Space Station: Campaigning for a Permanent Human Presence in Space

Chapter 5, “Space Station: Campaigning for a Permanent Human Presence in Space,” transitions from the space shuttle as the focus of U.S. human spaceflight to NASA’s push for a permanent space station from the 1980s into the new century. The space station became the new icon for justifying humans living and working off the planet. The focus here is the constant effort to shape and reshape both the rationale for the station and its actual configuration in the face of mounting opposition. Two phrases served to reshape the meaning of spaceflight once a space station claimed the agenda: “the next logical step” and “a permanent presence in space.”

Spaceflight: Discerning Its Meaning

Chapter 1, “Spaceflight: Discerning Its Meaning,” introduces key concepts of framing, branding, and construction of meaning and then explores the heroic, pioneering spaceflight imaginary of the 1960s as an example of the power of ideas and images to shape public understanding. For Americans, human spaceflight resonates with core ideas that pervade U.S. history and culture--exploration, pioneering, the frontier, freedom, innovation, leadership, success. President John F. Kennedy notably placed spaceflight in this frontier tradition, and pioneering the space frontier became NASA’s signature theme. Establishing the origins, influences, and communication of that matrix of meaning sets up the shift into the shuttle era.

Memory: Preserving Meaning

The last chapter, “Memory: Preserving Meaning,” considers what the end of the shuttle era meant. With the orbiters retired to museums, the International Space Station assembled, the astronaut corps dwindled, the future-oriented Constellation program canceled, and NASA’s Orion spacecraft and industry’s commercial space transportation still under development in 2016, the future of U.S. human spaceflight was uncertain. Prospects for new human spaceflight rationales are unsettled, but museums that preserve the relics of the shuttle era are busy shaping public memory and the meaning of the past. Might there be some constructive dialogue between future planners and past explainers?

Plans: Envisioning the Future in Space

The sixth chapter, “Plans: Envisioning the Future in Space,” surveys the episodic effort to redefine the purpose and chart the course of future human spaceflight beyond the space station. It examines the effort by presidents, NASA planners, and blue-ribbon commissions to present energizing ideas and images--to generate a new imaginary--for expanding (or curbing) the human presence in space. These exercises in charting a way into the future typically failed, in part because they were ineffectively framed for consensus or political support. The current spaceflight imaginary puts humans on the moon again, or on Mars, or visiting an asteroid at some unspecified time.

Science: Doing Research in Space

The fourth chapter, “Science: Doing Research in Space,” traces the shift in the purpose of spaceflight from practical work to laboratory research and the increase of knowledge during the 1980s and 1990s. It presents the rationale for and rapid growth of a new field--microgravity research--in the life and physical sciences, and surveys selected results from shuttle science missions that helped set the stage for research on a space station. In the space station era, spaceflight became synonymous with research.

Space Shuttle: Going to Work in Space

Chapter 2, “Space Shuttle: Going to Work in Space,” explores the deliberate redefinition of spaceflight as practical work and routine commuting in a space truck. It identifies the verbal and visual rhetorics that NASA used to establish this concept and traces their emergence in the media as a framework for public understanding and shared meaning. A rich body of resources from the early 1970s into the mid-1980s is mined to reveal how meaning was shaped and shared to launch a new imaginary of spaceflight around a new icon for a new era.

Introduction

According to public opinion polls, Americans are rather fickle about space exploration. In open-ended questions—“Do you think the United States should explore space?”—most eagerly say yes. To more focused questions—“Do you think the United States should explore space or tackle [insert any social issue here]?”—many supporters defect. This suggests that people generally do not have a firm commitment to the meaning or value of space exploration, and particularly not to its higher-risk, higher-cost mode: human spaceflight. Yet most do carry around some kind of mental construct—a metaphor, a meme, a cliché—that gives spaceflight meaning in their own intellectual domains....

Astronauts: Reinventing the Right Stuff

The third chapter, “Astronauts: Reinventing the Right Stuff,” examines how the astronaut as icon embodied new meanings of spaceflight. A salient distinction of the shuttle era was the broadening, diversity, and democratization of the astronaut corps through new roles and new selection criteria. The nature of the job (engineering and scientific research) contrasted with the public’s ingrained perception of astronauts as pilots, especially in the wake of the two shuttle tragedies. Two memes coexisted in a shifting balance: the astronaut as exceptional and heroic, and the astronaut as an extraordinarily capable “ordinary” person.