2001 to 1994: Political Environment and the Design of NASA’s Space Station System

Abstract

2001 to 1994: Political Environment and the Design of NASA’s Space Station System SYLVIA D. FRIES Not the least of the many questions raised about the U.S. space program in the aftermath of the Challenger explosion on January 29, 1986, was whether political pressures impinged on what should have been a purely technical judgment: How reliable were the joint seals on the space shuttle’s solid rocket boosters in the then-prevailing tem­ perature of 38° F?1 The noticeable degree to which the decision to build the space shuttle had been shaped by American politics was, of course, not news; John M. Logsdon and more recently Walter A. McDougall have shown that technology cannot be isolated from pol­ itics if our picture of the space program is to be complete.2 But what did distress many—including the worldly-wise William P. Rogers, chairman of the presidential commission that investigated the Chal­ lenger accident—was that subsystem engineering decisions appeared to have been affected by politically derived pressures, in this case NASA’s ambitious launch schedule intended to sustain an economic justification for the shuttle program itself.3 A new automobile design in Detroit or Osaka must run the gauntlet of oil-price predictions, tariffs, changing safety standards, and the ever-elusive market (to name only a few nontechnical considerations). Notwithstanding the complexities of the current regulatory environDr . Fries is director of the History Office of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. She is indebted to Nathaniel B. Cohen, John D. Hodge, Charles J. Donlan, Howard E. McCurdy, A. Michal McMahon, and Russell I. Fries for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this essay, and to Lee D. Saegesser of the NASA History Office for invaluable archival assistance. 'Report of the Presidential [Rogers] Commission on the Spaa' Shuttle Challenger Accident (Washington: U.S. Superintendent of Documents, June 6, 1986). ‘(John M. Logsdon, The Decision to Co to the Moon: Project Apollo and the National Interest (Cambridge, Mass., 1970); “The Space Shuttle Program: A Policy Failure,” Science 232 (May 30, 1986): 1099-1 105; Walter A. McDougall, . . . the Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age (New York, 1985). ^Rogers Commission Report (n. 1 above), pp. 164—65.© 1988 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040-165X/88/2903-0001 $01.00 568 The Design of NASA’s Space Station System 569 ment, technological development in the private sector must hew to a discipline that imposes the ultimate test of marketability on any new product. The amount of time that any private sector firm can sustain or “push” an unproved product or system on an unreceptive market is limited. Similarly, the design of a major technological system in the public sector—and not simply the choice of that system itself—is affected by its own highly complex political environment. The public sector, how­ ever, imposes no comparable discipline on the bureaucratic propo­ nents of new technological systems. The ongoing uncertainties of congressional and presidential politics, combined with the internecine struggles of federal R&D bureaucracies for influence over the nation’s total R&D budget, significantly reduce the likelihood that any new public-sector technology will be the result of systematic planning to­ ward clearly defined technological or utilitarian objectives. Thus his­ torians of technology, in recognizing the role of extrinsic (nontechnical) factors in the shaping of any new technology,4 must be prepared to distinguish, for explanatory purposes, the kinds of extrinsic effects, especially in the public sector, that can alter the logic of a new tech­ nological system. The U.S. civilian space station—a gleam in the eye of numerous NASA engineers since before the agency was founded in 1958 and promoted by NASA as the country’s “logical next step” into space— provides an excellent case study of the way public-sector R&D agencies continuously redefine new technologies in the absence of the market discipline that governs private-sector technological development.5 The number of space station design studies conducted since 1959, both internally by NASA or contracted by the agency to the aerospace industry, easily exceeds a hundred.6 Because of this, I have selected three clearly distinguishable examples...