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Societal Impact of Spaceflight. Edited by Steven J. Dick and Roger D. Launius. Washington: NASA, 2007. ISBN 978-0-16-080190-7. Photographs. Illustrations. Tables. Figures. Notes. Index. Pp. xv, 680. For sale by Superintendent of Documents, U.S. Government Printing Office at bookstore.gpo.gov.
The purely technological aspects and political ramifications of the Space Age receive extensive coverage in the literature of aerospace history. The influence of spaceflight on culture, ideology, and economics receives less attention but is perhaps the more important topic. Without a clear understanding of the effects of technology on society, we run the risk of simply celebrating the technical achievement and forgetting the unintended consequences that inevitably follow diese events. Societal Impact of Spaceflight is the result of a conference, sponsored by the NASA History Division and the National Air and Space Museum's Division of Space History in September 2006. Essays from a number of leading scholars in aerospace studies cover a wide range of topics on this societal impact. Together they form an extensive study of spaceflight's influence, or lack of influence, on humans across the planet.
The central theme of this anthology centers on a...