American Aeronautics and Space Administration

The American Aeronautics and Space Administration (AASA) is the civil space agency of the United Kingdom of America. It was created by the Aeronautics and Space Act 1958, passed in the months after the Russian Republic put the first artificial satellite into orbit, and it absorbed the laboratories of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, which had served the Realm’s aircraft industry since the First Great War. It is headquartered in New Westminster, runs its flights from Houston, launches from Cape Canaveral in the Republic of Florida, and answers to Parliament through a Minister for Science, an office created by the same Act.

The agency flew the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programmes and landed six crews on the Moon between 1969 and 1972, the first of them Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, with Michael Collins in lunar orbit. It then built the Space Shuttle, a reusable winged spacecraft that first flew in 1981 and was promised to fly nearly every week and pay for itself, and did neither. The Shuttle is still flying, decades past its intended life, because its replacement is not ready. With the Shuttle it assembled Concord Station, a permanent laboratory in low orbit shared equally with Great Britain, the German Empire, Japan and the Empire of China. Its robotic programme includes the Voyager probes, the Hubble and James Webb telescopes, the Viking landers and a succession of rovers on Mars, and the New Horizons mission to Pluto.

It is a civil body by deliberate choice. Its name is American rather than Royal because Parliament wanted an agency answerable to ministers and not to the command of the Crown’s forces, and in 1958 the same Parliament refused to let it employ its own pilots, so that every crew it has flown has been made up of officers seconded from the services, with civilian scientists commissioned into a naval reserve they are never required to serve in. Two crews have been lost: three men in a fire on the launch pad in 1967, and seven people when Intrepid broke apart on re-entry in 2003. The inquiry into the second found that the agency had come to treat known damage as an acceptable risk.

The agency’s budget reached about four per cent of federal spending in 1966 and is now about half of one per cent. The public likes it, understands it poorly, and turns against it whenever its budget is set beside a hospital’s. The Shuttle’s replacement is seven years late and launched its first crew, on a flight around the Moon, on 2 November 2028; a Commons motion to return to the Moon has no money attached to it, and two commercial companies now carry crews to Concord under contract. Its Administrator since 2025 has been the former astronaut Scott Kelly, who holds the Realm’s endurance record in orbit and is the twin brother of a member of the House of Commons.

Name

The agency’s name was argued over in committee and settled on principle. The services of the Crown are Royal: the Royal American Army, Navy and Air Force. The bill as first drafted proposed a Royal Space Administration, and the select committee that examined it struck the word out. Its report said that the body being created was to be a civil department of state spending a parliamentary vote, answerable to a minister in the Commons, and that a Royal prefix would suggest, at home and abroad, that the Realm’s exploration of space was a military undertaking under the command of the Crown. The word American was chosen instead, on the ground that the agency would belong to the whole federation and to no single arm of the state.

The decision has had consequences its drafters intended. The agency’s staff are civil servants, not members of the forces. Its budget is a separate vote. Its insignia carries no crown. When a crew went to the Moon in 1969, the plaque it left was signed by the Prime Minister and the Speaker, and the question of whether anything from the King should go too became a small constitutional quarrel that the Realm’s republicans have kept alive ever since.

The abbreviation AASA is pronounced as two syllables, “ah-sah”, in speech. Within the agency and in the press it is also simply the agency, and among the astronauts’ services, which lend it people and do not always enjoy doing so, it is sometimes called the civil side.

History

The French rockets and the Second Great War

The Realm’s rocketry began with an enemy’s. In the last years of the Second Great War, fascist France fired ballistic rockets at London and southern England from launching sites on the Norman and Channel coasts. The rockets were built in underground works in the Jura by the labour of prisoners held in camps nearby, several thousand of whom died building them, more than were killed by the weapons themselves. The rockets came too late and in too few numbers to change the course of the war, but every Allied government understood what they meant.

In the spring of 1945 a unit of the Royal American Army found the French programme’s technical documents hidden in a mine, a week before British forces reached the same area. The documents were shipped to the Realm. Britain has always maintained that the find was joint, and British histories of the period describe it as such; the Realm’s army records describe it otherwise, and the two governments have never found it necessary to settle the point.

