward a White Future (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998), p. 15. 

48. Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness ofa D@erent Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy $Race 

(Cambridge, MA: Harvard Umversity Press, 1999); Peggy McIntosh, “White Privilege: Unpacking the 

Invlsible Knapsack,” in Women: Images G Realities, A Multicultural Anthology, ed. Amy Kesselman, Llly D. 

McNair, and Nancy Schniedewnd, 3rd ed. (NewYork McGraw-Hill, 2003), pp. 424-427. 
572 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

Dr. Wernher von Braun greeting a crowd at the Gulf South State Fair in Picayune, 

Mississippi, in October 1963. [NASA photo no. GPN-2000-000538) 

characteristics of privilege is obliviousness. White privilege, for instance, 

includes the assumption of whiteness as the norm, a condition that does not 

need to be named (in contrast to the way that Blackness, for instance, does not 

go unnamed). Even though participants did not comment on the impact of 

whiteness or masculinity in the historical moment, the contemporary social 

construction of those identities continued to shape historical actors’ experiences. The insight that all history contains gender, race, ethnicity, and class 

opens up new possibilities for integrating these elements into the ongoing 

discussions of technologies and politics in any space history. 

One of the admitted drawbacks of critical theory is the jargon that accompanies it. As one teaching Web site suggests, “The hardest part of understanding and working with critical theory is grasping and using the new vocabulary, 

but, as with all languages, the new vocabulary will empower you and enhance 

your exposition of already existing thoughts and ideas.”49 I disagree. The concepts and insights of critical theory empower scholars. The vocabulary can be 

cumbersome and obfuscating. The examples offered above, however, demonstrate that critical theory can be employed in the service of an historical 

analysis while still using plain language. Keeping in mind the importance 

of narrative and craft in the writing of history will allow space historians to 

integrate these insights into readable histories. Critical theory does not offer 

all of the answers for the development of space history, but sampling from this 

toolbox can move the field forward. 

49. Din0 Felluga, “General Introduction to the Site,” Introductory Guide to Critical Theory, updated 

28 November 2003, http://www.purdue.edu/guidetotheory/introduction/ (accessed 16 February 2005). 
CHAPTER 17 

SPACE ARTIFACTS: ARE THEY HISTORICAL EVIDENCE? 

David A. DeVorkin 

Museum collections . . . show you not what there was 

but what was collected. 

-JimBennett, “Scientific Instruments,” 

in Research Methods Guide, Department 

of History and Philosophy of Science, 

University of Cambridge 

nyone sensitive to the immense costs involved in collecting and preserv- A ing the material legacy of modern culture must question such expenditures at one time or another. Can the needs of history, for instance, justify the 

effort and expense it takes to identify, acquire, transport, preserve, inventory, 

evaluate, and possibly even to exhibit some object of note? An 11th-century 

astrolabe, a Galilean telescope, or the fabulously mysterious and insightful 

Antikythera mechanism all, no doubt, have provided valuable insight into historic events, capabilities, unwritten norms of practice, and cultural imperatives. 

But what of the modern stuff, essentially the past 50 years of the Space Age? 

What does the Freedom 7 capsule tell us? Or what can Apollo 1 1, or Armstrong’s 

chronograph, or the backup mirror to the Hubble Space Telescope tell us that 

other forms of documentation cannot reveal? Why collect and preserve material artifacts of the Space Age when there is, indeed, a mountain of documentation readily accessible that can tell us everything we might possibly want to 

know or can answer every question we can imagine to ask? 

The act of collecting and properly preserving objects that somehow represent or inform the history of the exploration of outer space is one of the 

most expensive and labor-intensive ways of preserving the record of space 

history. As an historical activity, it is far more expensive, requiring a broad 

range of talents and expertise and an infrastructure at least an order of magnitude greater than that required for any library or archival facility devoted to 

space history, and it is many orders of magnitude greater than what is required 

by an individual scholar to pursue publishable space history. Why, then, do 
574 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

institutions and historians engage in such activity? Are the payoffs and returns 

proportionally worth the effort and expense? Can the payoffs be measured on 

scales that compare to the professional payoffs resulting from other forms of 

historical inquiry and outreach, or are the payoffs of a wholly different character, so removed or distinct from familiar intellectual processes and modes of 

communication that they demand a distinct scale for evaluation separate from, 

or complementary to, those in place within academe? This essay will raise 

these questions and explore them. 

WHY ARTIFACTS ARE MARGINALIZED 

AS HISTORICAL EVIDENCE 

In a 1962 essay in Science, filled with the exuberance of establishing a 

new discipline, Me1 Kranzberg argued that there were ample reasons to support the history of science and technology disciplines as the “ ‘newest’ history.”’ Speaking more about technology than science, the newest history, he 

argued, offered promise of reconnecting the two cultures, as if to counter C. P. 

Snow’s allegations. As Kranzberg wished to describe it, “It is about human 

work [in science and technology] . . . . Indeed, the search for truth and order 

and beauty in science is comparable to the same striving in literature, art, 

poetry.” It is a very human activity to search for truth, order, and beauty, and 

the nature of the search reflects changing intellectual climates, human inventiveness and imagination, and human values and social systems. Technology 

plays an intimate part in all of this because its significance “lies in what it 

does.” Again, following Kranzberg, “the significance of technology is in its 

use by human beings.”2 

In his 1962 essay, he explored the significance of the study of the history of science and technology, and its possible applications, and identified 

typical questions modern practitioners of the “newest history” ask and how 

the exploration of their answers might benefit society. Above all, Kranzberg 

placed humans at the center of attention as well as the institutions they build 

and the nations they defend. He used the telephone to describe what is important about technology: At one level, the telephone is merely a system of wires, 

circuits, and switches, transmitters and receivers of electrical signals. Issues 

historians have addressed have included who invented it and why they did it, 

motivations, resources available, assumptions, “but the human meaning of the 

telephone lies in its transmission of sound for long distances between persons.” 

The telephone has changed the way people live their lives and communicate 

1. Melvin Kranzberg, “The Newest History: Science and Technology,” Science 136, no. 3515 (11 

2. Ibid., p. 466. 

May 1962): 465. 
SPACE ARTIFACTS: ARE THEY HISTORICAL EVIDENCE? 575 

with others. Using the telephone and other examples, Kranzberg’s message is 

Kranzberg’s article, at one level, reflects modern practice. It leaves the 

strong impression that the “things” of technology do not constitute the knowledge base, but that they do represent history in some amorphous way. Indeed, 

in his campaign to increase attention by historians and scientists to the value 

of the history of science and technology, he emphasized its social application 

and minimized issues relating to what one might call a “material culture” 

focus. “Things” do appear prominently, and Kranzberg is clearly sensitive to 

the ills of Neoplatonic aristocratic dualism, the emphasis of brain over hand. 

But for the sake of his argument in 1962, things merely symbolize human 

goals and aspirations and adorn the titles, texts, and images of the literature of 

the history of science and technology. 

Thus, in the 40-odd years since Kranzberg’s essay in Science, an unintended consequence of his campaign, and of those of his generation, was a 

certain neglect of the things of science and technology, the material artifacts, 

as sources of information themselves. They could be sacralized and celebrated 

and even revered, but they did not, in and of themselves, provide a knowledge 

base. And as a new literature emerged in the history and technology of space 

exploration, a consequence of the increased interest in the field overall since 

Sputnik, it also reflected the same priorities of the newest history and did not 

include things in its formal knowledge base. 

Things do matter in the geological and biological sciences, as well as in 

the broader ranges of natural history including anthropology, archaeology, 

and paleontology. Collections do constitute primary knowledge. After all, 

these disciplines largely grew up around collections that had to be organized 

and preserved somehow, and the present structure of these museums and their 

collections still represents the organized data the scientist needs.“ But for the 

disciplines engaged in space history, where we might find historians of technology and science, or social and cultural history, military history, business 

history, American history, American studies, along with a smattering of sociologists, economists, policy specialists, and psychologists, to say nothing of 

those who came from backgrounds in aerospace itself, none of these areas of 

inquiry grew up around a practice of collecting artifacts, organizing and classifying them, and searching for new knowledge in the effort, through empirical analysis or some form of rational argument. As a result, although those 

engaged in curatorial functions most definitely think about their collections 

and treat them to all the standards required of their codes of ethics and institutional capabilities, few of them actually have utilized these collections as 

that science and technology have social consequence^."^ L‘ 

3. Ibid., p. 466. 

4. Bernard S. Finn,“The Science MuseumToday,” Technology and Culture 6, no. 1 (1965): 78-79. 
576 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

primary evidence in their historical research and writings. Many have written 

about their collections and the objects in them, of course, ordering them by 

age, manufacturer, speed, function, and capability, because they are fascinated 

by or are somehow attracted to objects, but the data they employ are of the 

more traditional kind: the written and spoken word, images, pictorial representations, and the like.5 

To make this last observation, Joseph Corn surveyed a decade’s worth of 

articles in Technology and Culture, the quarterly publication of the Society for 

the History of Technology. He found that less than 15 percent of the authors 

“employed any material evidence” and, of these, most wrote on ancient or 

early modern technologies. “Rhetoric to the contrary, then, the history of 

technology as a field is not deeply committed to learning from thing^."^ Corn 

takes this farther to identify factors that detract from the use of things as evidence and also argues that because of these social factors limiting how historians communicate processes and the influences upon them, in fact, the survival 

of the real thing (the true artifact and even the facsimile) is more important 

than one might appreciate from the published record alone. 

THINGS AS“CONGEALED CULTURE” 

After all, things do exist, have existed, and are constantly on the minds 

of at least some historians, especially those who find themselves working in 

museums or training those who might see museums as a career goal. Things 

constitute the “corpse” of much of what we call science and technology, and 

so they have been regarded by some as holding out potential as a source of 

diagnostic or even forensic knowledge offering insights unavailable otherwise. Given the emphasis on people and institutions fostered by Kranzberg 

and almost all subsequent workers, this potential has remained largely locked 

up in the things themselves, which has led at least one prominent historian of 

technology, Thomas Parke Hughes, to refer to them as “congealed ~ulture.”~ 

Hughes’s rhetorical concept has been applied by scholars to various and 

sundry objects, institutions, and individuals, mainly to describe a static relic 

or an art object, “a kind of tomb for the creative spirit” that has somehow 

been transported into a context wholly unlike that of its creation: the art gallery, living room, museum, or historic site. The term has also been used to 

5. Joseph J. Corn, “Object Lessons/Object Myths? What Historians of Technology Learn from 

Things,” in Learning from Things, Method and Theory oJMaterial Culture Studies, ed. W. David Kingery 

(Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996), pp. 35-54. 

6. Ibid., p. 37. 

7. Thomas Hughes, commentary in Pamela Mack and David DeVorkin, “Proseminar in Space 

History,” Technology and Culture 23 (1982): 202-206. 
SPACE ARTIFACTS: ARE THEY HISTORICAL EVIDENCE? 577 

encapsulate entrenched personalities, hopelessly outdated or resistive bureaucracies, and static libraries and the books they contain.* Hughes, however, 

had no such negative thoughts in mind when he used the term at a May 

1981 “Proseminar in Space History” at the National Air and Space Museum. 

There, he was expressing his feeling that it was the best we could hope for in 

material culture, but to utilize it we had to learn how to obtain the proper 

tools to capture the essence of an artifact and to understand how it represents 

an amalgam of interests, motivations, ideas, questions, and techniques that are 

representative of the culture that conceived of it, paid for it, built it, and used 

it. At least, that is what some participants took away from his commentary? 

Hughes’s remark embodied the perennial challenge facing curators of objects, 

or things, to find ways to unpack all the forces and drives that brought that 

artifact into existence and played a part in its lifetime of use. Curators trained 

as historians have certainly done much of this. The literature of space history is rich in the study of the technologies and the objects representing them 

that made space travel possible. But the question in my mind then and now 

is, where is the survival of the artifact itself in all this effort? And what is 

its role in history: as historical evidence leading to new knowledge, or as a 

commodity, an ornament that somehow illustrates or celebrates, but does not 

necessarily inform the past? 

Kranzberg’s assertion that the history of technology focuses on human 

actions did not prevent almost half of the articles in Technology and Culture 

scanned by Corn from dealing somehow with devices: tools, weapons, instruments, objects with a function. But historical studies of things are subject 

to a wide variety of perspective: “What’s nuts and bolts to one historian is 

‘congealed culture’ to another,” Larry Owens once observed, implying that 

things can be described in terms of their “brute facts” of existence, to excruciating detail, but they also “embody conceptual schemes and logical strategies for dealing with the world.” The historian’s task, ideally, is to employ 

interpretive and descriptive tools that present an integrated portrait of the 

machine/object/thing and the ideas and aspirations it embodies. Owens’s very 

definition of a good historian [of technology] was someone with sensitivity to 

“socioeconomic and institutional environments.”1° 

8. John S. Duffield, “Political Culture and State Behavior: Why Germany Confounds 

Neorealism,” International Organization 53 (1999): 765-803, noting Jepperson and Swidler describing institutions as “congealed” culture; John D. Kelly, “Nature, Natives, and Nations: Glorification 

and Asymmetries in Museum Representation, Fiji and Hawaii,” Ethnos 65, no. 2 (1 July 2000): 

195-216; Sham Gray, quoted in “Aesthetics of Computer Graphics,” pixxelpoint, http://www. 

pixxelpoint.org/2002/article-O1. html. 

9. Discussions with Pamela Mack over the years. 

10. Larry Owens, “Book Review,” Isis 78 (1987): 625-626 (review of Michael R. Williams, A 

History of Computing Technology [Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 19851). 
578 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

A machine can certainly embody ideas and assumptions. First, implicit 

in its design are ideas about the way nature works, as well as assumptions of 

the ways humans work, as well as assumptions about how a particular human 

goal can be met. Take the telescope: it definitely embodies basic assumptions 

about how nature works. Although invented before systematic rules in geometrical optics provided guidance, empirical or experimental exploration soon 

showed how to build telescopes with greater magnification, resolution, and 

light-gathering power. Following the development of astronomical telescope 

technology, then, how it changed over time, has the potential of revealing 

how technical limitations, intellectual drives, and social issues influenced the 

development of each of these powers or inhibited their growth for one reason 

or another. Yet, with but few exceptions, histories of telescope technology in 

the past tended not to be organized this way and instead were chronological and periodized, or centered on observatory development. And with even 

fewer exceptions, mainly the work of Albert van Helden and others noted 

below, histories of telescope technologies have not required the survival of 

the telescopes themselves. Yet telescopes are lovingly preserved and beautifully displayed throughout European culture as an enduring legacy of human 

achievement and curiosity. Faced with this situation, any curator of things 

must, at some point in life, pause and ask, “Why?” 

This essay, then, is an exploration of these questions: Is the existence of 

an artifact useful to history, or does its value reside elsewhere? Is there a sensible difference, in researching and writing history, having the actual artifact 

involved in that history at hand or not? We will begin by looking at institutional rationales for collecting, then at individual arguments, and finally we 

will sum up by suggesting some alternative ways to justify the effort. 

ADDRESSING THE ISSUE: RATIONALES FOR COLLECTING 

It is surprising that there doesn’t appear to be a literature critical of the 

act of formal collecting. There is a literature defending and rationalizing collecting and a smaller literature looking into the psychological motives that 

stimulate collecting on both individual and collective bases, but there appears 

not to be one questioning the value or importance of collecting. Of course, 

I raise this as an observation in the hopes that a reader who has read more 

widely than I have at this point will offer a correction and direct me to what 

I have missed. Until that happens, however, I will labor under the assumption that collecting is a core act of human culture, bound up some way in a 

search for identity and even for power and transcendence.” But I will also 

11. Werner Muensterberger, Collecting: An Unruly Passion (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University 

Press, 1994). 
SPACE ARTIFACTS: ARE THEY HISTORICAL EVIDENCE? 579 

accept the possibility that formal collecting, by institutions and nations, is a 

self-conscious act that in and of itself is artificial enough to warrant rationalization. Therefore, we should begin by looking at the rationalizations people 

and organizations have given for collecting. 

Institutions and organizations are, first and foremost, composed of individuals, and these individuals act singly and collectively out of both personal 

and professional motivations. Personal motivations to collect derive from a 

wide variety of impulses and drives: collecting can provide a sense of identity, 

personal exploration, security and validation, self-worth, transcendence, and 

power. All manner of people collect all imaginable things, from stamps, coins, 

and baseball cards to M&M items, cars, telescopes, and phonograph records.12 

It is one of our more basic instincts and seems to be shared among many cultures. Styles vary, of course, from astute collectors to indiscriminate hoarders. Individuals rarely rationalize why they collect, nor do they need to. But 

institutions, especially public ones or those existing on private or corporate 

philanthropy, typically try to, because of the costs involved. 

Historians, museum professionals, anthropologists, geologists, biologists, 

collectors of all types, and their institutions have presented numerous and 

varied arguments for preservation. In the cultural arena, possibly the most 

pervasive effort was established by the National Park Service emerging from 

the Historic Sites Act of 1935: “To preserve places of national significance 

that retain exceptional value as commemorating or illustrating the history of 

the United States for the inspiration and benefit of the pe~ple.”’~ The 1946 

enabling legislation that ultimately gave life to the National Air and Space 

Museum in 1976, which we always cite in the various editions of the introduction to our “Collections Rationale,” calls upon us to “memorialize the 

national development of aviation and space flight.” Our charge is to ”serve as 

the repository for, preserve, and display aeronautical and space flight equipment and data of historical interest and significance to the progress of aviation 

and space flight, and provide educational material for the historical study of 

aviation and space flight and their techn~logies.”’~ 

In order to carry out its designated task, the Park Service has mounted 

numerous “theme studies” and has created a standardized “National Register 

‘ 

12. Ibid.; Igor Kopytoff, “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process,” 

in The Social L@ .f Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadura (Cambridge: 

Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 64-91; Freder~ck Kunkle, “A Heart Melts at Sight of All 

Things M&Ms,” Washington Post (10 February 2005): Montgomery Extra, pp. 16-17. 

13. National Historic Landmarks Survey, “Surveying American History,” June 2003, ht$. // 

www.cr.nps.gov/nhl/, p. 1 (accessed 10 February 2005). 

14. Public Law 79-722, chap. 955, 70th Cong., 2nd sess., 12 August 1946. “Initially the legislation did not mention ‘space,’ but this was added and now serves as basis for the Museum’s Mission 

Statement, as promulgated July 29, 1996,” accord~ng to the Division ofspace History, “Collections 

Rationale,” 2005, NASM Curatorial Files, Washington, DC. 
580 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

Nomination Form” that contains room for not only describing the candidate, 

but for including a narrative statement of historical, cultural, and architectural 

significance and how these characteristics meet a set of criteria maintained by 

the NPS. Reproduced in full, it reads: 

The quality of significance in American history, architecture, 

archeology, engineering, and culture is present in districts, 

sites, buildings, structures, and objects that possess integrity of 

location, design, setting, materials, workmanship, feeling, and 

association, and: 

A.That are associated with events that have made a significant contribution to the broad patterns of our history; or 

B. That are associated with the lives of significant persons 

in or past; or 

C. That embody the distinctive characteristics of a type, 

period, or method of construction, or that represent the 

work of a master, or that possess high artistic values, 

or that represent a significant and distinguishable entity 

whose components may lack individual distinction; or 

D. That have yielded or may be likely to yield, [sic] information important in history or prehi~tory.’~ 

Commemorating, validating, and illuminating historical events, lives of 

note, or objects of construction or manufacture within their original environments is thus the domain of an agency concerned with such diverse issues as 

land use and national identity. An entity of the Department of the Interior, it 

promotes programs in public recreation and education, with preservation at 

its core: more than half of the parks represent land management “set aside as 

symbols and evidence of our history and prehistory.”16 

The process followed by curators at the National Air and Space Museum 

is somewhat different than the National Park Service, though many of its 

criteria map onto those of the NPS. Symbolism and national identity pervade the collection. Although collecting activity ranges over the whole of 

the 20th century, collecting in space history itself was heavily augmented 

15. National Register Bulletin, “How to Apply the National Register Criteria for Evaluation,” 

National Register Publications, http://w~.anps.gov/nripublicationsibulletins/nrb 15/nvb15_2. htm (accessed 

10 February 2005). 

16. “History,” National Park Service Web site, http://www.cv.nps.gov/history/hisnps/ (accessed 10 

February 2005). 
SPACE ARTIFACTS: ARE THEY HISTORICAL EVIDENCE? 581 

by an agreement between NASA and the Smithsonian set out in 1967 and 

modified on numerous occasions. This special agreement was set up because 

NASA realized that it was rapidly becoming responsible for “a growing number of artifacts, many with great historical value and others with great value 

for educational, exhibition, and other purposes, relating to the development, 

demonstration, and application of aeronautical and astronautical science and 

technology of flight.”” 

NASA decided that the Smithsonian was a more appropriate place to take 

on this responsibility since NASA did not really want to be in the business of 

managing a large collection of iconic objects that attracted wide public and 

political attention. Further, it sought out both a political buffer and a means 

of historical validation. Left unsaid but implicit in the act of agreement was 

the fact that in making this arrangement, the Smithsonian was also tacitly 

agreeing to a formal method of removing objects from the commodity sphere 

(commercial trading and speculation in space artifacts) and placing them into 

a singularized and sacralized sphere, to adopt (for the moment) the notions 

and rhetoric of the economic anthropologist. If one views the NASA/NASM 

Transfer Agreement as a cultural act from this perspective, one can see it as 

an example of culture counteracting commoditization (in fact, curators in the 

department have made this point repeatedly)-since the essence of culture is 

discrimination, and societies typically set aside or set apart certain objects they 

deem to be sacred. Anthropology teaches us that culture demands that certain things be singular, unexchangeable, and “publicly precluded from being 

c~mmoditized.”’~ Typically, such constraints are imposed by the state, seeking 

to create a symbolic inventory akin to the crown jewels of monarchies and 

reflecting the power of the state itself. National museums, then, can be likened 

to agencies of the state and mechanisms through which the state imposes its 

eminent domain to sacralize particular objects. To my knowledge, however, 

no other federal agency has this form of continuing formal agreement with 

the Smithsonian. Therefore, the existence of the act itself defines NASA as 

a unique cultural entity, and it would be useful if, sometime in the future, 

someone examined the agreement in that light. 

This agreement, however, does not compel the Smithsonian to collect 

a NASA object but gives it first right of refusal. In addition, this arrangement does not limit the Smithsonian’s interest to collecting NASA artifacts, 

since significant programs exist elsewhere within our culture and our focus is 

space history, not NASA history. Our department has thus identified issues of 

17. “Agreement Between the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the Smithsonian 

Institution Concerning the Custody and Management of NASA Historical Artifacts,” signed 10 

March 1967, in the introduction to Division of Space History’s “Collections Rationale,” 2005. 

18. Kopytoff, “Cultural Biography of Things,” p. 73. 
582 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

concern when evaluating any object for inclusion in the national collection, 

independent of national origin or the part of the government, academe, or 

industry responsible for it. These are placed within a context that we hope and 

expect will somehow illuminate and inform space history generally. Choices 

are made based upon 

1. the unique qualities of [the object] 

2. the relationship of flown items to engineering prototypes, 

backups, and models 

3. the place for ground support equipment such as simulators, 

operational consoles, test stands, and the like, and 

4. the different metrics of culture, history, and technology 

that come into play when assessing the historical value of a 

space artifact.’’ 

Within the agreement set forth by the two agencies, one also finds rhetoric describing what should be collected, again offering some guidance on how 

and why, and overall it attests to NASA’s view that these objects possess cultural and educational, as well as technical, value. We maintain no other agreement with any other agency or institution in this country or with any nation. 

However, although there is a tacit understanding that the criteria we utilize 

to collect any object remain independent of the originating institution, our 

special agreement with NASA creates an institutional bias that we cannot and 

should not ever forget or ignore. The quotation from Jim Bennett at the outset 

of this paper should always be kept in mind: that collections represent choices 

made and therefore should not be construed as history but as part of history. 

