Spies and Shuttles: NASA’s Secret Relationships with the DoD and CIA by James E. David (review)

Unmasking the participation of America’s intelligence agencies in the nation’s civilian space program is a little like peeking into the kitchen at a fast food restaurant. Good sense requires that someone do it, but the food is not made any tastier by knowing how it was prepared—in fact, a willful blindness on the part of the customer may be a requirement for any satisfying meal. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration knew this fact all too well: there was no clear line separating the agency from its national security partners, but NASA still made sure that America’s peaceful space program didn’t look like the set of a James Bond movie. While NASA’s managers were on good terms with the nation’s intelligence community, they also knew that NASA’s international reputation would not survive too close a flirtation with it.

In Spies and Shuttles, a book titled to suggest a less expansive survey than the author has accomplished, historian James David, a curator of national security spaceflight programs at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum, explains the long history of NASA’s tangled relationships with the Department of Defense and Central Intelligence Agency—both their secret successes and some of their more public failures. Readers expecting a detailed account of the space shuttle’s flirtation with the clandestine service will not be disappointed, but this story is a small part of the whole: the spies in Spies and Shuttles existed long before the Space Transportation System started flying in 1981. The connections between peaceful and military space programs in the United States, David notes, were not limited to a single vehicle: from the time of the space agency’s establishment in 1958 through the Space Race of the 1960s and beyond, NASA, the air force, the CIA, and other defense and intelligence organizations shared personnel, facilities, and hardware. NASA even cooperated in crafting the CIA’s cover story for America’s illegal U-2 flights over the Soviet Union, but the space agency was not a military front—it was merely an organ of government stuck with the challenging mission of beating swords into plowshares while the cold war still raged.

The story of NASA’s involvement with the national security apparatus suggests that the partnership worked best when it was limited to setting rules, generating ideas, and sharing knowledge. NASA personnel successfully briefed intelligence agencies on the performance of Soviet air and space vehicles, and CIA monitoring of Soviet space shots helped NASA schedule its own. Classified knowledge aided in the creation of the Hubble Space Telescope; more classified knowledge might have enabled NASA to identify the satellite’s notorious optical problems before launch.

Occasional efforts to design and operate spacecraft jointly, though, often met with frustration for both parties. The shuttle of the book’s title stands as the most obvious example of this phenomenon—David considers it the first spacecraft NASA built that thoroughly obliterated its “peaceful” mission. NASA and its contractors designed the spaceplane to meet unusual DoD requirements and intended it to carry military crews and perform classified missions. Barely three years into its flight schedule, though, the unreliable shuttle lost the support of its military backers.

For decades, authors such as Curtis Peebles and Dwayne Day have worked in the shadows of military spaceflight; Spies and Shuttles is the most complete discussion of this subject yet, and is apt to be regarded as an essential resource to the space history community. The thrills of the 1985 film The Falcon and the Snowman, though, aren’t to be sought in David’s text: his story is principally a diplomatic and political one, and nobody gets punched or interrogated. Instead, David treads carefully, never claiming more than he can prove from declassified and redacted sources. Nevertheless, Spies and Shuttles breaks new ground on various subjects, including the...