Inventing the American Astronaut
Inventing the American Astronaut

Author: Matthew H. Hersch

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2012-10-08

Total Pages: 404

ISBN-13: 1137025298

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Who were the men who led America's first expeditions into space? Soldiers? Daredevils? The public sometimes imagined them that way: heroic military men and hot-shot pilots without the capacity for doubt, fear, or worry. However, early astronauts were hard-working and determined professionals - 'organization men' - who were calm, calculating, and highly attuned to the politics and celebrity of the Space Race. Many would have been at home in corporate America - and until the first rockets carried humans into space, some seemed to be headed there. Instead, they strapped themselves to missiles and blasted skyward, returning with a smile and an inspiring word for the press. From the early days of Project Mercury to the last moon landing, this lively history demystifies the American astronaut while revealing the warring personalities, raw ambition, and complex motives of the men who were the public face of the space program.

Dark Star
Dark Star

Author: Matthew H. Hersch

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2023-12-26

Total Pages: 329

ISBN-13: 0262376660

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A captivating history of NASA’s Space Transportation System—the space shuttle—chronicling the inevitable failures of a doomed design. In Dark Star, Matthew Hersch challenges the existing narrative of the most significant human space program of the last 50 years, NASA’s space shuttle. He begins with the origins of the space shuttle: a century-long effort to develop a low-cost, reusable, rocket-powered airplane to militarize and commercialize space travel, which Hersch explains was built the wrong way, at the wrong time, and for all the wrong reasons. Describing the unique circumstances that led to the space shuttle’s creation by President Richard Nixon’s administration in 1972 and its subsequent flights from 1981 through 2011, Hersch illustrates how the space shuttle was doomed from the start. While most historians have accepted the view that the space shuttle’s fatal accidents—including the 1986 Challenger explosion—resulted from deficiencies in NASA’s management culture that lulled engineers into a false confidence in the craft, Dark Star reveals the widespread understanding that the shuttle was predestined for failure as a technology demonstrator. The vehicle was intended only to give the United States the appearance of a viable human spaceflight program until funds became available to eliminate its obvious flaws. Hersch’s work seeks to answer the perilous questions of technological choice that confront every generation, and it is a critical read for anyone interested in how we can create a better world through the things we build.

Limiting Outer Space
Limiting Outer Space

Author: Alexander C.T. Geppert

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2018-04-18

Total Pages: 375

ISBN-13: 1137369167

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Limiting Outer Space propels the historicization of outer space by focusing on the Post-Apollo period. After the moon landings, disillusionment set in. Outer space, no longer considered the inevitable destination of human expansion, lost much of its popular appeal, cultural significance and political urgency. With the rapid waning of the worldwide Apollo frenzy, the optimism of the Space Age gave way to an era of space fatigue and planetized limits. Bringing together the history of European astroculture and American-Soviet spaceflight with scholarship on the 1970s, this cutting-edge volume examines the reconfiguration of space imaginaries from a multiplicity of disciplinary perspectives. Rather than invoking oft-repeated narratives of Cold War rivalry and an escalating Space Race, Limiting Outer Space breaks new ground by exploring a hitherto underrated and understudied decade, the Post-Apollo period.

After Apollo?
After Apollo?

Author: John M. Logsdon

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2015-04-02

Total Pages: 616

ISBN-13: 1137438541

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Once the United States landed on the moon in July 1969, it was up to President Nixon to decide what to do in space after Apollo. This book chronicles the decisions he made, including ending space exploration and approving the space shuttle. Those decisions determined the character of the US human space flight program for the next forty years.

The Last American Hero
The Last American Hero

Author: Alice L. George

Publisher: Chicago Review Press

Published: 2020-11-10

Total Pages: 373

ISBN-13: 1641602163

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On February 20, 1962, John Glenn became a national star. That morning at Cape Canaveral, the small-town boy from Ohio took his place atop a rocket and soared into space. He became celebrated in all corners of the world as not just the first American to orbit the Earth, but as the first space traveler to take the human race with him. Refusing to let that dramatic day define his life, he went on to become a four-term US senator—and returned to space at the age of seventy-seven. The Last American Hero is a stunning examination of the layers that formed the man: a hero of the Cold War, a two-time astronaut, a veteran senator, a devoted husband and father, and much more. At a time when an increasingly cynical world needs heroes, John Glenn's aura burns brightly in American memory.

Making Time on Mars
Making Time on Mars

Author: Zara Mirmalek

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2020-04-07

Total Pages: 213

ISBN-13: 0262043858

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An examination of how the daily work of NASA's Mars Exploration Rovers was organized across three sites on two planets using local Mars time. In 2004, mission scientists and engineers working with NASA's Mars Exploration Rovers (MER) remotely operated two robots at different sites on Mars for ninety consecutive days. An unusual feature of this successful mission was that it operated on Mars time—the daily work was organized across three sites on two planets according to two Martian time zones. In Making Time on Mars, Zara Mirmalek shows that this involved more than a resetting of wristwatches; the team's struggle to synchronize with Mars time involved technological and communication breakdowns, informal workarounds, and extra work to support the technology that was intended to support people. Her account of how NASA created an entirely new temporality for the MER mission offers insights about the assumptions behind the organizational relationship between clock time and work. Mirmalek, herself a member of the mission team, offers an insider's view of the MER workplace and community. She describes the discord among MER's multiple temporalities and examines issues of professional identity that helped shape the experience of working according to Mars time. Considering time and work relationships through a multidisciplinary lens, Mirmalek shows how contemporary and historical human–technology relationships inform assumptions about the unalterability of clock time. She argues that the organizational connection between clock time and work, although still operational, is outdated.

