NASA in the World

О ur first debt of gratitude goes to Steve Dick and Steve Garber in the NASA History Office. In selecting this team for this project they not only placed their faith in experience. They sought also to extend and consolidate the community of space historians, and gave two young scholars the opportunity to grow per­sonally and intellectually. Bill Barry provided extensive and invaluable feedback on an earlier version of this text when he was appointed NASA chief historian, and did all he could to facilitate its publication with an academic press.

The advice and generous help of the archivists in the NASA History Office made the product possible. Jane Odom was not only our guide and counselor. She also had the task of frequently dealing with the formalities needed for two of us to enter the NASA Headquarters Building. Nadine Andreassen provided invaluable additional support. Collin Fries, John Hargenrader, and Elizabeth Suckow pulled file after file from storage cabinets, tracked down obscure refer­ences, and lived with four huge boxes of our material on the floor of the archive for months on end. This study has benefited extensively from their knowledge of the primary source material, their imagination in suggesting new leads, and their generous availability whenever we called on them. Thanks too to Patrick Reust of the World Meteorological Organization Library, Geneva, and Betsey Stout and Elizabeth Rogers of the Marriott Library Special Collections at the University of Utah for their advice and help.

Primary sources were supplemented with about two dozen formal interviews, now transcribed and available in the NASA Historical Reference Collection, and with many informal discussions with eminent members of the space community. Those interviewed included many dedicated NASA staff who gave generously of their time. All interviewees are acknowledged individually in the “List of Interviews”: their insights added important texture to the documentary record. John Hall and Paula Geisz deserve a special word of thanks for their careful reading, and rereading, of the chapter on export control compliance.

The Georgia Institute of Technology was an immensely supportive envi­ronment for doing this work. We want to thank Chris Fehrenbach, above all, for administering this contact with consummate skill and good humor. Janis Goddard, in the Office of Sponsored Programs, was our interface with NASA itself. Katharine Calhoun, Gladys Toppert, and Bruce Henson in the library made untiring efforts to get books, articles, and dissertations in record time. The faculty and the graduate community in the School of History, Technology and Society were always engaged and willing to give advice and feedback. We particularly want to thank Ron Bayor, Laura Bier, Doug Flamming, Prakash Kumar, Ken Knoespel, Nathan Moon, Jenny Smith, Tim Stoneman, and Steve Usselman whose insight and personal encouragement was invaluable.

Preliminary versions of our findings have been presented at many confer­ences, workshops, and university seminars. Engaged audiences were construc­tive critics. We owe a particular debt of gratitude to Jacques Blamont, Roger Bonnet, Jason Callahan, Jean Pierre Causse, Indira Choudhary, Martin Collins, Mark Finlay, James Flemming, Kristine Harper, Tom Lassman, Pam Mack, Ian Pryke, Yasushi Sato, Asif Siddiqi, Raman Srinivasan, Roger Turner, and Odd Arne Westad for thoughtful comments and criticisms on various incarnations of this research.

In transiting from a NASA publication to an academic press we owe an immense debt of gratitude to Roger Launius and Jim Fleming, who immediately agreed to include it in their series. Chris Chappell and Sarah Whalen at Palgrave Macmillan provided outstanding editorial support.

This book would not have been possible without the unstinting support, pro­fessional and personal, that many colleagues, friends and family have provided. Special friends too numerous to mention have stood by us through thick and thin. And then there are those who have intimately shared our anxieties and our excitement—Lydie, and David, Peter, Simon, and Sara; Adrienne, Cyndi, Frances, and Jason; Dolly and Nate, and Appa, Amma, Kannan, Rajesh, and Anand. We could not have done this without knowing that you were there.