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E S S A Y O N S O U R C E S  353  This book is based on extensive research in a number of public and private archives. In addition, I was given access to the office files of a number of individuals at the NASA Langley and NASA Glenn Research Centers for the final two chapters . Although these files are not public, I was able to get a few key documents cleared for release and have placed copies in the project collection held by the NASA History Office. Due to the time span covered by this book, the availability, nature, and sources of the “archival” documents referenced herein change radically and my research approach had to change in response. For the first six chapters, I was able to rely on historians’ traditional approach to research, digging through memos, correspondence, reports, etc. held in discrete, organized archival collections. The archives I used are discussed below. For these chapters, I used oral histories sparingly, to fill in gaps in the record and to flush into the open the sorts of things that do not get written down—in aerospace, at least, a great deal happens that never gets inscribed on paper. Beginning with chapter 7, roughly 1988 on, the traditional approach was unworkable. The only organized archive from this period, the George Herbert Walker Bush Presidential Library, chose to adopt an extremely broad interpretation of “executive privilege” that effectively prevented me from gaining access to anything dealing with the NASA budget, even communication between low-level staffers. Without organized records to mine, I had to rely on the office files of several individuals in NASA to reconstruct the HSR program. These records were quite complete, but they differed in their basic nature from the kinds of materials available before 1990. The vast majority of these records are viewgraph presentations made using Microsoft Powerpoint and similar software. These differ from traditional kinds of documents in several important respects. The first is that they were written by and for technically trained people and tend to present important information in charts and graphs instead of words. Most historians are untrained in the art of visual representation of data, especially as practiced in modern engineering, making this material a great challenge to master. The second important difference is lack of context. One often cannot know why a particular presentation was given. Sometimes the reason is obvious—annual and monthly progress reports—but frequently it isn’t. Some presentations were generated after “something went wrong” and are thus important bits of evidence, but ESSAY ON SOURCES there is no way to discover that from the documents themselves. The third difference is that presentations do not serve as a record of discussion. Unlike an exchange of memos, they give only the presenter’s view. And they only give an incomplete depiction of that view. We cannot know what, exactly, the speaker said during the presentation or how it was said. Electronic mail records were not available to me and were not systematically kept on paper, eliminating this source. For all of these reasons, I had to approach the last two chapters very differently. I relied much more on oral history, in some cases taking presentations back to their originators and asking questions about them. The result is that the book’s final chapters are based on much less traditional “evidence” than the rest of it. One countervailing benefit, however, is that they are backed by a substantial set of oral histories that will be useful to future researchers. A R C H I V E S Air Force Historical Research Agency, Maxwell Air Force Base, Montgomery, Alabama. Contains material related to the XB-70 and the “Advanced Manned Strategic Aircraft.” Much of this is still classified because it deals directly with nuclear strategy, but the staff is willing to review selected documents for prompt declassification. The Boeing Company. Alone among the major aerospace companies, Boeing maintains an archive that is accessible to researchers. It contains a very large photographic collection, reference files searchable via a database, and a substantial set of oral history interviews. It also has a huge amount of unprocessed material from the former North American Aviation, but this is unfortunately unavailable. Most useful for this project were the papers of William Allen, a former chairman of the company, which contained a substantial amount of SSTrelated material. Several of the oral histories were useful as well, and the reference collection...

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