Thus far, looking at the rhetoric of these two very different collecting agencies, NASM and the Park Service, one finds consistent appeal to the 

need to memorialize, display, educate, or stimulate. These goals are presumed 

by museum professionals and, again, are the results of choices, both individual and collective. Even though these choices are socially conditioned, one 

can easily find in the rhetoric of museology a presumption of warrant: the 

International Council of Museums offers, for instance, a “Code of Ethics” 

for museums that identifies their collective purpose and their unique responsibilities.20 Excerpting relevant elements, we find that according to ICOM, 

“Museums preserve, interpret and promote the natural and cultural inheri19. “Preface,” Division of Space History, “Collections Rationale,” 2005. 

20. ICOM, “ICOM Code ofEthics for Museums,” 2004, http://icom.mtrretrm/ethics.html (accessed 

20 February 2005). 
SPACE ARTIFACTS: ARE THEY HISTORICAL EVIDENCE? 583 

tance of humanity” and hold their collections “in trust for the benefit of society and its development.” Museums are, in effect, social institutions that exist 

to “acquire, preserve and promote their collections as a contribution to safeguarding the natural, cultural and scientific heritage.” ICOM sees these collections as a “significant public inheritance” that must be protected by law and 

international legislation. Throughout its ethics statement, there is a strong and 

explicit sense of stewardship “that includes rightful ownership, permanence, 

documentation, accessibility and responsible disposal.” 

Central to ICOM’s warrant is that “museums hold primary evidence for 

establishing and furthering knowledge.” Professional staff within museums 

are responsible not only for collections care and public accessibility, but for 

the interpretation of the collection as “primary evidence.” Indeed, the notion 

of “primary evidence” stands at the very core of ICOMs ethics statement. 

ICOM, which represents all types of museums, including art, technology, 

and the natural sciences, asserts without example or citation that what museums collect constitutes primary evidence. It recognizes that the designation 

of primary evidence should not be “governed by current intellectual trends 

or museum usage” and offers out hope that primary evidence will be used 

to make a “contribution to knowIedge that it would be in the public interest 

to preserve.” Thus, according to ICOM, museums should regard collections 

as both a present and a future potential resource for knowledge production. 

The overall policy of the Smithsonian Institution reflects this sensibility, reaffirmed by its Board of Regents in 2001: “Collections serve as an intellectual 

base for scholarship, discovery, exhibition, and education.”’l 

From the standpoint of the collecting institution, then, whose statements are 

largely bureaucratic and organizational, to say nothing of being self-serving, one 

finds arguments that still presume the value of collecting, rather than demonstrate value. Once again, it would be easy to reinterpret ICOM’s assertions 

using the perspective of the economic anthropologist: “Power often asserts 

itself symbolically precisely by insisting on its right to singularize an object, 

or a set or class of objects.”22 Taken together with ICOM’s view, these two 

interpretations offer copious evidence for rationalizing why we collect. 

Each assumes that collections will be useful to “memorialize” or to “educate” and “inform” and even to “inspire.” Each also assumes that collections 

constitute “primary evidence” for historical and scientific inquiry. Indeed, the 

economic anthropologist goes to considerable and quite convincing lengths to 

21. Board ofRegents, “Smithsonian Collections Management Guidelines,” SD-600,26 October 

22. Kopytoff,”Cultural Biography of Things,” p. 73. Sometimes that power is tested.When a National 

Park Service theme study promised to designate a number of observatories as potential candidates for 

landmark status, observatory directors objected, fearing that such a designation would limit their power 

to modify their equipment and buildings. Landmark status was not conferred. 

2001, p. 37. 
584 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

argue how a biography of a thing reveals new knowledge about culture. One 

can learn a lot, for instance, about inheritance rules and practices, as well as 

family structure, by following how a particular object moved through a family down through the generations. The biography of a thing, therefore, is not 

only contained in its production, but in its use and treatment as a commodity, and if that thing is somehow removed from the world of commerce and 

deified as a sacred object, its biography needs somehow to be preserved and 

made accessible in order for it to illuminate the culture involved.23 Historians 

acting as curators might see this as a new way to appreciate the importance 

of the “provenance” of an object, the history of who owned the object and 

the conditions of transfer from one hand to another. But few, to my knowledge, have knowingly explored how provenance informs us about the overall 

culture-its values, priorities, and stability-within which the object moved. 

Economic anthropologists have long used these techniques to map out change 

among generations. Historians might take a cue from this and look for ways 

to apply provenance. 

WHY PRESERVE OBJECTS? 

THE VIEWS AND ACTIONS OF INDIVIDUALS 

In his survey of a decade’s worth of articles in the journal Technology and 

Culture, Joseph Corn also identified ways that a few historians used objects as 

primary evidence, showing that indeed there is potential knowledge if the 

right questions are asked. He points to five different ways scholars have used 

objects as primary source material: 

1. Looking at the object in use or (if a machine) in motion can reveal 

information about the tacit shop practices and techniques of the culture that produced it. 

2. Performing a technical analysis of a manufactured object can reveal 

the process of manufacture, through contemporary accounts as well 

as retrospective accounts by producers and users. 

3. Simulating an object can test behavior and evaluate design expertise 

through models. 

4. Testing actual objects through use can reveal norms of precision. 

5. Microscopic analysis of surface markings and looking for consistency 

in dimension and weight may be evidence of skill and motive. 

23. Kopytoff, “Cultural Biography of Things,” p. 66. 
SPACE ARTIFACTS: ARE THEY HISTORICAL EVIDENCE? 585 

Corn identified each of these methods in specific case studies, mainly of 

objects from periods where other forms of documentation were not plentiful. 

Using a case study of a pin-making machine by Steve Lubar to illustrate the 

first modality, Corn argues that documentary sources (patent records) showed 

that there were many ways to make a pin machine, but the way the sample 

was made indicates choices based upon “specific beliefs and practices” because 

it mimicked manual assembly-line practice^.^^ This was only apparent when 

Lubar experienced the machine functioning, which underscores an argument 

recently made by Deborah Jean Warner that objects-scientific and technological artifacts and instruments-are interesting because they are functional 

and therefore should be interpreted in terms of their “performance characteristics.” Performance characteristics include all aspects of the building and 

use of the objects-the skills of design and manufacture involved, the ways 

to operate them, repair them, and finally, how they are disposed of after their 

production life.25 

None of Corn’s methodologies apply across the board, and there is significant overlap between some of them. Still and all, it is a useful exercise in 

articulating how objects have been found to increase historical knowledge 

and understanding. One finds examples from the history of astronomy that 

fit one or more of these methods. For instance, there is the famous case of 

the Antikythera mechanism that significantly improved understanding of the 

complexity obtained by the Greeks in gearing and clockwork.26 Modern interferometric studies of optical elements of 17th-century telescope makers like 

Torricelli, Divini, and Campani revealed the level of their optical polishing 

technologies and improved understanding of the limits of telescopic knowledge of that time.27 However, once we get beyond the 17th and into the 18th 

and 19th centuries, it is typically archival investigation that yields the most 

telling information about technological capabilities, as in Robert Smith and 

Richard Baum’s excellent study of William Lassell’s reflectors, whose optical 

imperfections led him to believe that he had detected a ring around the planet 

Neptune even though he was aware of those imperfections.28 But examples 

are harder to find when one moves into the contemporary era. This trend is 

24. Corn, “Object Lessons/Object Myths?” p. 37. 

25. Deborah Jean Warner, “A Matter of Gravity, with reflections on the differences between 

Gizmos and Works of Art” (unpublished manuscript; text kindly provided by Warner in advance 

of presentation, March 2005). 

26. Derek De Solla Price, Gearsfrom the Greeks: The Antikythera Mechanism-A Calendar Computer 

from ca. 80 B.C. (New York: Science History Publications, 1975). 

27. Mara Miniati, Albert Van Helden, Vincenzo Greco, and Giuseppe Molesini, “Seventeenthcentury Telescope Optics of Torricelli, Divini, and Campani,” Applied Optics 41 (February 2002): 

28. Robert W. Smith and Richard Baum, “William Lassell and the Ring of Neptune: A Case 

644-647. 

Study in Instrumental Failure,”Journalfor the History ofAstronomy 15 (1984): 6-15. 
586 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

likely similar for all types of collecting. The history of the technical museum 

in Western culture reflects this trend. 

Originally collections of antique instruments, machines, patent models, 

and industrial products, in the 20th century, technical museums became venues to commemorate “native scientific and technological genius” as well as to 

supplement the academic program attendant to a technical education: if there 

was a trend, it was toward commemoration and pedagogy. Thus the technical 

museum became what Robert Multhauf has described as “a laboratory course 

extended in space rather than in time, arranged in some historical sequence 

to exploit the value of historic apparatus.” These museums were also initially 

regarded as repositories of knowledge and inspiration insofar as they acted as 

places where inventors, designers, and engineers could go to get new ideas or 

to solve specific problems in design and manufacture. This application, however, closest to Corn’s ideal methodologies, proved to be transitory; it was 

merely a passing interest through the early 20th century. And so the trend 

moved on once again, when technical museums returned to promote industrial 

products and act as places for the “preservation of our cultural heritage and to 

the inspiration of young people with an interest in science and te~hnology.”’~ 

Multhauf‘s goal in this 1958 essay was to highlight the limitations of perspective: “Unlike the engineer of the last century,” he pointed out, “we begin our 

training, and rest our work, upon a basis of knowledge much of which is outside our own e~perience.”~’ Therefore, for Multhauf, technical museums were 

the best places where one could explore, through utilizing all available primary 

and secondary source material, the many ways that discovery and invention 

happen, the very human artificial element in the inventive process. 

Like Kranzberg, Multhauf did not actually regard the thing itself as 

embodying knowledge, but rather as a locus for the gathering in of knowledge in all forms and with increasing and changing perspective over time. His 

allusion to how the experience of the engineer of the last century differs from 

our experience offers testimony to how one needs to read an artifact: a worker 

who experienced the development of a technology before it was successful and 

before the principles upon which it was based were fully worked out would 

see that artifact very differently than someone looking at it years later, after it 

had proven itself and the principles it embodied. All the doubt, uncertainty, 

and promise congealed within the artifact can only be assumed, unless one 

has at hand numerous accounts of attempts made in that day to solve the same 

functional problem or goal, like attaining the facility of traveling in space and 

then having to learning how to work in that new theater, or how to build a 

I 

29. Robert P. Multhauf, “The Function of the Technical Museum in Engineering Education,” 

30. Ibid., p. 200. 

journal ofEngineering Education 49 (December 1958): 200. 
SPACE ARTIFACTS: ARE THEY HISTORICAL EVIDENCE? 587 

pin machine that would be acceptable to piece workers, or a rifle that could be 

assembled, disassembled, and made reliable in the field. 

To a certain extent, episodes in the recent history of the National Air and 

Space Museum’s space history collection bear out this transitory phase, but 

they also show that it lingers even today and no doubt will be present in the 

future. The NASA/NASM Transfer Agreement explicitly states that if NASA 

decides that an object it had transferred to the national collection somehow 

reacquired its usefulness to the space program, it would be recalled. Sometimes 

this works, sometimes not. When the Viking 1 lander failed to call home from 

Mars in November 1982, NASA engineers came to the Museum to inspect 

the computer inside the engineering model we display in the Milestones of 

Flight gallery, hoping that their inspection might help them figure out how 

to regain communication with the lander. Unfortunately, the box holding the 

on-board computer in our example, although real, was empty of its contents. 

Our Skylub orbital workshop, originally built for flight, has been on display 

since 1976, though modified to allow visitors to walk through the living quarters. In the early 1980s, Marshall Space Flight Center engineers requested the 

return of a set of circulating air fans and, a few years later, came to inspect the 

toilet systems, since surviving documentation was apparently unobtainable 

when they were looking for ways to adapt these designs for new human space 

initiatives. And on occasion, engineers and scientists have expressed interest in everything from our Saturn F-1 engines to the backup Hubble Space 

Telescope mirror now on display. In the case of the engines, the engineers 

sought out the technical documentation we held in our archives rather than 

the object itself. 

Multhauf‘s views on the use of objects in pedagogy were reflected in at 

least one of Corn’s methodologies, as well as by some of the presentations at 

a 1975 conference at the Winterthur Museum held to explore how material 

objects are useful to the study of American history. Historians, archaeologists, 

ethnologists, American studies specialists, and even a molecular chemist spoke 

from their perspectives and experiences. James V. Kavanaugh suggested how 

a course in American studies could be augmented by using anthropological techniques upon “accumulated material evidence” to more fully explore 

the culture of invention in American life.31 Cary Carson, Saint Mary’s City 

Commission, echoing Corn’s later observations, argued that artifacts have not 

contributed at all to “developing the main themes of American history” but 

have, in their design and arrangement, especially in the buildings of surviving 

early communities, certainly helped to fill in the details and provided new 

31. lames V Kavanaugh, “The Artifact in American Cu1ture:The Development of an Undergraduate 

Program in American Studies,” in Material Culture and the Study of American L+, ed. Ian M. G. 

Quimby (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), pp. 65-74. 
588 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

insights. Facing the aljegation that things “have seldom been a source of ideas 

for historians,” he argued that by looking differently at objects, the mind is 

certainly capable of thinking up questions that they can answer or contentions they might prove or disprove. Embracing Kranzberg’s “New History,” 

Carson argues that “bottom up” history can often best be reconstructed by 

looking at the details of living environments, and thereby it can pose new 

questions. The experience of life, of “society as a working organism,” can 

best be appreciated by somehow encountering the material vestiges of that 

experience. Although he applied his methodology to 17th- and 18th-century 

life on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, showing how “architecture became the 

instrument of segregation” and other insights, one might map these concepts 

into an exploration of the contemporary dwellings of scientific instruments 

and space operation^.^^ Building upon a recent comment by Pam Mack, it is 

one thing to examine graphic profiles or even photographs of the interior of a 

Mercury capsule. But it is quite another to actually experience that tiny space, 

looking from the outside, of course.33 Possibly someday someone might ask 

the crowded and complex chamber specific questions relating to the actual 

role of the astronaut in the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo eras that cannot be 

answered as completely or as poignantly by other forms of indirect documentation. One might also find such reminiscences in debriefing documents after 

the flights. Definitely riding in a machine and being part of its operation is a 

most valuable experience. Many historians have expressed how important it 

has been for them to fly in an aircraft they have studied; Ron Davies at NASM 

recently commented that it was an essential experience, even though his primary data came from airline timetables.34 

Probably the most eloquent argument for the value of experience at the 

1975 Winterthur Conference was Brooke Hindle, who was the lead speaker. 

Hindle was then Director of the National Museum of American History, and 

he took the occasion to explore the essence of material culture in his nowclassic “How Much Is a Piece of the True Cross Worth?” Hindle identified 

the factors that led him to what we today might call “priceless.” Pondering 

Lenin’s body, Dolley Madison’s gown, Ben Franklin’s printing press, he first 

stated that artifacts provide “direct, three-dimensional evidence of individuals who otherwise exist only as abstractions in words, paintings, or monument~.’’~~ In order to utilize them properly, however, one has to know how 

32. Cary Carson, “Doing History with Material Culture,” in Material Culture and the Study of 

33. Telephone conversations with Pamela Mack, February 2005. 

34. Ron Davies, personal communication in response to informal questionnaire sent to NASM 

35. Brooke Hindle, “How Much Is a Piece ofthe True Cross Worth?” in Material Culture and the 

American Life, ed. Quimby, pp. 42-50. 

curators, February 2005. 

Study of American Life, ed. Quimby, p. 6. 
SPACE ARTIFACTS: ARE THEY HISTORICAL EVIDENCE? 589 

to apply “linguistic models to the nonverbal, three-dimensional world.” This, 

however, was not a simple matter for Hindle, who felt that language “floats on 

top of the material world” and so remains separate from it. One must walk the 

battlefields, cruise the oceans, make landfall as explorers did, to find the words 

appropriate to the experience. Only in this experiential way, Hindle felt, “the 

abstractions of language are penetrated by direct knowledge of life’s complex 

multidimensional and instantaneous ~haracter.”~~ 

Hindle’s concept of the importance of experiential reality underscores 

what is, in fact, both a compelling but essentially still abstract circumstance. 

He did not describe any one set of analytical tools one must bring to the experience in order to sense it and then reduce it to language. He provided examples, 

as all writers of this genre tend to do, and many of those are compelling, such 

as Eugene Ferguson’s attempt to reconstruct the methods of artisans by showing how they thought in pictures, suggesting that one might do the same for 

the builders of machinery. His strongest suit, of course, is how the techniques 

of industrial archaeology have radically changed our view of Eli Whitney’s 

role in the development of interchangeable parts. This was indeed a wonderful 

example of how, in a manner suggested by Carson and others, asking the right 

questions of a set of artifacts yielded new knowledge about their history and 

provided a correction to the broader history of industrial technology. 

The success of the interchangeability study naturally raises the question 

of what is important about today’s space technology, especially what is important that might be studied by examining artifacts in the ways Corn and others 

suggest. Is the ability to exchange parts important in the technology of space 

history, does it define modern capabilities and practice? Does it typify an era? 

The answer is probably no, at least not in the way rifles illuminated manufacturing techniques of their day. However, a modern counterpart might be the 

ability to ensure consistency and reliability across a very widely spread-out 

system or infrastructure. How sure is an instrument developer, for instance, 

that his instrument will work within the environment of a satellite housing 

that has been launched into space? What steps does that developer take to 

design his instrument to be as forgiving and robust as possible-resistive to 

vast swings of temperature, pressure, and acceleration, yet sensitive enough to 

get the job done effectively? This is only one of many questions about “integration” that has been an issue ever since scientific instruments were flown 

on vessels that were not under the direct control of the instrument maker or 

scientist.37 The need to integrate a scientific instrument into a system used 

either remotely or by surrogates changes the way science is done and certainly 

36. Ibld., pp. 9-11. 

37. David DeVorkin, Race to the Stratosphere: Manned Scientific Ballooning in America (New York: 

Springer-Verlag, 1986). 
590 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

changes the experience of the scientist, much as the telephone changed how 

we communicate. A more obvious approach might be to compare designs of 

instruments flown on different vehicles, looking for changes or shifts that are 

only understood in terms of the capabilities of the vehicle. These and other 

questions can be asked by historians of space artifacts, whether they be launch 

vehicles, manned or unmanned craft, subsystems, or instruments. 

Historians of this contemporary scene might be more interested in 

issues such as how nations achieve new levels of capability or performance 

(as with Campani’s lenses), how design variations reveal compromise, or how 

adaptations were made to existing technologies to make them work in the 

space environment or to survive launch or landing. But unlike the study of 

Campani’s lenses, it is doubtful that the space historian will ask these questions 

of the artifacts themselves. 

Indeed, one usually finds questions directed to the nature of the individuals or organizations that produced the technology. Among historians contributing to the Osivis volume “Instruments” in the early 1990s, Robert Smith and 

Joseph Tatarewicz represented space history, showing how the technical complexity of the Hubble Space Telescope not only symbolizes the complexity of 

the institutions and motivations involved in creating the thing, but also revealing how these motivations were often in conflict. It is clear from their study of 

how the largely untested charge-coupled device (CCD) became the detector 

of choice for the critical Wide Field/Planetary Camera that one can only hope 

to understand the ultimate technological artifact through the interactions of 

conflicting institutional priorities between science, the military, and NASA, 

each possessing different goals, different resources, and different agendas.38 

This study of the CCD and the complexity of HST gets about as close 

to the artifact as I have seen in the literature of space history. It is typical 

of a small but hopefully growing literature that uses some characteristic of 

the hardware to inform a larger story. But the majority of the literature of 

space history is still rather far from this sort of treatment. Major characteristics 

include early practitioner histories, going into great detail describing examples of early rocketry and speculative space vehicles but asking few, if any, 

questions about them that informed broader historical interests. The NASAsponsored histories of the 1970s, O OS, and ’90s focused, correctly, on the elucidation of missions and the application of broad technologies, rarely focusing 

on specific examples of the technology and questions about their origin and 

application. Among the synthetic reviews and disciplinary histories, one often 

finds descriptions of objects, who built them and why, and what they did, but 

38. Robert W. Smith and Joseph N. Tatarewicz, “Counting on Invention: Devices and Black 

Boxes in Very Big Science,” Osiris 9 (1994): 101-123. 
SPACE ARTIFACTS: ARE THEY HISTORICAL EVIDENCE? 591 

rarely, if ever, is an artifact in a collection at the center of attention or used in 

any explicit way in the analysis. 

One can find this attitude explicitly stated in some of the papers from the 

XIX Scientific Instrument Symposium in September 2000, held in Wadham 

College, Oxford, where a session was devoted to “Instruments in the 20th 

Century,” organized by Paolo Brenni. Speakers said the usual things, like how 

instruments might provide useful information when other documentation is 

lacking, but gave no hint in their abstracts of the kind of information one 

might extract from an instrument other than suggesting that one look at an 

instrument or actually use it in performing an experiment. The most refreshing remarks about the value of collecting were made by Roland Wittje, who 

pointed out that any collection of 20th-century instrumentation was for purposes of exhibition and not for the study of history.39 In other venues, historians have said much the same thing. Marvin Bolt of the Adler Planetarium and 

Astronomical Instrument Collection, echoing a strong and persistent theme 

among educators, presented demonstrable evidence for how historical replicas 

can reveal physical and chemical processes more simply than modern devices. 

Others concentrated on how, reflecting Hindle, an encounter with an historical object can stimulate greater interest in the subject matter surrounding the 

actions of that device and the efforts of their human creators and users. 

We have touched on Hindle’s experiential argument before. It continues 

to appear in a wide range of studies. An excellent example is Paul Forman’s 

recent study of three mechanical wave guides from I. I. Rabi’s early research 

program that were part of the museum’s accession of his materials after his 

death and his office was cleaned out at Columbia. Paul was already interested 

in Rabi, of course, but, stimulated by the existence of these relics, he realized 

that their survival after all these years confirmed that Rabi regarded these 

early experiments very dearly and saved the devices as a result, even though 

they were completely overshadowed by his later work that won him the Nobel 

Prize. This encouraged Paul to search out the nature of his early work, and he 

found it to be more significant than hitherto realized. These wave guides also 

confirmed designs previously known only from publications.“’ 

At the same 1999 Artefact Conference where Paul Forman reported on 

Rabi’s devices, Paul Ceruzzi recalled an incident where someone examining a circuit board recognized that it was probably designed by the legend39. Roland Wittje, “How Can Scientific Instruments Teach the Historian about 20th Century 

Physics?” in Session VII A: Instruments in the 20th Century, session abstract, http://www.sic.iuhps. 

org/conf2000/ox_s07u.htm (accessed 18 January 2005). 

40. Paul Forman, “Researching Rabi’s Relics: Using the Electron to Determine Nuclear 

Moments Before Magnetic Resonance,” in Exposing Electronics, ed. Bernard Finn, Robert Bud, and 

Helmuth Trischler (Netherlands: Harwood, 20001, pp. 161-174. 
592 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

ary Seymour Cray because it had specific design earmarks that Cray had 

pioneered, specifically his “cordwood packaging” technique that achieved 

greater densities than hitherto attained. There were no markings on the board 

other than the known fact that it was part of a military mainframe called the 

Naval Tactical Data System, or NTDS, built by Sperry. This was a highly 

specialized machine known only within military circles, and nothing was 

known about its design. It was also not generally known that Cray worked 

for Sperry, although he left Sperry before the NTDS was delivered. There 

is little in the published record linking Cray to the NTDS-no reference 

in the technical manuals or other contemporary descriptions. In presenting 

this analysis of a design style and using it to discern design origins in other 

computing devices, Paul examined a CDC 3800 acquired by the National 

Air and Space Museum, finding the same packaging design, even though 

no documentation has yet been found identifying it as a Cray design. Paul 

describes this as a “reading of the text of the machine itself” and is using it as 

a guide to search for traditional doc~mentation.~~ 

“Reading the text of the machine itself” includes many other areas 

beyond the survival, existence, or design style of a device, but quite frankly, 

it is a circumstance that is not as common as one might like. However, there 

are ways to increase the chances that a reading of an artifact will result in new, 

useful knowledge. Here I offer two examples from my personal experience: 

one involves documentation efforts, and the other involves exhibit preparation. Both, by their nature, required the survival, existence, and availability 

of artifacts. 

