Reviews for Science of Space Environment

The average rating for Science of Space Environment based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-12-15 00:00:00 Glen Linch In the 19th century railroads covered the United States assisted with land grants from the federal government but all constructed by private companies each with its own idea of how and where to build. Capitalist competition, with a significant amount of corruption, laced the states with steel rails. In the 20th century, the economic collapse that brought the Depression stimulated desperate experiments in government direction of the economy during FDR's first terms. The free market had failed and many admired the rapid advance of industry in the USSR. Some of the New Deal programs were successful, many weren't, but the thought that it might be desirable to have direction from the top, a technocracy of experts and specialists, was spectacularly put to the test with the explosive expansion of US industry at the command of the government during WW2. When Dwight Eisenhower won the presidency in 1952, his thinking heralded a return to the idea that government should be limited in power and the free market should decide on the course the country should follow. He had been in the perfect position to see the operation of technocracy and feared what it would do to the traditional personal values held by Americans. Despite strong pressure to put government at the head of an effort to counter the military might of the USSR, Ike was determined to have a balanced budget while avoiding a welfare state for the military. His military background made his decisions difficult to question and the country enjoyed a strong economy and the general feeling that all was well. Then in 1957 came Sputnik and everything changed. Walter McDougall has written an excellent account of the effects of the resulting American panic that the USSR was ahead in technology and that all standing in the way of a technocratic push by the United States should be swept aside. The can-do top-down approach that had proven so successful in WW2 now was to be renewed not just in weaponry but in education and technology in general. McDougall alternates between reporting on what was actually taking place in the USSR and what an overexcited US was doing based on false assumptions of USSR might. The Space Race, closing the supposed "missile gap", the pouring of money into higher education resulting in universities becoming R&D labs for Uncle Sam are all explained with the personalities and policies that drove the nation to do all it could to convince not just Americans and Russians, but the developing world that capitalism in managed form was superior to communism. The edition that I read, the first, came out in the late 1980's, the first opportunity to have access to much formerly secret information, though not as much from the still functioning USSR as from the US. In the 80's the first generation of ICBM's were either history (Atlas) or being retired (Titan I and II) and the moon landing was well over ten years in the past. As McDougall documents, the fears that Ike tried so hard to contain were truly unwarranted. There was never a missile gap favoring the USSR. Ike knew this because of U2 reconnaissance flights that showed no significant missile building program in the USSR, yet he could not reveal the U2 program as national sovereignty in space was at issue. Even at the time of the Cuban missile crisis, the USSR had only two or three ICBM's. As for Sputnik, the US was planning on launching a satellite and could have been first in space but for the desire to make it a non-military effort (Vanguard) rather than use a military missile (Redstone) that was proven and ready to go. Werner von Braun, the famous German missile engineer captured from defeated Nazi Germany, had his pleas to go ahead with a launch ignored. The USSR had only one advantage and that was in having larger missiles that could lift heavier payloads into orbit. In all other areas, it was decidedly behind and the lag only increased with time as the US developed not just more ICBM's but a huge B52 bomber force and missiles that could be launched from submarines. In short, the space race was an American race against fear and for prestige in the eyes of the world. This didn't mean that Nikita Krushchev wasn't giving fuel to the fire, boasting, declaring at every opportunity how socialism was victorious over capitalism and pulling away. The USSR was clearly a technocracy where all that was done came on order from above. The irony is that the fear of a lead by Russia brought the US all in on technocracy and left the USSR increasingly in the dust. In the final two chapters of the book McDougall leaves history and begins a most powerful critique of technocracy, presenting ideas about our modern way of life that had not occurred to me and in such a stimulating read that I scanned the 26 final pages of the book to pass around to others. These pages alone make the book worth reading, putting aside the excellent history to which most of it is devoted. McDougall examines all the claims for technocracy, seeing the flaws in systems analysis, the impossibility of applying technologies to social problems (as in the Great Society), the distortion of scientific research and higher education when technocracy dictates what will be done. He relates how the man-to-the-moon program was a dead end, producing the giant Saturn 5 booster and the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo capsules that are retired and worthless for any other purpose. The Space Shuttle is dismissed as a program looking for a purpose and one that while claiming to save money on space flights ended up costing a fortune and, as we know, is now dumped. He doesn't discount the amazing technological feat of the moon landing, but argues that money was thrown to the winds with NASA with space program money creeping into areas that had nothing to do with the mission but got industry hooked on government contracts and got government hooked on providing jobs for PhD's, engineers and technicians. Readers in 2020 may well note how the end of the USSR brought only a short hiatus before an endless war against terror moved in comfortably as the new excuse for federal spending. One bright side that the author could not have known about in the 80's was the entrance of private companies into the exploitation of space based on selling something that consumers (wealthy though they will have to be) would willingly pay for. If you want to understand how the military-industrial complex came to be and how it manages to preserve itself making and doing things of no real use to the American taxpayer, this is the book to read. I am very grateful to Walter McDougall for the application of his very capable mind to a fascinating subject that should be of interest to us all.

Review # 2 was written on 2013-02-26 00:00:00 Varghese John McDougall's book is very well researched. It largely tells the back-and-forth space development, exploration, and exploitation tale between the USSR & the US. The book is thematically centered on the emergence of technocracy in the US as a result of (perceived or real) need to compete with the USSR for national prestige in space. In McDougall's analysis, the success of the lunar landing set the stage for LBJ to implement a number of technocratic, centrally managed national programs, to include the management of Vietnam and the "Great Society" writ large. Once the space program proved centralized management successful, education initiatives and social programs followed. McDougall takes a very cautionary view of this, invoking often Ike's fear of technocratic tendencies to shove aside the American ideals of freedom.