Expanding the Envelope

Michael Gorn's Expanding the Envelope examines the technical and bureaucratic narratives that helped shape the legendary research programs carried out by the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (1915-58) and its successor agency, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, after 1958. This is a selective overview of activities from a range of government centers and over the whole span of the agency's flight research. Gorn divides the book into five "generations": the 1920s and 1930s, when Langley researchers established the methodologies and objectives for the field; the 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s, when speed and altitude records fell regularly; the mid-1960s to 1980, when a range of projects, including lifting bodies and the space shuttle, occupied flight engineers and pilots; 1981 to the 1990s, when the Dryden Research Flight Center and the Ames Research Center were merged in a rethinking of the flight research program; and the [End Page 183] recent period when Dryden became autonomous once again and the need to redefine missions and purposes became of primary interest to the staff

Aeronautics · Agency (philosophy) · Bureaucracy · Operations research · Political science · Politics · Research center · Sociology · Space Shuttle · Successor cardinal · Aerospace Engineering · Engineering · Law · Space exploration and regulation