Defining NASA: The Historical Debate over the Agency's Mission (review)

W. D. Kay has written an insightful and thought-provoking history of United States space policy in the twentieth century. Defining NASA is a departure from much historical writing on space, focusing as it does on the larger political and policy contexts within which NASA has operated, rather than following the fortunes of one program, person, or center. Hence Kay is able to offer an outline for a new history of NASA and the U.S. manned-spaceflight program, one that does not deliver the inevitable declensionist account, lamenting the passage of the superb technical achievements of the Apollo program that were sadly followed by the shortsighted engineering and grubby bureaucratic failures that lost the Challenger in 1986 and the Columbia in 2003.

Many of these kinds of histories locate the causes of both success and failure within NASA itself, often with unkind references to a lack of presidential leadership since Lyndon Johnson. Kay's account draws attention away from both presidential politics and NASA's internal struggles, arguing that NASA has been most profoundly affected by the wider social, economic, and political forces that create the changes in the policy environment within which NASA has operated. He is correct to draw our attention back to the basic fact that NASA is an agency with a mandate to fulfill the policies passed on to it, rather than an autonomous entity setting its own goals and objectives. His key explanatory concepts—problem definition, goals, and reorganization—are drawn from the political-science literature and may seem to some historians too structural and rigid. But he deploys his theorizing with a light hand and with respect for the contingencies of history. With this framework firmly established, the author moves quickly through NASA's prehistory and history, from the first experiments in rocketry in the very early twentieth century to the loss of the Columbia in 2003. His key moments of transition are the late 1950s and early 1960s and the mid-1980s.

In the late 1950s, U.S. space policy was defined as a national-security problem, being "behind the Russians," and from that definition NASA was born in its current form as a large, well-funded centralized bureaucratic organization. As the power of this definition slipped away in the mid-1960s, as it became clear that the United States was no longer behind the Russians in any interpretation of that phrase, NASA's purpose for being and being funded became less clear. Kay points clearly to the fact that NASA's budget, perhaps the most tangible marker of its importance to the U.S. government, started to decline after 1965 as cold war fears and tensions eased, rather than after 1969 and the successful completion of the Apollo 11 mission. As NASA was no longer the obvious solution to a political or national-security problem, its budget was cut. In order to survive in this new policy environment, it developed the space shuttle as a set of capabilities to perform other missions, as yet undefined, rather than as a goal in its own right. An open-ended answer to an unasked question, the shuttle has not been a success.

Kay's second transformative moment for NASA came in the early 1980s as Ronald Reagan's presidency redefined space policy in terms of a primary concern with commerce. NASA was prohibited from engaging in defense-related activities, but was significantly reorganized to provide both commercial services and opportunities for private enterprise. Unfortunately, a series of technical mishaps during the 1980s, most particularly the Challenger accident in 1986, moved NASA out of the commercial exploitation of space. Once again, NASA found itself struggling to find its own place within the space policy of the country, a situation that...