The men were a different matter. The French programme’s chief designer was tried at the Paris Tribunal for the use of camp labour, convicted, and sentenced to death; the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, and he died in prison. Several of his engineers were tried alongside him. Others went home to France and were not employed in rocketry again. The Realm did not take any of them, a decision taken at ministerial level in 1945 and never reversed, and in consequence it rebuilt its rocketry slowly, from paper, over the following decade. The agency has always used the chief designer’s documents. It has never used his name, and it does not honour him in any form. Its historians’ phrase for him, used in its official histories, is that he is named and not forgiven.

The Bonn Technical Agreement

The Realm’s own engineers, working first for the army and then for the Air Force, spent the late 1940s and early 1950s learning from the French documents what the Frenchmen themselves would have been able to tell them in an afternoon. Progress was steady and slow. In 1955 the government concluded the Bonn Technical Agreement with the German Empire, under which engineers of the Imperial German forces, whose own rocketry had been developed for an allied state and never for a fascist one, were seconded to the Realm’s army programme. The agreement was published. It was the first large technical exchange between the two allies after the war, and Germany used the knowledge it received in return to build a programme of its own alongside the Realm’s.

The most senior of the seconded engineers was Wernher von Braun, an officer of the Imperial German forces, who became the leading figure of the army’s rocket team at Huntsville in Alabama and later the first director of the agency’s centre there. He applied for naturalisation in 1958. It was delayed for four years by a Commons objection, pressed by a small group of members from both sides of the House, that a serving officer of a foreign power, however friendly, ought not to direct a federal centre. The objection was never about his conduct during the war, which was not in question. He was naturalised in 1962.

The National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics

The agency’s other ancestor was civil and much older. The National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics was created in 1915, during the First Great War, when the Realm discovered that its aircraft were inferior to those of every power it was likely to fight. It ran research laboratories, wind tunnels and test facilities for the aircraft industry and the services, published its findings openly, and over forty years acquired a reputation as the most useful small body in the federal government. By the 1950s it had laboratories in Virginia, California and Ohio, and some of its engineers were already working on the problems of flight at the edge of the atmosphere.

Sputnik and the crisis of 1957

On 4 October 1957 the Russian Republic, governing in the name of the admiral who had founded it, put the first artificial satellite, Sputnik, into orbit. The Realm had expected to be first, and a satellite of its own was being prepared for the following months. In December a navy rocket carrying it exploded on its pad at Cape Canaveral, two seconds after ignition, in front of television cameras that had been invited to watch.

The consequence was a parliamentary crisis. Lyndon Johnson, then Leader of the Labour and Social Democratic Party and of the opposition, moved a motion of no confidence in the ministry of Dwight D. Eisenhower, charging it with having allowed the Realm’s rival to take the heavens unopposed. The ministry survived by about twenty votes. Johnson then forced the appointment of a select committee on the Realm’s missile and space programmes, and the committee sat through the winter, taking evidence from the services, the laboratories and the industry. Its report found that the Realm’s effort was divided among three services that competed with one another for money and for the same engineers, and recommended a single civil agency to take charge of everything that was not a weapon.

The army’s team at Huntsville launched the Realm’s first satellite, Explorer 1, on 31 January 1958. It was small and it discovered the belts of radiation that surround the Earth, which Sputnik had not, and for a few weeks the Realm consoled itself with that.

The Aeronautics and Space Act 1958

The Aeronautics and Space Act 1958 received royal assent on 29 July 1958. It created the American Aeronautics and Space Administration, transferred to it the whole of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics with its eight thousand staff and its laboratories, and gave it responsibility for “the exploration of space by the Realm for peaceful purposes and for the benefit of all mankind”. It created the office of Minister for Science to answer for the agency in the Commons, and the first holder, the Conservative and Crown Union member Harold Whitcombe, took office the same week. The agency opened on 1 October 1958.

Three decisions in the Act have shaped the agency ever since. The first was that it was civil, and that the military uses of space would remain with the services. The second was that its budget would be voted separately each year, which has made it the most visible single line in the federal estimates. The third, added at report stage by an amendment moved from the government’s own benches and carried against the minister’s advice, was that the agency was not to employ its own pilots. Members argued that the services had spent a fortune training test pilots, that a civil agency competing with them for the same men would bid up the price and weaken the forces, and that a man who flew for the Realm should hold the Crown’s commission when he did it. The agency has flown seconded officers ever since.