The first example deals with the use of video to document objects. In 

the late 1980s, the Smithsonian decided to experiment with the use of video 

recording to better document its collections. This program, sponsored by the 

Sloan Foundation, brought together artifacts with their makers and users. 

As part of this effort, between 1988 and 1990, I interviewed sets of scientists and technicians who had been involved in space research at the Naval 

Research Laboratory from the 1940s through the 1980s. During the course of 

these interviews, sessions were devoted to voice-overs of a series of slow pans 

through laboratories and workspaces, followed by on-camera “enactments” 

and, following that, by direct examination of artifacts, mainly x-ray and ultraviolet detectors, collimators, and other elements of flight systems. I could fill 

many pages with examples of how this experience produced evidence that 

documented the interface between an instrument and its builder, as well as the 

interaction between the instrument and the laboratory environment within 

which it was designed and tested in prototype fashion. We documented design 

41. Paul Ceruzzi, “The Mind’s Eye and the Computers of Seymour Cray,” in Exposing Electronics, 

ed. Finn, Bud, and Trischler, pp. 151-160. 
SPACE ARTIFACTS: ARE THEY HISTORICAL EVIDENCE? 593 

Typical x-ray ionization chamber designed, built, and used by the Naval Research 

Laboratory team on sounding rocket flights in the 1950s and early satellite systems. 

(File no. A1988-0012000, NASM Curatorial Files) 

choices, instrumental styles, experimental procedures, and testing methodologies, not merely through reminiscences, but through recording the tactical 

connection between instrument and builder, On one occasion, one scientist 

demonstrated the methods used to fill halogen Geiger counters with gas and 

then test them for sensitivity. He used a contemporary filling station as a backdrop, but his hands twisted invisible dials and stopcocks as if he was using one 

from the 1950s. They were literally imprinted in his tactile memory. These 

explorations of working environments gave body to other sessions where the 

people who built these detectors talked about them while they handled them. 

Edward T. Byram was faced with many detectors he had built, laid out on 

a table in front of him. He rarely took his eyes off the detectors during the 

interview, and when asked if his efforts making these devices work properly 

were frustrating, he replied: “I was never frustrated. I enjoyed fighting them. 

It wasn’t a frustration, it was a challenge. It was mind over Geiger tube.”42 

His behavior matched his rhetoric-throughout the interview, Byram’s gaze 

42. E. T. Byram, quoted in David H. DeVorkm, “Preserving a Tool-Building Culture: 

Videohistory and Scientific Rocketry,” in A Practical Introduction to Videohistory, ed. Terri A. 

Schorzman (Malabar, FL: Krieger Publishing, 1993), pp. 125-137. 
594 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

Early halogen counter with an entrance window of mica, capable of sensing ionizing 

ultraviolet radiation. Note the suspended anode just behind the mica window. This is 

a tube similar to the one Kreplin tapped during his video-history interviews. (File no. 

A1988-0010000, author digital file, NASM Curatorial Files) 

remained on the tubes. Obviously, he was still very attached to them, attached 

to devising ways to adhere exotic radiation entrance windows onto their shells 

and ways to ensure that the halogen gas mixtures he was filling them with 

did not leak or cause the seals to deteriorate. And finally, one of Byram’s colleagues, Robert Kreplin, was also asked to talk about the tubes he built. He 

held an early example while he talked, and in the review, I noticed that as he 

discussed ways to test the mechanical integrity of these detectors, which had 

to survive the launch of a rocket, he instinctively tapped the side of the tube 

and peered through the mica window at a small protruding wire anode. His 

tapping was reminiscent of the group’s concern for the survival of the anode, 

which in later models was supported at both ends.43 

Although my basic goal for these interviews was to produce a collective 

profile of what I deemed to be a tool-building culture at the Naval Research 

Laboratory and to explore aspects of that culture, I also came away with a better appreciation for how these people organized themselves, raised issues and 

43. Image of Kreplin holding a tube, in DeVorkin,“Preserving a Tool-Building Culture,” p. 134. 
SPACE ARTIFACTS: ARE THEY HISTORICAL EVIDENCE? 595 

problems, and dealt with outside entities first in the Navy and then at NASA. 

In a very definite, though not explicit, way, I feel that the surviving artifacts 

that we interrogated, and which are now in the collection, stimulated memories and physical responses and led to discussions between team members that 

rekindled behaviors that I could actually discern. From this vicarious experience, I feel I gained a fuller portrait of this tool-building culture. 

As my second example of the stimulus generated by a surviving artifact, 

1 turn to recent activities preparing for NASM’s new Udvar-Hazy Center. 

Curators had an unprecedented opportunity to examine a significant portion 

of the collections in a process that included improving documentation, preservation techniques, and methods of monitoring them, since from now on they 

will be on permanent display/storage. In the past, various factors have limited 

our access to these objects. They were stored off-site, sealed and boxed up, 

and required manpower and coordination for examination. One of the dozens of objects I had never had the chance to fully inspect was a model of the 

Explorer VI1 satellite identified as a “full scale replica.” It had been acquired 

on paper in 1976, inventoried several years later, but never actually examined 

at the Alabama Space and Rocket Center, where it was presumably on display. 

It finally was shipped to the Garber Facility in 1989. It was quickly inspected, 

but the box was never actually opened, nor were the insides of the object 

inspected. As a replica, it was, frankly, not of great interest. As to documentation, we were left with hardly more than a shipping document. 

In the years leading up to preparation for the Udvar-Hazy facility, our 

department’s sensitivity for the critical importance of adequate documentation vastly improved. Udvar-Hazy afforded me a chance to acquire intimate 

knowledge of a set of early satellites and the scientific instruments they hopefully contained, so I opted to examine Explorer VI1 as part of a suite of firstgeneration geophysical satellites. 

Typically, anything marked as a mock-up or replica or even reconstructed 

satellite is not going to contain actual flight hardware, so I was really not 

expecting much. However, many of those objects hauled out and destined for 

Udvar-Hazy labeled replica or model have turned out to be very real. Based 

upon my experience with the videotaping of NRL detectors, I quickly realized 

that the detectors in the skin of Explorer VI1 were, in fact, real. One detector 

had a clear entrance window revealing a small chamber that had a single wire 

on the cylindrical axis, just like the one Kreplin was tapping. Explorer VI1 

may well have been a flight backup, which means that everything about it is 

real. Documents in our technical files in the NASM library confirmed that 

the detectors were indeed built by the NRL group, and other elements of the 

craft closely matched the descriptions in an extensive Technical Note. 

None of this effort would ever have been made if I had not been compelled to answer detailed questions raised by an intimate inspection of an 
596 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

Explorer VI1 before cleaning and evaluation. Note that the artifact inventory tags were 

tied to a damaged x-ray detector similar to those examined at the Naval Research 

Laboratory and recorded during video-history sessions. See the image on page 593 for 

an intact example. (File no. A1978-1109000, author digital file, NASM Curatorial Files) 

artifact. Explorer VI1 is interesting as a representative of the state of technology available for multifaceted studies of solar radiation and the nature of 

the low-Earth-orbit environment in the late 1950s. As with any early flight, 

there were some technical “firsts” and at least one first for science: the detection of micrometeorite impacts. But whether or not the remnants of the craft 

itself reveal anything beyond what is still available from our technical files, at 

NASA, in our archives and oral histories (with people like Herbert Friedman 

and James Van Allen, another instrument principal investigator on Explorer 

VII), or from the published literature, it remains a fact that in the process of 

inspection and evaluation, more documentation was gathered and consistently 

filed away than was available before, and hence is likely to be retrievable in 

the future. Scattered documentation was collected, recorded, and filed away, 

hopefully someday to be of use in some unpredictable way, stimulated by 
SPACE ARTIFACTS: ARE THEY HISTORICAL EVIDENCE? 597 

motivations that we cannot predict. My contention is that the motivation 

would come either from the recognition someday that this was a watershed 

flight in space history (the first application of passive techniques of thermal 

stabilization) or that an artifact that has survived in a major collection calls 

out, by its very existence, for attention to the fine structure of nuts-and-bolts 

history, for only through such efforts is a full picture of the nature of the first 

years of true space research likely to emerge. 

SO, WHY COLLECT? 

As I prepared my remarks for the “Critical Issues” conference, I queried 

colleagues at NASM, asking them questions stimulated in part by Corn’s findings but also by my inability thus far to find unequivocal evidence of how an 

object relating to space history has actually been used as a source of historical 

knowledge. I also queried aeronautics curators as a cursory check on a collecting area where documentation tends to be not as rich or institutionally based. 

In general, the responses confirmed the impressions I was getting from the 

literature and from experience. Curators (John Anderson, Michael Neufeld, 

Ron Davies, Tom Crouch, and Jeremy Kinney) typically felt that direct and 

personal experience with an artifact stimulated them to make historical inquiries. Neufeld, in particular, felt that an encounter with an historical object 

can stimulate intellectual interests and makes the past seem more real, less dry 

and distant even for academic historians, but how much they drive any historiography is questionable. Others, like Tom Crouch, felt that they learned 

from these inspections and gained important intellectual insights. For Crouch, 

“interpretation . . . was in large measure based on a combination of examining 

the objects and knowing the documentary record.” Jeremy Kinney reported 

that what he learned from his detailed inspection of variable pitch propellers 

in the collection is reflected in his publications in significant ways, but that his 

physical inspections largely confirmed textual descriptions in primary sources. 

All felt more or less strongly that the survival of artifacts could be a stimulus to 

researching and writing history. Artifacts provide information on design and 

shop practices that run hand in hand with the intellectual methods of aeronautical engineering. As for the limits on collecting and the importance of the 

survival of the “real thing,” Tom Crouch added that it is impossible to preserve 

all the details of a machine (the written and visual records are approximations); 

close examination always reveals more detail-small mechanical details. For 

Crouch, one of the museum’s failings is the lack of attention to machine tools 

and production machinery-transitions from one medium (wood) to another 

(metal) and from metal to modern composite materials are always constrained 

by fundamental changes in tooling and production machinery. Reflecting 

issues raised by Warner and others, he also sees a problem with collecting 
598 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

“black boxes” if it is not possible to “turn them on” and examine their behavior. Finally, reflecting Jim Bennett’s qualification cited under the title to this 

essay, he suggests that we all have to consider carefully what we collect for 

exhibit and what we collect for research-these are not necessarily the same 

class of object, and selection rules may tend to be very different.“4 

From the arguments so far reviewed from the literature, from the responses 

of my Museum colleagues here, and from my own experiences, what conclusions do I draw as to the value of collection and preservation? Here is a brief 

summary of my impressions. Objects can provide the following: 

Validation-material proof that something happened in space history 

(Hindle). This requires solid information on provenance, however, 

and requires as well that the object that is experienced by the visitor 

was actually the very same one involved in the historical episode it 

preserves. Collections in space history are rather peculiar in that, as 

often is the case, the actual historical object that performed the act 

or the function deemed worthy of note is not accessible-it has been 

used up or lost in the process of conducting its business, or, simply 

put, it is still “up there” where we put it, and we have no known 

means or the wherewithal of retrieving it. There are very notable 

exceptions, of course: vehicles that have returned to Earth as part 

of their mission or, even rarer, have been returned to Earth through 

some conscious act unrelated to the historical event or process that 

made it noteworthy. For all the rest, we are left with some form of 

surrogate: an exact flight backup, just like the flight model in every 

way except that it, in and of itself, did not experience the final act of 

making history but was still very much a part of that history. It had a 

role in that process but definitely comes in second place. Third place 

are various levels of engineering models and mock-ups, reconstructed 

replicas using parts that were fabricated out of the same computer 

program, melt, or block. And a distant fourth is all sorts of replicas 

or reproductions. Are these approximations merely surrogates for the 

“True Cross,” or does each and every one of them tell a particular 

story that is available no where else in quite the same way? What does 

their existence, and their survival today, reveal about the culture in 

which they were made? 

2. Celebration-sense of transcendence promoted by physically encountering an object that made history. Accompanies commemorative 

44. Responses to curatorial questionnaire, author files, copy available in chronological publication files, NASA Historical Reference Collection, Washington, DC. 
SPACE ARTIFACTS: ARE THEY HISTORICAL EVIDENCE? 599 

or memorializing events, lends visibility and weight to these efforts 

(NASM legislation). 

3. Inspiration-evidence of challenges met or exceeded, handicaps overcome, struggles vindicated. Promotes insight into ways to illustrate 

basic principles of science and technology (Multhauf, Corn, Bolt). 

4. Illumination-preserves something about an historical event, era, or 

trend that, when means of interpretation are devised, provides additional knowledge that otherwise would not be available. Objects can 

survive for specific reasons, and searching out those reasons illuminates history (Corn, Lubar, Ceruzzi, Forman). 

5. Stimulation-the preservation of an object stimulates interest in it 

and efforts to learn about it and the history it symbolizes or represents. It also obligates those responsible for its curation to ensure that 

adequate documentation is collected and preserved to understand it in 

the future (Explorer VII, Forman, curatorial questionnaire). 

Of course, neither celebration nor inspiration actually requires the survival of an artifact, though it would clearly help. Even illumination and stimulation are possible without the real thing, though impact would be even more 

restrictive. Nothing but the actual object, however, can provide validationno facsimile, replica, reproduction, or description will ever suffice, although 

the survival of any of these items still stands testimony at some level. 

AFTERWORD 

If the survival of an artifact is useful to history in any of the five categories listed above, one still has to look beyond history to the institutions that 

house and somehow represent it to ask how they react to the suggestion that 

collections are important to their own survival. In a recent Smithsonian survey cited as significant by the Washington Post, 60 percent of the respondents 

claimed that they were visiting the Mall museums to see “the real thing,” 

whether it is Dorothy’s red shoes or the Apollo 11 capsule.45 The Post itself was 

concerned with what motivates programming at the Smithsonian in its efforts 

to overcome the tourist slump after 11 September 2001. Ironically, the part of 

45. “Smithsonian Institution Office of Planning and Analysis Report” (internal document, 

2004), quoted in J. Trescott, “The Smithsonian’s Concession to the Bottom Line,” Washifigton Post 

(13 April 2005): Al, A8. 
600 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

the Smithsonian being covered by the Post reporter and as reported by her, its 

Business Ventures arm, responded as if this fact gave it a “mandate” to push 

IMAX films, simulators, jazz concerts, and anything else it could imagine 

would raise revenues. The irony was, unfortunately, lost on the Post reporter. 

Yet the fact remains, the public, when asked in this instance, reified “the real 

thing” just as Hindle argued it should. This runs counter to opinions voiced 

by museum watchers and critics in studies over the past several years, who 

have claimed that, in the face of theme parks and Disneylands, public tastes 

have shifted “to immersion in an environment, to an appeal to all the senses, 

to action and interactivity, to excitement, and beyond that to aliveness.” And 

in response to this shift, many modern museums have “shifted their allegiance 

from real objects to real e~perience.”~~ Oddly, these are just the sorts of experiences that, at least in the case of Smithsonian Business Ventures, a museum 

can charge money for. No one knows if it is a viable strategy for long-term 

survival of these institutions as collecting agencies. 

46. Randolph Starn, “A Historian’s Brief Guide to New Museum Studies,” American Historical 

Review (February 2005): 92 (citing statements by David Lowenthal and Hilde S. Hein). 
SECTION VI1 

POSTSCRIPT 

AFTERWORD: 

COMMUNITY AND EXPLANATION IN SPACE HISTORY (?) 

Martin Collins 

The deep sign$cance of certain problemsfor the advance of mathematical science 

in general and the important role which they play in the work of the individual 

investigator are not to be denied. As long as a branch of science offers an abundance ofproblems, so long is it alive; a lack of problems foreshadows extinction 

or the cessation of independent development. Just as every human undertaking 

pursues certain objects, so also mathematical research requires its problems. It is 

by the solution ofproblems that the investigator tests the temper of his steel; he 

jinds new methods and new outlooks, and gains a wider andjeer horizon. 

-David Hilbert, “Mathematical Problems,” 1900 

ilbert, a pivotal figure in mathematics in the late 19th and early 20th cen- H turies, addressed these thoughts in 1900 to the International Congress 

of Mathematicians in Paris-a quadrennial, premier gathering of practitioners.’ In this year, poised at the crossing between centuries, Hilbert and his 

colleagues self-consciously took stock as to professional ethos, standards, and 

research. Holding center stage, Hilbert presented (in what was recognized 

then and since as) one of the most significant templates for research in mathematics, providing a conceptual outlook for his discipline and a list of 23 outstanding problems that engaged, in different ways, the foundations of the field. 

These problems, for Hilbert, served as vital links among practice, theory, and 

tacit notions of professional community-and, more broadly, connected all of 

these to European culture. 

Hilbert’s moment, of course, is not ours. The early modernist temperament, confidently ascendant, shines through-the application of reason seems 

to confiont few limits. Too, the “profession” as social and intellectual instrument 

1. David Hilbert, “Mathematical Problems: Lecture Delivered before the International Congress 

of Mathematicians at Paris in 1900” (trans. by Dr. Maby Winton Newson), Bulletin ofthe American 

Mathematical Society 8 (1902): 437-479. 
604 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

(with scientific disciplines as model) seems to promise a progressive, well-oiled 

engine to extend and secure reason’s reach-indefinitely. Hilbert’s moment 

reminds us of the arc (choose your geometric tracing) from then to now and 

of the undermining of that world’s foundational assumptions. Late modern 

and postmodern perspectives have made problematic the relationship among 

researcher, subject, and knowledge claims-the ontology and epistemology 

of the “true” and the “objective”-as well as the idea of the profession as selfcontained and self-regulated in its pursuits. 

Hilbert’s thoughts and their context provide one of many possible points 

of departure for reflecting on notions of discipline and profession in space history. The aim here is not an extended comparison with that earlier example, 

but a simple reminder of the history of these inventions and the complex of 

issues embedded within them. Nor is this afterword a critique of the seminar’s 

papers, separately or collectively, nor is it a meta-literature review. Rather, it 

is an attempt to foreground assumptions that lingered backstage in many of 

the papers, assumptions that speak to our sense of what space history is and 

does. The “(?)” in the title above signals one part of this examination: How 

and why we self-identify as “space history” rather than as space “something 

else”-and what such a choice implies. 

All of these bits of critique, of course, are right out of the big playbook of 

analytic moves-a (pseudo-) knowing voice taking us from background to foreground, dark to light, fuzzy to sharp-yet necessary and useful as part of thinking about “critical issues.”Reviews of this type are the rare occasions when“we” 

and “1”-as much as our subject matter-are preeminently our concern. 

This discussion will touch on two intertwined themes central to notions 

of discipline and profession (hereafter, for concision, I will use “discipline” 

to speak for both), yet largely submerged in this “Critical Issues” conference: 

community and explanation (our equivalent of Hilbert’s problems). The former, with a nod to Robert Merton, refers to norms and shared practices, and 

the latter to how we conceptually establish ourselves in relation to history and 

related disciplines and how we frame the aims of inquiry. In outline, these 

themes almost are banally familiar; in application to space history, they may 

illuminate “we” choices that should be explicit rather than implicit. 

COMMUNITY 

Is there something missing in our sense of community, in the way we 

approach our research domain? 

Such a question may seem off. The very fact ofthis seminar, ofa thoughtful 

focus on critical issues, signaled health and intellectual robustness. It reflected 

a shared interest (at least to the level of subject matter) among scholars from 

a range of disciplines. In narrative and argument, the individual papers were 
AFTERWORD: COMMUNITY AND EXPLANATION . . . 605 

“right on,” embodying a knowledgeable engagement with the best methodological practice. And as a topical map of the field, the seminar provided a 

thorough survey. 

Yet there were two prominent lacunae: a collective self-awareness and 

openness on the importance of methodology-of presenting, testing, and critiquing the conceptual tools that define a field as a domain of inquiry-und 

of the core aims of research. In short, the seminar shied away from “discipline”-of explicit correlation between methods and aims, a communal 

orientation and set of commitments that distinguish a discipline from a subject area. Open, systematic exchange, rumination, and struggle on points of 

method and explanatory focus (and attaching value to such) are integral to 

community practice within a discipline. To suggest the relative absence of 

such a mindset at the seminar is not to cast aspersion, but to bring to the fore 

an important choice: discipline (or more accurately, subdiscipline) or subject 

specialty? This choice was a largely unspoken tension within the seminar: we 

assumed discipline but performed as subject specialty. 

Does this distinction or choice matter? Space history as subject specialty 

can be commodious, welcoming a range of scholarship under a big tent-the 

seminar was a showcase. Under this mode of practice, we can learn from each 

other, then head back to our respective subfields-a kind of intellectual tourist 

model of research. And that may be enough. Space history best may be pursued as loose confederation sans discipline. But does the notion of discipline 

offer us opportunities worth considering? 1’11 highlight a few issues associated 

with method first, and then with aims and explanation. 

Method, of course, is not an end in itself. In recent years, its reputation has 

edged, on occasion, into a preoccupation with dreary, constant self-reference 

and culture-war comedy (recall Alan Sokal’s parody of postmodernism and 

deconstructionism in Social Text, a journal edited by the noted Stanley Fish).’ 

And, of course, to refer to method abstractly, without accounting for the 

many variants that have effloresced since the early 1960s, is to risk reduction 

and simplicity (Margaret Weitekamp’s essay, nonsimplistically, gives one overview of this landscape). But the point for us is primarily attitudinal-to note 

that a primary motivation for the boon in critique was a fundamental (and 

from a disciplinary perspective, necessary) question: How do we know and 

justify what we know (about the ~orld)?~ Taking that question seriously is not 

to turn historians (or other disciplines represented at the seminar) into phi2. Alan Sokal, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of 

Quantum Gravity,” Social Text 46/47 (1996): 217-252. 

3. For one recent overview of the centrality of epistemology and of the genealogy of critique in 

relation to the modern and postmodern, see Bruno Latour, “Has Critique Run Out of Steam: From 

Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern,” Critical Inquiry 30 (2004): 225-248. 
606 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

losophers, but to foreground the importance of method in any discipline’s 

practice-in establishing the constructs and categories through which we do 

research. Such a concern, for example, was at the heart of the formation of 

science and technology studies. There, method served two functions: to elevate epistemological issues as just noted and, equally important, as a focus for 

creating a sense of community among a congeries of disciplines. Method and 

explicit talk about method provided a means for drawing disciplines together 

and connecting and building on each community’s research perspectives. This 

orientation and the norm which is its corollary led to the designation of “studies” to characterize this research enterprise. 

With this “Critical Issues” seminar, space history, I think, faces, i la Yogi 

Berra, the simple recognition that there is indeed a fork in the road.4 The 

seminar was notable in that this norm regarding methodology (making how 

we do research as much a part of the discussion as the subject of research) was 

largely absent. How, for example, do we fruitfully interconnect history, political science, sociology, and policy studies (the four major disciplines represented at the seminar)? What are the issues arising from-the goals for-such 

interconnection? Are we after merely some vague expansion of “context”? Or 

can explanatory aims be integrated? Are there research projects that emerge 

from such interconnection that confront basic issues of historical change and 

explanation? To entertain these (or similar) questions is to probe the possibilities of discipline and space history as multidisciplinary crossroad. 

The supercilious “(?)” I keep pinning on the rump of space history is a suggestion that self-description matters-as it did with science and technology studies, women’s studies, and other domains of research-that it is a marker of our 

notion of community (subject specialty or [subldiscipline); goals; and organized, 

professional self-reflection. If we wish to emulate these examples, then we might 

rethink how we designate what we do-to self-identie in a way that embraces a 

range of disciplines in a common enterprise. Space history, hereafter in this essay, 

will stand, awkwardly, for history as well as a constellation of other disciplines 

interested in the cultural meaning and manifestations of space activity. 

Discipline is more than branding-as with that bygone image of the teacher 

rapping knuckles with a ruler, it imposes restraints, or, at the very least,“stop and 

think” road markers. One of those is a commitment to clarity in what methodological tools are in play and how they interrelate. In the seminar, this issue 

most often came to the fore in the several papers that sought to join a policy 

voice (concerned with the prescriptive and/or normative) and either a historical, political science, or sociological voice (concerned, primarily, with description and explanation). These two voices involve a different use of time and 

4. For those unfamiliar with Yogi Berra wisdom, the aphorism is: “If you come to a fork in the 

road, take it.” 
AFTERWORD: COMMUNITY AND EXPLANATION. . . 607 

tense, approach to conditionals and normative claims, and modes of argument. 

