Inside NASA: High Technology and Organizational Change in the U.S. Space Program (New Series in NASA History)

Inside NASA: High Technology and Organizational Change in the U.S. Space Program (New Series in NASA History) by McCurdy, Prof Howard E. E.. paperback edition. ISBN: 9780801849756.

Winner of the Henry Adams Prize from the Society for History in the Federal Government Inside NASA explores how an agency praised for its planetary probes and expeditions to the moon became notorious for the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger and a series of other malfunctions. Using archival evidence as well as in-depth interviews with space agency officials, Howard McCurdy investigates the relationship between the performance of the American space program and NASAs organizational culture. He begins by identifying the beliefs, norms, and practices that guided NASAs early successes. Originally, the agency was dominated by the strong technical culture rooted in the research-and-development organizations from which NASA was formed. To launch the expeditions to the moon, McCurdy explains, this technical culture was linked to an organizational structure borrowed from the Air Force ballistic-missile program. Changes imposed to accomplish the lunar landing—along with the normal aging process and increased bureaucracy in the government as a whole—gradually eroded NASAs original culture and reduced its technical strength.