Remembering the Space Age. - Black Vault Radio Network (BVRN)

70 reMeMBerING the SpaCe aGe
cherry-picked elements from their prior experience with atomic energy while
passively making unconscious assumptions based on the technological realities
of atomic energy. Often the decisions they arrived at were not appropriate for
the aerospace case.
NaSa represented a form of technocracy that divorced military interests
as completely as possible. In the 1960s, NaSa would become an agency
mobilized for social change. thomas hughes argues in American Genesis that,
during the Great Depression, the tennessee Valley authority (tVa) was a push
for regional social development by progressive politicians via electrifcation
and the management of water resources. 43 NaSa followed in these footsteps.
perhaps not so coincidentally one of the original commissioners of the tVa,
David Lilienthal, would later become the frst chairman of the aeC.
But NaSa was technocracy in an evolved form. It combined three
trends that had not yet together existed in any american organization: 1) Big
Science, i.e., the close cooperation of large numbers of scientists and engineers
in a vertically integrated hierarchy organized for the production of massive
projects; 2) a mandate that pushed science for social benefts and simultaneously
minimized obligations to the military; and 3) science in the service of national
prestige abroad.
the atomic energy Commission took over the operation of the entire
american atomic machine, from enrichment to reactor design to bomb testing
in the South pacifc. NaSa, instead, was given a mandate to push the boundaries
forward in aerospace technology only insofar as they could be peacefully used.
this was, then, a pivotal transformation in the history of american technocratic
institutions. Under the presidencies of Kennedy and Johnson, NaSa was a
juicy target to be expanded, but this was merely opportunism. NaSa’s form
had already been cemented in 1958, a form which had atomic roots.
43. thomas p. hughes, American Genesis: A Century of Invention and Technological Enthusiasm
1870-1970 (New York, NY: Viking penguin, 1989), pp. 360-381.