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

134 reMeMBerING the SpaCe aGe
big, and too slow.” 49 he, like many other NaSa reformers, wanted the agency
to undertake “faster, cheaper, smaller” projects. If NaSa shifted from large,
prolonged, expensive projects to smaller, faster, cheaper projects, critics argued,
the agency would be able to accomplish more science for less money. Quayle
pushed NaSa to undertake “faster, cheaper, smaller” projects in imitation of the
management style of the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization. the favored
management style of the New right became the de rigueur management style of
NaSa under Quayle and the agency’s new administrator, Dan Goldin. 50
the Space Shuttle was a programmatic relic of the Cold War; it embodied
the expensive, large-scale, long-term projects that characterized the Cold War era,
which conservatives had embraced unabashedly. Now it was out of place in the
fscally conservative post-Cold War environment that favored cheaper, smaller,
short-term projects. although NaSa was expected to conform to the management
style born in the “black” world of national security secrecy, conservatives persisted
in burdening the country with expensive, large-scale, long-term projects, the
embodiment of which now became the Space exploration Initiative (SeI), a
grandiose plan to return to the Moon and then land astronauts on Mars. 51 With
the return to power of conservatives under George W. Bush, the Space exploration
Initiative returned from the dead as the “vision for Space exploration.” 52
as we consider the “National and Global Dimensions of the Space age,”
we need to keep in mind how ideology—and in particular the conservative
space agenda—has so profoundly shaped the U.S. space program and how we
think about it. the changes brought about may appear to be the outcome of a
rational policymaking process, but are laden with the values of the New right.
General acceptance of this conservative space agenda, of course, is assured by the
nation’s ongoing turn to the right. this ideological agenda, therefore, refects
the country’s own turn to the right, and that conservative bent has shaped and
molded the distinct national identity of the United States and its space program.
49. Dan Quayle, Standing Firm: A Vice-Presidential Memoir (New York, NY: harperCollins publishers,
1994), pp. 179 & 180.
50. Butrica, Single Stage to Orbit: Politics, Space Technology, and the Quest for Reusable Rocketry (Baltimore:
Johns hopkins University press, 2003), pp. 134-137 & 150-151; and the general discussion
in howard e. McCurdy, Faster, Better, Cheaper: Low-Cost Innovation in the U.S. Space Program
(Baltimore, MD: Johns hopkins University press, 2001), passim.
51. the most recent and complete scholarly treatment of the Space exploration Initiative is
thor hogan, Mars Wars: The Rise and Fall of the Space Exploration Initiative (Washington, DC:
NaSa, august 2007).
52. White house, Ofce of the press Secretary, “president Bush announces New vision for Space
exploration program,” January 14, 2004, http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/01/
20040114-3.html (accessed November 13, 2007).