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SPACEWORK: Labor and Culture in America’s Astronaut Corps, 1959–1985
Matthew H. Hersch, a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania, is this year’s recipient of the HSS/NASA Fellowship. He describes his project here.
Fifty years ago, the United States selected its first group of space travelers: men who were part pilot, part field scientist, and part “systems man.” Well-educated, middle-class strivers comfortable maneuvering in large organizations, America’s astronauts recognized the changing relationship between humans and technology in the 20th century and created a managerial identity in space not much different from that of the white-collar workers proliferating on Earth. Despite the seemingly inexhaustible public fascination with all aspects of human spaceflight, much remains to learn about how the United States created and maintained its professional astronaut corps, how this professional group influenced space policy, and what it tells us about the evolution of “big science” in postwar America.
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Table of Contents
Notes from the Inside
From the President
First Person: Darwin in a Different Voice
Engines of Ingenuity
Playing with Dolphins
The Perils of Publicity
Profile: Leeds University
Patenting Jefferson
Michigan State University
2009 Preliminary Program
Koyré Medal, Telescopes,
Southern Host,
Latest News,
Member News
In Memoriam, Jobs, Conferences, Grants
These first space travelers were members of a new profession that seemed to be without clear antecedents. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration wasn’t sure, at first, exactly who it wanted for the job. Scientists? Combat veterans? or Athletes? Air Force research, though, pointed to a particular kind of person: a keen observer, quick thinker, and skilled aviator—calm, resourceful, able to react quickly even under extreme duress. Such a person would do all of these things, moreover, without a desire for validation or personal aggrandizement. One can scarcely imagine that such a person actually existed, but after examining hundreds of military test pilots in 1959, NASA’s Selection Committee thought it had found seven of them.
These first American astronauts did not necessarily enjoy long space careers (only one reached the Moon), but they did define the bounds of a new technical profession. During NASA’s first decades, these astronauts (and the pilots they recruited) constituted a distinct and powerful subculture within the organization, with substantial authority over day-to-day engineering, training, and flight operations.
Like other 20th-century engineers, astronauts grappled with questions of professionalization, employee-management relations, working conditions, pay, office culture, gender, and deskilling. Unlike other workers, though, astronauts had to negotiate the hazards of their workplace while satisfying the fickle demands of politicians and the public, and the complex emotions that often accompanied spaceflight and the return to Earth. Astronauts also attempted, with partial success, to police the boundaries of their profession, relying upon membership standards both objective and so intangible that the astronauts themselves did not know what they were. During the 1960s and 1970s, these men (and, eventually, women) found themselves divided by skill and experience, constrained by technology, and besieged by a diffuse national culture that simultaneously embraced spaceflight and starved it of funds. Veteran pilots struggled to fill an ever-smaller number of flights with an ever-larger number of qualified astronauts, including new “scientist-astronauts,” who waged an often bitter battle for acceptance.
Despite the seemingly inexhaustible public fascination with all aspects of human spaceflight, much remains to learn about how the United States created and maintained its professional astronaut corps, how this professional group influenced space policy, and what it tells us about the evolution of “big science” in postwar America.
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