Exp Astron (2009) 26:149–161 DOI 10.1007/s10686-009-9152-y HISTORICAL REVIEW

Early history space astronomy Issues of patronage, management and control Robert W. Smith

Received: 9 February 2009 / Accepted: 10 February 2009 / Published online: 12 March 2009 © Springer Science + Business Media B.V. 2009

Abstract The history of space astronomy is usually written from the perspective of the remarkable scientific findings garnered by space astronomers and the ways these findings have enriched and guided new views of the universe. This paper examines some aspects of the history of space astronomy in the early years of NASA, but takes patronage, management and control as its key issues. Keywords Space astronomy · Orbiting astronomical observatories · Large space telescope · Superconducting supercollider

1 Introduction The history of observational astronomy can be divided into four main periods: the age of pre-telescopic astronomy (from the earliest times to the early seventeenth century); the first era of the telescope (from the early seventeenth century to the mid-nineteenth century); the combination of the telescope with spectroscopy and astronomical photography (from the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century), and the modern era (from the mid-twentieth century on) characterized by the opening up of all wavelength ranges of the electromagnetic spectrum to astronomical investigations. In this paper, I will concentrate on aspects of the development of space astronomy in the fourth of these periods. The focus will not be on the cognitive changes in astronomy

R. W. Smith (B) Department of History and Classics, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AL, Canada, T6G 2H4 e-mail: [email protected]

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that were driven by scientific findings from space telescopes (remarkable as they have been), but on some of the central institutional and social issues that have arisen in the history of large-scale space astronomy projects due to the new forms of patronage. Central will be patronage and what might be described as the organizational context of space astronomy, that is, who has power, how do they get it and maintain it, and how has that context shaped what spaces telescopes have been built. Key too will be issues of management and control. Indeed, if we recast the relatively recent history of the telescope more generally so as to take these issues into account, then a somewhat different narrative emerges in place of the usual fairly straightforward story of ever bigger and more powerful instruments. At root this story contains a dose of technological triumphalism. It also embodies what in some accounts is presented as almost an organic and perfectly natural process of telescope evolution instead of a story of often highly contentious and contingent matters to do with intricate mixes of competition and collaboration. In so doing I will also centre on the United States in the 1960s and 1970s, and in particular on optical and ultraviolet wavelengths. This means that unlike the situation for, say, X-ray astronomers who had to figure out ways to get their instruments into space or they could not study the X-ray universe, the astronomers I will be discussing usually had a choice about whether or not to pursue space astronomy. This, as we shall see, was an important factor in the early history of the Hubble Space Telescope. However, to throw what I have to say about patronage and management in the history of space astronomy into a sharper light I will begin by taking a few steps back into the nineteenth century.

2 Patronage As other papers in this volume have reminded us, large, powerful speculum metal telescopes of the first half of the nineteenth century were generally the products of highly motivated individuals who sat outside the mainstream of positional astronomy. Makers such as the third Lord Rosse and William Lassell financed their initiatives with their own money and were the telescope managers when they were not the actual users (Fig. 1). Perhaps the most famous example of where that was not the case was the Melbourne telescope, completed in 1862. For this 48-in. speculum metal reflector the design flowed from a committee appointed by the British Royal Society. The telescope was constructed at the Grubb works in Dublin, Ireland and so the makers were very distant from the users. The telescope was a failure, at least in its early years [1]. When we examine the development of astronomy in the United States in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, we find a major remaking of the tools of American astronomy, a remaking powered by the patronage of wealthy foundations and individuals who did not use the telescopes they financed. Nor were they makers, rather, they wrote the checks. Remarkably, astrophysics, one of the least utilitarian of the sciences, became arguably the

