Did NASA Become the Post Office Gone to Space?
Review of Howard E. McCurdy, Inside NASA, High Technology and Organisational Change in the U.S. Space Program, John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1993.
When Pathfinder landed on Mars on the 4th of July 1997, and Sojourner was rolled out in front of the world’s eyes, NASA played the role it likes best: an organisation (leading space agency in the world) capable of cutting-edge technological achievements (robotic rover), of bringing people together (this time on the internet) through a miraculous performance of good (peaceful, elegant, intelligent) high technology. Pathfinder was the inaugeral mission of the Surveyor program, another mission of which, the Mars Surveyor Lander, is now on its way to Mars. Pathfinder also can be seen as the inaugeral ceremony of the new NASA. It was the first high-visibility project realized under the ‘faster, cheaper, better’ policy the current Chief Administrator, Dan Goldin, introduced in 1994. The mission was directed by a young crew, in intense collaboration with industry and with a low budget. (Pathfinder is said to have cost less than Jurassic Park.) It would be rash to take Pathfinder as exemplary of NASA’s current practice, but it showed NASA to be healthy and highly capable organisation.
The book under review testifies to the fact that only four years earlier it was far from evident that NASA could again become the centre of true excellence it had been at the time of the Moon missions. It traces the decline of NASA’s capability of accomplishing technologically difficult projects during the seventies and eighties. As the book’s title makes clear, the account of public affairs scholar Howard McCurdy is from the inside, and organisational change lies at the center of analysis. Starting from the culture put in place with the establishment of the space agency, McCurdy describes its blossoming during the first decade of spaceflight. The organisation s subsequent weakening is explained as the erosion of its original culture. The book is thus about the old NASA; it examines the rise and fall of NASA as it was in the beginning. Bureaucratisation is seen as the principal force of decline. Eventhough McCurdy doesn’t exclude the possibility of revival, he does consider bureaucratic take-over a structural tendency affecting high-performance organisations in the public sector.
Not only is it an unproblematic sociological insight that governmental institutions undergo bureaucratisation as they grow older, but from an STS point of view McCurdy’s frame of analysis is also fairly unusual. McCurdy namely opposes bureaucratisation to culture. Instead of describing bureaucratisation as part of the organisation’s overall cultural development, he sees it as going against culture. In his approach, norms and practices unify an organisation, excessive regulation and administrative growth takes it apart. Moreover, McCurdy takes strong culture as strengthening an organisation’s performance, a proposition he derives from neo-functionalist studies of corporate culture.[1] McCurdy thus works with a framework where the dominance of culture over bureaucracy explains success, and the overshadowing of culture by bureaucracy accounts for failure.
Even at first sight, this approach can be judged assymetrical, and possibly also romantic. It should be taken into account that McCurdy’s analysis is based on the opinions of NASA employees. It relies on interviews with NASA engineers, scientists and administrators and an additional survey, and was written as part of the program of the NASA History Office. While McCurdy takes care to meet requirements of statistical analysis and also crosschecks personal accounts with historical documents, he stresses that his observations reflect the views held by people associated to NASA. ‘This is the culture as they describe it’ (p. xiv). It provides an uncritical insider’s view of a technoscientific institute that perceives itself ideally as a centre of pure excellence, and prefers whenever possible to downplay its managerial and political affairs.
McCurdy begins with an overview of the organisations that were brought together in 1958 to form NASA. Most of them had been part of the military, but McCurdy doesn’t put a strong emphasis on this origin. Instead he focuses on the culture of ‘the engineer-scientist in charge’ and its constribution to early NASA culture. McCurdy observes a large continuity between the predecessor organisations and the new space agency. The research centres of NACA (National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics), those of AMBA (Army Ballistic Missile Agency, lead by Werner von Braun and other German engineers) and the Naval Research Laboratories (which was in charge of the first [unsuccessful] satellite-program), received new names and new tasks when they became NASA, but their location and composition remained largely the same. McCurdy describes the centres as distant from Washingtonian politics, as adherents to ‘the triumph of technology and scientific inquiry for problem solving’ (p. 13) and as cultivating a meticulous work attitude. His account is very detailed, but because McCurdy brings these characteristics together under the heading of technical culture, his analysis remains one-sided. That the above properties can be explained, not only as deriving from the techno-scientific practice of the organisations, but also from their embeddedness in the U.S. military, is largely left out of the account. When McCurdy does refer to the military context in which the organisations operated, it is treated as simply an external condition for the development of technical culture. With regard to NACA, for example, McCurdy states: ‘Since much of NACA’s aeronautical work was done for the military, it acquired a powerful client that could shield it from the political cross-firing affecting other civilian agencies.’ He doesn’t go on to treat this situation as directly constituting organisational culture; instead he concludes by stating that it allowed ‘a technical rather than a bureaucratic culture’ (p. 28) to blossom.
