Local engineering in the early American and Japanese space programs: Human qualities in grand system building

After the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) was created in 1958, its field centers, located across the United States, started to carry out the nation's civilian space programs. This dissertation examines four of those NASA centers and two Japanese space development institutions as local engineering communities and analyzes their engineering styles. These local communities had diverse institutional origins, and featured unique engineering styles suited to their social structures. Their engineering processes were generally loose and opaque, characterized by orientation for empirical judgments, emphasis on human discretion, and weakness in formal command lines. As they carried out large-scale national projects, however, they faced pressures to adopt a new mode of engineering that embraced formalized, standardized, document-intensive methods, with systems engineering at its core. They reluctantly came to practice the new methods, but did not easily accept the values associated with them, such as centralized control, clarity, rigorous optimization, universality, predictability, and accountability. Such rationalistic, depersonalizing values were threatening to the social structure of the local communities where many human particularities existed.; The central issue in this dissertation is the cultural conflict between various local engineering styles and the centralized, universal mode of engineering. While historians of technology have studied such conflicts for the periods before World War II, very few of them have dealt with this issue in the large system building in the Cold War period. This dissertation demonstrates that the local engineering communities which developed large-scale, highly complex technological systems for space exploration depended on human-oriented engineering practices and assumptions, and that they found the rational, depersonalized style of new engineering incompatible with their styles. In order to show that engineers who practiced those different styles of engineering also lived in distinct social worlds, this dissertation looks into the social components of their engineering communities such as reward structures, interpersonal relationships, career expectations, and institutional identities and allegiances. While the lives of systems engineers were shaped by constant mobility and aspiration for upward advancement, those of local engineers were woven in stable communities. Behind their distinct engineering styles were their different social values and assumptions.