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Fig. 1 William Lassell’s 48-in. reflector

most richly endowed of all the sciences in the United States [6]. When we turn to the key examples of the observatories of Yerkes, Lick, and Mount Wilson, we nevertheless see institutions where astronomers set the research agenda. These institutions were headed by astronomers who essentially also had control over the construction of new telescopes. The directors of these institutions had, in fact, far more authority than would be typical later in the era of large-scale government funding. In many ways the leading astronomical observatory in the world in the first half of the twentieth century was the Mount Wilson Observatory, established in 1904. A 60-in. reflector was added to its armory within a few years, and this was followed in 1919 by the 100-in. Hooker telescope, the most powerful in the world. For many problems, astronomers elsewhere were simply outgunned by the users of the 100-in. reflector. One example of this is provided by the case of measuring the redshifts of spiral nebulae, what we would now term galaxies [13]. This enterprise had been pioneered by V.M. Slipher at the Lowell Observatory in the early 1910s, but by the mid-1920s his patient and longrunning attack on the radial velocities of the spirals had run out of steam. For new measurements of such dim and small nebulae the combination of the Lowell 24-in. refractor and spectrograph was ineffective. The financial position of Lowell was such that a new state-of-the-art telescope to bring Slipher back to the cutting-edge of these researches was not on the cards. Instead, this line of research was effectively taken over by Milton Humason working with Edwin Hubble at Mount Wilson, who enjoyed big institutional advantages in conducting such researches. In what I have elsewhere called “the ‘material economy’ of American astronomy, Hubble had access to telescopes,

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instruments, colleagues, and calculators about which Slipher could only dream. Also, in the ‘moral economy’ of American astronomy in this period—that is, the set of usually tacit assumptions and traditions that regulate and structure a scientific community—there was some sharing of photographic plates by astronomers at different observatories. Younger astronomers might also secure a fellowship to be held at least in part at the Mount Wilson Observatory, but only very rarely did astronomers in other institutions have direct access to the Mount Wilson telescopes and then only when the research was of especial interest to the Mount Wilson astronomers” [13]. But Mount Wilson was financed by the Carnegie Institution of Washington, and as a private institution it directly controlled the time on its telescopes. Thus the best and biggest instruments were available to only a small group of astronomers. One of the well-springs of the national observatory movement in the United States after World War II was the very unequal distribution of time on state-of-theart telescopes with high-quality instrumentation. In the construction of the 100-in. reflector on Mount Wilson there had been conflict between George Ellery Hale and his chief optician George Ritchey [10]. This conflict had ultimately been resolved by Hale firing Ritchey. The leading astronomer, then, had had the power and authority to take such an action. With the construction of the 100-in. we also see the start of a committee system to work on particular problems and issues. This sort of system was still more evident with the considerably more challenging 200-in. reflector that would eventually go into action on Palomar Mountain in 1949, though planning had begun in 1928. An effort of that magnitude called forth very different sorts of management techniques than those that had generally prevailed for even the biggest telescopes of the nineteenth century. The astronomer J.A. Anderson now took on the role of telescope developer and his career was devoted to that end. As King points out, “Dr. Anderson was, for fifteen years, chief optical expert at Mount Wilson. To him fell eventually the tasks of choosing the observatory site and the organization of the optical work [for the 200-inch] in the shops of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena.” But King also notes that the “Hale telescope and observatory resulted from the co-operative effort of a legion of experts” ([4], p. 402). Thus a different ‘Big Science’ scale and complexity of enterprise was fashioning new social roles for astronomers.

3 World War II and after The history of American science and technology during and after World War II has drawn a huge literature. The events of the years of World War II and immediately after were momentous in terms of their effects on the scientific enterprise and the transformed relationship between science and the state. Certainly the effects were enormous, not just in terms of the vast outpouring of funds driven by the acceptance by national governments that science was critical to national security, but also in the numbers of scientists, the attitudes

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of these scientists towards state funding, the remaking of various disciplines, and new forms of scientific practice. After 1945, these changes were entrenched by the rapid onset of the Cold War rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union. Many of the telescopes and instruments discussed in this volume were in effect a gift of the Cold War. For astronomers, one of the most important changes that occurred after World War II was the breakdown of the older forms of relationship between patrons and leading astronomers, relationships usually founded on informal contacts and an easy exchange of information. The management relationships in the aerospace world that many astronomers encountered after 1958 and the founding of NASA (the National Aeronautics and Space Administration) were instead fashioned around ‘Requests for Proposals,’ contracts and deliverable “products.” Working with NASA would present much more bureaucratic and hierarchical structures than the ones to which most astronomers were used, and many felt uneasy in this new world.