McCurdy further elaborates on ‘the engineer-scientist in charge’ when discussing the working assumptions of NASA management (former NACA scientists and engineers, and administrators from Washington). The testing of prototypes and developed devices is described as playing a crucial role in the young agency: it served as a source of innovation and as the dominant criterion in assessing reliability and in decision-making in general. McCurdy attributes great importance to the last aspect: he values the culture of verification for its capacity to ward off tendencies of bureaucratisation, and to shield NASA from political interference. He thus observes a great distance between the techno-scientific authority that ruled NASA and conventional policy-making in the public sector as well as the political authority of government. While the fact that NASA management succeeded in implementing a policy where decisions were founded on technical and scientific standards is certainly significant, McCurdy falls short in his explanation of this success. He only accounts for it as deriving from the assumptions held in the predecessor organisations (NACA and AMBA). The question as to why an agency that is assigned the politically highly laden project of spaceflight, with a Washington official as its Chief Administrator, nevertheless managed to keep techno-scientific control over the decision process, is left unanswered.
By describing a substantial part of NASA’s original culture as deriving from the predecessor organisations, McCurdy to a certain degree evades the political and economic factors that influenced it. While he does present cultural elements that evolved in NASA in reaction to events in the political realm, McCurdy’s distinction between those that do and don’t pertain to the world outside, seems arbritary. The relation between NASA and industrial contributors to the space program, for example, is described entirely in terms of the NACA and AMBA cultures. According to McCurdy, the inherited emphasis on in-house technical capability assured NASA’s relative independence from commercial contractors, and allowed it to subject them to close supervision. But the high interdependence between NASA and industry (95% of NASA’s budget was spend on industrial contracts), as vividly described by journalist Norman Mailer in his A Fire on the Moon, is not considered constitutive of NASA culture. The cultural elements of tolerance towards risk and failure and frontier mentality, on the other hand, are discussed in a political context. McCurdy describes them as having evolved in response to the task President Kennedy formulated in 1961 (“I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth”), and to the financial and public support NASA enjoyed as a consequence. NASA’s willingness to put men on top of modified intercontinental ballistic missiles is thus brought in relation to America’s involvement in the battle over technical supremacy with the U.S.S.R. But, as McCurdy also mentions, in reference to Tom Wolfe’s docu-drama about the early days of spaceflight, The Right Stuff, tolerance of risk and the drive to do what no man has done before played their part as well in the cutting-edge cultures of NACA and AMBA, with their test flights of experimental airplanes and rockets. In his analysis of NASA’s original culture, McCurdy doesn’t make sufficiently clear how it was marked by the national goals it was assigned to realize.
McCurdy’s account is susceptible to the critique that he mainly explains success by internal factors, not by external ones. But the other half of this criticism does not fully apply. McCurdy doesn’t switch to an external explanation in order to account for failure, but largely remains inside NASA. He considers budget cuts, fading public support and bureaucratisation of government as a whole only partly responsible for the decline, and locates the epicenter of change in NASA’s inability to negotiate with government and the preponderance of management over technical culture within NASA. On the basis of statistics of the size and age of the work force, internal promotions and the ratio of administrative to scientific and technical employees, McCurdy shows that the weakening of NASA began in 1967. This moment of turnabout is also recognized in other studies of U.S. science and technology policy. McCurdy describes it as the point at which political considerations took over from techno-scientific ones. This rather naive separation of the political and the techno-scientific again approaches an all too familiar asymmetry, but McCurdy does conceptualize the conflict between the two as an internal dynamic. He lays bare the grounds on which a previously technocratically run centre of excellence experiences the mixing of techno-science and politics as an unhappy marriage. He gives a detailed account of how the slow-down of the decision-making process, inconsiderate interference of managerial considerations in design affairs and incessant project presentations made it impossible to direct programs as efficiently as before. Describing the overspending, delays and technical problems that infested the Space Shuttle, space station Skylab and the Hubble Space Telescope, McCurdy makes clear how ‘NASA became the Post Office gone to space’, as one employee expressed it. (It’s a comment I’ve also heard being made about the European Space Agency, in a bar at ESTEC, ESA’s research centre near the picturesque coastal town Noordwijk, the Netherlands. There an employee said that ESA has always resembled a space-faring Post Office).
