| NASA
at 50
Interviews with NASA's Senior Leadership
The
50th anniversary of NASA on 1 October 2008 found an agency in
the midst of deep transition. In the closing year of the presidency
of George W. Bush, only a month before the presidential election
and in the midst of a worldwide economic crisis, the Agency
was implementing a new Vision for Space Exploration intended
to return humans to the Moon, to proceed onward to Mars, and
to study the cosmos beyond.
All
of this was to be done not with new funding, but by ramping
down the Space Shuttle Program that had been the centerpiece
of human spaceflight for three decades and ramping up a new
program known collectively as Constellation. The immediate elements
of Constellation were a new launch vehicle, Ares I; an “Apollo
on steroids” human capsule dubbed Orion; and the lunar
lander Altair. Huge decisions were being made that would likely
affect the Agency for decades to come. In short, a new era of
spaceflight was dawning—or at least that was NASA’s
fondest hope.
It
was in this milieu that the History Division at NASA Headquarters
commissioned oral history interviews to be undertaken with NASA
senior management. This volume is the result and provides a
snapshot of the thinking of NASA senior leadership on the occasion
of its 50th anniversary and in the midst of these sea changes.
It is all the more valuable from an historical point of view
because of the large changes that have again taken place since
the 50th anniversary. Since the interviews could not be done
instantaneously, this volume is the result of conversations
recorded during 2007 and 2008. The interviews were facilitated
by Rebecca Wright and Sandra Johnson of the Johnson Space Center
( JSC) in Houston, and the whole program was under my guidance
as the NASA Chief Historian at Headquarters in Washington, DC.
Recordings and transcripts are available at JSC and Headquarters
and are now part of the Agency’s considerable oral history
efforts of the past several decades.
Contact
the NASA Headquarters History Office for more information on
purchasing a copy of the book, or download the e-book from the
NASA
e-Books website.
The
reader of this volume may also wish to consult a companion volume
in the NASA History series,
NASA’s First 50 Years: Historical Perspectives, the proceedings
of NASA’s 50th anniversary conference. There
the reader will find in-depth critical analysis from a variety
of scholars of the diverse array of NASA’s activities
from 1958 to the present.
Steven
J. Dick
NASA Chief Historian
December 2009
All
of the Oral History transcripts collected by the JSC History
Office are archived in the JSC
History Collection at the University of Houston-Clear Lake
and are available from the alphabetical list below or from the
complete list of participants,
including the original NASA at 50 oral
histories.
Transcript
lists were last updated: February
12, 2013
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