ABSTRACT
Shifts in NASA's organizational priorities occurred from the early 1970s as NASA's administrators started to position the shorter-term mercerization and militarization of Space as key imperatives within its longer-term, larger-scale societal, and symbolic, value. The commercial ethos of the Shuttle project helped spur on these cultural shifts, as NASA's stated goal of the Shuttle enabling routine, low-cost, low-risk, profitable space flight, encouraged the development of new contracts to fulfil the seemingly standardized tasks, including launch preparation. Initially at least, the organizational shifts appeared highly compatible with notions of an American transcendental state. NASA also benefitted from constructing the rationale for its new spacecraft around a space industry whose long-term future was unavoidably uncertain; hence the flexibility of the Shuttle appeared even more attractive. The empirical focus will shift away from space policy and NASA's organizational culture and back towards the reproduction of Space within a more public domain of American culture.
