Into the Black; J.P.L. and the American Space Program, 1976–2004, and: A History of the Kennedy Space Center (review)

The fiftieth anniversary of the launching of Sputnik in l957 produced a wave of space history volumes. These two are National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) center histories. Both are political and institutional chronicles, not scientific ones. Westwick's volume is a sequel to Clayton R. Koppes' J.P.L. AND THE AMERICAN SPACE PROGRAM of l983, and concerns the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), NASA's best-known (and best-advertised) planetary research and development center. LiPartito and Butler's book is a sequel to earlier volumes on NASA's chief space launch operations facility at Cape Canaveral in Florida. Both Westwick's and LiPartito and Butler's books accent the managerial challenges of the Space Age after the Apollo lunar program ended in l973.

In both well-written narratives, personalities and people matter. Bureaucratic structures are inevitable in complex applied science and engineering projects. But the qualities of specific managers matter as much or more than organization charts.

Westwick's volume is the more organizationally focused. JPL is a uniquely hybrid, university affiliated, center within NASA. It is both "private" and "public," depending upon its specific political and financial circumstances. It is also the only NASA center where civil service rules do not normally apply, and which solicits work from the private sector and from other government agencies, both civilian and military. JPL's institutional roles include being a bridge via which R&D is secret military and intelligence space projects passes over into the civilian space program.

Westwick is good at discussing the "increasing symbiosis" between the military and civilian space programs during and after the l980s, in technology areas like microelectronics and supercomputing (143-l45). "The military," he rightly concludes, "is the elephant in the living room of the U.S. space program" (309). Westwick has no essential complaints with what his analysis predecessor Koppes called the "national security state." He thus presents a collection of primary explanations for key organizational and policy changes at JPL and lets the reader select among them. He also occasionally argues, on the basis of unclear or anecdotal evidence, that JPL, NASA, or "the American public" had no stomach for various things—like risky space missions that were not directly related to military projects (284).

Overall, Westwick sees the men who led JPL as illustrating three major eras in the lab's modern history: post-Apollo salesmanship; l980's remilitarization of outer space; and the end of the Cold War in the 1990s. Academic Bruce Murray, a friend of astronomer Carl Sagan, comes across badly. Presented as an inexperienced manager selected for "political salesmanship and public engagement," Murray antagonized JPL and NASA staff with his "missionary zeal" and an organizational "fire drill atmosphere" in which the lab went from "one crisis to another" from l976 to l982 (17, 22, 73). Revitalization was accomplished, from l982 to l99l, by Lew Allen, an Air Force General, spymaster, and physics PhD who did not seek to change JPL's civilian-military "organizational culture," and who replaced "quiet negotiations" for "perpetual crisis mode" (l26, 127). Under Allen, the first non-CalTech head of JPL, the center diversified its work, but "lost schedule and work discipline" in ways that produced a string of embarrassing and expensive spacecraft failures in the late 1980s. Under the leadership of academic Ed Stone, from l99l to 200l, the lab dealt successfully with the "scattershot" and "overbearing" demands of NASA head Dan Goldin, but internal project oversight and review suffered. Finally, Charles Elachi of CalTech brought the lab into the present.

This book well plots organizational and technological dynamics as JPL leaders moved the lab into new R&D arenas. But Westwick merely mentions two elements crucial to JPL's success. Internally, there is JPL's "Deep Space Network...