They have, succinctly, different narrative standards. To shifi casually between 

these narrative strategies is to muddy what is at stake analytically in space history 

as subject matter-and to blur the distinction between the methods and aims of 

explanation and the elucidation of options in service of policy. 

These concerns raise a deeper consideration regarding notions of discipline and space history: the stance of practitioners to subject matter and, 

especially, to participants in that subject matter. As noted by Roger Launius, 

many writers on space history conflate their research with a “fer it or agin it” 

normative stance on space exploration’s social or political value.5 The prevalence of this stance, of the conflation of the normative (which presumes at 

least a partial overlap between analytic practitioners and participants) with 

narrative explanation, is profoundly antidisciplinary-that is, undermines 

discipline’s formative characteristic: independence in intellectual standards.6 

In an important but not often cited essay, “Independence, not Transcendence, 

for the Historian of Science,” Paul Forman addressed a closely similar set of 

relations in history of science.’ His argument was that for history of science 

to be history of science it had to frame questions, methods, and aims distinct 

from those of science. History of science, if it was to be a profession (sporting 

more than the social trappings of self-regulation), had to separate itself from 

providing social and intellectual justification for (or dismantling of) science 

and scientists’ self-image. It had to be thoroughly, completely historical. The 

thick veins of a similar predicament run through space history. If space history 

leans toward discipline rather than subject specialty, then issues of practice and 

boundary setting will need to come to the fore. 

EXPLANATION 

Let’s take as given that understanding and explaining change-socially, 

culturally, historically-is a fundamental task of our effort, that description 

and causality loom large. To think in terms of discipline, then, is to ask in 

what ways space history might define its research domain and to focus an 

5. Roger D. Launius, “The Historical Dimension of Space Exploration: Reflections and 

Possibilities,” Space Policy 16 (2000): 23-38. 

6. This point is not to say that history cannot be “useful” or be applied to a wide range ofcultural 

concerns. The notion of utility, too, has been a central methodological issue for sociology and political science since their formation as disciplines in the 19th century. The issue is whether “usefulness” 

provides the right intellectual basis for a discipline that aims toward explanation. For one of the most 

prominent statements on history and its application, see Richard Neustadt and Ernest May, Thinking 

in Time: The Uses of Historyfor Decision-Makers (New York. Free Press; London: Collier Macmdlan, 

1986). Importantly, for Neustadt, “usefulness” is a byproduct of disciplinarity, not an aim. 

7. Paul Forman, “Independence, not Transcendence, for the Historian of Science,” Isis 82 (1991): 

71-86. 
608 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

explanatory enterprise.’ In contrast to space history as subject specialty, this 

slight shift of the kaleidoscope has ramifications. 

Consider Walter McDougall’s seminal . . . The Heavens and the Eavth? This 

work, I think, is most often viewed as an exemplar of contextualization, of 

rescuing space history from the modalities of program and institutional history 

and binding the subject to the perspectives of diplomatic history and political science. For McDougall, the emergence of spaceflight was not a subplot, 

but a major narrative thread of the all-encompassing drama of the Cold War. 

Less noted, but more germane here, is that McDougall’s work was not merely 

context-expanding and thesis-driven, but broadly explanatory-an identifiable 

set of causes (preeminently ideology, new social/technical tools associated with 

systems thinking, and an uptick in the concentration of power in the federal 

government and willingness to apply it-in combination, technocracy) structured historical description and shaped historical change on a broad cultural 

scale. It was an explanatory framework that, with national variations, provided 

a common way of seeing events in the U.S., USSR, and Europe and that yielded 

good, scholarly fruit: a coherent (albeit contestable) notion of period.” 

It is a revealing feature of space history scholarship that this call to explanation generated little to no resonance in the community.” The work was 

absorbed into mantras for “context” (an improvement over “internalism,” but 

still a half-rigorous notion for a research program) and into quasi-policy research 

agendas (Why did spaceflight diminish in the U.S.’s political agenda?). Vestigial 

trails of this absorption were evident throughout the seminar. Embedded in 

this stance is a stultifying (and unexamined) research proposition: that with 

the undoing of the 1960s framework for spaceflight, space history itself has no 

deep relation to explanatory accounts of change in the world after 1970 and, 

thus, provides no distinctive vantage onto recent history. Or, stated somewhat 

differently, the field has no overarching explanatory outlook. 

8. For adherents to history-as-special-kind-of-narrative, explanation as an aim of inquiry is not 

a given. The description versus explanation stands in history have, well, a tangled history. The 

best account, seen through the lens of the “objective,” is Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The 

“Objectivity Question” and the Amencan Historical Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 

1988) For an enlightening but philosophically muddled defense of description and its relation to 

explanation, see Allan Megill, “Recounting the Past: ‘Description,’ Explanation and Narrative in 

Historiography,” American Historical Review 94 (1989). 627-653. 

9. Walter A. McDougall, The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age (New 

York: Basic Books, 1985). 

10. These views were more succinctly argued in an earlier essay: Walter McDougall, “Technocracy 

and Statecraft in the Space Age: Toward the History of a Saltation,” American Historical Review 87 

11. To be clear: My claim is that the space history literature seems to have had little interest in 

the explanatory element of McDougall’s work. Science and technology studies, Cold War studies, 

and diplomatic history did engage and integrate the issues of explanation posed by McDougall into 

the problematics of their respective fields. 

(1982): 1010-1040. 
AFTERWORD: COMMUNITY AND EXPLANATION.. 409 

If this is true, then space history is history at the margins-or, more 

generously, serves as a source of case studies for other disciplinary projects 

(for example, for sociology in understanding organizations that manage risk 

or pursue complex problems, or for political science in unpacking decisionmaking in technology-infused modern polities) or as a site for exploring 

important but largely disaggregated themes: exploration, innovation, and 

so on. This may be the proper research stance-but it should be arrived at 

through open examination, not happenstance. If space history is to have a selfidentity, to be discipline-oriented, then a concern with explanation, with the 

relation of space history to macrostructures of change, seems a crucial starting 

point. This is not to say that the only ’‘good’’ history is grandly explanatory, 

that theory reigns over the hard work of research-but rather that models of 

explanation, and debate about them, are central to discipline.” 

Perhaps, historiographically, the Cold War lulled us into anticipating 

an explanatory framework (in that case, the centrality of state action joined 

to an overweening interest in science and technology) that was conceptually 

straightforward, yet capable of informing and being informed by a variety 

of “local” histories. Is there an explanatory framework, post-Heavens and 

the Earth, which offers us the start of a (contingent) synthetic view of space 

history and currents of change in recent decades? Significantly, McDougall 

hinted at the necessity of new interpretive frames nearly contemporaneously with publication of Heavens and the Earth in his article “Space-Age 

Europe: Gaullism, Euro-Gaullism, and the American Dilemma.”13 Here he 

argued that to comprehend the European approach to space, the market as 

well as the state needed to be incorporated into post-Apollo and broadly 

geopolitical analyses. 

But a deeper, sustained response to the problem of post-World War I1 

periodization arose in other scholarly quarters-in sociology, literary criticism, and philosophy-as part of the tangled reflections on demarcating 

the modern from the postmodern. For discussion and to retain a focus on 

explanation in space history, I will pull only a few threads G-om this skein. 

Postmodernism (by no means monolithic) is best known for its epistemological and ontological claims, particularly Francois Lyotard’s dictum that grand 

narratives (transcendent certainties about human nature, culture, knowledge 

12. Exemplars ofsuch history abound in which explanation, problems, research, cases, and debate 

create a disciplinary ecology. A beautiful recent snapshot of such scholarship is captured in Leonard 

Rosenband’s retrospective on David Landes’s seminal The Unbound Prometheus: Leonard Rosenband, 

“Never Just Business: David Landes, The Unbound Prometheus,” Technology and Culture 46 (2005): 

168-176. Seminar contributor Phil Scranton has been at the center of a related research ecology for 

most of his career through his scholarship on innovation, business, and U.S. industrialization. 

13. Walter A. McDougall, “Space-Age Europe: Gaullism, Euro-Gaullism, and the American 

Dilemma,” Technology and Culture 26 (1985): 179-203. 
610 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

of the “real”) no longer could withstand ~crutiny.’~ But, more important for 

our purpose here, it advances a set of causes that provide tentative reference 

points for description and explanation of contemporary culture (generally, 

and not coincidentally for space history, taking the 1970s as watershed). And 

these causes that shape the postmodern condition ring familiar: that, relatively, economic and political power have shifted from states to markets; that 

communications technologies and systems (and that large-scale technological 

systems of many types) have been integral to this shift; and that, in combination, these factors have remapped processes of cultural production, changing 

the ways in which states, corporations, communities, ethnic groups, and individuals exercise power and create identities. The acceleration of actions and 

reactions across national borders, of the collapse of geographic distance, of 

the sense that everyone and every place potentially seem proximate become, 

in this frame, distinctive features of a global cultural landscape. This new 

condition mirrors, with steroids injected, McLuhan’s infamous “global village,” a notion partially rooted in the beginnings of the Space Age. That 

postmodernism has attempted to specify a template of material causes for such 

phenomena is not too surprising. The leading exponents draw heavily on the 

Marxist intellectual tradition that links base to superstructure, economics to 

~ulture.’~ Too, in considering causes and explanation, postmodernism must be 

seen in conjunction with its close cousin, globalism. The two roughly map 

onto each other-but with one important difference in emphasis: globalism 

addresses more directly the functioning of political and economic power on 

the transnational stage, particularly as regards the U.S. dominant position in 

the aftermath of the Cold War. 

Should these turns of thinking be of interest to space history? Readers 

already will have their pointy objects handy to prick the above notions of any 

seeming juice;-at minimum, we might skeptically ask if such causal assertions have empirical weight. But as a set of ideas, as a heuristic, I think this 

framework is provocative for space history, suggesting ways to explore notions 

of causation and change that (re)integrate the field into broader structures of 

meaning and reconceptualize our sense of the problem map of the field.“ 

14. See Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis: 

University ofMinnesota, 1984 [originally published in 1979]), and Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, 

or, The Cultural Logic ofLate Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991). 

15. The most lucid and extended account of the interconnections among epistemology, causes, 

and cultural effects in the postmodern is David Harvey, The Condition ~~Postmodernity: An Enquiry 

into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford, England: Basil Blackwell, 1989). 

16. One case study that attempts to connect space history with the interpretive frames of postmodernism and globalism is Peter Redfield, “The Half-Life of Empire in Outer-Space,” Social 

Studies ofScience 32 (2002): 791-825. See also Martin Collins, “One World . . . One Telephone: 

Iridium, One Look at the Making ofa Global Age,” History and Technology 21 (2005): 301-324. 
AFTERWORD: COMMUNITY AND EXPLANATION. . . 61 1 

At a simple level of correspondence, elements of space activity seem 

central to postmodern/global analysis: a variety of space-based transnational 

technical systems-communications, navigation, and surveillance and monitoring-are implicated in their material and causal account of the how and 

why of recent cultural change. Notably, these applied space systems-with 

origins in markets, civilian government, and military and intelligence agencies-have not been, relatively, the center of policy debate (at least in the 

U.S.), nor the perceived strategic focus of scholarship. Through the lens of 

postmodernism/globalism, though, one is inclined to start from the proposition that these undertakings, individually and collectively, are crucial sites 

for research, for understanding the very composition of a post-1960s world 

order. This emphasis on the applied, on systems of culture and technology that 

intersect with the global “everyday” (including constructions of power and 

identity), if taken seriously, de-centers NASA and human space exploration as 

the signature markers of geopolitics-an orientation that aligns with the halting course of decisions and funding in post-Moon-landing space history-yet 

provides a rich, alternative framework for making the “international” a central area of investigation. 

Conceptually, postmodernism and globalism, too, reemphasize, in comparison to the focus on state-centered accounts in Cold War space history, the 

centrality of markets and culture (in particular, their distinctive interrelation in 

the postmodern) as loci of change. To say this is almost to be “history 101” obvious. But the persistent legacy of Cold War literature seems to have pushed the 

obvious to the margins. Regarding markets, postmodernism/globalism highlights the issue of developing better accounts of state-market configurations in 

the post-Moon-landing years as a means to situate all space activities, including 

human space exploration. Thus considered, NASA’s travails in the 1970s and 

after might be examined as part of a broader framework of change, rather than 

as (often, normatively, bemoaned) exemplars of half-measure policy-making 

and institutional diminishment. This, I think, put somewhat differently, is Asif 

Siddiqi’s point on the “problem” of Apollo in space history scholarship. 

Regarding culture, postmodernism points us to a fundamental (and not 

yet fully articulated) question in the field: How do we analytically frame 

the interconnections between space activity and culture? Is this primarily a 

dynamic in which cultural tropes broadly circulate to be plucked, adopted, 

and made instrumental by a range of groups (individuals, civil associations, 

markets, government)? Is such a process marked by a mutual perfusion of the 

real and fictional-with broad consequences for creators and consumers of 

space-related cultural productions? Or, more narrowly, is space culture merely 

an overlay, a gloss, a distraction from the meaty acts of political and business 

decision-making? In considering such questions, postmodernism advances 

an important claim: that culture, especially in the post-World War I1 years, 
612 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

serves not primarily as a set of restraints but becomes an active instrument, a 

resource to be deployed by the powerful and, in the information age, by the 

less powerful. Culture, thus, is not only precepts, assumptions, ways of doing, 

but is as protean and purpose-driven as capital-and is as central to macrostructures of change.” Seen from this angle, culture is not a side motif in space 

history, but a central explanatory problem. 

These reflections are not meant to suggest that we swallow the bait and 

barb of postmodernism and globalism claims without care. Rather it is, first 

and foremost, to point to the value of generating our own conscientious 

engagement with scholarly discussions of historical change-with a suggestion that postmodernism and globalism make provocative foils. Second, it is 

to acknowledge the special place of historical (and other) research in situating and grounding explanatory claims in the empirical. This latter task is not 

insignificant. In the case of postmodernism/globalism, an outlook primarily 

developed by disciplines other than history, it theorizes about but often fails to 

engage the tough actualities of how technology, markets, states, and cultures 

17. A little more needs to be said here. Consider two prominent definitions of culture. 

First, Clifford Geertz: “The concept of culture I espouse . . . is essentially a semiotic one. 

Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself 

has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretative one in search of meaning. It is explication I am 

after . ” (Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays [New York. Basic Books, 

Second, Raymond Williams: “Culture is ordinary: that is the first fact. Every human society has 

its own shape, its own purposes, its own meanings. Every human society expresses these, in institutions, and in arts and learning. The making of a society is the finding of common meanings and 

directions, and its growth is an active debate and amendment under the pressures of experience, 

contact, and discovery, writing themselves into the land. The growing society is there, yet it is also 

made and remade in every individual mind. The making of a mind is, first, the slow learning of 

shapes, purposes, and meanings, so that work, observation and communication are possible. Then, 

second, but equal in importance, is the testing of these in experience, the making of new observations, comparisons, and meanings. A culture has two aspects: the known meanings and directions, 

which its members are trained to; the new observations and meanings, which are offered and 

tested. These are the ordinary processes of human societies and human minds, and we see through 

them the nature of a culture: that it is always both traditional and creative; that it is both the most 

ordinary common meanings and the finest individual meanings” (Raymond Williams, Culture and 

Soctefy [New York: Columbia University Press, 19581). 

These notions of culture were used implicitly and effectively in a number ofthe essays, especially 

in those that focused on institutions and communities (including those by Diane Vaughan, Todd 

La Porte, Phil Scranton, and Alexander Brown). Postmodernism/globalism does not upend these 

analytic frameworks but does claim that “capital” and new communications technologies (to be 

unwarrantedly deterministic) have assumed an enhanced role in lifting and disconnecting cultural 

products from their local settings, resulting in two strata of culture. that associated with capital and 

global information flows and that associated with the “traditional” and the local. This dynamic 

is the core idea in a range of global “clash” literature, including work by Samuel Huntington, 

Bernard Barber, and Thomas Friedman. 

19731, pp. 4-5). 
AN AFTERWORD. 613 

interrelate, of how technological innovation occurs and integrates with culture, and of how the local and global are variously co-related. 

But those are tepid aspirations and disciplinary goals. More, I think, postmodernism and globalism highlight the ways in which space and associated 

undertakings are central to the modern condition, and provide crucial sites 

of research for an explanatory enterprise. Three longstanding, deep culturaltechnical themes of space history-exploration, control, and systems-also 

are integral to unpacking and giving substance to postmodern and globalism 

accounts. Space history, too, raises issues that these literatures largely sidestep: for example (and crucially), analytic engagement with the meaning and 

import of military and intelligence space activities (especially in relation to the 

U.S.). The scale of these activities (in terms of funding, geospatial reach, and 

range of technologies) and, for a significant fraction, their relative invisibility 

behind barriers of security classification, pose important issues for models that 

seek to interconnect states, markets, and global technical systems. As Stephen 

Johnson’s essay ably and starkly details, great chunks of military and intelligence space activity are shadowed. The emphasis in the postmodern has been 

on the public transnational modalities of interconnection. But what are we to 

make of the largely secret global systems of surveillance and control, of their 

interconnections with markets, of their integration into models of explanation 

and change? Given classification barriers, this now may be an unresearchable 

question, but as a discipline, it is of the first consequence to pose it.18 

I have offered here at least two layers of idiosyncrasy: my own reading 

of the present state of the field and of possible responses and questions that ask 

us to consider the implications of subject specialty versus discipline. My goal 

here was not to make the case for a particular formulation of community, but 

to argue that we face a substantive choice-and that space history possesses 

the intellectual heft to make that choice important. We have come to a fork 

in the road. Take it. 

18. An important reconnaissance of this problem in the Cold War and after (especially post-9/11) 

is Peter Galison, “Removing Knowledge,” Critrcal Inquiry 31 (2004): 229-243. On the comparative scope of unclassified and classified information in the United States, the money quotation is: 

“In fact, the classified universe, as it is sometimes called, IS certainly not smaller and very probably 

much larger than this unclassified one” (p. 229). The “unclassified one” that Galison uses as a point 

of reference is the total estimated page count of all material in the Library of Congress: 7.5 billion 

pages. The significance of classified activity in understanding the Cold War or “postmodern” eras 

is yet to be fully mapped. 

ABOUT THE AUTHORS 

Alexander Brown is a graduate student in MIT's Program in Science, 

Technology and Society. His research examines changing engineering 

practice from the 1960s to the 1990s. Using accidents and their investigations 

as a lens, he examines the changing cultures of engineering within NASA. 

He is tracking changes in engineering practices from Apollo 1 to Challenger 

to Columbia. 

Andrew J. Butrica earned his Ph.D. in history of technology and science 

from Iowa State University in 1986. He then worked at the Thomas A. Edison 

Papers Project and the Center for Research in the History of Science and 

Technology in Paris. Subsequently, as a contract historian, he has researched 

and written Out of Thin Air, a history of Air Products and Chemicals, Inc., 

a Fortune 500 firm; Beyond the Ionosphere, a history of satellite communications; To See the Unseen, a history ofplanetary radar astronomy, which won the 

Leopold Prize of the Organization of American Historians; and Single Stage 

To Orbit: Politics, Space Technology, and the Quest for Reusable Rocketry, which 

was recently published by Johns Hopkins University Press and won the 2005 

Michael C. Robinson Prize of the National Council on Public History. In 

addition, he was the historian on NASA's X-33 Program and currently is a 

historian on the Defense Acquisition History Project responsible for researching and writing the fourth volume of From the Reagan Buildup to the End ofthe 

Cold War, 2981-2990. 

Martin J. Collins is a curator in the Smithsonian National Air and Space 

Museum. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Maryland in history 

of science and technology. Book publications include Cold War Laboratory: 

RAND, the Air Force, and the American State (2002) and Showcasing Space, edited 

with Douglas Millard, volume 6 of the Artefacts series: Studies in the History 

of Science and Technology (2005). He is currently working on a history of 

the Iridium satellite telephone venture. 

David H. DeVorkin is presently the curator of the history of astronomy and 

the space sciences within the Department of Space History at the National 

Air and Space Museum (NASM). He was brought to NASM in January 1981 

as an associate curator, and in the interim, he has held the positions of both 

acting chairman of the Space Science and Exploration Department (1983-84) 
616 CRITICAL ISSUES INTHE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

and chairman ofthe department (1984-86). Since 1985, he has held the concurrent position of chairman of the Advisory Committee to the Smithsonian 

Videohistory Program, and he spent the summer and fall of 1991 as a visiting member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. His major 

research interests are in the origins and development of modern astrophysics 

during the 20th century and the origins of the space sciences in the V-2 and 

early Aerobee eras through the International Geophysical Year (IGY). He 

specializes as well in the history of space astronomy and in the government 

patronage of science in the postwar era. He recently has published a major 

biography of the Princeton astronomer Henry Norris Russell, which has been 

critically acclaimed. DeVorkin has authored over 100 scholarly papers and has 

authored, edited, or compiled 9 monographs in the history of, and education 

in, astronomy and the space sciences. His works have appeared in theJourna1 

for the History of Astronomy, Sky G Telescope, his, Scientific American, Minerva, 

Science, Historical Studies in the Ph cal Sciences, Physics Today, and elsewhere. 

He holds a P1.D. in the history science from the University of Leicester 

(1978), a master of philosophy in astronomy from Yale (1970), an M.S. in 

astronomy from San Diego State College (1968), and a B.S. in astronomy/ 

physics from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) (1966). His 

present external and research activities are supported by an ongoing National 

Science Foundation (NSF) grant and a newly approved scholar’s grant from 

NSF (with Patrick McCray). An educational outreach grant from NASA is 

pending. His present major contract is with National Geographic for a book 

on the Hubble Space Telescope. 

Steven J. Dick is the Chief Historian for NASA. He obtained his B.S. in 

astrophysics (1971) and his M.A. and Ph.D. (1977) in history and philosophy 

of science from Indiana University. He worked as an astronomer and historian of science at the U.S. Naval Observatory in Washington, DC, for 24 

years before coming to NASA Headquarters in 2003. Among his books are 

Plurality of Worlds: The Origins of the Extraterrestrial Lij2 Debate from Democritus 

to Kant (1982), The Biological Universe: The Twentieth Century Extraterrestrial 

Lij2 Debate and the Limits ofscience (1996), and Lije on Other Worlds (1998). 

The last book has been translated into Chinese, Italian, Czech, and Polish. 

His most recent books are The Living Universe: NASA and the Development of 

Astrobiology (2004) and a comprehensive history of the U.S. Naval Observatory, 

Sky and Ocean Joined: The U.S. Naval Observatory, 1830-2000 (2003). The 

latter received the Pendleton Prize of the Society for History in the Federal 

Government. He also is editor of Many Worlds: The New Universe, Extraterrestrial 

Lij2 and the Theological Implications (2000) and (with Keith Cowing) of the 

proceedings of the NASA Administrator’s symposium Risk and Exploration: 

Earth, Sea and the Stars (2005). He is the recipient of the Navy Meritorious 
ABOUT THE AUTHORS 617 

Civilian Service Medal. He received the NASA Group Achievement Award 

for his role in NASA’s multidisciplinary program in astrobiology. He has 

served as chairman of the Historical Astronomy Division of the American 

Astronomical Society and as president of the History of Astronomy 

Commission of the International Astronomical Union, and he is the immediate past president of the Philosophical Society of Washington. He is also a 

member of the International Academy of Astronautics. 

Slava Gerovitch received two doctorates in the history of science and 

technology from the Russian Academy of Sciences (1992) and from MIT 

(1999). His book From Newspeak to Cyberspeak: A History ofSoviet Cybernetics 

(2002) received an honorable mention from the American Association for the 

Advancement of Slavic Studies for an outstanding monograph in Russian, 

Eurasian, or East European studies. He published articles on the history and 

historiography of Soviet science and technology in the journals Technology and 

Culture, Social Studies of Science, and the Russian Review, and in the collections 

Science and Ideology, Cultures of Control, and Universities and Empire. Currently, 

he is a research associate at the Dibner Institute for the History of Science 

and Technology at MIT, serving as the principal investigator on the NSFfunded project “Trusting the Machine: Onboard Computing, Automation, 

and Human Control in the Soviet Space Program.” 

