Dark Star: A New History of the Space Shuttle by Matthew H. Hersch (review)

IF 0.8 3区 哲学 Q2 HISTORY & PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE
Michael J. Neufeld
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Conceived as part of the infrastructure of an ambitious post-Apollo space program, it became instead NASA’s last chance to sustain human spaceflight as its budget began falling even before the first lunar landings. In order to save the shuttle, the agency made major design concessions to secure Air Force participation and to reduce peak expenditures in the lean 1970s. The result was a “bad design” (p. 160) that NASA accepted on the <strong>[End Page 1066]</strong> assumption that the shuttle would soon be redesigned or replaced—it never was. As a result, “<em>the shuttle failed because it was designed to fail</em>” (p. 12; italics in the original).</p> <p>Hersch is critical of the most important scholarly work on the topic, Diane Vaughn’s <em>The Challenger Launch Decision</em> (1996). That book is a sociological analysis of the first shuttle accident in 1986, and Vaughn asserts that the disaster’s root cause was poor management, leading to the “normalization of deviance” and the refusal to recognize that a catastrophic failure of one of the solid-rocket boosters (SRBs) was imminent. Hersch argues instead that NASA managers succumbed to “fatalism” (p. 160) because they knew that the shuttle’s design was flawed. Mounting the orbiter on the side of a huge external tank that shed insulating foam, often striking the orbiter’s fragile reentry protection system, and next to segmented SRBs that could burn through or explode, doomed the system to an accident. Making matters worse, the design constraints made it impossible to install an escape system for the full crew.</p> <p>I am in fundamental agreement with Hersch’s critique of the shuttle, which I have long considered the United States’ worst space policy decision. (Full disclosure: I am mentioned in passing in the acknowledgments and my work is cited and quoted.) But he often pushes the argument too far. In his analysis of the <em>Challenger</em> accident, he makes his disagreement with Vaughn into a binary choice: either it was a short-term management failure, or it was a long-term result of a bad design (pp. 149–56). Yet in his epilogue, he concedes that it could be both (p. 217). He condemns the segmented SRB (in which the solid propellant was stacked in four segments with joints between them) as inherently dangerous, yet after that accident, NASA made 110 more shuttle launches with a redesigned SRB joint that worked every time. (The 2003 <em>Columbia</em> accident was caused by the other launch vulnerability: foam strikes on the reentry protection system.)</p> <p><em>Dark Star</em> is very readable and is suitable not only for scholars but also for general readers and classroom use. But it is often written in a breezy way, prone to exaggeration and factual errors. Just to pick a few examples from my own work, Hersch exaggerates the impact of the V-2 on the German potato supply (p. 28), he gets the origins of Wernher von Braun’s participation in the <em>Collier’s</em> space series wrong (p. 35), and he is in error about how German Gen. Walter Dornberger came to the United States and where he retired (pp. 37, 61). In addition, he errs in identifying the Bell X-1 rocket plane’s engine (p. 39) and the cancellation date of the X-20 DynaSoar (p. 51). He even makes a few small factual mistakes about the shuttle’s history. 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引用次数: 0

Abstract

Reviewed by:

  • Dark Star: A New History of the Space Shuttle by Matthew H. Hersch
  • Michael J. Neufeld (bio)
Dark Star: A New History of the Space Shuttle
By Matthew H. Hersch. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2023. Pp. 315.

Dark Star (a title taken from an obscure science fiction movie) is not a comprehensive technical history of NASA’s space shuttle program, nor does it contain much new information. (For that, see the work of Dennis Jenkins.) Rather, it is a scathing critique of what Hersch sees as a project doomed from the start by space agency leaders’ fixation on a winged, reusable rocket plane as the means to drastically reduce the cost of space launch. Conceived as part of the infrastructure of an ambitious post-Apollo space program, it became instead NASA’s last chance to sustain human spaceflight as its budget began falling even before the first lunar landings. In order to save the shuttle, the agency made major design concessions to secure Air Force participation and to reduce peak expenditures in the lean 1970s. The result was a “bad design” (p. 160) that NASA accepted on the [End Page 1066] assumption that the shuttle would soon be redesigned or replaced—it never was. As a result, “the shuttle failed because it was designed to fail” (p. 12; italics in the original).

Hersch is critical of the most important scholarly work on the topic, Diane Vaughn’s The Challenger Launch Decision (1996). That book is a sociological analysis of the first shuttle accident in 1986, and Vaughn asserts that the disaster’s root cause was poor management, leading to the “normalization of deviance” and the refusal to recognize that a catastrophic failure of one of the solid-rocket boosters (SRBs) was imminent. Hersch argues instead that NASA managers succumbed to “fatalism” (p. 160) because they knew that the shuttle’s design was flawed. Mounting the orbiter on the side of a huge external tank that shed insulating foam, often striking the orbiter’s fragile reentry protection system, and next to segmented SRBs that could burn through or explode, doomed the system to an accident. Making matters worse, the design constraints made it impossible to install an escape system for the full crew.

I am in fundamental agreement with Hersch’s critique of the shuttle, which I have long considered the United States’ worst space policy decision. (Full disclosure: I am mentioned in passing in the acknowledgments and my work is cited and quoted.) But he often pushes the argument too far. In his analysis of the Challenger accident, he makes his disagreement with Vaughn into a binary choice: either it was a short-term management failure, or it was a long-term result of a bad design (pp. 149–56). Yet in his epilogue, he concedes that it could be both (p. 217). He condemns the segmented SRB (in which the solid propellant was stacked in four segments with joints between them) as inherently dangerous, yet after that accident, NASA made 110 more shuttle launches with a redesigned SRB joint that worked every time. (The 2003 Columbia accident was caused by the other launch vulnerability: foam strikes on the reentry protection system.)

