The United States in space

Abstract

The US program is examined in three contexts: its position internationally, its role domestically, and NASA's workings internally. Some of the principal issues explored are: what it means for NASA to be simply a lead agency instead of the sole agency charged with implementing the US space program; whether the types of technical and managerial troubles NASA has recently experienced are different in quality from the troubles it had during the Apollo era; how the various pressures to which it is being subjected are effecting its internal ways of doing business; and whether there are lessons from the experiences of other nations' space programs and their ways of overseeing projects are doing business that could be useful to the US space program, and vice versa.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>