The Routledge Handbook of Social Studies of Outer Space
The Routledge Handbook of Social Studies of Outer Space

Author: Juan Francisco Salazar

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-07-10

Total Pages: 778

ISBN-13: 1000890643

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The Routledge Handbook of Social Studies of Outer Space offers state-of-the-art overview of contemporary social and cultural research on outer space. International in scope, the thirty-eight contributions by over fifty leading researchers and artists across a variety of disciplines and fields of knowledge, present a range of debates and pose key questions about the crafting of futures in relation to outer space. The Handbook is a call to attend more carefully to engagements with outer space, empirically, affectively, and theoretically, while characterizing current research practices and outlining future research agendas. This recalibration opens profound questions of intersectional politics, race, equity, and environmental justice around the contested topics of space exploration and life off-Earth. Among the many themes included in the volume are the various infrastructures, networks and systems that enable and sustain space exploration; space heritage; the ethics of outer space; social and environmental justice; fundamental debates about life in outer space as it pertains to both astrobiology and SETI; the study of scientific communities; the human body and consciousness; Indigenous astronomical systems of Knowledge; contemporary space art; and ongoing critical interventions to overcome the legacies of colonialism and dismantle hegemonic narratives of outer space.

NASA Spaceflight
NASA Spaceflight

Author: Roger D. Launius

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2017-10-11

Total Pages: 414

ISBN-13: 331960113X

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This book presents the first comprehensive history of innovation at NASA, bringing together experts in the field to illuminate how public-private and international partnerships have fueled new ways of exploring space since the beginning of space travel itself. Twelve case studies trace the messy, risky history of such partnerships, exploring the role of AT&T in the early development of satellite technology, the connections between the Apollo program and Silicon Valley, the rise of SpaceX, and more. Some of these projects have succeeded, and some have failed; all have challenged conventional methods of doing the public’s business in space. Together, these essays offer new insights into how innovation happens, with invaluable lessons for policymakers, investors, economists, and members of the space community.

Handprints on Hubble
Handprints on Hubble

Author: Kathryn D. Sullivan

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2019-11-05

Total Pages: 301

ISBN-13: 0262355949

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The first American woman to walk in space recounts her experience as part of the team that launched, rescued, repaired, and maintained the Hubble Space Telescope The Hubble Space Telescope has revolutionized our understanding of the universe. It has, among many other achievements, revealed thousands of galaxies in what seemed to be empty patches of sky; transformed our knowledge of black holes; found dwarf planets with moons orbiting other stars; and measured precisely how fast the universe is expanding. In Handprints on Hubble, retired astronaut Kathryn Sullivan describes her work on the NASA team that made all this possible. Sullivan, the first American woman to walk in space, recounts how she and other astronauts, engineers, and scientists launched, rescued, repaired, and maintained Hubble, the most productive observatory ever built. Along the way, Sullivan chronicles her early life as a “Sputnik Baby,” her path to NASA through oceanography, and her initiation into the space program as one of “thirty-five new guys.” (She was also one of the first six women to join NASA’s storied astronaut corps.) She describes in vivid detail what liftoff feels like inside a spacecraft (it’s like “being in an earthquake and a fighter jet at the same time”), shows us the view from a spacewalk, and recounts the temporary grounding of the shuttle program after the Challenger disaster. Sullivan explains that “maintainability” was designed into Hubble, and she describes the work of inventing the tools and processes that made on-orbit maintenance possible. Because in-flight repair and upgrade was part of the plan, NASA was able to fix a serious defect in Hubble’s mirrors—leaving literal and metaphorical “handprints on Hubble.” Handprints on Hubble was published with the support of the MIT Press Fund for Diverse Voices.

The New Laws of Outer Space
The New Laws of Outer Space

Author: Ugo Pagallo

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2024-11-14

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 1509976205

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This book maps out the moral, legal and societal issues brought forth by the use of autonomous systems such as AI and smart robots in outer space. Humanity is on the brink of a new space era in which projects for permanent human colonies on the Moon and space missions with autonomous AI systems will soon become a reality. Principles and provisions of international space law fall increasingly short in tackling this scenario. Experts and institutions have recommended improvements to the legal framework, such as new international agreements, or policies that would not require any amendment to conventional law. Most of the time, such proposals and recommendations overlook the challenges posed by technology and how autonomous and intelligent systems in outer space require moral and legal standards of their own. This book argues that the traditional focus on satellite communications, space-related services, and the appropriability of celestial resources needs to be integrated by new laws of outer space regulating cybersecurity law and environmental law, data governance and consumer protection. The new laws of outer space will increasingly concern the development of new standards for the behaviour and decision-making of AI systems and smart robots, with and without humans aboard deep space missions and in next-generation colonies. What laws shall govern us out there, in a new terra incognita? This is the question that the book sets out to answer.