Few federal agencies have more extensive ties to the private sector than NASA. NASA's relationships with its many aerospace industry suppliers of rocket engines, computers, electronics, gauges, valves, O-rings, and other materials have often been described as "partnerships." These have produced a few memorable catastrophes, but mostly technical achievements of the highest order. Until now, no one has written extensively about them. In NASA and the Space Industry Joan Lisa Bromberg explores how NASA's relationship with the private sector developed and how it works. She outlines the various kinds of expertise public and private sectors brought to the tasks NASA took on, describing how this division of labor changed over time. She explains why NASA sometimes encouraged and sometimes thwarted the privatization of space projects. And she describes the agency's role in the rise of such new space industries as launch vehicles and communications satellites. "An important study of a neglected aspect of NASA's history, that is, its relationship with the aerospace industry, which it helped bring into existence.
Bromberg is particularly good in her nuanced discussions of how innovations and new ideas flowed back and forth from the agency to industry, and how the flow was influenced by large changes in the economy and polity."--William H. Becker, George Washington University