The Space Telescope: A Study of NASA, Science, Technology, and Politics by Robert W. Smith

Abstract

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 637 Astronomer by Chance is Lovell’s autobiography. Generally pitched at a popular level, the story moves quickly and usually gracefully. Lovell has already written at length about his life as a radio astronomer in The Story ofJodrell Bank, Out ofthe Zenith, and TheJodrellBank Telescopes. As most of Astronomer by Chance is concerned with radio astronomy, it is in part a summary of these three earlier volumes. In 1984, Dudley Saward’s uncritical biography of Lovell was published, so there is not much new on his early career, war years, and private life. It is, then, as an introduction to Lovell’s other, more detailed writings that Astronomer by Chance is most useful. The book’s central theme is modern large-scale scientific research as a product of cooperation among government, industry, and a scientific community. For the type of radio astronomy Lovell wanted to pursue, he needed big technologies on a scale that far outstripped the capabilities of the university physics department in which he was based. Lovell there­ fore turned to the engineering firm of Husband and Company to transform his and his research group’s aspirations into reality. The most spectacular example of this collaboration is the so-called Mark I radio telescope, essentially a steerable dish some 250 feet across. Its funding and construction, however, were nightmares for Lovell. He and the telescope’s builders found themselves beset by extremely tough technical difficulties and trapped in a bureaucratic maze. The rela­ tionships of technology to science, and of engineers to scientists, have of course been much studied of late. The tensions often inherent in the latter relationship have been scrutinized, but how often, for instance, do we have the example of an engineer threatening to serve a writ on a scientist for £1 million, as happened to Lovell when H. C. Husband found the quality of his work unfairly criticized by the British government’s Public Accounts Committee? (The collaboration survived and Husband built other radio telescopes for Jodrell Bank.) More generally, with Lovell’s career we are provided with an excellent case study of the dependance of scientists on engineers and patronage from national governments for much of modern scientific practice. Robert W. Smith Dr. Smith is a historian at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum and an associate professor at Johns Hopkins University. His latest book is The Space Telescope: A Study ofNASA, Science, Technology, and Politics (1989). The Space Telescope: A Study ofNASA, Science, Technology, and Politics. By Robert W. Smith. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Pp. xviii + 478; illustrations, notes, appendixes, bibliography, index. $39.50. The price tags of current and proposed public science projects have moved big science to the top of the national science policy agenda. As 638 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE the genome sequencing project, the Superconducting Supercollider, the space station, and the lunar-Mars initiative fight for attention and congressional support, a thorough analysis of the politics of big science is particularly timely. Robert Smith has written a detailed account of the initiation, design, adoption, and implementation of the Hubble space telescope (HST). Launched in 1990, about seven years behind schedule and at a cost of about $2.1 billion, it is the largest American commitment to unmanned space science. The Space Telescope is an important book for those interested in the history of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and astronomy, the politics of science, and the organization of technological research and development. Beginning in 1982, the author and his colleagues attended meetings, collected interviews, and studied correspondence, notes, and reports as part of the Space Telescope History Project. As the project’s principal product (in addition to an archive of the program), Smith’s book describes the program in considerable detail, yet in a style accessible to the general reader. After tying the project’s genesis to the evolution of astronomy, Smith launches a detailed account of the construction of the coalitions that would design the telescope and champion its development through NASA, the White House, and Congress. The second half of the book continues the theme of coalition building and maintenance while delving deeper...