4 NASA and the orbiting astronomical observatories From the time of its establishment NASA was determined to be in tight control of the projects it funded. A direct challenge to the fledgling agency, however, came quickly from the National Academy of Sciences, the leading group of elite scientists in the United States. In 1958 the National Academy created a “Space Science Board” that initially sought to lay out priorities for space science by asking for interested scientists to send proposals for space projects that would follow those undertaken for the International Geophysical Year. By the end of 1958, there were three U.S. government agencies involved in space science, ARPA (the Advanced Research Projects Agency), the Department of Defence, and NASA. Thus NASA has to carve out a role for itself with potential institutional rivals as well as deal with space scientists. Although there would be ups and downs in the relationship, NASA’s early response to the Space Science Board was tepid, if not hostile. NASA would certainly seek advice from scientists outside the space agency and would devise its own advisory structures as well as listen carefully to the views expressed by the National Academy, but it was loath to hand control over to anyone [7]. Advice from the research arm of the National Academy in the form of the National Research Council would later become extremely significant. Perhaps the most important institutional form of this advice for astronomers would come from the so-called decadal surveys. One example of such a survey was that conducted in the years around 1990 and led by John Bahcall with what would become known as the Bahcall Committee. In time, such surveys would directly engage many hundreds of astronomers every decade or so in developing priorities for the American astronomical community, priorities that NASA as well as the patrons of ground-based astronomy would take very seriously. But in the space agency’s early years, the first of these broad surveys, led by the astronomer Jesse Greenstein, was well in the future (its reports

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would be published in 1972) and astronomers outside the agency lacked this counter to NASA’s own decision making. One specific example of what NASA’s desire to maintain control in its first decade or so meant for astronomers who jumped into the world of space astronomy after the founding of the space agency comes from the story of the ‘Orbiting Astronomical Observatories.’ NASA, it is important to remember, was established as one of the U.S. responses to the so-called Sputnik crisis that had been prompted by the launch of Sputnik I in October 1957. President Dwight Eisenhower might have earlier disliked space projects that were pursued largely for the sake of prestige, but the world was different after 1957 and the orbiting of Sputnik I. Even for a reluctant Eisenhower prestige became a policy driver for space efforts, particularly after Sputnik I was followed by Sputnik II. In fact, the race for prestige in the Cold War theatre offered by space would become a crucial factor for U.S. (as well as Soviet) space enterprises. When George Kistiakowsky, President Eisenhower’s Science Advisor, spoke to the President about the “potential gains in national prestige if we establish the first astro-observatory on a satellite, the President was very much interested and said he would certainly be in favor of proceeding vigorously” ([5], p. 385). For some astronomers the prospect of building such an astro-observatory presented a remarkable opportunity. It was one they could hardly have imagined even a few years before. Particularly attractive was that working space observatories promised vastly more data than offered by the very short-lived (5 min or so) flights of rockets above the obscuring layers of the atmosphere. But which missions and observatories to fly? Here the new space agency confronted a critical issue for government funded modern science. Given that there are always more worthwhile projects than money to support them, how should the space agency decide on the funding levels for the various areas of astronomy and how pick which instruments and space telescopes to build from a wide array of possible ones? In the 1960s, NASA strove to best the Soviet Union in the battle for prestige. While by far the most effort in terms of prestige went into the Apollo program, prestige also mattered for science projects. Homer Newell, the then head of NASA’s space science program, claimed in 1966 that “for the initial exploration in virgin fields relatively simple instrumentation and limited-scope research programs often suffice to permit rapid exploration of new technologies and breakthroughs of understanding” ([8], p. 6) (Fig. 2). Plans for the sort of astro-observatory discussed by Eisenhower and Kistiakowsky swiftly coalesced around what would become the Orbiting Astronomical Observatory (OAO) program. The OAO’s were being funded for more reasons than potential scientific results. For agency managers, ‘simple’ instrumentation was less attractive in terms of prestige than more challenging and difficult-to-build systems. With the OAOs focused principally, although not exclusively, on ultraviolet astronomy, the resulting spacecraft would need to build on long experience of observations in the optical region and so go well beyond the sort of relatively simple instrumentation Newell reckoned sufficient for the exploration of “virgin fields”.

