Societal Impact of Spaceflight, edited by Steven J. Dick and Roger D. Launius (National Aeronautics and Space Administration, 2007, $25), offers a snapshot of space history and the NASA history program. Both appear to be thriving. Space history is a subfield within aerospace history—itself a subset of the history of technology—and focuses primarily on the civilian sphere, most of which has been NASA activity. More than 150 books have been published through the NASA history program since it was founded by NASA’s first administrator, T. Keith Glennan, at the suggestion of Melvin Kranzberg. The current strengths of space history, as evidenced in this volume, are the youth and diversity of the scholars pursuing it and the quality of their work. Not surprisingly, some of its weaknesses are apparent as well.

The 2006 NASA conference on which the volume is based brought together quite an array of men and women: various kinds of historians; civil servants; a communications specialist; independent scholars; museum curators; an astronomer; an economist and lawyer; an engineer; and professors of English, American studies, public administration, public affairs, and space policy. The book is subdivided into six sections, though boundaries between sections are porous and topics spill over and sometimes duplicate one another. The section on “Commercial and Economic Impact,” for example, covers some of the same ground as that on “Applications Satellites, the Environment, and National Security.” In general, the organization is sound and the quality of the essays is good, although it is doubtful whether a commercial publisher would have accorded editors Steven Dick and Roger Launius the luxury of including all the contributions that appear here.

Some of the material is refreshingly original and unexpected, at least to this reviewer. Kim McQuaid’s account of NASA’s hiring, demoting, firing, rehiring, and bridling of Ruth Bates Harris, the agency’s highest-ranking black woman at the time of her appointment as director of equal opportunity in 1971, is a chilling reminder of the mindset at NASA in the Apollo era, what subsequent administrator Daniel Goldin called “male, pale, and stale” (p. 448). Jennifer Ross-Nazzal analyzes the Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point (HACCP), NASA’s pioneering plan for proactive quality control in the development of processed foods for the Apollo astronauts, showing how it became the food-industry gold standard in ensuing decades; here we appear to have an instance of an innovative technological development that really did spin off from the space program. Peter Westwick’s brief but insightful appraisal of the impact of Cal Tech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory on Southern California reveals the agency’s seminal contributions to commercial computer graphics and suggests that the JPL itself may be seen “as a subset of the entertainment business” (p. 479).

Societal Impact of Spaceflight also displays a critical edge, a refreshing exception to the party line so often encountered in official histories. Glen Asner, for example, a civil servant in NASA’s History Division, notes that space history “remains focused on elites and artifacts.” Even “the concept of societal impact is problematic,” he says, because it suggests a causal arrow that moves only from spaceflight to society (p. 388). Asner recommends a dose of rigorous social history, including attention to class, race, gender, labor, education, and community relations. Martin Collins voices a similar dissatisfaction with the failure to employ critical theory and other conceptual contributions from the humanities in order to situate space history in the “broader landscape of the postwar historical experience” (p. 621). Collins particularly recommends framing space history in the nexus between culture and Marxist production. Equally critical of normative space history are the four authors in this volume—Valerie Neal, Linda Billings, Ron Miller, and Wendell Mendell—who analyze the public rationales for spaceflight, usually meaning human spaceflight.

As for the weaknesses of space history illustrated or exposed in this volume, three stand out. First, almost all of the essays display a surprising lack of evidence: Stephen Johnson’s reprise of his exemplary and exhaustive statistical analyses of space activity within the U.S. and world economies is the exception that proves this rule. Even though Philip Scranton offers anecdotal evidence from a wide range of aerospace industrial projects to support his claim that NASA has been the “hub of Big Engineering in America,” not all of his cases are drawn from the space program. Too many of the chapters in Societal Impact of Spaceflight lend credence to Eric Conway’s stinging rebuke that “space history has been little more than advocacy written in heroic prose” (p. 287).

A second deficiency in this volume, and the conference from which it proceeded, is the slight amount of attention paid space activities in the realm of national security. According to Stephen Johnson’s data, in 2005 the United States spent almost three times as much on space-related military and intelligence-gathering activities as it did on NASA. It seems reasonable to suspect that the impact from these different realms was proportional to their funding. Of course, much of the national security work is secret and its impact can be even more difficult to measure than that of civil programs. Still, the title of this volume cries out for more attention to national security programs in space.

Finally, space history remains a parochial and internalist field, narrowly focused on civilian, especially human, spaceflight as a self-contained historical entity. To the extent that the topic is contextualized at all, it is usually represented as a cold war phenomenon that has struggled for adequate funding in the years since Apollo. Scranton’s chapter on the aerospace industry suggests some of the interpretive rewards of putting space activity in play with its economic, political, technological, and business environment, but little work in the field rises to the challenges posed by Asner and Collins. Too much of the space history represented in this volume is solipsistic; not enough engages the mainstream of historical scholarship.

Alex Roland is professor of history at Duke University, where he teaches military history and the history of technology.

©2010 by the Society for the History of Technology.

Filed under: Vol. 51 No. 1 (January 2010)