National Space Program from the Fifties into the Eighties

摘要

This monograph traces the National Space Program and its confusing history from the 1950s to the 1980s. Its focus is the Government agencies charged with leading this nation's public and military programs, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the Department of Defense (DOD), respectively. Although the legal role each agency plays can be found in the Space Act of 1958, the programs each pursues are most governed by national space policy. Thus, the central theme of this work is civilian and military space policies and the organizational changes that have been required to implement them. The introduction and chapter 1 review events and influences that have been part of the complex space policy formulation process. Chapter 2 presents a rather detailed evolution of the National Space Program through past administrations for an understanding that is essential to put current issues into proper perspective. To keep this work unclassified, there is no mention of the intelligence community's space work, and program-specific data on military space systems are kept to a minimum.