NASA and the Space Industry

Front Cover
JHU Press, 2000 M11 24 - 247 pages

Few federal agencies have more extensive ties to the private sector than NASA. NASA's relationships with its many aerospace industry suppliers of rocket engines, computers, electronics, gauges, valves, O-rings, and other materials have often been described as "partnerships." These have produced a few memorable catastrophes, but mostly technical achievements of the highest order. Until now, no one has written extensively about them.

In NASA and the Space Industry, Joan Lisa Bromberg explores how NASA's relationship with the private sector developed and how it works. She outlines the various kinds of expertise public and private sectors brought to the tasks NASA took on, describing how this division of labor changed over time. She explains why NASA sometimes encouraged and sometimes thwarted the privatization of space projects and describes the agency's role in the rise of such new space industries as launch vehicles and communications satellites.

 

Contents

Legacies
16
A Tale of Two Companies
45
The Space Shuttle
75
Space and the Marketplace
114
In the wake of the Challenger
149
Trends in NASAIndustry Relations
175
NOTES
191
BIBLIOGRAPHY
229
INDEX
241
Copyright

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Page 234 - The Space Shuttle Decision: Technology and Political Choice," Journal of Contemporary Business, Vol.

About the author (2000)

Joan Lisa Bromberg is a visiting scholar in the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology Department at the Johns Hopkins University. She is the author of Fusion: Science, Politics, and the Invention of a New Energy Source and The Laser in America, 1950-1970.

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