Critical Issues in the History of Spaceflight (NASA Publication SP-2006-4702) 12+

📗 At a May 1981 "Proseminar in Space History'' held at the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum (NASM) in Washington, DC, historianscame together to consider the state of the discipline of space history. It was an historic occasion. The community of scholars interested in the history of spaceflight was not large; previously, well-meaning but untrained aficionados consumed with artifacts had dominated the field, to the exclusion of the larger context. At a fundamental level, this proseminar represented a "declaration of independence'' for what might be called the "new aerospace history.'' In Retrospect, it may be interpreted as marking the rise of space history as a recognizable subdiscipline within the field of U.S. history. Bringing together a diverse collection of scholars to review the state of the art in space history, this proseminar helped in a fundamental manner to define the field and to chart a course for future research. Its participants set about the task of charting a course for collecting, preserving, and disseminating the history of space exploration within a larger context of space policy and technology. In largemeasure, the course charted by the participants in this 1981 proseminar aided inadvancing a very successful agenda of historical research, writing, and understanding of space history. Not every research project has yielded acceptable results, nor can it be expected to do so, but the sum of the eff...