Peter L. Hays is a policy analyst supporting the planning integration division 

of the National Security Space Office. A retired lieutenant colonel with 25 

years of service in the U.S. Air Force (USAF), his previous positions include 

executive editor of Joint Force Quarterly, professor at the School of Advanced 

Airpower Studies (SAAS), associate professor of political science and division 

chief for the international relations and defense policy curriculum, and director of the USAF Institute for National Security Studies. He holds Ph.D. and 

M.A.L.D. degrees in international relations from the Fletcher School of Law 

and Diplomacy at Tufts University and an M.A. in defense and strategic studies from the University of Southern California. A 1979 honor graduate of the 

USAF Academy, Hays was a command pilot with over 3,200 hours of flying 

time, primarily in the C-141 Starlifter. He has focused his studies and research 

on U.S. national security space policy by developing space policy courses 

at the USAF Academy, SAAS, National Defense University, and George 

Washington University; serving as a research assistant at the White House 

Office of Science and Technology Policy and the National Space Council; 

and writing a dissertation on the U.S. military space doctrine. Hays is author 

of United States Military Space (2002) and is a coeditor of Space Powerfor a 

New Millennium (2000), Countering the Prol$+ration and Use of Weapons ofMass 

Destruction (1998), and the seventh edition of American Defense Policy (1997). 
618 CRITICAL ISSUES INTHE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

Stephen Johnson is an associate professor in the Space Studies Department 

of the University of North Dakota (UND) teaching military space, space history, and management and economics of space endeavors. He is the author of 

The United States Air Force and the Culture oflnnovation, 1945-1965 (2002) and 

The Secret ofApollo: Systems Management in American and European Space Programs 

(2002). He is also the editor of Quest: The History of Spaceflight Quarterly. 

His current research involves the development of cognitive psychology and 

artificial intelligence, space industry management and economics, dependable system design, and the history of space science and technology. Prior to 

coming to UND, he worked in the aerospace industry for 15 years, managing computer simulation laboratories, designing space probes, and developing 

engineering processes. He received his doctorate in 1997 in the history of science and technology from the University of Minnesota, where he was also the 

associate director of the Babbage Institute for the histoky of computing. 

John Krige is the Kranzberg Professor in the School of History,Technology, and 

Society at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia; for academic 

year 2004-05, he was the Charles A. Lindbergh Professor at the National Air 

and Space Museum in Washington, DC. His historical interest is in the relations 

between science, technology, and foreign policy in the first two decades of the 

Cold War. He has coauthored a three-volume history of CERN, the European 

Organization for Nuclear Research, and a two-volume history of ESA, the 

European Space Agency. Krige serves on the editorial board of several international journals and is the executive editor of History and Technology, published by 

Routledge. His most recent book, American Hegemony and the Postwar Reconstruction 

of Science in Europe, is scheduled for publication by MIT Press in 2006. He currently is working on U.S.-European relations in the field of rocketry. 

Todd R. La Porte has been a professor of political science at the University 

of California, Berkeley, since 1965, where he was also associate director of 

the Institute of Governmental Studies (1973-88). He received his B.A. from 

the University of Dubuque (1953) and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Stanford 

University (1962). He also held faculty posts at the University of Southern 

California and Stanford University. He teaches and publishes in the areas of 

organization theory; technology and politics (and assessment); and the organizational and decision-making dynamics of large, complex, technologically 

intensive organizations, as well as public attitudes toward advanced technologies and the problems of governance in a technological society. He was a 

principal of the Berkeley High Reliability Organization Project, a multidisciplinary team that studied the organizational aspects of safety-critical systems such as nuclear power, air traffic control, and nuclear aircraft carriers. 

Currently, his research concerns the evolution of large-scale organizations 
BIOGRAPHIES 619 

operating technologies demanding a very high level of reliable (nearly failurefree) performance and the relationship of large-scale technical systems to 

political legitimacy, especially in the nuclear domain. This took him to Los 

Alamos National Laboratory (1998-2003) to examine the institutional challenges of multigeneration nuclear missions. He was elected to the National 

Academy of Public Administration (1985) and was a Fellow at the Woodrow 

Wilson International Center for Scholars, Smithsonian Institution, and 

Research Fellow at the Wissenschaftszentrum (Sciences Center), Berlin, and 

the Max Planck Institute for Social Research, Cologne. He has been a member 

of the Board on Radioactive Waste Management and served on panels of the 

Committee on Human Factors and Transportation Research Board, National 

Academy of Sciences. He served on the Secretary of Energy Advisory Board, 

Department of Energy, and chaired its Task Force on Radioactive Waste 

Management, examining questions of institutional trustworthiness; he also 

was on the Technical Review Committee, Nuclear Materials Technology 

Division, Los Alamos National Laboratory. Additionally, he has served as 

a member of the Committee on Long-Term Institutional Management 

of Department of Energy (DOE) Legacy Waste Sites: Phase Two and the 

Committee on Principles and Operational Strategies for Staged Repository 

Systems, both of the Board on Radioactive Waste Management, National 

Academy of Sciences (2001-03). He is currently a faculty affiliate, Decision 

Science Division, Los Alamos National Laboratory. 

Roger D. Launius is Chair ofthe Division ofspace History at the Smithsonian 

Institution’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC. Between 

1990 and 2002, he served as Chief Historian of NASA. A graduate of Graceland 

College in Lamoni, Iowa, he received his Ph.D. from Louisiana State University, 

Baton Rouge, in 1982. He has written or edited more than 20 books on aerospace history, including Space: A Journey to Our Future (2004); Space Stations: Base 

Camps to the Stars (2003), which received the American Institute of Aeronautics 

and Astronautics’ (AIAA’s) history manuscript prize; Flight: A Celebration of 100 

Years in Art and Literature (2003); Reconsidering a Century of Flight (2003); To 

Reach the High Frontier: A History 0fU.S. Launch Vehicles (2002); Imagining Space: 

Achievements, Possibilities, Projections, 1950-2050 (2001); Reconsidering Sputnik: 

Forty Years Since the Soviet Satellite (2000); Innovation and the Development $Flight 

(1999); Frontiers of Space Exploration (1998; rev. ed., 2004); Spacejight and the 

Myth of Presidential Leadership (1997); and NASA: A History of the U.S. Civil 

Space Program (1994; rev. ed., 2001). He is frequently consulted by the electronic 

and print media for his views on space issues. His research interests encompass 

all areas of U.S. and space history and policy history, especially cultural aspects 

of the subject and the role of executive decision-makers and their efforts to 

define space exploration. 
620 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

John M. Logsdon is the director of the Space Policy Institute at George 

Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs, where he is also 

a professor of political science and international affairs. He holds a B.S. in physics from Xavier University (1960) and a Ph.D. in political science fi-om New 

York University (1970). Dr. Logsdon’s research interests focus on the policy and 

historical aspects of U.S. and international space activities. Dr. Logsdon is the 

author of The Decision to Go to the Moon: Project Apollo and the National Interest 

and is general editor of the eight-volume series Exploring the Unknown: Selected 

Documents in the History ofthe U. S. Civil Space Program. He has written numerous 

articles and reports on space policy and history. He is frequently consulted by the 

electronic and print media for his views on space issues. Dr. Logsdon recently 

served as a member of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board. He is a 

former member of the NASA Advisory Council and a current member of the 

Commercial Space Transportation Advisory Committee of the Department of 

Transportation. He is a recipient of the NASA Distinguished Public Service and 

Public Service Medals and a Fellow of the American Institute ofAeronautics and 

Astronautics and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. 

Howard McCurdy is a professor of public affairs and chair of the Public 

Administration Department at American University in Washington, DC. An 

expert on space policy, he recently authored Faster, Better, Cheaper, a critical analysis of cost-cutting initiatives in the U.S. space program. An earlier 

study of NASA’s organizational culture, Inside NASA, won the 1994 Henry 

Adams prize for that year’s best history on the federal government. He also 

has written Space and the American Imagination and coedited SpaceJEight and the 

Myth of Presidential Leadership. His work appears in scholarly journals such 

as Public Administration Review and Space Policy. He is often consulted by the 

media on public policy issues and has appeared on national news outlets such 

as the NewsHour withJim Lehrer, National Public Radio, and NBC Nightly 

News. Professor McCurdy received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from 

the University of Washington and his doctorate from Cornel1 University. 

David A. Mindell is Dibner Professor of the History of Engineering and 

Manufacturing and Professor of Engineering Systems at MIT. He is the founder 

and director of MIT’s “DeepArch” research group in technology, archaeology, 

and the deep sea. His research interests include technology policy (historical 

and current), the history of automation in the military, the history of electronics and computing, new theories of engineering systems, deep-ocean robotic 

archaeology, and the history of space exploration. His book War, Technology, and 

Experience aboard the USS Monitor was published in April 2000 by Johns Hopkins 

University Press. His second book, Between Human and Machine: Feedback, 

Control, and Computing before Cybernetics, was published in the spring of 2002. 
ABOUTHE AUTHORS 62 1 

Mindell is currently researching a book on the history of the Apollo Guidance 

Computer that guided the astronauts to the Moon. From 1992 to 1995, Mindell 

was a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellow, and from 1995 to 1996, he 

was a Fellow at the Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology 

at MIT. He is an adjunct researcher at the Institute for Exploration. Before coming to MIT, Mindell worked as a research engineer in the Deep Submergence 

Laboratory of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, where he is currently a visiting investigator. Mindell has consulted on engineering and policy 

for a number of industrial and research organizations, including the National 

Academy of Sciences. He has degrees in literature and electrical engineering 

from Yale University and a doctorate in the history of technology from MIT. 

Stephen Pyne is a professor with the human dimensions faculty in the School 

of Life Sciences at Arizona State University, where he teaches courses on 

environmental history; the history of exploration; and the history, ecology, 

and management of fire. He is the author of 16 books, which mostly concern 

the history of fire on Earth. Of the others, three develop themes in the history 

of science and exploration (Grove Karl Gilbert, The Ice: A Journey to Antarctica, 

and How the Canyon Became Grand), as have several essays on space exploration. He is currently writing a fire history of Canada. 

Philip Scranton is Board of Governors Professor in history of industry and 

technology at Rutgers University and director of the Center for the History 

of Business, Technology, and Society at the Hagley Museum and Library. He 

edits a monograph series, Studies in Industry and Society, for the Johns Hopkins 

University Press and coedits a collected-essays series, Hagley Perspectives in 

Business and Culture, for the University of Pennsylvania Press. He is author, 

coauthor, or editor of nine books; serves as a consultant for historical museums and public programming; and, most recently, held the Charles Lindbergh 

Chair (2003-04) at the National Air and Space Museum. His current project 

focuses on Cold War innovation and specialty production, especially regarding jet propulsion, NASA space capsules, instrumentation, and the new materials “explosion” in and following the Second World War. 

Asif Siddiqi received his Ph.D. in history from Carnegie Mellon University 

in 2004. He specializes in the history of science and technology with a focus 

on the history of astronautics. He is the author of Challenge to Apollo: The 

Soviet Union and the Space Race, 1945-1974 (2000) and the series editor for 

Rockets and People, the four-volume memoirs of Russian space engineer Boris 

Chertok. He is currently a Visiting Fellow in the American Academy of Arts 

& Sciences in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and took up a position as assistant 

professor of history at Fordham University in New York in the fall of 2004. 
622 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

Diane Vaughan received her Ph.D. in sociology from Ohio State University 

in 1979 and began teaching at Boston College in 1982, where she is now a professor of sociology. She has been awarded fellowships at Yale (1979-82), Centre 

for Socio-Legal Studies, Oxford (1986-87), the American Bar Foundation 

(1988-89), the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton (1996-97), and the 

John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (2003-04). Her areas of specialization are the sociology of organizations; sociology of culture; deviance 

and social control; field methods; research design; and science, knowledge, and 

technology. Much of her research has examined the “dark side” of organizations: mistake, misconduct, and disaster. In 2003, she worked with the Columbia 

Accident Investigation Board on their analysis and report on the loss of the 

Space Shuttle Columbia. Her books include Controlling Unlawful Organizational 

Behavior, Uncoupling, and The Challenger Launch Decision, which was awarded the 

Rachel Carson Prize, the Robert K. Merton Award, and Honorable Mention 

for Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship of the American Sociological 

Association, and was nominated for the National Book Award and Pulitzer 

Prize. Her current projects are Theorizing: Analogy, Cases, and Comparative Social 

Organization and Dead Reckoning: Air Trafic Control in the Early 21st Century. 

Margaret A. Weitekamp earned her B.A. summa cum laude from the 

University of Pittsburgh and her Ph.D. in history at Cornel1 University in 

May 2001. Currently, she is a curator in the Division of Space History at the 

National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution, in Washington, 

DC. There, she oversees the “Social and Cultural Dimensions of Spaceflight” 

collection, almost 3,500 individual pieces of space memorabilia and space science fiction objects. These social and cultural products of the Space Ageeverything from toys and games to clothing and stamps, medals and awards, 

buttons and pins, and even comics and trading cards-complete the story 

about spaceflight told by the museum’s collection of space technologies. Her 

first book, Right StuJ Wrong Sex: America’s First Women in Space Program, was 

published by the Johns Hopkins University Press as a part of the Gender 

Relations in the American Experience series in November 2004. The book 

investigates shifting ideas about gender in the early 1960s through the history 

of a privately funded project that tested women pilots for astronaut fitness at 

the beginning of the Space Age. In addition, Weitekamp also has contributed to an edited anthology entitled Impossible to Hold: Women and Culture 

in the 1960s (2005). She won the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and 

Space Museum Aviation/Space Writers Award in 2002. She spent academic 

year 1997-98 in residence at the NASA Headquarters History Office in 

Washington, DC, as the American Historical Association/NASA Aerospace 

History Fellow. She was a 1993 Mellon Fellow in the Humanities. 
ACRONYMS AND bBREVIATIONS 

AliAS 

AAS 

ABC 

ABM 

ABMA 

ACES 

AFB 

AGARD 

AHA 

AIAA 

AmRoc 

ARDC 

ARPA 

ASA 

ASAT 

ASEE 

ASME 

ASSET 

AT&T 

ATV 

BAMBI 

BMD 

BMDO 

BMEWS 

BOR 

American Association for the Advancement of Science 

American Astronautical Society 

American Broadcasting Company 

antiballistic missile 

Army Ballistic Missile Agency 

Air Collection and Enrichment System 

Air Force Base 

Advisory Group for Aerospace Research and Development 

American Historical Association 

American Institute ofAeronautics and Astronautics 

American Rocket Company 

Air Research and Development Command 

Advanced Research Projects Agency 

American Studies Association 

antisatellite 

American Society for Electrical Engineering; American 

Society for Engineering Education 

American Society of Mechanical Engineers 

Aerothermodynamic/elastic Structural Systems Environmental Tests 

American Telephone and Telegraph Company 

Advanced Technology Vehicle 

Ballistic Missile Boost Intercept 

ballistic missile defense 

Ballistic Missile Defense Organization 

Ballistic Missile Early Warning System 

Unpiloted Orbital Rocketplane (in Russian) 
624 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

c2 

c31 

CAIB 

Caltech 

CAPCOM 

CBI 

CCD 

CCP 

CDC 

CELV 

CEO 

CERN 

CEV 

CIA 

CMLC 

comsat 

COMSAT 

COMSTAC 

CRV 

C/SGT 

CSM 

csoc 

DARPA 

DCAS 

DC-X 

DC-XA 

DDR&E 

DEW 

DMSP 

DNA 

DOD 

command and control 

command, control, communications, and intelligence 

Columbia Accident Investigation Board 

California Institute ofTechnology 

capsule communicator 

Chicago Bridge and Iron 

charge-coupled device 

Contract Change Proposal 

Centers for Disease Control 

Complementary Expendable Launchvehicle 

chief executive officer 

European Organization for Nuclear Research 

Crew ExplorationVehicle 

Central Intelligence Agency 

Civilian-Military Liaison Committee (of the House) 

commercial satellite; communications satellite 

Communications Satellite Corporation 

Commercial Space Transportation Advisory Committee 

Crew Recovery Vehicle 

Continental/SemiGlobal Transport 

Command and Service Module (Apollo) 

Consolidated Space Operations Center 

Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency 

Defense Contract Administration Services 

Delta Clipper-Experimental 

Delta Clipper-Experimental Advanced 

Director of Defense Research and Engineering; Deputy 

Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering; designing, developing, researching, and engineering 

Distant Early Warning 

Defense Meteorological Satellite Program 

deoxyribonucleic acid 

Department of Defense 
ACRONYMS AND ABBREVIATIONS 625 

DOE 

DSCS I1 

DSP 

Dyna-Soar 

ECR 

EEC 

EELV 

ELDO 

ELINT 

ELV 

EOP 

EORSAT 

EOS 

EPA 

ESA 

ESRO 

EST 

ET 

EVA 

FCC 

FEMA 

FLATS 

FLTSATCOM 

FOBS 

FOC 

FOIA 

FRC 

FRR 

FY 

GALCIT 

GAO 

GE 

Department of Energy 

Defense Satellite Communications System I1 

Defense Support Program 

Dynamic Soaring 

Engineering Change Request 

European Economic Community 

Evolved Expendable Launchvehicle 

European Launcher Development Organisation 

electronics intelhgence 

expendable launch vehicle 

Executive Office of the President 

Electronic Intelligence Ocean Reconnaissance Satellite 

Earth Observing System 

Environmental Protection Agency 

European Space Agency 

European Space Research Organisation 

eastern standard time 

External Tank (of the Space Shuttle) 

extravehicular activity 

Federal Communications Commission 

Federal Emergency Management Agency 

First Lady Astronaut Trainees 

Fleet Satellite Comunications 

Fractional Orbiting Bombardment System 

full operational capability 

Freedom of Information Act 

Flight Research Center 

Flight Readiness Review 

fiscal year 

Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory at the California 

Institute of Technology 

General Accounting Office 

General Electric 
626 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

GEODSS 

GIRD 

GLONASS 

GOES 

GPO 

GPS 

GRAB 

GUKOS 

GURVO 

HAER 

HL 

HRO 

HSS 

HST 

HumVee, 

Hummer 

IAU 

ICBM 

IC0 

ICOM 

IDCSP 

IEEE 

IGY 

ILV 

IMINT 

IMP 

INPO 

INTELSAT 

IRBM 

IS 

ISS 

ISTS 

Ground-Based Electro-optical Deep Space Surveillance 

Group for the Investigation of Reactive Engines and Reactive Flight 

Global Navigation Satellite System 

Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite 

Gemini Program Office; Government Printing Office 

Global Positioning System 

Galactic Radiation and Background 

Chief Directorate of the Space Systems (Soviet) 

Chief Directorate of Reactive Armaments (Soviet) 

Historic American Engineering Record 

Horizontal Lander 

high-reliability organization 

History of Science Society 

Hubble Space Telescope 

High Mobility Multipurpose WheeledVehicle 

International Astronomical Union 

intercontinental ballistic missile 

Intermediate Circular Orbit 

International Council of Museums 

Initial Defense Communications Satellite Program 

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers 

International GeophysicalYear 

Industrial Launchvehicle 

overhead photoreconnaissance 

Imager for Mars Pathfinder 

Institute for Nuclear Power Operators 

International Telecommunications Satellite Consortium 

intermediate-range ballistic missile 

Istrebitel Sputnikov 

International Space Station 

International Symposium on Space Technology and Science 
ACRONYMS AND ABBREVIATIONS 627 

IUS 

JBIS 

JCS 

JPL 

JSC 

JDFN 

KGB 

KSC 

KVR 

L-5 

LACES 

LANL 

LBJ 

LEM 

LLRV 

LLTV 

LM 

LOR 

MAS1 

MASINT 

MASTIF 

MCC 

MDA 

MIDAS 

MISS 

MIT 

MMT 

MODS 

Inertial Upper Stage 

Journal .f the British Interplanetary Society 

Joint Chiefs of Staff 

Joint Defence Facility Nurrungar 

Jet Propulsion Laboratory 

Johnson Space Center 

Soviet secret police organization 

Kennedy Space Center 

Space Forces (Soviet) 

Lagrange Point 5 

Liquid Air Collection Engine System 

Los Alamos National Laboratory 

Lyndon Baines Johnson 

Lunar Excursion Module 

Lunar Landing Researchvehicle 

Lunar Landing Trainingvehicle 

Lunar Module (Apollo) 

lunar orbit rendezvous 

Ministry of Space Industry (Chinese) 

measurement and signature intelligence 

Multiple Axis Space Test Inertia Facility 

Mission Control Center 

Missile Defense Agency 

Missile Defense Alarm System 

Manned Military Space System; Man-In-Space-Soonest 

Massachusetts Institute of Technology 

Mission Management Team 

Military Orbital Development System 

MOL Manned Orbiting Laboratory 

MOM 

MOU Memorandum of Understanding 

MSC Manned Spacecraft Center (later renamed Johnson 

Space Center) 

Ministry of Machine Building (Soviet) 
628 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

MSE 

MV 

NA 

NAA 

NAC 

NACA 

NARA 

NASA 

NASC 

NASCAR 

NASM 

NASP 

NATO 

NE0 

NESC 

NLS 

NM 

NOAA 

NORAD 

NOTS 

NOTSNIK 

NPO 

NPOESS 

NPS 

NRC 

NRL 

NRO 

NS 

NSAM 

NSC 

NSD 

NSDD 

Manned Spaceflight Engineer 

Ministry of Armaments (Soviet) 

North American 

North American Aviation 

NASA Advisory Council 

National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics 

National Archives and Records Administration 

National Aeronautics and Space Administration 

National Aeronautics and Space Council 

National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing 

National Air and Space Museum 

National Aero-Space Plane 

North Atlantic Treaty Organization 

Near-Earth Object 

NASA Engineering and Safety Center 

National Launch System 

nautical mile 

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration 

North American Air Defense Command 

Naval Ordnance Test Station 

designation combining “Naval Ordnance Test Station” 

and “Sputnik” 

Scientific-Production Association (Soviet) 

National Polar-Orbiting Environmental Satellite System 

National Park Service 

Nuclear Regulatory Commission 

Naval Research Laboratory 

National Reconnaissance Office 

national security 

National Security Action Memorandum 

National Security Council 

National Security Directive 

National Security Decision Directive 
ACRONYMS AND ABBREVIATIONS 629 

NSF 

NSI 

NSIAD 

NSPD 

NSSD 

NSTC 

NTDS 

OAH 

OCST 

OKB 

OMB 

ONR 

OSD 

OSHA 

OSP 

OSTP 

PAGEOS 

PAWS 

PD 

PSAC 

psi 

PUC 

QA 

R&D 

RAF 

RASV 

RCA 

RFP 

RGAE 

RLV 

ROLS 

National Science Foundation 

NASA and the Space industry 

National Security and International Mairs Division 

(within GAO) 

National Space Policy Directive 

National Security Study Directive 

National Science andTechnology Council 

Naval Tactical Data System 

Organization of American Historians 

Office of Commercial Space Transportation 

designation for a Soviet design bureau 

(such as Om-1 or OKB-52) 

Office of Management and Budget 

Office of Naval Research 

Office of the Secretary of Defense 

Occupational Safety and Health Administration 

Orbital Space Plane 

Office of Science and Technology Policy 

Passive Geodetic Earth Orbiting SateUite 

Phased Array Warning System 

Presidential Directive 

President’s Science Advisory Committee 

pounds per square inch 

Public Utility Commissions 

quality assurance 

research and development 

Royal Air Force (United Kingdom) 

Reusable Aerodynamic Space Vehicle 

Radio Corporation ofAmerica 

Request for Proposals 

Russian State Archive of the Economy 

reusable launch vehicle 

Recoverable Orbital Launch System 
630 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

RORSAT 

R.U R. 

