ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the consequences of NASA's bodily prescriptions with reference to the gendering of American space exploration, starting with the Apollo-era. It presents how bodily discipline is performed through gender in NASA offers more insights into how individuals negotiate technocratic discipline, along with the image of an American transcendental state. Connections between space technology and gender are found across the pages of McCurdy's study of NASA's organizational culture: Inside NASA. Given the technical and physical likeness of jet testing and space flight, many early astronauts were recruited and tested from jet-test programs, including Neil Armstrong who was recruited by NASA from the US Air Force in September 1962. Technocratic thinking helped to establish NASA during the Apollo era as the supposed guarantor of an American transcendental state; yet it also perpetuated a set of narrow assumptions about what individuals this supposedly American led, better, world would value most.
