By John M. Logsdon
Review of
The People’s Spaceship: NASA, the Shuttle Era, and Public Engagement after Apollo
By Amy Paige Kaminski
Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2024, 320 pp.
"The People’s Spaceship: NASA, the Shuttle Era, and Public Engagement after Apollo" by Amy Paige Kaminski
In July 1969, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration achieved the goal that President John F. Kennedy had set eight years earlier: “landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to earth.” Once a lunar landing had been achieved, the obvious question was, What next? NASA proposed a crewed mission to Mars as a post-Apollo goal. To achieve this objective, the space agency would construct a 12-person space station in low Earth orbit during the 1970s; that station would be the staging base for trips to Mars starting in the 1980s. To support the space station, NASA also proposed developing a spacecraft that would bring supplies and crew to the station, then return to Earth for reuse: a space shuttle.
After several years of contentious debate, President Richard Nixon decided that the next major step in space would not be traveling to Mars—or any other space spectacular. Instead, NASA would be tasked with developing the space shuttle. Only after the shuttle was flying might NASA receive the White House’s approval for developing a space station. In January 1972, the White House issued an announcement in Nixon’s name, stating that the shuttle would “revolutionize transportation into near space by routinizing it,” thereby taking “the astronomical costs out of astronautics.”
For NASA, developing what in essence was a space truck was a far less glamorous task than sending astronauts to the moon or Mars. Without the space station as a destination, NASA was left to develop various rationales to justify shuttle development. NASA managers were concerned about how to maintain public enthusiasm for the shuttle, believing that in the absence of a dramatic goal like the lunar landing, such enthusiasm was essential to creating and sustaining political support for the shuttle program and for human spaceflight in general.
According to Amy Paige Kaminski’s The People’s Spaceship: NASA, the Shuttle Era, and Public Engagement After Apollo, one direction the agency took in this regard was to send “multiple messages … to communicate to a broad range of publics that the vehicle would be relevant and accessible to them.” NASA’s goal was, as shuttle manager Wayne Hale put it, “to transform space and the opening of the frontier to more people.” Kaminski’s extensively researched and well-written book tells the story of how NASA sought to engage both specific groups outside NASA and the public in general in achieving this objective, in the process making the shuttle “the people’s spaceship.”
Once a lunar landing had been achieved, the obvious question was, What next?
Kaminski, who some years ago was a student of mine at George Washington University, describes in detail the initiatives that NASA undertook during the shuttle’s development and early years of operation to demonstrate that the shuttle was a “democratic technology belonging to the nation.” She notes that there was no “master plan” guiding these initiatives, which included significant changes in who would fly on the shuttle. For instance, NASA pursued what in contemporary terms would be called a diversity, equity, and inclusion approach to recruiting astronauts, who had traditionally been white males. The 1978 class of astronaut candidates included for the first time six women and three African Americans.
In the early 1980s, NASA began allowing “payload specialists”—technical or scientific experts who received far less training than career astronauts—to accompany their experiments into orbit. NASA next extended the opportunity to be a shuttle crewmember to “ordinary” individuals. The first person chosen was a high school teacher named Christa McAuliffe; she was to be followed by a journalist. NASA hoped to launch two to four lay citizens per year as “space flight participants.”
Kaminski’s extensively researched and well-written book tells the story of how NASA sought to engage both specific groups outside NASA and the public in general in achieving this objective, in the process making the shuttle “the people’s spaceship.”
NASA also made changes to what the space shuttle would bring into orbit. The agency created small containers designated “Get Away Specials” to be made available for the “man and woman in the street”—allowing more people to develop non-NASA experiments, and eventually nonscientific payloads, to fly aboard the shuttle. One aspect of this effort was especially targeted toward high school students. NASA also organized what was basically a marketing office to attract non-NASA paying customers, both domestic and foreign, to launch their payloads on the shuttle.
Most of these initiatives were based on the illusion that the shuttle was safe enough to carry non-astronauts on a routine basis. That illusion was rudely shattered in January 1986 when the shuttle Challenger was consumed in flames 73 seconds after launch, killing all seven crewmembers, including “teacher in space” McAuliffe.
The final chapters of Kaminski’s book chronicle the 25 years of post-Challenger shuttle operations. After the 1986 disaster, shuttle use policy was revised to limit the shuttle to launching missions that required its unique capabilities; there would be no competition for lucrative commercial launch contracts, much less flying non-astronauts. (There was one exception to this latter prohibition: 77-year-old senator John Glenn, who in 1962 was the first American to orbit the Earth, successfully lobbied his way aboard the shuttle Discovery for a 1998 flight.)
By the turn of the century, the shuttle was limited to launching elements of and supplies for an orbital outpost, by now known as the International Space Station. This was, ironically, a return to the shuttle’s original purpose when it had first entered NASA’s post-Apollo planning.
The 2003 breakup of the shuttle Columbia, which once again killed its seven-person crew, demonstrated the risks of continuing shuttle operation. In January 2004, President George W. Bush announced that the remaining three shuttle orbiters would end their service when the assembly of the International Space Station was completed. Kaminski comments that in the aftermath of the Columbia accident, “NASA no longer saw a value proposition for using the shuttle to further democratize space flight.” The “democratic vision” faded away; “the agency no longer depended on securing the active involvement of various segments of the public to ensure the shuttle’s viability.”
Most of these initiatives were based on the illusion that the shuttle was safe enough to carry non-astronauts on a routine basis.
Kaminski writes from the perspective of an admirer of the space shuttle. At various point in her study, she characterizes the shuttle as “sublime,” “majestic,” and as an object to “behold” and “venerate.” While she describes in depth the various initiatives designed to make the shuttle the people’s spaceship, she never evaluates the success of those initiatives nor criticizes the assumptions of routine and safe shuttle operation on which they were based.
The initiatives detailed in Kaminski’s book may also have been less than relevant with respect to the sustainability of the shuttle program than its advocates believed. Toward the end of her treatise, Kaminski inserts a surprising observation. She has spent most of her book recounting the many ways NASA saw public engagement as key to continued government support of the space shuttle program. But she concludes that such engagement had only a modest impact: “In an environment in which entrenched stakeholders and national imperatives hold sway over elected officials’ decisions, it is a fallacy to assume that political support of a space initiative will be heavily influenced by expressions of public preferences such as through opinion polls.” There needed to be other reasons for public engagement than sustaining political support for the shuttle. Kaminski suggests that NASA might use such engagement as a way to reimagine “how it serves its publics and how it involves them substantively in its human space flight programs.”
The space shuttle was a major technological achievement. It stands as a monument to American capabilities and a symbol of US space leadership. But as an experimental, first-generation reusable spacecraft, it could never have matched the promises of routine, safe, and economical operation made at the inception of the shuttle program. The public engagement initiatives that Kaminski describes were based on those promises. In various writings I have characterized the space shuttle as a “policy failure” and a “policy mistake.” Unfortunately, that mistake was derived, at least in part, by those same beliefs that Kaminski argues made the shuttle “the people’s spaceship.”