While McCurdy’s discussion of bureaucratisation is revealing, his analysis of the sources and consequences of the process is slightly dissapointing. The latter are almost exclusively described as the erosion of NASA’s original culture. The elements that McCurdy put in place in the first part of the book, are taken up one by one to report on their decline: instead of letting test results decide, managerial factors became decisive; instead of keeping up the technical capability inside NASA, the agency increasingly came to rely on industry; instead of acknowledging risk, people closed their eyes to it; instead of looking for projects that no man had undertaken before, employees grew conservative. This account is extremely homogeneous. Besides the Space Shuttle Program, which he describes as an partially failed attempt at the routinisation of space flight, McCurdy pays little attention to the other types of space missions that NASA continued to develop after the ending of Project Apollo in 1972. The unmanned planetery probes, for example, that NASA launched during the seventies and eighties, are only mentioned very briefly. While these missions [2] didn’t produce the shock effect of the manned missions to our nearest celestial body, and didn’t come near to the sense of victory and heroism attached to the first moonlanding (the culmination point of the space race), they seem to point at a change of the space agency, more subtle and open-ended than the simple loss of original culture. With regard to the sources of change, McCurdy’s mainly attributes it to organisational aging, a concept he derives from studies of government. It suggests that organisations go through a life-cycle, moving from a period of expansion, characterized by a growing work force and high flexibility, to a period of contraction, where budgets decline and maintaining the organisation becomes the main challenge. Apart from the question what status can be ascribed to this movement (is it natural?), the concept of aging remains silent on the different role NASA came to play within the govermental realm at large. McCurdy states that govermental agencies have to compete with other agencies for funding. But he doesn’t draw the conclusion that it is important how NASA formulates the relevance of going to space.
At this point one wonders whether McCurdy rates the situation to which NASA attempted to adapt itself at its own value, or whether he judges it by standards that fit past but not present circumstances. Generally speaking, the integration of spaceflight in the socio-economical landscape has been a major occupation of space agencies from the seventies onwards. As part of this undertaking, NASA tightened its relationship with the private sector and scientific institutions. The agency increasingly relied on contracts with industry, offered itself as a service provider to military and commercial satellite owners, and collaborated with Earth and climate sciences. While McCurdy recognizes that NASA had to adapt to the loss of its monopoly on astronautical expertise, he mainly interprets NASA’s partnerships as signs of the sapping of its superiority and independence. While he doesn’t explicitly refer to the fact that the Challenger disaster of 1986 has been attributed to an engineering mistake made by an industrial partner, he exclusively describes increased subcontracting as compromising innovation and reliability. He fails to see in NASA’s bonding with industry a new way of making itself socio-economically indispensable. The fact that the high-technology industry developed itself into an equal partner of government (as Chris Hables Gray, a student of Haraway, points out in his study of the U.S. military, Postmodern War, The New Politics of Conflict, Routledge, 1997) is presented as doing no good but only wrong to NASA.
McCurdy’s account shows a strong bias towards NASA’s early years. Especially in his conclusion, it becomes apparent that his view of the development of the older NASA as one of unambiguous decline partly results from his preoccupation with the original NASA. Here McCurdy stresses that the run-up to the moonlanding was a crash program: it demanded a huge innovative effort, and goverment was willing to provide the funding for it. He states that the blossoming of innovative cultures is dependent on circumstances like these. This raises the question whether McCurdy’s narrative of downward movement is not the outcome of his narrow definition of innovative culture. One could argue that in the fields of Earth observation, communication and unmanned planetary probes, NASA did make headway in the decades that followed Apollo. It is just that these successes were of another kind than those of the space race era. The projects had less public visibility, lower budgets, and were developed in negotiation with industry and scientific institutes. One might even ask if it isn’t the case that NASA’s big problems occured precisely in the projects it approached as if still working under a crash program regime. McCurdy doesn’t ask these questions; he takes the crash program as the ideal situation for space exploration. He also doesn’t take into consideration that the crash program paradigm is one of one-time victory and short-term success, bringing forth the assumption that some steps and a little cruising around in a rover equals ‘doing’ the moon. It makes a Mars walk seem the only satisfying next step, the only next frontier worthy of that name. It is a typical insider perspective on NASA’s future, which McCurdy takes over uncritically. While McCurdy’s lack of distance made him an attentive observer in previous passages, it here results in a narrow view of what may count as progress.
The central role attributed to the young NASA is also problematic in another way. McCurdy claims that the NASA experience, as he calls it, is generalisable to high-performance agencies in the public sector. Since most of these agencies, with the exception of the military sector, didn’t start out as crash programs, the generalization is questionable.
NOTES
T. Peters and R. Waterman, In Search of Excellence, Harper and Row, 1982, and H. Kilmann, M. Saxton and R. Serpa, Gaining Control of the Corporate Culture, Jossey-Brass, San Francisco, 1985, among others. The former traces the business success of Walt Disney and IBM back to the distinctive cultures of these companies. Success is approached as dependent on the incorporation of certain key-tenets (hands-on orientation, bias for action etc.) in a company’s internal culture. In the latter the histories of AT&T and Chrysler Corporation are equally described in terms of the development of corporate culture.
An example of a NASA unmanned planetary probe of the seventies is Pioneer 10, launched in 1972, which became the first to reach an outer planet in 1973 and the first to leave the solar system in 1983. Viking 1, the first to make a soft landing on Mars in 1976, is another.