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Fig. 2 Homer Newell (left) with William Pickering and Harris Schumeier at a JPL press conference in 1964

Ultraviolet astronomy, pursued by for the standards of the time advanced and sophisticated spacecraft, promised prizes in terms of prestige as well as significant new scientific results, or at least that is the argument that prevailed that was made by NASA managers ([12], p. 38). NASA had in hand a draft project plan in December of 1958, that is within months of the formation of the agency (which was formally established on 1 October 1958), and by February 1959 had assembled a working group of astronomers to help plan the OAO program. From its deliberations as well as the work of NASA staffers and NASA contractors, a design began to evolve in which there would be a spacecraft common to the OAO series. The space agency issued ‘requests for proposals’ for the OAO spacecraft and associated instrumentation in 1960 and 1961. The newly established Goddard Space Flight Center, NASA decided, would provide overall project management. Issues of control however soon loomed large. The OAOs would be, for the time, NASA’s most complicated scientific spacecraft. Each of the spacecraft would weigh around 1,800 kg and involve some 50 km of wiring and 440,000 parts. The astronomers in fact had pressed for a series of smaller and less complex observatories. They wanted to build a base of knowledge and support with less demanding astronomical payloads before moving to more advanced designs. While the astronomers did persuade NASA to split solar from nonsolar missions by using very different platforms so that the OAOs would centre on stellar astronomy, the space agency, driving hard for prestige as well as original scientific results, chose to forge ahead with the more challenging version of the project.

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The principal investigators on the Orbiting Astronomical Observatory program were also taken aback at how the program was to be managed on a day-to-day basis. Even the prominent Princeton astronomer Lyman Spitzer Jr., who had participated in a variety of large-scale government-funded programs during World War II and later in his fusion research, was surprised (Fig. 3). In 1960, he wrote to NASA Headquarters. For the design of a complicated scientific system, Spitzer argued, the most efficient way to proceed was to give overall responsibility to a single organization and to preferably one person. For relatively simple payloads to be launched into space, Spitzer conceded that it had been feasible for the scientists to develop “little black boxes” while the engineers fashioned the spacecraft. The NASA project manager was then able to harmonize the integration of the boxes with the satellite. But, in Spitzer’s opinion, this would not be an appropriate way of doing business for a project as demanding as the Orbiting Astronomical Observatories. Splitting the scientists from the engineers was problematic. He contended that it was preferable “to have the scientific experiment and the engineering design integrated under one individual (or institution). Then the scientific requirements can be altered to meet the detailed engineering difficulties as they arise, and the engineering plans can be guided to yield the maximum scientific usefulness. . . It is obvious, I believe, that the overall responsibility to which I refer must be given to someone who is intimately familiar with the objectives of the system, and with the possible uses of the scientific equipment. Hence this responsibility must be given not to an engineer but to an astronomer, preferably a senior astronomer who has had substantial experience in the coordination of large engineering programs” [14].

Fig. 3 Artist’s impression of OAO I

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While NASA did respond to some of Spitzer’s points and criticisms by others by offering consultations on the major technical problems of the spacecraft, the space agency was adamant in not granting official management responsibility for the development of the observatories to the astronomers. Had it done so, it would have meant, as far as NASA was concerned, that the agency had lost control over the Orbiting Astronomical Observatory program (Fig. 4). NASA was responsible to Congress for the funds that it spent, not the astronomers. Hence NASA’s basic position, as one senior manager would later recall “was that operational responsibilities placed by law upon the agency could not be turned over to some other agency. Moreover, decisions concerning the space science program could not be made on purely scientific grounds. There were other factors to consider, such as funding, manpower, facilities, launch vehicles and the saleability of projects in the existing climate at the White House and on Capitol Hill—factors that only NASA could properly assess” ([9], p. 205). What the leading astronomers outside of the space agency wanted was for NASA to run its scientific programs in similar ways to those they were familiar with from their interactions with the National Science Foundation in connection with ground-based observatories. One of these leading astronomers, Fred Whipple of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, had, for example, made his position clear in hearings before Congress in early 1958, that is, even before NASA had been established. In his view, “this national space agency should be the coordinating agency for the activities in space research. That does not mean that it should control this activity, but it should be in a position of coordinating.” Space exploration, Whipple believed strongly, should not be under the control of the government or of the military. For Whipple, as DeVorkin has pointed out, “Co-ordination, not control, by an informed civilian government agency, letting contracts to universities and industry, and even to the military, was the ideal solution” ([3], p. 239). Similarly, those U.S. government agencies responsible for high-energy accelerators had delegated to high-energy physicists important measures of control and oversight. At SLAC (the Stanford Linear Accelerator) engineers

