Nasa Historical Data Book Volume 4

This is Volume 4, NASA Resources 1969-1978, of a series providing a 20-year statistical summary of NASA programs. This series is an important component of NASA published historical reference works, used by NASA personnel, managers, external researchers, and other government agencies. This volume combines statistical data of the component facilities with the data of the parent installation. Gawdiak, Ihor Y. and Fedor, Helen Unspecified Center NASA-SP-4012-VOL-4, NAS 1.21:4012-VOL-4 ...

This volume of the NASA Historical Data Book is the seventh in the series that describes NASA’s programs and projects. Covering the years 1989 through 1998, it includes the areas of launch systems, human spaceflight, and space science, continuing the volumes that addressed these topics during NASA’s previous decades. Each chapter presents information, much of it statistical, addressing funding, management, and details of programs and missions.

This volume is the fourth in a series of reference works intended to present a statistical summary of the activity of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration from its inception. Volume IV, NASA Resources 1969-1978, is an update of the initial volume in the series, NASA Resources 1958-1968. The present volume treats briefly, as did its predecessor, NASA's history, organization, management, financing, personnel, and procurement matters during the second decade of its existence. Its primary objective is to provide the reader with comprehensive statistical data to illustrate the status of NASA in the decade after the first man set foot on the Moon. Volume IV is organized in the same way as the first volume. Each chapter of the present volume deals with the same subject matter as the first one. There are some differences, however. Whereas the first volume provided statistical data not only for the individual installations but also for each installation's component facilities as well, this volume combines statistical data of the component facilities with the data of the parent installation. There are two reasons for this. First, many of the component facilities were consolidated with their parent installation between 1969 and 1978. Second, increasingly during this decade NASA offices themselves tended to consolidate all statistical data on the particular installation. The statistical tables in this volume contain some gaps simply because the prerequisite data were not available. Finally, until 1976 the fiscal year began in July and ended at the end of June. Starting October 1976, it began in October and ended at the end of September. Whenever information was available, data were provided for the so-called "transition quarter" (TQ) to cover the period July 1, 1976, to September 30, 1976. Otherwise, the transitional quarter is combined with 1976.

Few federal agencies have more extensive ties to the private sector than NASA. NASA's relationships with its many aerospace industry suppliers of rocket engines, computers, electronics, gauges, valves, O-rings, and other materials have often been described as "partnerships." These have produced a few memorable catastrophes, but mostly technical achievements of the highest order. Until now, no one has written extensively about them. In NASA and the Space Industry, Joan Lisa Bromberg explores how NASA's relationship with the private sector developed and how it works. She outlines the various kinds of expertise public and private sectors brought to the tasks NASA took on, describing how this division of labor changed over time. She explains why NASA sometimes encouraged and sometimes thwarted the privatization of space projects and describes the agency's role in the rise of such new space industries as launch vehicles and communications satellites.