RVSN 

SAAS 

SA8 

SAC 

SAE 

SAEF 

SAGE 

SAINT 

SALT 

SATCOM 

SBIRS 

SCORE 

SCOT 

scramjet 

SDC 

SDI 

SDIO 

SDS 

SEI 

SET1 

SETP 

SHF 

SHOT 

SIG 

SIGINT 

SIR 

SLC 

SLV 

SMV 

SOPC 

Radar Ocean Reconnaissance Satellite 

Rossum’s Universal Robots 

Missile Forces of Strategic Designation (Soviet) 

School ofAdvanced Airpower Studies 

Scientific Advisory Board (USAF) 

Strategic Air Command 

Society of Automotive Engineers 

Spacecraft Assembly and Encapsulation Facility 

Semi-Automatic Ground Environment 

Satellite Inspector for Space Defense 

Strategic Arms Limitations Talks 

RCA Americom Satellite “SATCOM” series 

Space-Based Infrared System 

Signal Communication by Orbiting Relay Equipment 

social construction of technology 

supersonic combustion ramjet 

System Development Corporation 

Strategic Defense Initiative 

Strategic Defense Initiative Organization 

Satellite Data System 

Space Exploration Initiative 

Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence 

Society for Experimental Test Pilots 

Super High Frequency 

Society for the History ofTechnology 

Senior Interagency Group 

signals intelligence 

Shuttle Imaging Radar 

space launch complex 

Standardized Launch Vehicle 

Space Maneuver Vehicle 

Shuttle Operations and Planning Complex 
ACRONYMS AND ABBREVIATIONS 63 1 

SR&QA 

SFU3 

SRM 

SRTC 

SSI 

ssm 

SSTO 

STAIF 

START 

STG 

STP 

STS 

TAOS 

TAV 

TCP 

TDRSS 

TIROS 

TQ 

TRW 

TsUKOS 

UCLA 

UHF 

UND 

UNKS 

unk-unks 

us. 

US-A 

USA 

USACERL 

ries 

USAF 

us-P 

USSR 

Office of Safety, Reliability and Quality Assurance (NASA) 

Solid Rocket Booster 

Solid Rocket Motor 

Solid Rocket Technical Committee 

Space Services, Inc. 

Space Shuttle Main Engine 

single stage to orbit 

Space Technology & Applications International Forum 

Strategic Arms Reduction Treaties 

Space Task Group 

space test program 

Space Transportation System 

Thrust-Assisted Orbiter Shuttle 

Trans Atmospheric Vehicle 

Technological Capabilities Panel 

Traclung and Data Relay Satelhte System 

Television and Infrared Observation System 

transition quarter 

Thompson Ram0 Wooldridge Corporation 

Central Directorate of Space Systems (Soviet) 

University of California, Los Angeles 

Ultra-High Frequencies 

University of North Dakota 

Directorate of the Space Systems Commander (Soviet) 

unknown unknowns 

United States 

active radar (Soviet) 

US. Army 

U.S. Army Construction Engineering Research LaboratoUS. Air Force 

passive radar (Soviet) 

Union of Soviet Socialist Republics 
632 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

VKS Military Space Forces (Soviet) 

VNIIEM All-Union Scientific Research Institute of Electromechanics 

(Soviet) 

V-PRO Forces of Anti-Missile Defense (Soviet) 

WDD Western Development Division (USAF) 

ws Weapons System (USAF) 

WWMCCS World-Wide Military Command and Control System 
THE NASA HISTORY SERIES 

REFERENCE WORKS, NASA SP-4000: 

Grimwood, James M. Project 1Mercury:A Chronology. NASA SP-4001,1963. 

Grimwood, James M., and C. Barton Hacker, with Peter J.Vorzimrner. Project 

Gemini Technology and Operations: A Chronology. NASA SP-4002,1969, 

Link, Mae Mills. Space Medicine in Project Mercury. NASA SP-4003,1965, 

Astronautics and Aeronautics, 1963: Chronology of Science, Technology, and Policy. 

NASA SP-4004,1964. 

Astronautics and Aeronautics, 1964: Chronology of Science, Technology, and Policy. 

NASA SP-4005,1965. 

Astronautics and Aeronautics, 1965: Chronology of Science, Technolon, and Policy. 

NASA SP-4006,1966. 

Astronautics and Aeronautics, 1966: Chronology of Science, Technology, and Policy. 

NASA SP-4007,1967. 

Astronautics and Aeronautics, 1967: Chronology of Science, Technology, and Policy. 

NASA SP-4008,1968. 

Ertel, Ivan D., and Mary Louise Morse. The Apollo Spacecraft: A Chronology, 

Volume I, Through November 7, 1962. NASA SP-4009, 1969. 

Morse, Mary Louise, and Jean Kernahan Bays. The Apollo Spacecraft:A Chronology, 

Volume 11, November 8, 1962-September 30, 1964. NASA SP-4009,1973. 

Brooks, Courtney G., and Ivan D. Ertel. The Apollo Spacecrdt: A Chronology, 

Klume III, October 1, 1964January 20, 1966. NASA SP-4009,1973. 

Ertel, Ivan D., and Roland W; Newkirk, with Courtney G. Brooks. The Apollo 

Spacecr4t: A Chronology, Volume I~January 21, 1966-July 13, 1974. NASA SP4009,1978. 

Astronautics and Aeronautics, 1968: Chronology of Science, Technology, and Policy. 

NASA SP-4010,1969. 

Newkirk, Roland W, and Ivan D. Ertel, with Courtney 6. Brooks. Skylab: A 

Chronology. NASA SP-4011,1977. 
634 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

Van Nimmen, Jane, and Leonard C. Bruno, with Robert L. Rosholt. NASA 

Historical Data Book, Volume I: NASA Resources, 1958-1968. NASA SP-4012, 

1976; rep. ed. 1988. 

Ezell, Linda Neuman. NASA Historical Data Book, Volume II: Programs and Projects, 

1958-1968. NASA SP-4012,1988. 

Ezell, Linda Neuman. NASA Historical Data Book, Volume HI: Programs and 

Projects, 1969-1978. NASA SP-4012,1988. 

Gawdiak, Ihor Y., with Helen Fedor, compilers. NASA Historical Data Book, 

Volume IV: NASA Resources, 1969-1978. NASA SP-4012,1994. 

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Space Science. NASA SP-4012, 1999. 

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Space Applications, Aeronautics and Space Research and Technology, ?lacking and Data 

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Astronautics and Aeronautics, 1969: Chronology of Science, Technology, and Policy. 

NASA SP-4014,1970. 

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NASA SP-4015,1972. 

Astronautics and Aeronautics, 1971: Chronology of Science, Technology, and Policy. 

NASA SP-4016,1972. 

Astronautics and Aeronautics, 1972: Chronology of Science, Technology, and Policy. 

NASA SP-4017,1974. 

Astronautics and Aeronautics, 1973: Chronology of Science, Technology, and Policy. 

NASA SP-4018,1975. 

Astronautics and Aeronautics, 1974: Chronology of Science, Technology, and Policy. 

NASA SP-4019,1977. 

Astronautics and Aeronautics, 1975: Chronology of Science, Technology, and Policy. 

NASA SP-4020,1979. 

Astronautics and Aeronautics, 1976: Chronology of Science, Technology, and Policy. 

NASA SP-4021,1984. 
THE NASA HISTORY SERIES 635 

Astronautics and Aeronautics, 1977: Chronology of Science, Technology, and Policy. 

NASA SP-4022,1986. 

Astronautics and Aeronautics, 1978: Chronology of Science, Technology, and Policy. 

NASA SP-4023,1986. 

Astronautics and Aeronautics, 1979- 1984: Chronology of Science, Technology, and 

Policy. NASA SP-4024,1988. 

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Noordung, Hermann. The Problem .f Space Travel: The Rocket Motor. Edited by 

Ernst Stuhlinger and J. D. Hunley, with Jennifer Garland. NASA SP-4026,1995. 

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Kosholt, Robert L. An Administrative History ofNASA, 1958-1963. NASA SP4101,1966. 

Levine,Arnold S. Managing NASA in the Apollo Era. NASA SP-4102,1982. 

Roland, Alex. Model Research: The National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics] 

1925-1958. NASA SP-4103,1985. 

Fries, Sylvia D. NASA Engineers and the Age ofApollo. NASA SP-4104,1992. 

Glennan, T. Keith. The Birth of NASA: The Diary of T. Keith Glennan. J. D. 

Hunley, editor. NASA SP-4105, 1993. 

Seamans, Robert C., Jr. Aiming at Targets: The Autobiography of Robert C. Seamans, 

JK NASA SP-4106,1996. 

Garber, Stephen J., editor. Looking Backward, Looking Forward: Forty Years of US. 

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Chertok, Boris. Rockets and People, LGZurne I. NASA SP-2005-4110,2005. 

Laufer, Dr. Alexander, Todd Post, and Dr. Edward J. HofGnan. Shared Voyage: 

Learning and Unlearningfrom Remarkable Projects. NASA SP-2005-4111,2005. 

Dawson,Virginia P., and Mark D. Bowles, editors. Realizing the Dream of Flight. 

NASA SP-2005-4112,2005. 
636 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

PROJECT HISTORIES, NASA SP-4200: 

Swenson, Loyd S., Jr., James M. Grimwood, and Charles C. Alexander. This New 

0cean:A History ofproject Mercury. NASA SP-4201,1966; rep. ed. 1998. 

Green, Constance McLaughlin, and Milton Lomask. Vanguard: A History. NASA 

SP-4202,1970; rep. ed. Smithsonian Institution Press, 1971. 

Hacker, Barton C., and James M. Grimwood. On the Shoulders ofTitans:A History 

of Project Gemini. NASA SP-4203,1977. 

Benson, Charles D., and William Barnaby Faherty. Moonport: A History ofApollo 

Launch Facilities and Operations. NASA SP-4204,1978. 

Brooks, Courtney G., James M. Grimwood, and Loyd S. Swenson, Jr. Chariots for 

Apol1o:A History ofManned Lunar Spacecr.ft. NASA SP-4205,1979. 

Bilstein, Roger E. Stages to Saturn: A Technological History of the Apollo/Saturn 

Launch Ehicles. NASA SP-4206,1980, rep. ed. 1997. 

SP-4207 not published. 

Compton, W. David, and Charles D. Benson. Living and Working in Space: A 

History of Skylab. NASA SP-4208,1983. 

Ezell, Edward Clinton, and Linda Neuman Ezell. The Partnership:A History of the 

Apollo-Soyuz Test Project. NASA SP-4209,1978. 

Hall, R. Cargill. Lunar Impact:A History ofproject Ranger. NASA SP-4210,1977. 

Newell, Homer E. Beyond the Atmosphere: Early Years of Space Science. NASA SP4211,1980. 

Ezell, Edward Clinton, and Linda Neuman Ezell. On Mars: Exploration ofthe Red 

Planet, 1958-1978. NASA SP-4212,1984. 

Pitts, John A. The Human Factor: Biomedicine in the Manned Space Program to 1980. 

NASA SP-4213,1985. 

Compton, W. David. Where No Man Has Gone Before: A History ofApollo Lunar 

Exploration Missions. NASA SP-4214, 1989. 

Naugle, John E. First Among Equals: The Selection of NASA Space Science 

Experiments. NASA SP-4215, 1991. 

Wallace, Lane E. Airborne Tuailb1azer:Two Decades with NASA Langley 's Boeing 737 

Flying Laboratory. NASA SP-4216,1994. 

Butrica, Andrew J., editor. Beyond the Ionosphere: F$y Years of Satellite 

Communication. NASA SP-4217,1997. 
THE NASA HISTORY SERIES 637 

Butrica, Andrew J. To See the Unseen: A History of Planetary Radar Astronomy. 

NASA SP-4218,1996. 

Mack, Pamela E., editor. From Engineering Science to Big Science: The NACA and 

NASA Collier Zophy Research Project Winners. NASA SP-4219,1998. 

Reed, R. Dale, with Darlene Lister. Wingless F1ight:The L@ng Body Story. NASA 

SP-4220,1997. 

Heppenheimer, T. A. The Space Shuttle Decision: NASA’s Search for a Reusable 

Space Vehicle. NASA SP-4221,1999. 

Hunley, J. D., editor. Toward Mach 2: The Douglas D-558 Program. NASA SP4222,1999. 

Swanson, Glen E., editor. “Before this Decade Is Out . . . ”: Personal ReJ‘Zections on 

the Apollo Program. NASA SP-4223,1999. 

Tomayko, James E. Computers Take Flight: A History of NASA’s Pioneering Digital 

Fly-by- Wire Project. NASA SP-2000-4224,2000. 

Morgan, Clay. Shuttle-Mir: The US. and Russia Share History’s Highest Stage. 

NASA SP-2001-4225,2001. 

LeaqWilliam M. “We Freeze to P1ease”:A History ofNASA% Icing Research Tunnel 

and the Questfor Flight Safety. NASA SP-2002-4226,2002. 

Mudgway, Douglas J. Uplink-Downlink: A Histovy of the Deep Space Network 

195772997. NASA SP-2001-4227,2001. 

Dawson,Virginia E’., and Mark D. Bowles. Taming Liquid Hydrogen: The Centaur 

Upper Stage Rocket, 1958-2002. NASA SP-2004-4230,2004. 

CENTER HISTORIES, NASA SP-4300: 

Rosenthal, Alfred. Enture into Space: Early Years of Goddard Space Flight Centev. 

NASA SP-4301,1985. 

Hartman, Edwin P. Adventures in Research: A History of Ames Research Center, 

1940-1965. NASA SP-4302,1970. 

Hallion, Richard E’. On the Frontier:Flight Research at Dryden, 1946-1981. NASA 

SP-4303,1984. 

Muenger, Elizabeth A. Searching the Horizon: A History ofAmes Research Center, 

1940-1976. NASA SP-4304,1985. 

Hansen, James R. Engineer in Charge: A History of the Langley Aeronautical 

Laboratory, 1917-1958. NASA SP-4305, 1987. 
638 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

Dawson, Virginia P. Engines and Innovation: Lewis Laboratory and American 

Propulsion Technology. NASA SP-4306, 1991. 

Dethloff, Henry C. “Suddenly Tomorrow Came . . .”:A History ofthejohnson Space 

Center. NASA SP-4307,1993. 

Hansen, James R. Spacgight Revolution: NASA Langley Research Center fYom 

Sputnik to Apollo. NASA SP-4308,1995. 

Wallace, Lane E. Flights ofDiscovery: 50 Years at the NASA Dryden Flight Research 

Center. NASA SP-4309,1996. 

Herring, Mack R. Way Station to Space: A History of the John C. Stennis Space 

Center. NASA SP-4310,1997. 

Wallace, Harold D., Jr. Wallops Station and the Creation of the American Space 

Program. NASA SP-43 1 1,1997. 

Wallace, Lane E. Dreams, Hopes, Realities: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Centev, 

The First Forty Years. NASA SP-4312,1999. 

Dunar, Andrew J., and Stephen F? Waring. Power to Explore: A History of the 

Marshall Space Flight Center. NASA SP-4313,1999. 

Bugos, Glenn E. Atmosphere of Freedom: Sixty Years at the NASA Ames Research 

Center. NASA SP-2000-4314,2000. 

GENERAL HISTORIES, NASA SP-4400: 

Corliss, William R. NASA Sounding Rockets, 1958-1 968: A Historical Summary. 

NASA SP-4401,1971. 

Wells, Helen T., Susan H. Whiteley, and Carrie Karegeannes. Origins of NASA 

Names. NASA SP-4402,1976. 

Anderson, Frank W., Jr. Orders of Magnitude: A History of NACA and NASA, 

1915-1980. NASA SP-4403,1981. 

Sloop, John L. Liquid Hydrogen as a Propulsion Fuel, 1945-1959. NASA SP4404,1978. 

Roland, Alex. A Spacejaring People: Perspectives on Early SpacefEight. NASA SP4405,1985. 

Bilstein, Roger E. Orders ofMagnitude:A History ofthe NACA and NASA, 1915- 

1990. NASA SP-4406,1989. 
THE NASA HISTORY SERIES 639 

Logsdon, John M., editor, with Linda J. Lex, Jannelle Warren-Findley, Ray A. 

Williamson, and Dwayne A. Day. Exploring the Unknown: Selected Documents in 

the History ofthe US. Civil Space Program, Volume I, Organizing for Exploration. 

Logsdon, John M., editor, with Dwayne A. Day and Roger D. Launius. Exploring 

the Unknown: Selected Documents in the History of the US. Civil Space Program, 

Volume 11, External Relationships. NASA SP-4407, 1996. 

Logsdon, John M., editor, with Roger D. Launius, David H. Onkst, and Stephen 

J. Garber. Exploring the Unknown: Selected Documents in the History ofthe U; S. Civil 

Space Program, Volume III, Using Space. NASA SP-4407,1998. 

Logsdon, John M., general editor, with Ray A. Williamson, Roger D. Launius, 

Russell J. Acker, Stephen J. Garber, and Jonathan L. Friedman. Exploring the 

Unknown: Selected Documents in the History ofthe US. Civil Space Program, Volume 

IL(Accessing Space. NASA SP-4407,1999. 

Logsdon, John M., general editor, with Amy Paige Snyder, Roger D. Launius, 

Stephen J. Garber, and Regan Anne Newport. Exploring the Unknown: Selected 

Documents in the History of the US. Civil Space Program, Volume V Exploring the 

Cosmos. NASA SP-2001-4407,2001. 

Siddiqi, Asif A. Challenge to Apollo: The Soviet Union and the Space Race, 1945- 

NASA SP-4407,1995. 

1974. NASA SP-2000-4408,2000. 

MONOGRAPHS IN AEROSPACE HISTORY, NASA SP-4500: 

Launius, Roger D., and Aaron K. Gillette, compilers. Toward a Hisfory of the Space 

Shuttle: An Annotated Bibliography. Monographs in Aerospace History, No. 1,1992. 

Launius, Roger D., and J. D. Hunley, compilers. An Annotated Bibliography ofthe 

Apollo Program. Monographs in Aerospace History, No. 2,1994. 

Launius, Roger D. Apollo: A Retrospective Analysis. Monographs in Aerospace 

History, No. 3, 1994. 

Hansen, James R. Enchanted Rendezvous: John C. Houbolt and the Genesis of the 

Lunar-Orbit Rendezvous Concept. Monographs in Aerospace History, No. 4,1995. 

Gorn, Michael H. Hugh L. Dryden’s Career in Aviation and Space. Monographs in 

Aerospace History, No. 5,1996. 

Powers, Sheryll Goecke. Women in Flight Research at NASA Dryden Flight Research 

Centqfvom 1946 to 1995. Monographs in Aerospace History, No. 6,1997. 

Portree, David S. E, and Robert C. Trevino. Walking to Olympus: An EVA 

Chronology Monographs in Aerospace History, No. 7,1997. 
640 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

Logsdon, John M., moderator. Legislative Origins of the National Aeronautics 

and Space Act of 1958: Proceedings of an Oral History Workshop. Monographs in 

Aerospace History, No. 8,1998. 

Rumerman, Judy A., compiler. US. Human Spacejight, A Record ofAchievement, 

1961-1998. Monographs in Aerospace History, No. 9,1998. 

Portree, David S. E NASA’s Origins and the Dawn ofthe Space Age. Monographs 

in Aerospace History, No. 10,1998. 

Logsdon, John M. Together in Orbit: The Origins of International Cooperation in the 

Space Station. Monographs in Aerospace History, No. 11,1998. 

Phillips, W. Hewitt. journey in Aeronautical Research: A Career at NASA Langley 

Research Center. Monographs in Aerospace History, No. 12,1998. 

Braslow, Albert L. A History of Suction-Tjpe Laminar-How Control with Emphasis 

on Flight Research. Monographs in Aerospace History, No. 13, 1999. 

Logsdon, John M., moderator. Managing the Moon Program: Lessons Learned From 

Apollo. Monographs in Aerospace History, No. 14,1999. 

Perminov,V. G. The DEfficult Road to Mars: A Brief History of Mars Exploration in 

the Soviet Union. Monographs in Aerospace History, No. 15,1999. 

Tucker,Tom. Touchdown:The Development of Propulsion ControlledAircrafc at NASA 

Dryden. Monographs in Aerospace History, No. 16,1999. 

Maisel, Martin D., Demo J. Giulianetti, and Daniel C. Dugan. The History of 

the XV-15 Tilt Rotor Research Aircraft: From Concept to Flight. Monographs in 

Aerospace History, No. 17,2000. 

Jenkins, Dennis R. Hypersonics Before the Shuttle: A Concise History of the X- 15 

Research Airplane. Monographs in Aerospace History, No. 18,2000. 

Chambers, Joseph R. Partners in Freedom: Contributions of the Langley Research 

Center to US. Military Aircrgt in the 1990s. Monographs in Aerospace History, 

No. 19,2000. 

Waltman, Gene L. Black Magic and Grem1ins:Analog Flight Simulations at NASA’s 

Flight Research Center. Monographs in Aerospace History, No. 20,2000. 

Portree, David S. E Humans to Mars: Fijy Ears of Mission Planning, 1950-2000. 

Monographs in Aerospace History, No. 21,2001. 

Thompson, Milton O., with J. D. Hunley. Flight Research: Problems Encountered and 

What They Should Teach Us. Monographs in Aerospace History, No. 22,2000. 

Tucker,Tom. The Eclipse Project. Monographs in Aerospace History, No. 23,2000. 
THE NASA HISTORY SERIES 64 1 

Siddiqi, Asif A. Deep Space Chronicle: A Chronology of Deep Space and Planetary 

Probes, 1958-2000. Monographs in Aerospace History, No. 24,2002. 

Merlin, Peter W. Mach 3+: NASANSAF YF-12 Flight Research, 1969-1979. 

Monographs in Aerospace History, No. 25,2001. 

Anderson, Seth B. Memoirs of an Aeronautical Engineer-Flight Tests at Ames 

Research Center: 1940-1970. Monographs in Aerospace History, No. 26, 2002. 

Renstrom, Arthur G. Wilbur and Orville Wright: A Bibliography Commemorating 

the One-Hundredth Anniversary of the First Powered Flight on December 17, 1903. 

Monographs in Aerospace History, No. 27,2002. 

No monograph 28. 

Chambers, Joseph R. Concept to Reality: Contributions of the NASA Langley 

Research Center to US. Civil Aircr&t of the 1990s. Monographs in Aerospace 

History, No. 29,2003. 

Peebles, Curtis, editor. The Spoken Word: Recollections of Dryden History, The Early 

Years. Monographs in Aerospace History, No. 30,2003. 

Jenluns, Dennis R., Tony Landis, and Jay Miller. American X-Ehicles: An 

Inventory-X- 1 to X-50. Monographs in Aerospace History, No. 31,2003. 

Renstrom, Arthur G. Wilbur and Orville Wright Chronology. Monographs in 

Aerospace History, No. 32,2003. 

Bowles, Mark D., and Robert S.Arrighi. NASA’s Nuclear Frontier: The Plum Brook 

Reactor Facility, 1941-2002. Monographs in Aerospace History, No. 33,2004. 

McCurdy, Howard E. Low-Cost Innovation in Spaceflkht. Monographs in 

Aerospace History, No. 36,2005. 

Seamans, Robert C. Project Apollo: The Tough Decisions. Monographs in Aerospace 

History, No. 37,2005. 

Lambright, Henry W. NASA and the Environment: The Case of Ozone Depletion. 

Monographs in Aerospace History, No. 38,2005. 

Phillips, W. Hewitt.journey Into Space Research: Continuation ofa Career at NASA 

Ldngley Research Center. Monographs in Aerospace History, No. 40,2005. 

ELECTRONIC MEDIA, NASA SP-4600: 

Remembering Apollo I 1:The 30th Anniversary Data Archive CD-ROM. NASA SP4601,1999. 

The Mission Transcript Collection: U. S. Human Spacejlight Missions +om Mercury 

Redstone 3 to Apollo 17. NASA SP-2000-4602,2001. 
642 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

Shuttle-Mir: The United States and Russia Share Histo y3 Highest Stage. NASA SP2001-4603,2002. 

U. S. Centennial $Flight Commission Presents Born $Dreams-Inspired by Freedom. 

NASA SP-2004-4604,2004. 

Of Ashes and Atoms: A Documentary on the NASA Plum Brook Reactor Facility. 

NASA SP-2005-4605,2005. 

Taming Liquid Hydrogen: The Centaur Upper Stage Rocket Interactive CD-ROM. 

NASA SP-2004-4606,2004. 

