Spaceflight in the Shuttle Era and Beyond; Redefining Humanity's Purpose in Space

xiii, [3], 270 pages. Illustrations (some color). Notes. Index. Signed by the author with sentiment on the title page. Signed "With best wishes, Valerie Neal". Dr. Valerie Neal is an emerita curator in the Smithsonian's Department of Space History. She joined the Museum as a curator in 1989 and was responsible for human spaceflight artifact collections from the Space Shuttle era and International Space Station, most prominently the orbiter Discovery. She led the Museum's effort to prepare shuttle test vehicle Enterprise for public display and to acquire Spacelab, SpaceShipOne, the Manned Maneuvering Unit, the space-flown IMAX camera, and personal effects from several astronauts for the national collection. Dr. Neal's publications include Spaceflight in the Shuttle Era and Beyond (2017) which was the recipient of the AIAA Gardner-Lasser Aerospace History Literature Award. She has been instrumental in the production of eight Smithsonian Channel documentaries about the shuttle and other major engineering projects for space exploration. Before joining the Museum, Dr. Neal spent a decade as a writer, editor, and manager for some 25 NASA publications on shuttle and Spacelab missions, the Hubble Space Telescope and other great space observatories, the space sciences, and NASA history. She also participated in underwater astronaut-training activities and worked on the mission management support team for four shuttle missions. A Phi Beta Kappa, she earned a Ph.D. in American studies from the University of Minnesota. An exploration of the changing conceptions of the iconic Space Shuttle and a call for a new vision of spaceflight. The thirty years of Space Shuttle flights saw contrary changes in American visions of space. Valerie Neal, who has spent much of her career examining the Space Shuttle program, uses this iconic vehicle to question over four decades’ worth of thinking about, and struggling with, the meaning of human spaceflight. She examines the ideas, images, and icons that emerged as NASA, Congress, journalists, and others sought to communicate rationales for, or critiques of, the Space Shuttle missions. At times concurrently, the Space Shuttle was billed as delivery truck and orbiting science lab, near-Earth station and space explorer, costly disaster and pinnacle of engineering success. The book’s multidisciplinary approach reveals these competing depictions to examine the meaning of the spaceflight enterprise. Given the end of the Space Shuttle flights in 2011, Neal makes an appeal to reframe spaceflight once again to propel humanity forward.…