Notes Chapter 1 1. U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Aeronautics and Space Report of the President, Fiscal Year 1998 Activities (Washington, DC: NASA, 1999), app. E-1B. Figures are adjusted for inflation. 2. See, for example, Gregg Easterbrook, “Lost in Space,” Washington Monthly (April 1987): 48–54, and “The Spruce Goose of Outer Space,” Washington Monthly (April 1980): 32–48. In addition, the widely held belief that spaceflight was responsible for the creation of Teflon, Velcro, and Tang turns out to be only a myth. 3. The controversy regarding spin-offs is not over whether they really exist, but whether they are a sufficient reason, in and of themselves, to spend billions of dollars on space projects. More recently, this issue has spread to the discussion of U.S. research and development policy generally. See John A. Alic, Lewis M. Branscomb, Harvey Brooks, and Ashton Carter, Beyond Spinoff: Military and Commercial Technologies in a Changing World (Boston: Harvard Business School Press), 1992; and David H. Guston, Between Science and Politics: Assuring the Integrity and Productivity of Research (New York: Cambridge University Press), 2000, particularly chap. 5. 4. More recently, the debate has also turned to who should be responsible for doing it (see chapters 7 and 8). 5. The Departments of Defense (DOD), Commerce (DOC), and Energy (DOE), among others, all have space projects of one kind or another. Moreover , there have been periods over the past 50 years when DOD was actually the nation’s largest space agency, at least as measured by funding. In 1988, for example , DOD’s space budget was almost double that of NASA’s. See U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Aeronautics and Space Report. 6. Although not as visible as human spaceflight, NASA’s (relatively) smaller automated space science programs—including the Hubble Space Telescope , the Galileo (Jupiter) and Cassini (Saturn) probes, and the Halley’s comet intercept mission (which was eventually canceled)—have also come in for their share of criticism. 179 7. It is always possible, of course, that some new technical innovation (or, more likely, a series of innovations) could change this by lowering the costs and reducing the risks. 8. National Aeronautics and Space Act, Public Law 85-568, sec. 102 (c), 1–8. The full text of the act can be found in John M. Logsdon, ed., Exploring the Unknown: Selected Documents in the History of the U.S. Civil Service Program, vol. 1, Organizing for Exploration (Washington, DC: NASA, 1995), 334–345. 9. Ibid., sec. 203 (b) (5). 10. Ibid., sec. 203 (a) (3). 11. This omission was addressed in a 1984 amendment. See the discussion in chapter 7. 12. U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration, NASA Strategic Plan, 2000 (Washington, DC: NASA, 2000), 1. 13. An attempt to describe some of this complexity can be found in W. D. Kay, Can Democracies Fly in Space? The Challenge of Revitalizing the U.S. Space Program (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1995). 14. This includes the organizational development of NASA’s predecessor organizations, particularly the National Advisory Council on Aeronautics. See Howard E. McCurdy, Inside NASA: High Technology and Organizational Change in the U.S. Space Program, New Series in NASA History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press), 1993. 15. See Alexander J. Morin, Science and Politics (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1993), chap. 5. 16. Whether such research is actually worth the current cost of getting into orbit is a matter of some dispute. 17. There are even some who envision a time when all factories could be moved off the earth’s surface, thereby eliminating industrial pollution forever. See, for example, G. Harry Stine, The Space Enterprise (New York: Ace Books), 1980. 18. See Arthur C. Clarke, The Promise of Space (New York: Harper and Row, 1968). A similar claim is often made by proponents of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence program, who often speak of the “new attitude” they believe will follow from the discovery that “we are not alone.” 19. Bryan Bunch with Alexander Hellmans, The History of Science and Technology: A Browser’s Guide to the Great Discoveries, Inventions, and the People Who Made Them From the Dawn of Time to Today (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 2004), 719. 20. Paul Kallender, “Officials Call for Japan to Establish Manned Space Program,” Space News, 17 February 2003, 17. 21. A task which must, of course, also take into account who is receiving those benefits. 22. See, for example, Roger D. Launius and Howard E. McCurdy...