Dark Star is very readable and is suitable not only for scholars but also for general readers and classroom use. But it is often written in a breezy way, prone to exaggeration and factual errors. Just to pick a few examples from my own work, Hersch exaggerates the impact of the V-2 on the German potato supply (p. 28), he gets the origins of Wernher von Braun’s participation in the Collier’s space series wrong (p. 35), and he is in error about how German Gen. Walter Dornberger came to the United States and where he retired (pp. 37, 61). In addition, he errs in identifying the Bell X-1 rocket plane’s engine (p. 39) and the cancellation date of the X-20 DynaSoar (p. 51). He even makes a few small factual mistakes about the shuttle’s history. None of these errors are critical to the argument, but they do show a certain carelessness during the preparation of the book. [End Page...

黑暗之星:Matthew H. Hersch 著的《航天飞机新史》(评论)
评论者: 黑暗之星马修-H-赫希著《航天飞机新史》 迈克尔-J-诺伊菲尔德(简历) 《黑暗之星》:航天飞机的新历史》,马修-H-赫希著。马萨诸塞州剑桥市:麻省理工学院出版社,2023 年。页码315.黑暗之星》(书名取自一部晦涩难懂的科幻电影)并不是美国国家航空航天局航天飞机项目的全面技术史,也没有包含太多新的信息。(相反,在赫希看来,航天局的领导者们一心想要将可重复使用的带翼火箭飞机作为大幅降低航天发射成本的手段,从一开始就注定了这个项目的失败。航天飞机被认为是后阿波罗时代雄心勃勃的太空计划基础设施的一部分,但它却成了美国宇航局维持载人航天的最后机会,因为其预算甚至在首次登月之前就开始下降。为了挽救航天飞机,美国国家航空航天局在设计上做出了重大让步,以确保空军的参与,并减少 20 世纪 70 年代的高峰期开支。其结果是,NASA 接受了一个 "糟糕的设计"(第 160 页),并假定航天飞机很快就会被重新设计或替换--但事实并非如此。结果,"航天飞机失败了,因为它的设计就是失败的"(第 12 页;斜体为原文所加)。Hersch 对有关该主题的最重要的学术著作 Diane Vaughn 的《挑战者号发射决策》(1996 年)持批评态度。该书对 1986 年发生的第一起航天飞机事故进行了社会学分析,沃恩断言灾难的根源在于管理不善,导致 "偏差正常化",并拒绝承认其中一个固体火箭助推器(SRB)即将发生灾难性故障。赫希反而认为,NASA的管理者屈服于 "宿命论"(第160页),因为他们知道航天飞机的设计存在缺陷。将轨道飞行器安装在一个巨大的外部油箱侧面,这个外部油箱会脱落绝缘泡沫,经常会撞击轨道飞行器脆弱的再入保护系统,而且旁边的分段式 SRB 可能会烧穿或爆炸,这就注定了该系统会发生事故。更糟糕的是,由于设计上的限制,无法为所有乘员安装逃生系统。我完全同意赫希对航天飞机的批评,我一直认为这是美国最糟糕的太空政策决定。(充分披露:我在致谢中被顺带提及,我的作品也被引用)。但他经常把论点推得太远。在分析挑战者号事故时,他把与沃恩的分歧变成了二选一:要么是短期的管理失败,要么是长期的设计失误(第 149-56 页)。但在后记中,他承认两者都有(第 217 页)。他谴责分段式 SRB(其中固体推进剂分四段堆叠,每段之间有接头)本身就很危险,但在那次事故之后,NASA 又用重新设计的 SRB 接头发射了 110 次航天飞机,每次都能正常工作。(2003 年哥伦比亚号事故是由另一个发射漏洞造成的:再入保护系统上的泡沫撞击)。黑暗之星》可读性很强,不仅适合学者阅读,也适合普通读者和课堂使用。但该书往往写得轻描淡写,容易出现夸张和事实错误。仅从我自己的作品中挑出几个例子,赫希夸大了 V-2 对德国马铃薯供应的影响(第 28 页),他弄错了沃纳-冯-布劳恩参与《科利尔太空系列》的由来(第 35 页),他还弄错了德国将军沃尔特-多恩伯格是如何来到美国以及在哪里退休的(第 37 页和第 61 页)。此外,他还弄错了贝尔 X-1 火箭飞机的发动机(第 39 页)和 X-20 DynaSoar 的取消日期(第 51 页)。他甚至还在航天飞机的历史方面犯了一些小的事实错误。这些错误对于论证都不是关键性的,但它们确实表明了本书在编写过程中的某种粗心大意。 [尾页...
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来源期刊
Technology and Culture
Technology and Culture 社会科学-科学史与科学哲学
CiteScore
0.60
自引率
14.30%
发文量
225
审稿时长
>12 weeks
期刊介绍: Technology and Culture, the preeminent journal of the history of technology, draws on scholarship in diverse disciplines to publish insightful pieces intended for general readers as well as specialists. Subscribers include scientists, engineers, anthropologists, sociologists, economists, museum curators, archivists, scholars, librarians, educators, historians, and many others. In addition to scholarly essays, each issue features 30-40 book reviews and reviews of new museum exhibitions. To illuminate important debates and draw attention to specific topics, the journal occasionally publishes thematic issues. Technology and Culture is the official journal of the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT).
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