Spring 2026 Colloquium - Matthew Hersch

Title: Human and Machine in Spaceflight’s Second Century

 

Abstract: Throughout the first decades of America’s space program, its astronauts sought opportunities to advance in their careers despite signs that their chosen profession would not sustain and fulfill them. Automation, spaceflight’s inherent dangers, America’s limited ambitions in space, NASA’s growing frustration with astronauts as a labor pool, public calls for the democratization of crewed missions, and the rise of commercial space activities all threatened to make astronauts peripheral to the exploration of the cosmos. By 1988, nearly a third of the astronauts NASA recruited only a decade earlier had died or retired. Space wasn’t a “career” astronaut James van Hoften found, echoing the experiences of many of his colleagues. “There’s no upward mobility. With so many astronauts, there aren’t going to be many chances to fly.”  

 

The third of three, interconnected research monographs on the history of American human spaceflight, my new book project, Untethered: Human and Machine in Spaceflight’s Second Century, will explore how a late-twentieth-century technical profession was transformed by massive systemic failure, including the loss to two space shuttle orbiters and their crews in 1986 and 2003. Stretching from the science fiction of the nineteenth century through the rise of space robotics and space tourism in the twenty-first, this project will examine the struggles, transformation, and eventual contraction of America’s professional astronaut corps.