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

150 reMeMBerING the SpaCe aGe
Less successful were eforts to employ the concept bureaucratically. Bauer
and others, including Minnesota Senator Fritz Mondale, employed SocialIndicators
to promote action by the federal government, including the establishment of a
Council of Social advisors similar to the Council of economic advisors and
more advice to Congress. 64 While such a council did not appear, a bipartisan
Congress established the Ofce of technology assessment (Ota) in 1972.
Ota lasted until 1995, when terminated by the new republican Congress.
aNaLYSIS
In his introduction, Mazlish outlined fve issues to address:
1. What were the theoretical problems of historical analogy?
2. What was the impact of the railroad on 19th century america?
3. Could the railroad’s impact be used as a “device of anticipation” to
study the impact of the space program?
4. Could this aaaS efort possibly become the prototype of future
“impact” studies?
5. Could this volume serve as an example of the difculties involved in
organizing such a project? 65
as he noted, this efort was an initial exploration, designed to probe
possibilities, not prove. the volume indeed provided a much richer appreciation
of the theoretical challenges of creating and using historical analogy as well
as the many impacts of the railroad on 19th century america. the grander
goals and visions, however, remained unfulflled. the frst two issues were the
province of the historian and the most successfully developed. the last three fell
into the province of NaSa and the aaaS as well as the historian, and they must
be answered either negatively or, to use the Scottish legal concept, not proven.
What happened to the last three goals of the aaaS and Railroad? Or, more
accurately, what did not happen? Was the problem a lack or loss of aaaS and NaSa
support, a lack of efort to link historians with social scientists and NaSa policymakers,
or a more fundamental mismatch between historians and policymakers?
that is, were the grand aaaS expectations killed by factors beyond
their control, executed poorly and thus unsuccessfully, or doomed from the
64. talcott parsons, “report of the president,” Records of the Academy (American Academy of Arts and
Sciences), (1968 - 1969), 11; Otis Dudley Duncan, “Developing Social Indicators,” Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences 12 (December 1974), 5096-5102; elmer B. Staats, “Social Indicators
and Congressional Needs for Information,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social
Science 435 (January 1978): 277-285.
65. Mazlish, op.cit., “preface,” pp. vii-xi.