Fueling Space Exploration: The Histo y of NASA’s Rocket Engine Test Facility DVD. 

NASA SP-2005-4607,2005. 

CONFERENCE PROCEEDINGS, NASA SP-4700: 

Dick, Steven J., and Keith L. Cowing, editors. Risk and Exploration:Earth, Sea and 

the Stars. NASA SP-2005-4701,2005. 
A 

A-9, A-10, A-12, 305 

Access to Space Study, 315, 327-329 

Advanced Research Projects Agency 

Advanced Technology Vehicle 

(ATV), 318. See also X-37 

Advisory Committee on the Future 

of the U.S. Space Program. See 

Augustine Committee 

Aerospace, origins and use of term, 

545 

Aerospace industry, 164-198, 541- 

542, 563-564 

Aerospaceplane, 304-305 

Afanas’ev, Sergei, 124 

Agena, 491 

Agnew, Spiro T., 220, 222-223, 294 

Air Force, U.S., 166-167, 172; and 

199; and Aerospaceplane, 304- 

305; and command and control, 

500-505; and communications, 

505-508; and Dyna-Soar, 152, 

305-308,491, 492; entry into 

space systems, 200-201, 205, 207- 

212, 447, 521; and expendable 

launch vehicles, 275-276, 278, 

332; historiography, 487-488, 

543; and human spaceflight, 213- 

222, 521-522; and lifting bodies, 

308; and missiles, 148, 150-151, 

152,203-204,485; and missile 

defense, 508-511; and navigation, 

530-532; and RASV, 308-310; 

and reconnaissance, 516; and. 

(ARPA), 204-206,210-211 

NASA, 176-177, 184, 189, 190, 

335; rivalry with other military 

services, 535-537; and space 

power theory, 544-546; and 

Space Shuttle, 222-238, 275-276, 

322; and space transportation, 

275-277; and systems management, 150-151, 400, 543; 

Vandenberg Air Force Base, 493; 

and X-37,318. See also Manned 

Orbiting Laboratory (MOL), 

NASA, National Aero-Space 

Plane, National Reconnaissance 

Organization (NRO), 

Trans Atmospheric Vehicle (TAV) 

Air Force, Soviet, 120-121 

Air Force Cosmonaut Training 

Center (USSR), 121, 135 

Air Force Geophysics Laboratory, 

528 

Air Force Flight Research Institute 

(USSR), 113 

Air Force Space Command, 536- 

537 

Air Force Space Systems Division, 

184 

Air University Quarterly Review, 212 

Albuquerque, Afonso de, 18 

Aldridge, Edward, 234-235 

Aldrin, Buzz, 30, 162, 433 

All in the Family, 50 

Allen, Paul, 61 

Alpha Centauri, 96, 101 

American Astronautical Society 

American Museum of Natural 

(AAS), 49 

History, 27 

INDEX 

reusable launch vehicles, 334- American Rocket Society, 436, 485 
644 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

Ames Aeronautical Laboratory, 308 

Amundsen, Roald, 82 

Anderson, Michael, 388 

Andrews, Roy Chapman, 27 

Angle of Attack, 159, 191 

Anik, 321 

Antisatellites, 532-534 

Apollo, Project, 10, 49-50, 62-63, 

65-66, 83, 107-108, 131; as 

anomaly, 34, 461; and astronauts 

as pilots, 149-158; budget, 

293-294; engineering changes 

for, 194-195; historiography of, 

438-440, 464; human-machine 

interaction, 147-155; significance 

of, 465; and space history, 433; 

and systems management, 400; 

and test pilots, 148-149 

269, 345, 346, 347, 348, 377, 378, 

Apollo 204 (Apollo 1) accident, 

379-383,389,391,392,394 

Apollo 8, 107 

Apollo 11, 65, 147 

Apollo 13, 147 

Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, 68, 

Applications satellites, 454-455; 

military weather and science, 

524-530; navigation, 530-532 

240-241,298 

ARABSAT, 322 

Arecibo Radio Telescope, 97 

Ariane, 322 

Armstrong, Neil, 30, 77, 149-150, 

153, 157,379, 433 

Army, U.S., 167, 189, 205, 521, 

535-536; antiballistic missile 

program, 508-510; antisatellite 

program, 533; historiography, 

489, 510; mapping from space, 

527; and NASA, 205-208,213; 

and navigation, 530-531; rivalry 

with military services, 200, 

204-208; and TIROS weather 

satellite program, 526. See also 

Army Ballistic Missile Agency 

(ABMA) 

(ABMA), 166, 172, 176, 190, 

Army Space Command, 536-537 

Arnold, Henry H. “Hap,” 201 

Artifacts, space, 573-600 

Asimov, Isaac, 88, 91, 92, 93 

Astrofuturism, 38 

Astronaut, 523-524; as historioArmy Ballistic Missile Agency 

205-207,535,571 

graphic theme, 456-458 

AT&T, 55-56 

Atlas, 150-152, 263, 330, 400, 453, 

485, 486, 487, 493; Air Force 

resumption of production in 

1987, 278; decline in orders after 

Shuttle, 322; and Schriever, 543 

Atlas-Centaur, 237, 334, 451; and 

Europe, 246 

Attwood, Lee, 193-194 

Atwell, William D., 472 

Audubon, John James, 26 

Augustine Committee, 279-280 

AUSSAT, 322 

Bainbridge, William Sims, 465, 468 

Ballistic missiles, 485-493, 508-511, 

539; British, 490; Chinese, 490; 

defense against, 508-511; German, 

485, 486; Soviet, 24, 486, 489- 

490, 491; U.S., 55, 150-152, 154, 

189-190,200,203,253-256,260, 

336, 485-488, 490. See also 

BMEWS, launch vehicles, 

individual names of missiles 

Barnard’s Star, 96 

Barnes, Richard, 257-259 

Barnes, Thomas, 26 

Baron, Thomas, 383 

Battelle, 189 
INDEX 645 

Beagle, HMS, 28, 82 

Beaglehole, J. C., 11 

Beggs, James M., 52, 234 

Bekey, Ivan, 289,314-315 

Beliaev, Pavel, 118, 127 

Bell Laboratories, 55-56 

Benjamin, Marina, 473 

Bennett, James, 582 

Beregovoi, Georgii, 123 

Berger, Brian, 61 

Bernardi, Daniel, 570, 571 

Between Human and Machine, 142, 145 

Bilstein, Roger E., 170, 181, 464 

Blade Runner, 90, 94 

Blatz, William, 183 

Blue Gemini. See Gemini, Blue 

Blue Streak rocket, 247-248 

BMEWS (Ballistic Missile Early 

Warning System), 494 

Boeing Co., 170; and Dyna-Soar, 

306-307; and RASV, 308-311 

Bolt, Marvin, 591 

BoMi, 305-306 

Bonestell, Chesley, 78-79 

Boone, Daniel, 22 

Boulle, Pierre, 101 

Bradbury, Ray, 4, 8, 85 

Bradford, William, 8 

Brands, H. W., 450 

Bredt, Irene, 304 

British Interplanetary Society, 104 

Bromberg, Joan Lisa, 181, 188-190, 

Brooks, Overton, 208-210 

Brown, David, 388 

Brownlee, Donald, 48 

Brucker, William, 205-206 

Brunsson, Nils, 179-180 

Bunker, Archie, 50 

Burke, Adm. Arleigh, 207 

Burke, Walter, 183 

Burroughs, Edgar Rice, 12 

Burrows, William E., 438, 445, 479 

191, 192 

Bush, George H. W., 279,282,287, 

Bush, George W., 47-48, 52, 269, 

294,300 

287, 335-337, 403. See also Vision 

for Space Exploration 

Byram, Edward T., 593-594 

Byrd, Richard E., 27, 82, 83-84 

Byrld, Mette, 476 

Byrnes, Mark E., 469 

C 

Caidin, Martin, 103 

California Institute of Technology 

(Caltech), 46 

Capek, Karel, 88 

Capsule Review Board, 183 

Carson, Cary, 587-588, 589 

Carter, Dale, 472 

Carter, Jimmy, 222, 225, 227-228, 

231,291,294 

Centaur. See Atlas-Centaur 

Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 

202-203,210-211,220-221,515, 

535 

Cernan, Gene, 457 

Ceruzzi, Paul, 591-592 

Chaffee, Roger, 379 

Chaikin, Andrew, 440 

Challenger (Space Shuttle) accident, 

227-232; 269-270,276, 278, 

322,345-375,377,383-388,390, 

392-394, 568; lessons learned, 

371. See also Rogers Commission 

Chamberlain, James, 182-184 

Charge-coupled device (CCD), 590 

Charyk, Joseph, 211-212 

Chawla, Kalpana, 388 

Chelomey, Vladimir, 129, 489, 496 

Chertok, Boris, 126, 134 

Childhood’s End, 101 

Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day 

CIA, 447 

Saints, 97-98 
646 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

Clancy, Tom, 320 

Clarke, Arthur C., 12,40-41, 55- 

Cleator, P. E., 450 

Clinton, Bill, 282, 294, 327 

Clynes, Manfred, 103 

Cold War. See Space, Cold War 

Collier’s magazine, 53, 78-79 

Collins, Michael, 141-142, 147, 149, 

Collins, Patrick, 58 

Columbia (Space Shuttle) accident, 

56,73,74, 79, 101-102 

158, 456 

52,286-287,345-375,377,388- 

391, 397, 569; lessons learned, 371 

Board (CAIB), 269-273,345-346, 

Columbus, Christopher, 7, 10, 11, 19 

Command and control, space, 

Commercial launch firms, 333-335 

Communications Satellite Act of 

1962,56 

Communications Satellite 

Corporation (COMSAT), 56 

Communications satellites, 55-57, 

Competition as historiographic 

theme, 442-445 

Computers, 395-397 

Conrad, Pete, 51, 315 

Consolini, Paula, 175 

Contact, 99-100 

Continental/SemiGlobal Transport 

Control systems, 500-501 

Cook, Capt. James, 3,10,11,15,21,22 

Copper Canyon, 277,312 

Corn, Joseph, 576, 577, 584-587, 

CORONA Program, 211-214, 445- 

527, 529; declassified, 514-517 

Columbia Accident Investigation 

348,349,363-367,388-391,396 

500-505 

505-508 

(CISGT), 309 

589, 597 

446,448, 491, 512-513, 520, 526, 

Costigliola, Frank, 570 

Council of Chief Designers (USSR), 

Cox, Catherine Bly, 464 

Crater (software), 396-397 

Cray, Seymour, 592 

Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV), 

287,300,336 

Crew Recovery Vehicle (CRV), 318 

“Crossing the Last Frontier,” 79 

Crouch, Tom, 478, 597 

Crusoe, Robinson, 20 

Culture, organizational, 345-426 

Cunningham, Walt, 457 

Curator for Planetary Materials 

Curtiss JH-4, 141 

Cyborgs, 75,77-104 

Cyclops, Project, 97 

116 

Office, 63 

Daedalus, Project, 96 

Darwin, Charles, 23, 82 

Daumpier, William, 20 

Davies, Ron, 588 

Day, Dwayne A., 61,446-447,448, 

Day the Earth Stood Still, The, 93 

DC-XA. See Delta Clipper 

Dean, Jodi, 568 

Dean, Robert, 570 

Defense, Department of (U.S.), 

456 

53-55, 165-166, 199-238,277, 

280,289,306,329-330, 520; 

and expendable launch vehicles, 

space expenditures, 5; and Space 

Shuttle, 222-238, 308, 520. See 

also Air Force, Army, Army 

Ballistic Missile Agency, DynaSoar, military spaceflight, Naval 

Research Laboratory, Navy, 

Strategic Defense Initiative 

315-316,322-326,329-337; 
INDEX 647 

Defense Meteorological Satellite 

Program (DMSP), 526,529 

Defense Satellite Communications 

System (DSCS), 505, 520 

Defoe, Daniel, 20 

Delta (launch vehicle), 37, 267, 278, 

Delta Clipper (DC-X), 283, 313- 

Department of Defense (U.S.). See 

DeVorkin, David, 555 

Diamandis, Peter, 61 

Diamant-A rocket, 250-251 

Dibner Institute, 144-145 

Dick, Philip K., 90-91 

Dick, Steven, 99, 103 

Discovery and Exploration, ages 

of, 7-16; beyond the third age, 

32-25; first age of, 16-20; 

great voyages of, 16-20; as 

historiographic theme, 435-441; 

second age of, 20-27; themes of, 

7-35; third age of, 27-36 

322,323,330,334,486 

316, 325, 329 

Defense, Department of 

Dittemore, Ron, 351 

Divine, Robert, 461 

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, 

Dornberger, Walter, 305, 452, 486, 

Douglas Aircraft Go., 170, 201 

Drake, Frank, 99-100 

Draper, Charles Stark, 155 

DuBridge, Lee, 220 

Dulles, Allen, 210-211 

DuPont, Tony, 312 

Dyna-Soar. See X-20/Dyna-Soar 

90-91 

519 

E 

Early Bird Satellite, 56 

Early-warning systems, 494-499 

Eisenhower, Dwight D., 166,201,203, 

204-206,208,210,211,552,517 

ELDO. See European Launcher 

Development Organization 

ELDO-A rocket, 257 

Eliseev, Alexei, 121, 134 

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 23 

Emme, Eugene M., 452, 554 

Endeavour (Space Shuttle), 237 

Engineering, computer use in, 395- 

397; education, 397-399; management versus practice, 378, 386- 

387, 394. See also systems 

engineering 

Estess, Roy W., 60 

Etzioni, Amitai, 444 

Europa 11, 257 

European Launcher Development 

Organization (ELDO), 168, 

245-253,255-257,260 

European Space Research 

Organization (ESRO), 254-255 

European Union, 32,245-253 

Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle 

Experimental Design Bureau No. 1 

Exploration. See Discovery and 

Exploration 

Exploration and Empire, 7 

Explorer 1, 166 

Explorer VII, 596 

Explorer’s Club, 162 

(EELV), 332,336-337 

(USSR), 116-117, 119, 120 

F 

Faget, Max, 190,292,382 

Faludi, Susan, 475 

Federal Communications 

Feoktistov, Konstantin, 112, 116, 

Ferguson, Eugene, 589 

Ferguson, James, 218-219 

Fermi, Enrico, 100 

Feynman, Richard, 386,387 

Commission (FCC), 56 

136 
648 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

Flanigan, Peter, 295 

Fletcher, James C., 41, 46-47, 

Foner, Eric, 563 

Ford, Gerald R., 231, 294 

Forman, Paul, 591, 607 

Foster, Jodie, 99 

Freedom (space station), 444 

Friederick, Caspar David, 30 

Fries, Sylvia, 401 

From Vinland to Mars: A Thousand 

Frontier thesis. See space, Frontier 

Frosch, Robert A., 226 

Frutkin, Arnold W., 240-244, 249, 

97-98,438-439 

Years ofExploration, 3, 10 

Thesis 

252-253,255-256,257-258 

G 

Gaddis, John Lewis, 449-450 

Gagarin,Yuri, 113-1 14,117,123,132 

GALCIT (Guggenheim Aeronautical 

Laboratory of the California 

Institute of Technology), 436 

Galison, Peter, 378, 394 

Gama, Vasco de, 15, 23 

Garb, Yaakov Jerome, 476 

Gates, Thomas, 211 

Gaulle, Charles de, 247 

Gehman, Adm. Harold, 369, 389 

Gemini, Blue (military program), 

Gemini, Project, 112,169,175-178, 

Gemini 8,379. See also Gemini, 

Blue 

213, 215, 520 

182,184,186-187,214,215; 

General Electric, 170 

Gilruth, Robert R., 149, 184 

Glenn, John H., 46, 186 

Glennan, T. Keith, 207, 377, 552, 

Global Positioning System (GPS), 

553 

57,208,530-532 

GLONASS, 531 

Goddard, Robert H., 38-39, 103, 

Godin, Isabella, 22 

Goetzmann, William H., 3, 7, 11, 

Goldin, Daniel S., 62, 281, 282, 314, 

Goodpaster, Andrew, 210-211 

Gore, Albert, 284, 289 

Grand Tour, 4,21,28 

Gray, Mike, 169, 181, 191 

Grechko, Georgii, 135 

Griffin, Michael, 463 

Grimwood, James M., 169, 181 

Grissom, Gus, 379 

Grumman Aircraft, 177 

Gruntman, Mike, 479 

Guggenheim Aeronautical 

107,303,436,468,485 

GOES-G, 323 

20,24 

322,463 

Laboratory of the California 

Institute of Technology. See 

GALCIT 

Gulliver, Lemuel, 20 

Hacker, Barton C., 169, 181, 183 

Hall, R. Cargill, 203, 446, 464 

Halley, Edmund, 21 

Hallion, Richard P., 149 

Harrison, Albert A., 60 

Hartz, Louis, 84 

Heinlein, Robert A., 101 

Helios, 258-259 

“Hell’s Angels,” 141 

Henry, John, 143 

Henry the Navigator, Prince, 18 

Heppenheimer, T. A., 41,455-456, 

478 

High-reliability organizations. See 

organizations, high-reliability 

Hilbert, David, 603-604 

Hindle, Brooke, 588-589, 591 
INDEX 649 

Historiography of space, 433-613; 

community and explanation, 

603-613; and critical theory, 549- 

572; and cultural history, 472- 

477; and method, 605-606; and 

new aerospace history, 434-435, 

458-477,550,559-566; and new 

social history, 550-551, 562-563, 

566; and oral history, 556, 565- 

566; political history, 459-463; 

and race, 570-572; relation to 

history subdisciplines, 549-572; 

Smithsonian Institution proseminar, 555-556; social construction, 

464, 468; social history, 468-471; 

technology history, 463-468; 

women’s history, 564-565. See also 

postmodernism 

Howard, Ron, 568 

Hubble Space Telescope, 63, 105, 

Hudson, Gary, 320 

Hughes, Howard, 141 

Hughes, Thomas P., 150-151, 338, 

Hughes Aircraft Gorp., 56, 188, 191 

Human spaceflight, military, 213- 

221, 519-524. See also Apollo, 

Gemini, International Space 

Station, Mercury, Soyuz, and 

other human spaceflight programs 

Humboldt, Alexander van, 3, 4, 23, 

25, 28, 30 

Hunter, Maxwell W., 111, 339 

Hurt, Harry, 111, 439 

Husband, Rick, 388 

Hypersonic flight, 277, 486, 491. See 

also Dyna-Soar, National AeroSpace Plane, individual entries in 

“X’ series aircraft 

590 

455,464,576-577 

1, Robot, 86-92 

ICBM. See ballistic missiles 

INSAT, 322 

Integrated Space Transportation 

Plan, 286 

International Geophysical Year 

(IGY), 10, 28, 166,203, 210 

International Polar Year, 24 

International Space Station (ISS), 53, 

58,59-62,63, 106,243,259-260, 

272,274,281,286-287,300,361, 

368, 444. See also Freedom 

Satellite Consortium 

International Telecommunications 

(INTELSAT), 56,255-256 

T 

James Webb Space Telescope, 62 

Jefferson, Thomas, 23 

Jenkins, Dennis, 453-454 

Jervis, Robert, 350, 374 

Jet Propulsion Laboratory, 205-206, 

Johnson, Kelly, 202 

Johnson, Lyndon B., 50,205,239- 

485 

240,244-245,247-248,258,443, 

509 

Johnson, Roy, 205 

Johnson, Stephen B., 177, 179, 181, 

Johnson Space Center, 60, 63, 106 

Johnson-Freese, Joan, 241, 243 

Joule, James Prescott, 304 

Jupiter C, 166 

455,613 

K 

K-1, 319 

Kaiser, David, 397 

Kamanin, Nikolai, 107, 123, 126- 

Kavanaugh, James, 587 

Kay, W. D., 170, 191, 289 

127, 134, 135, 139-140 
650 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

Landsat satellites, 57 Lunar module, military, 524 

Kecskemeti, Paul, 201 

Kelly, Michael S., 319, 334 

Kelly, Thomas J., 169, 172 

Kennan, George, 570 

Kennedy, John F., 11,46,49-50, 

56, 148, 161, 166,209-212, 239, 

240-241, 391, 437, 443,463, 570 

KH-5, 527 

KH-7, 514 

KH-9 HEXAGON, 446,513, 520 

KH-11 KENNAN, 446, 506,513 

Khrushchev, Nikita, 115, 129 

Kilgore, De Witt Douglas, 39, 451, 

Killian, James R., 201-205, 210, 211 

Kipling, Rudyard, 26 

Kirk, James T., 46 

Kissinger, Henry, 219-220 

Kistiakowsky, George, 211-212 

Kistler Aerospace, 319 

Kline, Nathan, 103 

Kliper, 337 

Komarov, Vladimir, 123 

Korolev, Sergei, 112-113, 115, 116, 

474, 570 

119-121, 129-130, 132, 143,454, 

479,489 

Kraft, Chris, 291 

Kranzberg, Melvin, 552-554, 557, 

Kreplin, Robert, 594 

Krige, John, 52-53 

Krugman, Herbert E., 469 

574-577, 588 

L 

L-1, 129-132 

La Porte, Todd, 175, 345, 393 

LaCapra, Dominic, 567 

Laika, 93 

Laird, Melvin R., 219-220 

Lamar, Howard R., 47 

Lambright, Henry W., 455 

Land, Edwin H., 202,210,211 

Lang, Fritz, 143 

Langley Research Center, 309 

LaRouche, Lyndon, 42 

Lassell, William, 585 

Lasser, David, 450 

Lassie, 93 

Launch vehicles, 485-493; costs, 

301-302; military origins, 486; 

reliability, 302; reusable versus 

expendable, 237-238,266-268, 

301-341. See also ballistic missiles; 

Defense, Department of; individual launch vehicle names; 

National Space Transportation 

Policy 

Launius, Roger, 269, 270, 292, 456, 

458,459,461,465,469,549-550, 

566,569,607 

Lavery, David, 473 

Lebedev, Valentin, 135 

Leonov, Alexei, 118, 127, 129, 130, 

Levine, Arnold S., 455 

Lewis, Richard S., 3, 10, 440, 442 

Lewis and Clark Expedition, 10, 

Ley, Willy, 435-436, 450, 454 

Liji and Death of Planet Earth, The, 48 

Lifting bodies, 308 

Lindbergh, Charles A., 147 

Lockheed Martin Corp., 57, 170, 

Logsdon, John M., 49, 69, 443 

Long March (launch vehicle), 486 

Lord, M. G., 569 

Lost in Space, 93 

Lovelace, Randy, 564-565 

Low, George M., 224-225 

Lubar, Steve, 585 

Lucas, William, 388 

Lunar Landing Research Vehicle 

132 

20-24,26,82 

188,202,302 

(LLRV), 157 
INDEX 651 

Lunar Orbit Rendezvous (LOR), 157 

Lunar Orbiter, 516 

Lund, Robert, 387, 388 

Lykke, Nina, 476 

Lyotard, Francois, 609-610 

M 

M-13, 9 

Mack, Pamela, 464, 555, 588 

Mackenzie, Donald A., 464 

Macmillan, Harold, 247 

Magellan, Ferdinand, 19, 21 

Maher, Neil, 562 

Mailer, Norman, 472 

Maita, M., 58 

Makarov, Oleg, 130, 134-135 

Malina, Frank J., 452 

Manned Orbiting Laboratory 

cancellation in 1969, 520 

(MOL), 215-221, 520, 522; 

