Exploring the Unknown - NASA's History Office

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SPACE AS AN INVESTMENT IN ECONOMIC GROWTH
of the Vietnam War were well understood and before the large social welfare programs
passed by Congress during the administration of Lyndon Johnson attained rapid growth.
This was also before the very high inflationary period of the 1970s and early 1980s, which
propelled the federal government into a deficit and made the interest payments on the
national debt one of the largest single components of the federal budget, dwarfing even
the defense budget.
Early studies commissioned by NASA show that the space agency was not unaware of
the implications of its spending on the economy. However, those impacts were secondary
to NASA’s primary mission of space exploration. A 1965 study by Jack Faucett Associates
found that NASA’s socioeconomic activities were “separate, uncoordinated, and almost
incidental.” The Faucett study recommended that NASA create a headquarters staff devoted
to collecting economic data and coordinating various economic activities throughout
the agency. These recommendations were ignored; to this day, the agency still addresses
economic policy on an ad hoc and uncoordinated basis. [III-1]
The goal of stimulating economic growth through NASA technology was very much a
side issue to the space agency during the 1960s and 1970s. For example, a 1968 NASA publication
listing goals and objectives for the next decades in space does not mention economic
growth at all, but only refers in passing to the facilitation of communications and
navigation as an afterthought to developing space capabilities for managing the Earth’s
resources. 3
During the 1960s, one of the important goals of NASA was to stimulate science and
engineering at the universities. NASA sponsored social science and economic studies during
this era, which were oriented primarily toward defining and identifying the impact of
NASA expenditures on particular regions. One study, performed at the University of
Pennsylvania in its Regional Science Department, was an input-output economic analysis
of the Philadelphia economy that developed measures of NASA expenditures on the
Philadelphia region. 4 There is no evidence that the results of this study were ever used by
NASA to publicize the local benefits, nor is there any evidence that the results directly
influenced NASA policy. The primary purpose and benefit of this study were to support
university research activities and to advance knowledge in regional economic measurement
techniques. NASA also sponsored another input-output study by William Miernyk of
West Virginia University during this era. 5 Orr and Jones of Indiana University performed
an industrial breakdown of NASA expenditures to measure national impacts. 6 Again, these
were primarily academic theory-building studies that were not sponsored by policy-making
offices at NASA, nor were the results extensively used by the space agency in support
of its programs.
In 1974, Mary Holman of George Washington University published a comprehensive
review of the ways in which NASA had an impact on the economy, based on her research
at the agency during the late 1960s. 7 According to the preface in the book, this research
was initiated by concerns that NASA’s associate administrator for manned spaceflight,
George Mueller, had about possible future “serious problems and distortions in several
3. Space Task Group, The Post-Apollo Space Program: Directions for the Future, September 1969, published
Document III-25 in John M. Logsdon, gen. ed., with Linda J. Lear, Jannelle Warren-Findley, Ray A. Williamson,
and Dwayne A. Day, Exploring the Unknown: Selected Documents in the History of the U.S. Civil Space Program, Volume I,
Organizing for Exploration (Washington, DC: NASA Special Publication (SP)-4407, 1995), 1:522–43.
4. See Walter Isard, Regional Input-Output Study: Recollections, Reflections, and Diverse Notes on the
Philadelphia Experience (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971).
5. William H. Miernyk, Impact of the Space Program on a Local Economy: An Input-Output Analysis
(Morgantown, WV: West Virginia University Press, 1967).
6. L.D. Orr and D. Jones, “An Industrial Breakdown of NASA Expenditures,” November 1969,
Documentary History Collection, Space Policy Institute, George Washington University, Washington, DC.
7. M.A. Holman, The Political Economy of the Space Program (Palo Alto, CA: Pacific Books, 1974).