Fig. 4 Lyman Spitzer photographed in the 1980s

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reported to physicists, and when the design and construction of Fermilab began in the 1960s, physicists took important engineering roles and also assumed key management positions. Physicists designed, built and managed the laboratory, and again engineers reported to physicists. Hence in high-energy physics and ground based astronomy, the scientists had secured very important measures of overall management responsibility even within the context of patronage from the federal government. NASA, with its managers generally coming from very different sorts of cultures from those of high-energy physics and groundbased astronomy, would not follow suit.

5 Towards the Hubble Space Telescope The issue of control would continue to be central for space astronomers after the early years of NASA. In post-war ground-based astronomy, astronomers had typically enjoyed large measures of autonomy. But to what extent was an individual space astronomer to be able to determine the direction of his or her research and to what extent were particular communities to set their own research directions and forms of scientific practice? These questions were certainly fundamental to those who were advocating what would end up as the Hubble Space Telescope. In the 1960s, NASA’s ways of doing business put off at least some potential space astronomers and bred a sense that advice coming from outside the agency was not really taken seriously. There was also concern at what many astronomers reckoned was a wasteful human spaceflight program combined with unease about increasing NASA involvement with universities. To address these matters, in 1965 NASA administrator James Webb appointed a committee to make recommendations on how NASA might engage more of the scientific community in its forthcoming big programs. These included what was known at the time as the Large Space Telescope, a telescope with a primary of 120-in. diameter that would work in the optical and the ultraviolet that would be sited either on the moon or on orbit that was already being actively discussed by some astronomers. In Webb’s view, “We in NASA think it is essential that competent scientists at academic institutions participate fully in the next generation of space projects, and we believe that we will need new policies and procedures in order to enable them to participate” [15]. Norman Ramsey, a physicist from Harvard, was chosen to chair the committee. After extensive deliberations, the Ramsey Committee backed the idea of a Large Space Telescope but decided to set it alongside other space observatories that would be designed to observe other wavelengths besides the optical and the ultraviolet. As might have been expected from a group of academic scientists, they argued that there should be strong scientific oversight of the orbiting telescopes project. What was the appropriate institutional mechanism to do this? The Committee proposed the formation of a consortium of universities. It would be called STAR, or Space Telescopes for Astronomical Research. Such a proposal was certainly in line with the emergence after World

