High-Speed Dreams: NASA and the Technopolitics of Supersonic Transportation, 1945-1999 (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by Virginia P. Dawson High-Speed Dreams: NASA and the Technopolitics of Supersonic Transportation, 1945–1999. By Erik M. Conway. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005. Pp. xvii+369. $49.95. Erik Conway has aptly titled his history of American efforts to develop supersonic-transport aircraft High-Speed Dreams to underscore the past century's infatuation with speed as a symbol of Western technical progress. He focuses on three American efforts to develop an SST and shows how national security, environmental concerns, and market forces provided the rationale for decisions at different points in the story. What makes his account particularly valuable is his ability to provide the economic, social, and political context for the technology he describes. Conway seems to have struck the right balance between attention to the nuts-and-bolts of aircraft design and discussion of the larger issues, particularly state support for advanced technology. The book's prize from the American Institute for Aeronautics and Astronautics is well deserved. The first effort to develop a high-speed airplane began during the late 1950s as a military project. However, when the development of advanced missile technology obviated the need for a supersonic bomber, the dreams of aircraft designers were transferred to the commercial arena. By the early 1960s, proponents of an American SST used not only its propaganda value in the cold war, but also the need to compete with a state-supported consortium of European manufacturers that was developing the Concorde, to justify its funding. Conway suggests that the cancellation of the American SST as a result of anti-sonic-boom environmentalists is only half the story. By 1971, Boeing's profitability was eroding, and it seemed clear that the SST would never prove economically viable. More important, Airbus Industrie, formed by the European consortium, threatened the American monopoly in the subsonic aircraft market. The SST had become an unwelcome diversion from the development of more competitive, if slower, aircraft. Surprisingly, given the aerospace industry's lukewarm support, NASA received political and financial backing for a relatively small effort to develop a supersonic airplane. The Advanced Supersonic Transport (AST) program, later renamed the Supersonic Cruise Aircraft Research (SCAR) program, was cancelled by the Reagan administration in 1981 as an example of "corporate welfare." Nevertheless, this program provided funding for important scientific investigations into the depletion of the ozone layer. During the 1990s, NASA and the aircraft industry tried one last time to realize their high-speed dreams. The new plane, dubbed the "Orient Express" because it was to put Asian markets within a few hours of the American continent, was proposed as a means to trump Europe's next-generation SST, the "Concorde II." It too was cancelled. [End Page 866] Conway concludes his star-crossed history of America's infatuation with high speeds by offering a perceptive analysis of the incompatibility of the technologist's belief in unlimited progress and the environmentalist's stress on the need to accept limitations in order to save the earth's resources for future generations. He points out that the demise of the American SST is connected to the rise of the "free market" ideology of the 1980s and 1990s. Markets, he points out, never drive the development of very large and expensive technological projects: "Only the state has the ability to fund the grand techno-dreams of aerospace enthusiasts, be they supersonic/ hypersonic transports, air-breathing launch vehicles for routine space access, giant orbiting solar-power stations, or the like" (p. 305). To disentangle the various forces that beset the three American efforts to develop supersonic-transport aircraft, Conway has made excellent use of documents from many archival collections, including the Boeing Company (one of the few aircraft manufacturers with a publicly accessible collection), the National Archives, NASA Research Center, the Sierra Club, and presidential libraries. For his early chapters, in addition to archival material, Conway had excellent secondary sources to draw upon, including a body of work...