The Space Station Decision: Incremental Politics and Technological Choice by Howard E. McCurdy

Abstract

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 385 inconclusive reassessments of “The New Moon” in the wake of the Fourth Lunar Science Conference after Apollo 17 came home in December 1972. Then he discusses three major issues in Apollo with properly apologeticjudgments: “Science in the Project,” “Scientists as Astronauts” and vice versa, and “Lunar Sample Management and Quarantine.” The ultimate successes of six out of seven missions to sample the moon in person were hard to deplore, yet many people still do that. The epilogue to Chariots for Apollo, published ten years after the first lunar landing, ended with a quotation from Arthur Schlesinger,Jr.: “The 20th Century will be remembered, when all else is forgotten, as the century when man burst his terrestrial bounds.” Compton ends his parallel and sequel ten years later in a section subtitled “Project Apollo: Stunt or Portent?” with the following words: “Future generations may look back on Apollo as a costly technological stunt or the portent of man’s destiny in the universe. Scientists studying the origin and evolution of the solar system may devise other means of acquiring data from the moon and the planets, but they will surely be thankful for the samples gathered by the twelve men who made the first lunar voyages” (p. 270). Loyd S. Swenson, Jr. Dr. Swenson, professor of history at the University of Houston, coauthored Chariots for Apollo: A History ofManned Lunar Spacecraft (Washington, D.C., 1979) and co-edited 100 Years of Science and Technology in Texas (Houston, 1986). The Space Station Decision: Incremental Politics and Technological Choice. By Howard E. McCurdy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990. Pp. xii + 286; illustrations, notes, index. $34.95. Three major decisions have largely shaped the character of the U.S. civilian space program over the past three decades. Two of those decisions—to go to the moon and to develop a space shuttle—have been extensively chronicled. Now, with Howard McCurdy’s book, we have an authoritative account of the steps that led to the Reagan administration decision to approve the development of a permanently manned space station. This was announced in the president’s State of the Union address on January 25, 1984. McCurdy’s account takes the program through the summer of 1984, when Congress approved the first-year space station budget and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) set up a permanent office to manage the program. It does not deal with the multifold travails of the station program since, although most of those problems stem from the weak political foundation of the program the author so vividly describes. McCurdy views the space station decision as a product of the small-step-by-small-step, incremental politics that are the norm for the United States. He points out that it is almost impossible within the 386 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE American political system to get agreement on long-term goals and then sustained support for programs to achieve them. This leaves advocates of programs like the space station, which are means to broader purposes but themselves take a decade or more to imple­ ment, to find ways to maneuver in the minefield of year-to-year politics. The result, observes McCurdy, was a program that “was less than perfect and difficult to implement” (p. 235). In this sense, and given the history of the space station program since 1984, the book can be read as a cautionary tale on how not to make space policy. Most of the book is a narrative account of how NASA developed a concept for the station program and sold it to Ronald Reagan, over the advice of most of his staff. When James Beggs was selected in 1981 to be Reagan’s NASA administrator, he and his deputy Hans Mark decided that the station would be their highest-priority initiative. Beggs formed an internal Space Station Task Force to flesh out a rationale and requirements for the station, and early on he indicated his hope that Europe, Japan, and Canada could be convinced to participate in the program. In the White House, Gilbert Rye, the staff person for space at the National Security Council, became convinced that the...