Joan Lisa Bromberg, NASA and the Space Industry. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. x + 247 pp. $19.95 (paper), ISBN: 0-8018-6532-8.

Reviewed for EH.NET by Glenn Bugos, Principal Historian, The Prologue Group.

This book brings conceptual clarity to an immense and complicated subject. Between 1958 and 1991, NASA spent roughly $200 billion dollars procuring all variety of space equipment from thousands of suppliers. NASA's relations with the "space industry" are proportionately complex, even more so since they have changed as basic industrial structure, technology, and political priorities have changed over time. Furthermore, the historical literature on space industry has grown rapidly over the past decade, fueled largely by NASA's investment in understanding its own history. Bromberg wrote this book under contract from the NASA history office. She is an independent scholar, now affiliated with the Johns Hopkins University Program in the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, who previously wrote on the laser and fusion -- two other technologies spawned by non-linear government involvement.

Yet in this compact book, Bromberg has done a superb job of characterizing major shifts in NASA's industrial policy, introduced each major procurement challenge, selected telling case studies to prove a point, and cited the salient references for those who wish to read more. By no means is this book comprehensive, though it may be the most teachable book available on the economic importance of the recent American aerospace industry.

Bromberg achieved such clarity by following through the decades two general technologies -- commercial communications satellites and launch vehicles. She understands that commercialization of space is fundamentally distinct from the procurement of space technology. She recognizes that NASA itself lacked clarity in its industrial policy, and lets its actions speak more than its words. She assumes divisions of labor are constantly renegotiated, yet that each player seeks to maximize its self-interest. She has left to gather dust on the shelves the many policy plans that were never adopted. Countless historians of technology policy have followed the red-herrings of failed policy plans and thus diverted their gaze from broad trends.

Bromberg starts with the formation of a space industry in the technologies emerging from World War II to characterize the many interests at play in the shaping of NASA. Aircraft, electronics and chemical firms were each claiming the primary expertise needed to build space craft. Furthermore, the Army and Air Force each had their own military needs in space, and their own established methods of contracting for space hardware. NASA itself was pieced together from a variety of research groups with their own procurement traditions, and its early years were spent defining roles and practices that were uniquely its own.

However, NASA never left the shadow of the military, never transcended its research and development culture, never subsumed its self-interest in space exploration to industrial goals, and never cultivated the trust that encouraged firms to follow its leadership into space. The result, Bromberg suggests, is that even from its birth NASA has grown increasingly unable to influence its industrial environment.

In the early 1960s NASA's participation in communication satellite research -- by favoring Hughes' geostationary approach -- set the trajectory for the satellite industry, by far the most vigorous commercial activity in space. She contrasts that with the story of how NASA learned to work with North American Rockwell, its largest contractor on the Apollo program. Though the boundary between public and private remained fluid on all levels -- even at the level of selecting personnel -- NASA and the firms each pursued their own interests in building their institutional capabilities. Bromberg avoids the easy reductionism that it was all a complex.

The accomplishment of the Apollo mission in 1970s left NASA adrift. It reconceived its mission around the space shuttle -- less as a technology in man's great adventure into space and more as reliable transportation for a new age. In making its mission more politically palatable, NASA also opened itself to industry influence on the issue of a fully reusable versus a partly expendable shuttle. NASA's shuttle policy became its de facto industrial policy. In understanding the centrality of the shuttle in NASA's mission, she looks at the choice of technology and pricing on the makers of expendable launch vehicles and the makers of communications satellites. To make the economic models for the shuttle work, NASA set prices and schedules to capture all future flights and thus blunted the development of private launch services and competition from abroad. Entrepreneurs looking to make money on space realized from the start that there was no such thing as a free launch.

Bromberg casts the early 1980s as a celebration of private enterprise. New space companies were spawned in the Reagan administration's free-market ideology, the shuttle became an operational success, and the commercial communication satellite industry showed real competitive vigor. NASA responded to this flood of free-market initiative with a new appendage of its bureaucracy, the NASA Office of Commercial Programs. She also sketches the varied amorphous ideas subsumed in "space commercialization." Those charged with justifying NASA's current investment in biotechnology and computing could learn much by reviewing its efforts in materials processing in the 1970s.

Only the explosion of the Shuttle Challenger opened up the market for launch services, and opened up a new era of commercial investment in space industry. NASA then placed the space station at the core of its space mission and industrial policy, and began the extensive and excruciating negotiations to make the station serve the needs of both a wide array of corporations and a wide array of cooperating national governments. As the cold war ended and NASA was forced to cut its budget, the space station was renegotiated and NASA began to look for more symbiotic ways to interact with the space industry. Bromberg ends on a somber note. Despite NASA's best efforts over nearly half a century, America still has no real space industry.

Glenn Bugos is principal historian with The Prologue Group and author of Engineering the F-4 Phantom II (Naval Institute Press, 1996) and Atmosphere of Freedom: Sixty Years at the NASA Ames Research Center (NASA SP-4314, 2000).

Editor's note: Another EH.NET review of this book can be found at http://eh.net/bookreviews/library/0215.shtml.