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War II of university consortia as the generally preferred means to manage costly new research facilities. By the time the Ramsey Committee reported, the use of university consortia had also become widely accepted as the tool to transform the concept of national laboratories or facilities (national in the sense of being open to all qualified scientists and not just members of the laboratory staff) into working institutions. But NASA balked at the Ramsey Committee’s recommendations and the proposals for STAR got massively watered down until they ended up with the creation of a new advisory group, the Astronomy Missions Board, which, as events would demonstrate, carried little weight. It is against this background then that we should see the efforts in the early 1970s by various influential astronomers concerned with a possible Large Space Telescope (what would in time be transformed into the Hubble Space Telescope, although for several years the Large Space Telescope became the Space Telescope before it was renamed the Hubble Space Telescope in 1983) to ensure that they, not NASA, control the telescope’s scientific operations and, even better from the perspective of some of them, its development. NASA initially balked at the notion of giving an outside group responsibility for scientific operations let alone the telescope’s development, and it was accepted by the space agency only with great difficulty. Here, though, the key point is that NASA did decide by the mid-1970s to create what became the Space Telescope Science Institute, overseen by a university consortium, to manage the telescope’s scientific operations ([12], chapter 6). There was, nevertheless, a continuing tension over what exactly the Institute’s role was to be (a tension that would not disappear after the Institute was actually established) with some astronomers hoping for a decidedly wider role for an Institute. For them, the goal was a Space Astronomy Institute, not just a Space Telescope Science Institute. In 1975, for example, at a meeting of the Council of the American Astronomical Society attendees heard presentations on a “Space Astronomy Institute.” The Space Astronomy Institute, in this plan, would play the same sort of role for space astronomy that the National Observatories played for ground-based astronomy. One reason that NASA decided to form the Space Telescope Science Institute run by a university consortium was what elsewhere I have called coalition building [12]. In other words, in order to win approval from the Congress and White House for a Space Telescope, its advocates had to be able to assure their colleagues and its patrons that it would be technically feasible. But they also had to labour to make sure it would be politically feasible too, and for it to be politically feasible it needed the energetic support of a broad range of astronomers. The ‘Space Telescope Science Institute’ was thus in part the means to bring on board those ground-based astronomers who were uneasy at the prospect of getting involved in a big NASA project or who might be skeptical that outside advice would not be heeded by NASA. Such ground-based astronomers, it is important to note, had the option of continuing to pursue ground-based astronomy and not getting involved with space enterprises such as the Space Telescope.

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Certainly in mid-1975 pressure from outside the space agency was building for an institute, and at that stage support for the Space Telescope was relatively flimsy. Thus for the telescope’s supporters, drawing in more ground-based astronomers was an attractive proposition. Some form of Institute run by a university consortium that did not sit inside the fence of a NASA center seemed to the leading advocates among non-NASA astronomers to be one way to achieve that. As well as these political advantages, there were of course strong and obvious scientific and technical advantages to drawing in a wider body of interested astronomers. More broadly, “the fundamental question of whether or not to approve the Space Telescope was constantly being reframed as the issues bearing on the decision were themselves reshuffled and repackaged, often because of the needs of coalition building. Moreover, the telescope’s design and the associated programs to build it were central elements in these changes.” Thus here was a very large scale project reconstituting “the institutional organization of the scientific enterprise and was itself reconstituted by its necessary financial, political and ideological ties to society at large” ([2], p. 15). Thus issues of management and control were at the very heart of the battle to win approval of the Space Telescope. Management, then, was not just something that was imposed on the perfect form of the telescope project in the manner of Platonic philosophy. Management and control issues were instead interwoven with scientific, technical, economic and political issues. Space astronomy has certainly thrown up its share of scientific visionaries and charismatic leaders. But by the late twentieth century, the grand figures we can readily identify as the astronomer/managers and builders of the stateof-the-art reflecting telescopes of the nineteenth and early twentieth century had to a large degree been replaced by scientific communities and large and sometimes very large groups of scientists and engineers. The biggest sorts of space astronomy projects had become Very Big Science indeed.

6 Coda As a coda to this paper, it is interesting to consider the case of the ill-fated U.S. very big science project, the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC), the design of which formally began in 1984. There the issue of the control of the workplace would prove to be hugely important. Writing on the history of high-energy physics in the U.S., Michael Riordan has argued that “Control of the scientific workplace became increasingly contentious during the 20th century as experimentation grew in scale from the laboratory workbench to particle accelerators and colliders that stretch for kilometers across the Earth’s landscape. The need to find increasingly larger sources of funding to support their ever more costly instrumentation has required physicists to surrender a measure of control, at least temporarily, over their experimental activities” ([11], p. 125). In the earlier history of U.S. high energy physics, the physicists had very largely run the show, but with the SSC matters were quite different.

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For assorted reasons, two antagonistic cultures developed in the management of the SSC, that of the physicists and that of managers and engineers more used to the projects pursued by the U.S. armed services. While the cancellation of the SSC in 1993 (by which time around $4 billion had been spent out of an estimate of well over $10 billion) occurred for various complex reasons, key factors in the SSC’s demise were the battles between these two cultures. Control of the workplace does matter though it is rarely as crucial to a project’s fate as in the example of the SSC.

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