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

Abstract

The U.S. civilian space station, a hope of numerous NASA engineers since before the agency was founded in 1958 and promoted by NASA as the country's 'next logical step' into space, provides an excellent case study of the way public-sector research and development agencies continuously redefine new technologies in the absence of the market discipline that governs private-sector technological development. 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. Because of this, three clearly distinguishable examples are selected from the almost thirty-year history of space station design in NASA. Together these examples illustrate the difficulty of defining a new technological system in the public sector as that system becomes increasingly subject, for its development, to the vagaries of federal research and development politics.