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  • Inventing the American Astronaut by Matthew H. Hersch
  • Slava Gerovitch (bio)
Inventing the American Astronaut. By Matthew H. Hersch. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Pp. xiv+220. $27.

This slim though rich, cogently argued, and highly readable book is an excellent example of how applying a new analytical framework leads to fresh insights on a familiar subject. Popular imagination has been saturated with NASA's image-making, astronauts' self-fashioning, politically charged accounts loaded with either glorifications or accusations, and imaginative journalism catering to the sensation-seeking public. Set against this background, scholarly studies have evolved from dry technical and institutional histories, to animated stories of political machinations, to the most recent social and cultural analyses, including studies of the iconic role of the American astronaut in popular culture, the institutional culture of NASA, the role and identity of the astronaut in the age of automation, the conceptualization of the astronaut's body in aerospace medicine, and multifaceted gender issues. Drawing on the wealth of these studies, and complementing them with his own thorough research of space archives and oral interviews, Matthew Hersch has created an integrated picture of the meteoric rise and slow descent of the American astronaut as a profession.

Hersch applies the sober, decidedly unsentimental, and almost brutally incisive analytical framework of labor conflict and professionalization to a whole range of issues negotiated within NASA. Each of the debated issues—from the criteria for astronaut selection, to the degree of spacecraft automation, to crewing decisions, to mission programming—emerges loaded with interests of various professional groups—test pilots, military pilots, scientists, engineers, and managers. Peeling off the familiar layers of heroic imagery, colorful personality, and sensational notoriety, Hersch shows that at the core lies a series of clashes of professional cultures, each competing for influence within the U.S. space program.

Unlike the first Soviet cosmonauts, who were selected from among junior military pilots and whose identity was kept secret until their flights, the first American astronauts were well-educated, experienced, elite test pilots who became celebrities well before they flew into space. While the cosmonauts found themselves almost completely at the mercy of powerful space engineers, the astronauts skillfully used their symbolic capital to gain influence in various aspects of the U.S. human-spaceflight program, from crewing decisions to spacecraft design. Thus while the cosmonauts and the astronauts seemed to fit into the same occupational niche, their professions, emerging in dissimilar sociocultural contexts, showed remarkable differences.

A series of social and cultural tensions shaped the profession of the American astronaut. The first astronauts had to navigate between NASA's [End Page 687] engineering corps, which favored reliable automation, and the test-pilot community, which placed the highest value on superb piloting skills. In the end, the astronauts were able to carve out a professional role for themselves, which combined high technical expertise with manual piloting and backup options at crucial phases of flight. Further, the arrival of scientist-astronauts and later military pilots challenged the dominant status and cultural norms of pilot-astronauts. In response, the pilot-astronauts hardened their stance, marginalizing the other groups within the astronaut corps. Tracing how these tensions played out in the Apollo and Skylab programs, Hersch shows that the research component of the U.S. human-spaceflight program suffered as a result of such labor disputes.

The role and identity of the American astronaut were constantly renegotiated in response to internal professional disputes, public-relations goals, and political agendas. In response to the changing sociocultural context—the cold war, détente, environmentalism, civil rights, and multiculturalism—NASA deftly adjusted its priorities, while the different groups of astronauts were also quick to exploit the political and cultural sensibilities of the day.

Constantly drawing comparisons with other historical labor disputes and the formation of other professions—from mechanical engineers to doctors and lawyers—Hersch fleshes out the specificity of the astronaut case. The astronaut profession emerges as a problematic outcome of the complex interplay of narrow expertise, high publicity, massive and expensive technological infrastructure, and the uneasy burden of popular imagination.

The story told in the book calls for a more systematic comparison with the Soviet case. The Soviet...

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