Mariner Program, 12 

Mark, Hans, 41, 226-227,231-233 

Martin Corp., 189 

Mars Exploration Rovers, 94 

Mars Global Surveyor, 98 

Mason, Jerald, 387, 388 

Massachusetts Institute of 

May, Ernest R., 448 

Mayo, Robert, 219-220 

McAuliffe, Christa, 383-384, 568 

McConnell, John, 223 

McCool, William, 388 

McCurdy, Howard C., 177-178, 191, 

McDonald, Robert, 448 

McDonnell Aircraft, Inc., 170, 176, 

McDougall, Walter A., 201, 459- 

McElroy, Neil, 207-208,210-211 

McNair, Ronald, 383 

Technology (MIT), 154,220 

401, 444, 461, 473, 561-562 

177, 182-187, 190-198 

460,482, 555,557-558,608-609 

McNamara, Robert S., 148, 210, 

Medaris, John B., 205-206 

Mellon Corp., 189 

Mercury, Project, 93, 110, 112, 148- 

Merton, Robert, 604 

“Metropolis,” 143 

Midas Program, 211, 495-496,497, 

Midway Island, 15 

Military spaceflight, and geodesy, 

526-527; human, 519-524; and 

navigation, 530-532; Soviet, 521, 

531; and weather and science, 524- 

530. See also Air Force; Army; 

Defense, Department of; Navy 

Military-Industrial Commission 

(USSR), 116 

Milstar, 506 

Ministry of General MachineBuilding (USSR), 120, 124 

Minuteman, 486, 487, 488 

Mir, 59 

MirCorp, 59 

Mishin, Vasilii, 120-121, 124, 

Missiles. See ballistic missiles, launch 

vehicles 

Mitchener, James, 46 

Molniya, 506 

Mondale, Walter, 225, 382 

Monitor, USS, 143 

Moon Lander, 169 

Moore, Jesse, 388 

Moorman, Thomas S., 330 

Moran, Thomas, 26 

Morrow, Walter, 220, 224 

Morse, Samuel F. B., 304 

Morton-T hiokol, 38 7-38 8 

Mueller, George P., 96, 176-177, 382 

Mulloy, Lawrence, 388 

Multhauf, Robert, 586-587 

215,253-254,306,520 

149, 176, 182-183, 184, 192-198 

498 

131-132, 134 
652 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

Murray, Bruce, 12, 438 

Murray, Charles, 464 

N-1, 132 

NACA. See National Advisory 

Committee for Aeronautics 

NASA Advanced Programs Office, 

41 

NASA and the Space Industry, 188 

National Academy of Sciences, 203 

National Advisory Committee for 

Aeronautics (NACA), 169, 170, 

176, 189, 205-207, 239; and 

Dyna-Soar, 306; and lifting-body 

research, 308 

National Aeronautics and Space Act 

National Aeronautics and Space 

of 1958,62,205-207,377 

Administration (NASA), and the 

aerospace industry, 169-198; and 

the Air Force, 199-238; and 

American exceptionalism, 79-86; 

and Apollo human-machine 

interaction, 147-157; and artifacts, 

580-582; and barriers to international cooperation, 251-263; 

budget, 55,271,294; and 

Challenger accident, 227-232, 269- 

383-388,390,392-394, 568; and 

the Cold War, 49-55; colonization 

of, 26-42; and communications 

satellites, 55-57; compelling 

rationales for exploration, 37-70; 

creation of, 62, 204-207; culture, 

345-426,465; and Department of 

Defense (DOD), 199-238; and 

economic competitiveness and 

commercial applications, 55-61; 

and European Launcher 

Development Organization 

(ELDO), 167,245-253; and 

270,276,278,322, 345-375,377, 

exploration, 44, 438; and external 

relations, 165-260; and Frontier 

Thesis, 44-47, 79,84-86; and 

geopolitics and national prestige, 

49-53; and ground control 

(USSR), 126-127; as highreliability organization (HRO), 

403-426; history office, 377,452- 

453,548, 551-555; and human 

destiny, 44-49; and human 

spaceflight mandate, 270-271, 

292-298; and human-machine 

interfaces (U.S.), 141-162; and 

human-machine interfaces 

(USSR), 107-140; and humans 

versus robots, 77-104; and 

intelligence community, 447; and 

international cooperation, 239- 

260; and interstellar travel, 94- 

100; long-range plan of, 83; and 

“manifest destiny,” 46, 79-86; and 

Manned Orbiting Laboratory 

(MOL), 215-221; and military 

systems, 54-55; motivations for 

exploration, 38-43; and national 

defense, 53-55; and on-board 

automation, 107-140; organization, 

policy on robotics, 93-94; and the 

postbiological universe, 100-104; 

and posthumanism, 77-104; and 

rendezvous and docking, 112-113; 

and robotics, 77-104; and scientific discovery and understanding, 

62-67; and Soviet lunar program, 

129-132; and Soviet Union, 75, 

107-140; and Space Shuttle, 222- 

and space transportation policy, 

320-337; and systems engineering, 

148-155; and survival of the 

species, 46-49; theories of exploration, 7-35; and tourism, 58-62; 

349-375, 389-391, 403-426; 

238,269-300,348-375,383-402; 
INDEX 653 

and utopia, 38-43; and Vision for 

Space Exploration, 3-4, 47-48, 

200-205; visions of, 78-86, 200- 

205; and “X’ vehicles, 314-319; 

and X-15, 152-155; and X-20 

“Dyna-Soar,” 152-154,213-216, 

221, 306-308. See also Air Force, 

US.; Defense, Department of; 

organizations, high-reliability; 

individual NASA launch vehicles, 

programs, and spacecraft 

Tokyo, 58 

National Aerospace Laboratory, 

National Aero-Space Plane (NASP), 

312, 325, 328, 486; cancellation in 

1992,280 

277-278,279,280,289-290,311- 

National Air and Space Museum 

National Commission on Space, 

National Oceanic and Atmospheric 

Administration (NOAA), 168 

National Reconnaissance Office 

(NRO), 166, 199, 203, 206, 211, 

512-513, 520; existence revealed 

in 1992, 514 

National security, 442-450, 481-548 

National Security Action 

(NASM), 52, 580-600 

78-79 

220-221,226,227,231-232,481, 

Memorandum (NSAM) 294, 

254-255 

National Security Action 

Memorandum (NSAM) 354, 

245-247, 249-250 

National Security Action 

Memorandum (NSAM) 357,249 

National Security Decision Directive 

National Security Decision Directive 

National Security Decision Directive 

(NSDD)-8,231 

(NSDD)-42,231 

(NSDD)-80,234 

National Security Decision Directive 

National Security Decision Directive 

National Security Decision Directive 

National Space Launch Strategy, 326 

National Space Transportation 

Policy, 282, 287, 289, 315, 320- 

337; and military, 228-238 

Naval Research Laboratory, 189, 

Navy, U.S., antisatellite systems, 

(NSDD) -144,235 

(NSDD)-164,236 

(NSDD)-254,236-237 

204,481, 535, 592-595 

533; and communications, 506; 

entry into space systems, 200, 205, 

207,535-536,539; and Goddard, 

485; and hypersonics, 312; and 

Manned Orbiting Laboratory, 

218; and Naval Research 

Laboratory, 535, 592-595; and 

Naval Space Command, 537; and 

navigation, 530-531; and Polaris, 

151; and Vanguard, 166, 189, 204, 

487, 528. See also Vanguard 

Navigation. See applications satellites 

Neufeld, Michael, 597 

Newell, Homer E., 65-66 

Nike-Ajax (missile), 509 

Nike-X (missile), 509 

Nike-Zeus (missile), 509, 510 

Nina, 7 

Nixon, Richard M., 50-51, 219- 

220,222-223,240, 509; and 

Apollo aftermath, 271, 294, 295- 

297,322 

Noble, David, 465 

NORAD (North American Air 

Defense Command), 501-504 

North American Aviation, Inc., 155, 

188, 192 

Northeastern University, 170 

Northwest Passage, 10 

Noviko, A. A., 132 
NPOESS (National Polar-Orbiting 

Environmental Satellite System), 

526 

NSC-5520,203 

Nye, David E., 465 

Oberth, Hermann, 436, 468 

O’Connor, Carroll, 50 

O’Connor, Edmund, 176-177 

Office of Management and Budget 

Office of Science and Technology 

Policy (OSTP), 226 

O’Keefe, Sean, 388-389 

Okhapkin, Sergei, 112-113 

On the Shoulders of Titans, 169, 182 

O’Neill, Gerard K., 40-42, 85 

Onizuka, Ellison, 383 

Opportunity, 96 

Orbital Science Corp., 57 

Orbital Space Plane, 286, 287 

Ordway, Frederick I., 436, 486 

Organizational systems, 350; lessons 

learned, 350,371-375; at NASA, 

(OMB), 222-226 

349-375,390 

Organizations, Chinese space, 538; 

high-reliability, 347,403-426; 

Soviet space, 537-538; space-related, 

535-544; U.S. space, 535-537 

O-rings. See Solid Rocket Booster 

Orphans ofthe Sky, 101 

Owens, Larry, 577 

654 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

Peenemunde, 176 Ramo, Simon P., 151-152 

Paine, Thomas, 220, 259, 296 

Palapa, 322 

Parry, J. H., 17 

Paterson, William, 31 

Pathfinder (RLV), 317 

Peary, Robert E., 31 

Pegasus Launch Vehicle, 57 

Penley, Constance, 476, 568 

Perrow, Charles, 175, 393 

Phelps, J. Alfred, 564 

Philip, Chas G., 450 

Phillips, Samuel C., 176-177, 191, 

Piccard, Bertrand, 162 

Pierce, John R., 55-56 

Pike, Zebulon, 10 

Pilyugin, Nikolai, 130 

Pinta, 7 

Pioneer Program, 30 

Polaris, 151, 152, 486 

Polaroid Corp., 202 

Poletaev, Igor’, 122 

Pollack, Herman, 241, 249 

Ponomareva, Valentina, 113, 128 

Popular Science, 53 

Postbiological universe, 75, 99-103 

Postmodernism, 4, 47, 431, 472, 

504, 566-572, 609-613. See also 

historiography of space 

382 

Pournelle, Gerry, 42 

Powell, John Wesley, 27 

“Preliminary Design of an 

Experimental World-Circling 

Spaceship,” 201 

Committee (PSAC), 205,215 

President’s Science Advisory 

Propellant, rocket, 492-493 

Pyncheon, Thomas, 472 

Quarles, Donald, 203-204, 207-208 

R1 (launch vehicle), 486, 489 

R7 (launch vehicle), 486, 489 

Rabi, I. I., 591 

Radar, 494; Soviet, 496-497 

Railroad and the Space Program, 437 

Raleigh, Walter, 31 
INDEX 655 

Ramon, Ilan, 388 

Ramo-Wooldridge, 189 

RAND Corp., 189, 201 

RASV. See Reusable Aerodynamic 

Space Vehicle 

Raushenbakh, Boris, 117 

RCA Corp., 56 

Reagan, Ronald, 52,231,277-278, 

287, 294, 321, 323, 324, 384, 508, 

510 

Reconnaissance satellites, 512-519 

Recoverable Orbital Launch System 

(ROLS), 304 

Red Star, The, 107 

Redstone Rocket, 172, 208, 263 

Relay satellite, 56 

Rendezvous with Rarna, 101-102 

Rennie, Michael, 93 

Resnik, Judith, 383 

Reusable Aerodynamic Space 

Vehicle (RASV), 308-311 

Reusable launch vehicles. See launch 

vehicles 

Reynolds, David West, 442 

Richardson, Allen, 396 

Richelson, Jeffrey T., 446, 447 

Right Stug The, 149 

Risk, definition of, 468; 

normalization of, 349-375; 

perceptions of, 348, 373, 386 

Robinson, James Harvey, 553 

Robonaut, 106 

Robotics, 77-104; and slavery, 

Rocketdyne, Inc., 187-188 

Rockwell International, 233 

Rogers Commission (Challenger 

accident), 269-270,357-363, 

86-95 

384-388 

Roland, Alex, 77 

Romanenko, Yurii, 135 

Rostow, Walt W., 245 

Roton, 319-320 

Royal Society of London, 21-22 

RubeI, John, 211 

Rumsfeld, Donald, 382-383 

Runyon, Damon, 33 

R. U.R. (Rossum’s Universal 

Robots), 88 

Rutan, Burt, 61 

S 

Sagan, Carl, 4, 8, 48,97-99, 107 

Sagan, Scott, 303 

SAGE (Semi-Automatic Ground 

Salyut 3, 130, 521 

Salyut 5, 521 

Salyut 6, 125 

Samos Program, 211, 512, 516 

Sanger, Eugen, 304,519, 521 

Santa Maria, 7 

Sarton, George, 553 

Satcom, 321 

Satellites, communications, 505- 

508; military weather and science, 

524-530. See also aiitisatellites, 

applications satellites 

Environment), 400, 494, 501, 504 

Saturn rocket, 7, 154, 159, 170, 

Schmid, Sonja, 128 

Schmitt, Harrison, 233 

Science in NASA’s Vision for Space 

Exploration, 63 

Scobee, Dick, 383 

SCORE (Signal Communication by 

Orbiting Relay Equipment), 505 

Scott, Dave, 379 

Scott, Dred, 90 

Scott, Robert, 82 

Scott, W. R., 174 

Scramjet, 303, 305 

Scranton, Phil, 425 

Seamans, Robert C., 223, 379, 

181-185,208-210,273, 587 

382-383,455 
656 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT 

Search for Extraterrestrial 

Shackleton, Ernest, 24, 82 

Shatalov, Vladimir, 124 

Shaw, Debra, 568 

Shayler, David, 467 

Shea, Joseph, 150, 176-177, 383 

Shoemaker-Levy 9, Comet, 49 

Shuttle. See Space Shuttle 

Shuttleworth, Mark, 61 

Siddiqi, Asif, 558, 611 

Sikorsky S-29, 141 

Single stage to orbit (SSTO), 282, 

328, 333. See also spaceplane 

Six Million Dollar Man, The, 103 

Skylab, 520, 587 

Slayton, Deke, 457 

Sloan Foundation, 144-145 

Smith, Michael, 383 

Smith, Robert, 590 

Snow, C. P., 574 

Social science, role of, 374-375 

Society for Experimental Test Pilots 

Sokal, Alan, 605 

Solid Rocket Booster (SRB), 349, 

384; O-rings, 349, 351-354, 

386-387, 392, 393. See also Space 

Shuttle 

Intelligence (SETI), 96-100 

289,302, 304,309,313-314,325, 

(SETP), 149-150, 152 

Soviet Council of Ministers, 116 

Soviet Union, 75, 107-140 

SOYUZ, 119-120, 121, 123-125, 126, 

130, 137, 286, 486, 521, 523. See 

also Apollo-Soyuz Test Project 

Space, access to, 263-341; and the 

aerospace industry, 169-198; and 

American exceptionalism, 79-86; 

and Apollo human-machine interaction, 147-157; artifacts, 573-600; 

and barriers to international cooperation, 251-263; and Challenger 

accident, 227-232; and the Cold 

War, 49-55,443-450; colonization 

of, 26-42; command and control, 

500-504; and communications 

satellites, 55-57,505-508; compelling rationales for exploration of, 

37-70; and Department of Defense 

(DOD), 199-238; and economic 

competitiveness and commercial 

applications, 55-61; and European 

Launcher Development Organization (ELDO), 167,245-253; and 

federal budget, 55; five rationales 

for exploration, 44; and Frontier 

Thesis, 44-47,79,84-86,436-438, 

473; and geopolitics and national 

prestige, 49-53; and ground control 

(USSR), 126-127; and human destiny, 44-49; and human-machine 

interfaces (U.S.), 141-162; and 

human-machine interfaces 

(USSR), 107-140; and humans 

versus robots, 77-104,468; intelligence and reconnaissance, 512- 

519; and international cooperation, 

239-260; and interstellar travel, 

94-100; and major military systems, 54-55; and “manifest destiny,” 

46,79-86; and Manned Orbiting 

Laboratory (MOL), 215-221; and 

military humans in space, 2 13-2 14, 

5 19-524; motivations (political, 

ditary, scientific), 441; motivations for exploration, 38-43; and 

national defense, 53-55,442-450, 

481-548,512-519; and on-board 

automation, 107-140; organizations, 535-544; and the postbiological universe, 100-104; and 

posthumanism, 77-104; power 

theory, 544-546; and religion, 465; 

and rendezvous and docking, 112- 

113; and robotics, 77-104; and 

scientific discovery and under- 
INDEX 657 

standing, 62-67; societal impact, 

463; and Soviet lunar program, 

129-132; and Soviet Union, 75, 

107-140; and Space Shuttle, 222- 

238; and Sputnik, 204-206; surveillance, 494-499; and survival of 

the species, 46-49; and systems 

engineering, 148-155; and 

Technological Capabdities Panel 

(TCP), 201-205; theories of 

exploration, 7-35; and tourism, 

58-62; and utopia, 38-43,437; and 

Vision for Space Exploration, 3-4, 

47-48,200-205; visions of, 78-86, 

200-205; warfare, 532-535; and 

women, 564-565; and X-15,152- 

155; and X-20 “Dyna-Soar,” 152- 

154,213-216,221. See also historiography, National Aeronautics and 

Space Adrmnistration, space science 

Space Exploration, Vision for, 3-4, 

336, 402-403; origins in CAIB 

Report, 270 

Space Exploration Initiative (SEI), 

294,325 

Space Frontier Foundation, 42-43, 

Space Launch Initiative, 285-286 

Space Launch Recovery Plan, 237-238 

Space policy, 42, 443-445. See also 

National Space Transportation 

Policy 

47-48,200-205,286-287,300, 

328-329 

Space power theory, 544-546 

Space science, 440-441, 454-455, 

Space Shuttle, 34, 50-51, 54, 63-66, 

524-526 

68, 105, 222-238, 269-300; 

historiography of, 455-456; 

political support for, 291-292; 

replacement for, 264-266, 269- 

and space transportation policy, 

300,308-309,315,327-329; 

320-333. See also Air Force, 

ChaIZenger, Columbia, National 

Space Transportation Policy, 

Solid Rocker Booster, Space 

Transportation System (STS), 

TransAtmospheric Vehicle 

Space Station, 52-53, 78-79, 80, 84, 

86, 105,222,234,523; and space 

tourism, 58-59. See also Freedom, 

International Space Station, 

Manned Orbiting Laboratory, Mir, 

Salyut, Skylab 

Space Task Group, 86, 149, 177, 220, 

Space tourism, 58-62 

Space Transportation Policy. See 

National Space Transportation 

Policy 

222,294-296 

Space Transportation System, 

Space warfare, 532-534 

Spaceflight, rationales for, 265 

Spacelab, 65 

Spaceplane, and Air Force, 304, 

303-321; and Goddard, 303; and 

Sanger, 304. See also National 

Aero-Space Plane, X-series 

320-321,338-339 

SpaceShipOne, 61 

Spacesuit, 523 

Special Purpose Dexterous 

Spirit, 96 

Sputnik, 459-460, 461, 544, 551, 

553 

Squyres, Steve, 6, 162 

Stages to Saturn, 170 

Stalin, 449 

Stanley, Henry Morton, 82 

Stapledon, Olaf, 104 

Star Trek, 28, 35, 46, 88, 90-91, 103, 

404, 570 

Star Trek: First Contact, 103 

Star Wars, 88 

Manipulator (Dextre), 106 
658 CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OFSPACEFLIGHT 

Stares, Paul B., 212-213, 445 

Starlife, Hans L. D. G., 75 

Stockmans, Richard, 58 

Storms, Harrison, 169, 383 

Strategic Air Command (SAC), 200, 

Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), 

Strategic Defense Initiative 

202 

42, 508, 510, 511 

Organization (SDIO), 311-314, 

510 

Surveillance, space, 494-499 

Swift, Jonathan, 20 

Sylvester, Arthur, 211-212 

Symphonie, 257 

Syncom satellites, 56 

Systems engineering, 346-347,399- 

401,539; and Atlas program, 150- 

151,400; and shift to “faster, better, 

cheaper” philosophy, 400-401 

T 

Tatarewicz, Joseph, 590 

Taylor, Frederick, 91, 142 

Teague, Olin, 382 

Technological Capabilities Panel 

Telstar satellites, 56, 321 

Thiokol, Inc., 170 

Thompson, Floyd, 380 

Thor (missile), 485, 487 

Thoreau, Henry David, 26 

Thorne, Kip, 99-102 

Tiapchenko, Yuri, 130 

Time Machine, The, 101 

Time magazine, 61 

TIROS satellite, 526, 530 

Titan (launch vehicle), 276,322-323, 

Tito, Dennis, 59-61 

Tocqueville, Alexis de, 84 

Total Quality Management, 401 

Tourism, space. See space tourism 

Trailblazer, 317 

(TCP), 201-205 

330,334,485,486,487-488,520 

TransAtmospheric Vehicle (TAV), 

Transportation, rockets as, 338-341 

Truly, Richard H., 279 

TRW, Inc., 151, 189 

Tsien Hsue-Shen, 538, 543 

Tsiolkovskiy, 436, 468 

Tsybin, Pavel, 112-113 

Tumlinson, Rick, 42 

Turner, Frederick Jackson, 44-47, 

Turner, Roscoe, 141-142 

Twining, Gen. Nathan, 207-208 

2001: A Space Odyssey, 86, 94, 102 

277,311,332 

84-88,437 

U 

U-2,211, 512 

TT 

V-2, 485-486, 508; American, 526 

Van Allen, James A., 67, 73-74, 77 

Van Helden, Albert, 578 

Vandenberg Air Force Base, 493 

Vanguard, Project, 166, 189, 204, 

Vaughan, Diane, 178-179, 181, 393, 

Vega, 99 

Venturestar. See X-33 

“Victory Unintentional,” 92 

Viking (launcher), 487 

Viking 1, 587 

Von Braun, Wernher, 39-40, 53,75, 

487. See also Navy 

425,465 

78-79,83-84,93, 190,205-206, 

208, 266,305, 436, 437, 454, 

473, 485, 487. See also von Braun 

paradigm 

Von Braun paradigm, 456 

Voskhod 2, 112, 117-118, 127 

Vostok, 110-115, 117, 120-121, 137 

Vostok 3, 117 

Vostok 4, 117 

Voyager Program, 4, 28, 30,63 
W 

Wachhorst, Wyn, 124 

Wallace, Alfred, 23 

Wanderer Above a Sea of Fog, 30 

Ward, Peter, 48 

Warden, Pete, 42 

Warfare, space, 532-534 

Warner, Deborah Jean, 585 

Washington, George, 22 

Webb, James E., 56, 148, 176-177, 

249-250,253-254,257-258,380, 

382-383,455 

Weber, Ronald, 472 

Weinberger, Caspar, 50-51 

Weitekamp, Margaret, 470 

Wells, H. G., 101 

Westar, 321 

Western Development Division 

(USAF), 151 

Wheelon, Albert D., 446 

White, Ed, 379 

White, Gen. Thomas D., 208-209 

White Sands Missile Range, 493 

Wiener, Norbert, 144 

Wiesner, Jerome C., 148 

Wildavsky, Aaron, 84 

Wilson, T. A., 310 

Wireless World, 55-56 

Wittje, Roland, 591 

Wolfe, Tom, 148, 456, 474 

Wooldridge, Dean, 151-152 

World War 11, 15 

Wright brothers, 143, 144 

WS-l17L, 205, 210-211 

X 

X Prize, 61 

“X” vehicles, 314-318 

X-20/Dyna-Soar, 152-154,213- 

X-15, 152-155, 157, 159, 169, 486 

216,221,305-308,486,491-492, 

520, 521-522; cancellation of in 

INDEX 

1963, 520 

659 

X-24A, 308,486 

X-24B,308 

X-30, 312. See also National AeroX-33/VentureStarm, 57,284,290- 

Space Plane 

291,302,308,316-317,329, 

334-335 

X-34, 316,334-335 

X-37, 318 

X-38, 318,334-335 

X-2000,315 

Xavier, St. Francis, 18 

TI 

Yazdovskii, Vladimir, 113-114 

York, Herbert, 207 

Young, John, 43 

Z 

Zimmerman, Robert, 438,454 

Zond, 129-132 

Zubrin, Robert, 85, 437 

Zuckerman, Solly, 249 
I 

The Galileo spacecraft and its Inertial Upper Stage 

booster rocket were deployed from the Space 

Shuttle Atlantis on 18 October 1989. Shortly thereafter, the booster rocket fired and separated, 

sending Gafileo on its six-year journey to the planet 

Jupiter. Upon its arrival at Jupiter in December 

1995, Galileo released a probe into the atmosphere 

so that scientists could survey the composition of 

the planet's clouds. The Orbiter has relayed probe 

information, surveyed its surroundings, and photographed Jupiter and some of its major satellites. 

(NASA photo no. STS-34-71-0001?) 

National Aeronautics and Space Administration 

NASA History Division 

Office of External Relations 

Washington, DC 

2006