Winner of the Michael C. Robinson Prize for Historical Analysis given by the National Council on Public History 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 past 50 years have brought forward a unique capability to research and expand scientific knowledge of the Solar System through the use of radar to conduct planetary astronomy. This technology involves the aiming of a carefully controlled radio signal at a planet (or some other Solar System target, such as a planetary satellite, an asteroid, or a ring system), detecting its echo, and analyzing the information that the echo carries. This capability has contributed to the scientific knowledge of the Solar System in two fundamental ways. Most directly, planetary radars can produce images of target surfaces otherwise hidden from sight and can furnish other kinds of information about target surface features. Radar also can provide highly accurate measurements of a target's rotational and orbital motions. Such measurements are obviously invaluable for the navigation of Solar System exploratory spacecraft, a principal activity of NASA since its inception in 1958. Andrew J. Butrica has written a comprehensive and illuminating history of this little-understood but surprisingly significant scientific activity. Quite rigorous and systematic in its methodology, To See the Unseen explores the development of the radar astronomy specialty in the larger community of scientists. More than just discussing the development of this field, however, Butrica uses planetary radar astronomy as a vehicle for understanding larger issues relative to the planning and execution of "big science" by the Federal government. His application of the "social construction of science" and Kuhnian paradigms to planetary radar astronomy is a most welcome and sophisticated means of making sense of the field's historical development.
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.
An investigation of mathematics as it was drawn, encoded, imagined, and interpreted by architects on the eve of digitization in the mid-twentieth century. In Formulations, Andrew Witt examines the visual, methodological, and cultural intersections between architecture and mathematics. The linkages Witt explores involve not the mystic transcendence of numbers invoked throughout architectural history, but rather architecture’s encounters with a range of calculational systems—techniques that architects inventively retooled for design. Witt offers a catalog of mid-twentieth-century practices of mathematical drawing and calculation in design that preceded and anticipated digitization as well as an account of the formal compendia that became a cultural currency shared between modern mathematicians and modern architects. Witt presents a series of extensively illustrated “biographies of method”—episodes that chart the myriad ways in which mathematics, particularly the mathematical notion of modeling and drawing, was spliced into the creative practice of design. These include early drawing machines that mechanized curvature; the incorporation of geometric maquettes—“theorems made flesh”—into the toolbox of design; the virtualization of buildings and landscapes through surveyed triangulation and photogrammetry; formal and functional topology; stereoscopic drawing; the economic implications of cubic matrices; and a strange synthesis of the technological, mineral, and biological: crystallographic design. Trained in both architecture and mathematics, Witt uses mathematics as a lens through which to understand the relationship between architecture and a much broader set of sciences and visual techniques. Through an intercultural exchange with other disciplines, he argues, architecture adapted not only the shapes and surfaces of mathematics but also its values and epistemic ideals.
Winner of the Michael C. Robinson Prize for Historical Analysis given by the National Council on Public History 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.
Mr. Amelinckx is an adroit storyteller and thorough researcher, and in Satellite Boy he has written a good, engrossing yarn." —The Wall Street Journal Spanning the underworld haunts of Montreal to Havana and Miami in the early days of the Cold War, Satellite Boy reveals the unlikely connection between an audacious bank heist and the “other Space Race” that gave birth to the modern communication age On April 6, 1965, Georges Lemay was relaxing on his yacht in a south Florida marina following one of the largest and most daring bank heists in Canadian history. For four years, the roguishly handsome criminal mastermind hid in plain sight, eluding capture and the combined efforts of the FBI, Interpol, and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. His future appeared secure. What Lemay didn’t know was that less than two hundred miles away at Cape Canaveral, a brilliant engineer named Harold Rosen was about to usher in the age of global live television with the launch of the world’s first twenty-four-hour commercial communications satellite. Rosen’s extraordinary accomplishment would not only derail Lemay’s cushy life but change the world forever. Brimming with criminal panache and technological intrigue, and set against a turbulent and iconic period that includes the moon landing and the civil rights movement, Satellite Boy tells the largely forgotten, high-stakes story of the two equally driven men who inadvertently launched the modern era.
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