What I’m Reading: ‘Spaceflight in the Shuttle Era and Beyond’

My interest in the history of NASA and human spaceflight led me to pick up Valerie Neal’s Spaceflight in the Shuttle Era and Beyond: Redefining Humanity’s Purpose in Space (Yale University Press, 2017). Not only is the book one of the best I have read on space policy and the future of NASA; it also gave me insights into my role as a dean.

During the “heroic era” of human spaceflight in the 1960s, NASA received large amounts of federal funding. In the shuttle era that followed, human spaceflight was less expensive and more routine.

In her broad analysis, Ms. Neal describes the endless cycle of strategic planning at NASA, sometimes done by different groups at the same time, and how this flawed approach never seemed to result in a new vision for moving forward.

Universities are among the many organizations that adopted strategic planning in the 1970s. Though such plans are useful for allocating resources in times of scarcity, they also pose potential difficulties.

At universities, we must take care to ensure that strategic plans receive broad input and understanding from faculty members and other parts of the university community. The plans should be succinct and realizable. Once we have agreed on a plan, we should use it as a guidepost for the coming years, rather than put it on a shelf or start a new one if the administration changes. Otherwise, we risk becoming adrift.

John Z. Kiss is dean of the College of Arts & Sciences at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and was a principal investigator on eight space experiments.