The People’s Spaceship: NASA, the Shuttle Program, and Public Engagement after Apollo

The next is an excerpt from The People’s Spaceship: NASA, the Shuttle Program, and Public Engagement after Apollo by Amy Paige Kaminski. The e-book will likely be revealed June 11, 2024, by the College of Pittsburgh Press.

It was a most uncommon sight, surreal and elegant suddenly. Two space shuttle orbiters confronted each other, nostril to nostril, on a tarmac on the Smithsonian Nationwide Air and House Museum’s Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Middle, adjoining to Dulles Worldwide Airport in Chantilly, Virginia. The car on the left, Enterprise, was vibrant white towards the close by inexperienced foliage and the cloud-dotted, limitless blue sky of that heat April day in 2012. After NASA had used the orbiter for atmospheric drop checks within the late Nineteen Seventies, Enterprise led a sheltered existence as a vacationer attraction earlier than retiring into its personal wing on the Smithsonian facility. The spacecraft on the correct, Discovery, was light and confirmed indicators of damage, bearing the markings of NASA’s most energetic orbiter. One yr earlier, it had accomplished the final of its thirty-nine missions to space, simply as NASA closed down the shuttle program to liberate funds for brand spanking new human space flight initiatives. For just some hours, the shuttles stood on this distinctive configuration. Enterprise had been pulled from the Udvar-Hazy Middle, and the orbiter would quickly journey, first strapped to the topside of a Boeing-747 after which by barge, to a brand new house in New York Metropolis’s Intrepid Sea, Air & House Museum. The identical 747 had carried Discovery from Kennedy House Middle in Florida two days earlier, and its cargo would retire by day’s finish into the hangar Enterprise had as soon as occupied.

NASA and Smithsonian personnel, members of Congress, White Home officers, astronauts, aerospace {industry} representatives, and people from most of the people flocked to witness this uncommon altering of the guard. It was a part of NASA’s plan to search out endlessly houses for its 4 decommissioned shuttle orbiters. A navy band performed patriotic tunes and bystanders waved American flags. Earlier than the ceremony started, famend opera singer Denyce Graves led the group in a shifting rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Towards this backdrop, dignitaries supplied fond phrases about Discovery’s accomplishments. NASA administrator Charlie Bolden, a former shuttle commander, recalled how “the House Shuttle program gave this nation many firsts and plenty of proud moments.” Wanting again over this system’s forty-year historical past, Bolden celebrated the very important function the shuttle performed in deploying and repairing the Hubble House Telescope and establishing the Worldwide House Station. It allowed folks to be taught to reside and work in space, he mentioned, and motivated future generations of space explorers.

Jack Dailey, director of the Nationwide Air and House Museum and as soon as a NASA affiliate deputy administrator, supplied a extra curious assertion in his transient speech honoring the space shuttle. Like Bolden, he linked the shuttle with the notion of nationwide satisfaction. However Dailey centered momentarily not on the venerable spaceships behind him, however on the enthusiastic crowd in his midst. “For each main milestone in space historical past,” he mentioned, “Individuals have participated within the pleasure, satisfaction, and optimism of the event.”    

Dailey’s phrases acknowledged that even those that weren’t instantly linked with NASA had a spot within the storied historical past of the nation’s human space flight program. However their function, in line with this characterization, was a passive and reactive one: to look at these spectacles, have a good time them, and really feel impressed by the achievements made on their behalf. Certainly, historians and political scientists have sometimes acknowledged NASA officers, giant aerospace companies, US presidents and different White Home officers, and members of Congress because the architects of the American space program. These outdoors this sphere sometimes solely present up in accounts explaining that the company put its feats on show to undertaking a strong US picture to folks across the globe in the course of the House Race with the Soviet Union and to “promote” its Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo human space initiatives to Americans who footed the invoice.

But, simply ten years after Apollo 11 landed on the Moon, an article in Parade journal describing NASA’s plans for its new main human flight initiative, the space shuttle, introduced a vastly totally different relationship between NASA and people outdoors of the government-industry nexus of space program builders. The article famous that the brand new space car would supply “the primary alternative the general public has needed to get entangled personally in a NASA undertaking.” NASA affiliate deputy administrator Ann Bradley echoed that declare in a 1984 memo. The car’s promise of offering routine and dependable entry to space to moderately wholesome folks with fundamental coaching meant that “[n]o growth has opened a higher prospect for direct citizen involvement in space flight than the House Shuttle.” In keeping with Hans Mark, NASA deputy administrator when the primary shuttle missions started, “the Shuttle opened the door for an enormous broadening of the human expertise in space.” Wanting again on the car’s legacy, former shuttle supervisor Wayne Hale elegantly summarized: “If the intent was to rework space and the opening of the frontier to extra folks, the shuttle achieved this.…The shuttle actually grew to become the folks’s spaceship.”

What a contrasting perspective these statements supply when in comparison with characterizations of NASA’s public relations actions in the course of the Apollo period! Whereas NASA by no means deserted its dedication to share the spectacle of human space flight broadly, the company approached public engagement with the shuttle in some new and alternative ways. Certainly, sustaining the shuttle prompted NASA to rethink methods to contain folks from throughout the globe, significantly in an period the place different nations have been creating capabilities to ship people and cargo to space. However above all, NASA poured great power into reworking its connections with the American citizenry, whose engagement the company considered paramount to the shuttle’s viability. This e-book tells the story of why and the way the company aimed to contain them because it transitioned from the Apollo interval of the Sixties and early Nineteen Seventies to the space shuttle period that will span the following 4 many years. It casts a contemporary gentle on the connections between NASA’s human space flight initiatives and its public engagement actions, displaying how Individuals past the sphere of presidency and {industry} space program gamers figured within the shuttle program.

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Amy Paige Kaminski has more than twenty years of experience in federal policy and program development roles, working closely with the academic, nonprofit, and corporate sectors. She has held senior positions at NASA, advising on science policy and building pathways to involve everyday people as contributors to the agency’s science and technology programs. She is editor of the book Space Science and Public Engagement.