NASA Engineers and the Age of Apollo by Sylvia D. Fries

Abstract

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 969 into unrealistic specifications and performance demands by the military and the airplane companies. They resisted plans for the engine labora­ tory to build wind tunnels for full-scale engine tests that they thought should be done by industry in order to protect proprietary interests. Dawson goes on to deal with the laboratory’s efforts, partly in response to its earlier lag in thejet engine field, to pioneer in other areas of flight propulsion such as nuclear propulsion and rocket engines using uncon­ ventional propellants such as liquid hydrogen. Writing institutional technological history of this sort requires the weaving together of many factors. They include the developments in government policy and agency management, the role of strong personalities in engineering research and administration, the often very different perspectives that are found in government and in the private sector, and not least the story of the actual technological developments themselves, whether of the cut-and-try kind or based on scientific data and analysis. Dawson has interviewed a large number of the engineers who participated in Lewis’s evolution; she has conducted a thorough search of the highly diverse and scattered literature on the subject; and she has located sources as varied as the FBI files on espionage in the 1950s and a graduate student’s master’s paper dealing with the original site selection process for the labora­ tory. So it seems picky to enumerate the few minor defects that one reader has detected. On rare occasions the technical discussion gets lost in the stratosphere. One example: “[He] applied a relaxation solution to the problem of two dimensional compressible flow in a centrifugal compressor with straight radial blades” (p. 139). And though there are several references in the text to the congressionally passed Unitary Wind Tunnel Plan of 1948, this interesting effort at planning for what today is called “big science facilities” is not, regrettably, traceable through the index. All told, however, this is yet another fine monograph in NASA’s series of solid historical publica­ tions which broadens our understanding of NACA’s role in working with American industry. John D. Holmfeld Dr. Holmfeld is the former executive director of the Council of Scientific Society Presidents. NASA Engineers and the Age ofApollo. By Sylvia D. Fries. Washington, D.C.: National Aeronautics and Space Administration, 1992. Pp- xx+ 216; notes, appendixes, index. $35.00 (paper). Sylvia Fries has partly written, partly compiled, a unique book about a much neglected aspect of engineering—how it is performed and experienced, not by the movers and shakers, but by the troops in the trenches. I say “compiled” because the words of the book are 970 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE largely those of an assortment of fifty-one task-oriented engineers who worked for NASA in the Apollo era (a loosely defined period centered on the 1970s) and were interviewed at length starting in 1984. Fries has artfully “let these engineers speak for themselves as much as possible” (p. xvi), at the same time weaving a narrative of NASA’s evolution and commenting on its institutional problems and broader themes. The task was facilitated by her position as director of NASA’s History Division from 1983 to 1990, which provided access and insight that she exercises with commendable objectivity. The result is a rich tapestry of what it means to be a working engineer in a large sociotechnical enterprise in late-20th-century America. The material speaks to a wide range of interests. Chapters 1-4 explore the personal and professional biographies of most of those interviewed. These turn out to be a remarkably diverse collection of varying age, who joined NASA (or its predecessor NACA, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics) anywhere from 1938 to 1972. Integrative themes emerge, however, as remarked in short commentaries at the end of each chapter. These include how eco­ nomic and social changes fostered by the military demands of World War II and after made “attending college . . . possible for the offspring of parents who had never dreamed of admission to the realm of the salaried professional” (p. 55); how, as a result, the federal government ensured that governmental agencies and the...