Andrew J. Butrica

This is the story behind NASA's successful exploration of the solar system. For a half century, NASA has sent one probe after another into space, achieving scientific and technological successes along the way and adding to humanity's knowledge of the solar system. NASA has reaped these great rewards thanks to a small investment in deep-space navigation. With rare exceptions, navigation's great achievements-and scientific accomplishments-have gone unobserved. The failures of the Mars Climate Orbiter and Mars Polar Lander shed navigation (wrongly) in a negative light. Yet, the indispensable role of navigators behind NASA's many successes over the past half century has not come to light-until now. The institutional home of deep-space navigation is the NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. JPL navigation originated long before it became part of NASA, when the lab developed and tested missiles for the nation's military space effort. From the start, deep-space navigation was an endeavor built on science and mathematics and dependent on the Deep Space Network for tracking spacecraft and on digital computers and software for processing data. Navigation is multidisciplinary. It involves astronomy and radio astronomy, geodesy and geophysics, cartography and meteorology, ionospheric physics and radio science. Navigators interact with a panoply of institutions, whether the Bureau International de l'Heure, the International Polar Motion Service, the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics, and the International Astronomical Union. JPL navigation started as a consumer of Naval Observatory data, practices, and ephemerides, but in the 1970s became the source of ephemerides, constants, models, and ephemerides for the world's almanac offices. Navigators have been project scientists on many NASA missions, performing experiments in celestial mechanics and gravitational fields, undertaking radio occultations, and testing Einstein's General Theory of Relativity. They also have made a number of memorable scientific discoveries: mascons on the Moon and Mars, volcanism on Io, and over a dozen satellites of the outer planets. The nature of deep-space navigation began to change with the introduction of optical navigation, which uses a probes science camera and telemetry to determine its position relative to a planet, moon, or asteroid. Deep-space navigation began-and remains-an activity carried out entirely on Earth. Radio signals from the Deep Space Network constituted the only information processed. Optical navigation began to move some of the process-and equipment-to spacecraft. At first, image processing was a labor-intensive and computer-intensive effort. Software improvements and advances in spacecraft computers paved the way for autonomous navigation, which transferred many basic navigation processes to the onboard computer: estimating trajectories, planning and executing imaging, and analyzing pictures. The most recent evolutionary stage has been the merger of this autonomous software with spacecraft guidance and control functions.

While the glories and tragedies of the space shuttle make headlines and move the nation, the story of the shuttle forms an inseparabe part of a lesser-known but no less important drama-the search for a reusable single-stage-to-orbit rocket. Here an award-winning student of space science, Andrew J. Butrica, examines the long and tangled history of this ambitious concept, from it first glimmerings in the 1920s, when technicians dismissed it as unfeasible, to its highly expensive heyday in the midst of the Cold War, when conservative-backed government programs struggled to produce an operational flight vehicle. Butrica finds a blending of far-sighted engineering and heavy-handed politics. To the first and oldest idea-that of the reusable rocket-powered single-stage-to-orbit vehicle-planners who belonged to what President Eisenhower referred to as the military-industrial complex.added experimental ("X"), "aircraft-like" capabilties and, eventually, a "faster, cheaper, smaller" managerial approach. Single Stage to Orbit traces the interplay of technology, corporate interest, and politics, a combination that well served the conservative space agenda and ultimately triumphed-not in the realization of inexpensive, reliable space transport-but in a vision of space militarization and commercialization that would appear settled United States policy in the early twenty-first century.

The story of Air Products and Chemicals, Inc., is exciting--full of struggle, determination, crisis, and heroic endeavor. Air Products grew out of the vision and drive of one individual, Leonard Pool. In the course of fifty years, Pool's precarious project has become a major, multinational corporation. Words like entrepreneurship, sales, finance, engineering, and technology are central to the history of Air Products. So too are concepts like being a late entrant to an established business, struggling to find market niches, moving into fields of endeavor, developing human resources, and breaking through to the level where economies of scale and scope would allow a secure future as a major player on a global scale. The story is one of success; plain luck at some points. But it also contains its share of hard knocks, disappointments, and mistaken strategies. The enduring style of Air Products--its customer-focus and its emphasis on sales and growth--emerged from the interactions of Leonard Pool's personality, the engineering skills of his colleagues, and the opportunities offered by the industrial gas supplier in the world. It is also a major chemical company and a pioneer in the emerging field of environmental and energy systems. Multinational, technology-based firms like Air Products are an important part of American society and of the emerging global economy. The history of Air Products will be of value to everyone interested in the industrial gas and chemical industries, business history, entrepreneurial history, and American studies.