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Beyond the Atmosphere:
Early Years of Space Science
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- CHAPTER 9
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- UNIVERSITIES
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- [129] NACA had
had a rather small involvement with the
universities.40 What university research NACA did pay for usually
was tied into research projects going on at the NACA laboratories.
For NASA, however, relations with universities would be more
extensive and different. This was especially true in space
science, where the number of disciplines encompassed in the
program dictated that a great deal of the work would have to be
done outside and largely in the universities. Much of this would
be an extension of a university's own research, with the addition
of new tools-rockets and spacecraft. NASA would accordingly be
funding university research as a major part of a broad space
science program rather than as specific support to in-house
projects. By undertaking to carry out a substantial part of the
national space science program, the universities became allies of
NASA.
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- But when NASA also decided to create space
science groups at the Goddard Space Flight Center, the jet
Propulsion Laboratory, and other centers, the universities found
themselves in the role of rivals to NASA. For, the in-house groups
would inevitably be in competition with those outside for funding
of their research and for accommodation on scientific flights, as
mentioned earlier. A number of the mechanisms that NASA devised
for working with the scientific community were influenced by the
need to moderate the tensions that soon appeared. For this reason
the responsibility for selecting space science experiments and
experimenters was kept in headquarters even during periods when
there was a general attempt to decentralize authority by
transferring to the field many functions previously handled by
headquarters.
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- Work with the universities was
sufficiently important to the space program-particularly to the
space science program-that NASA established an organizational unit
specifically for handling university
relations.41 The university office guided NASA's work with the
academic community, not hesitating to experiment with new ideas on
government university relations. More attention is given to the
NASA university program, particularly as it bore on space science,
in chapter
13.
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