Review: The People’s Spaceship

by Jeff Foust
Monday, June 24, 2024

The People’s Spaceship: NASA, the Shuttle Era, and Public Engagement after Apollo
by Amy Paige Kaminski
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2024
hardcover, 336 pp., illus.
ISBN 978-0-8229-4766-0
US$60.00

NASA today embeds public outreach in nearly every aspect of its activities. “Slow Your Student’s ‘Summer Slide’ and Beat Boredom With NASA STEM” declares a recent NASA release, explaining how agency resources can keep kids entertained and educated during summer vacation. (“Finally, summer isn’t complete without a sweet treat, so bake some sunspot cookies. Real sunspots are not made of chocolate, but in this recipe, they are!” it states.) People can also register to virtually “attend” for this week’s scheduled launch of the GOES-U weather satellite, giving people access to mission updates as well as “curated mission resources.” The unstated rationale for the mission updates, educational activities, and even cookie recipes is to build and maintain public support for the agency and its programs.

In the early years of NASA, the agency did its share of public outreach as well, through the news media as well as tours and other activities. But agency leaders said at the time they were not motivated by public support during its race to the Moon. “In NASA we do not translate interest in as support for. We only acknowledge the interest and try to supply goods and services on a reactive basis,” claimed Tom Paine, NASA administrator, in 1970.

That changed with the end of Apollo, argues Amy Paige Kaminski in her new book, The People’s Spaceship. Budget cuts forced NASA to find a new direction for human spaceflight, resulting in the shuttle program. That vehicle, intended to reduce the costs of accessing space, came at a time when NASA was redirecting its focus to more practical applications. The combination, she notes, opened the door to greater public participation in spaceflight that NASA, at least initially, welcomed as a means of building support for the shuttle.

Those efforts took many forms. Some are familiar to most, like the expansion of the astronaut corps from primarily test pilots (all white males) to include more scientists and engineers, including women and minorities, as well as payload specialists not strictly astronauts. Later, emboldened by a vision of the shuttle making spaceflight routine, that expanded to efforts to fly more ordinary citizens.

Those efforts involved more than flying a more diverse set of people, though. NASA sought to attract commercial customers for the vehicle, either for launching satellites or doing research. It also reached out to universities and the public at large through the Get Away Special (GAS) program to fly items in canisters placed the shuttle’s payload bay, or for flying experiments inside the cabin. There were more passive opportunities as well, as NASA extended invitations to watch shuttle launches and landings or cooperating with filmmakers, like IMAX.

Those efforts showed that while they could be effective in attracting support and even pride in the shuttle program, it could sometimes be difficult to control how the public wanted to be involved with the shuttle program. People purchased reservations for GAS cans to fly research, but also for flying artwork. Kaminski notes some people wanted to fill GAS cans with collectable items to be resold after their return to Earth. “A Dallas retailer hoped to fly gerbils in a GAS can with the same intent,” she writes. That led to concerns within NASA about tarnishing the agency’s reputation, resulting in stricter guidelines about what could or could not be flown.

The Challenger accident led NASA to revisit many of those efforts, most notably with the Teacher In Space effort and plans to fly journalists and artists. It also scaled back the GAS and related programs. Public participation continued in other ways, though, up until the retirement of the shuttles and their placement at museums and centers across the country.

Kaminski concludes the book with some lessons for NASA to apply public participation to the Artemis program. “One thing that is clear that today, perhaps even more so than in the shuttle era, many people can and want to participate directly in space activities,” she writes. That doesn’t mean flying spaceflight participants on Orion, but could leverage potions like prizes or online forums to solicit ideas and concepts outside of the conventional space industry. That involves “giving up some control” by NASA, she acknowledges, but can lead to a “rich and democratic” future for the United States in space. It will likely require something more than cookie recipes.

Jeff Foust (jeff@thespacereview.com) is the editor and publisher of The Space Review, and a senior staff writer with SpaceNews. He also operates the Spacetoday.net web site. Views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author alone.

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