The Act’s purpose clause is the nearest the agency has to a motto, and it has never adopted another. Its administrators quote the clause in evidence to committees, and its critics quote the last sentence of it back to them.

Mercury and the Seven

The agency’s first crewed programme, Mercury, was approved in its first week. Its purpose was to put a man into orbit, keep him alive there and bring him home, in a capsule barely larger than the man. In April 1959 the agency presented its first seven astronauts: Scott Carpenter, Gordon Cooper, John Glenn, Gus Grissom, Wally Schirra, Alan Shepard and Deke Slayton, all military test pilots, all seconded under the Act. The agency called them astronauts. The press called them the Seven, and for most of the 1960s did not call them anything else.

The selection rule required military test-pilot experience, and only men could be military test pilots. In 1960 and 1961 thirteen women, among them the pilot Jerrie Cobb, passed the same physical examinations the Seven had passed, several of them with better results, in a privately funded programme run by one of the agency’s own medical consultants. The agency declined to consider them, on the ground that none met the rule. A committee of the House of Commons heard evidence from Cobb and others in 1962, took note of the agency’s position that the rule was not its to change, and made no recommendation. No woman flew for the Realm until 1983.

In the same years the Air Force put forward Ed Dwight, a Black test pilot, for the programme that trained candidates for spaceflight. He was admitted, trained, and dropped, and the agency never selected him. The Realm’s first Black astronaut flew in 1983. Dwight became a sculptor, and flew to the edge of space in 2024, at the age of ninety, on a suborbital flight paid for by a commercial launch company.

On 12 April 1961 the Russian Republic flew Yuri Gagarin once around the Earth, the first human being in space. On 5 May 1961, three weeks later, Alan Shepard made a fifteen-minute flight that went up and came down again without reaching orbit. The Realm was second again, and knew it.

Mercury flew six crews in all. Gus Grissom’s suborbital flight in July 1961 ended with his capsule’s hatch blowing open after splashdown; the capsule filled with water and sank, and Grissom nearly drowned. Glenn made the first orbital flight in 1962. Scott Carpenter overshot his landing point by four hundred kilometres after a series of errors that the controllers blamed on him and he blamed on the controllers, and he never flew again. Gordon Cooper made the last and longest flight, of thirty-four hours, in May 1963, and flew the capsule home by hand after its automatic systems failed. Deke Slayton was grounded for a heart condition before his flight and ran the astronaut office instead, choosing the crews for every Apollo landing.

Kennedy’s statement to the Commons

On 25 May 1961 the Prime Minister, John F. Kennedy, made a statement to the House of Commons committing the Realm to landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth before the end of the decade. He presented it as a matter for the House rather than for himself, and asked the House to vote the money for it. The appropriation carried by eleven votes.

The margin surprised almost everyone, because Kennedy’s coalition of the Liberal Federal Democrats and the Conservative and Crown Union commanded an overwhelming majority. It was narrow because a substantial group of Conservative and Crown Union backbenchers, who regarded the undertaking as a waste of money on a scale the Realm had never contemplated in peace, voted against their own front bench, and a smaller group of Liberal Federal Democrats voted with them on the ground that the money was needed for housing. The appropriation was carried with the votes of Lyndon Johnson’s Labour and Social Democrats from the opposition benches. The price Johnson was understood to have exacted, and never denied having exacted, was that the agency’s new centre for manned flight should be built in Texas. It was built at Houston.

The phrase “I ask this House, not the nation” became the settled description of the undertaking in the Realm’s politics, and the agency’s supporters and critics have both used it since. Kennedy’s own view, recorded in his papers, was that a commitment made by a Prime Minister would last as long as the Prime Minister and a commitment voted by the Commons would last as long as the Commons kept voting it, and that only the second kind could reach the Moon. He was assassinated in 1966, three years before the landing.

Glenn and Friendship 7

On 20 February 1962 John Glenn became the first person from the Realm to orbit the Earth, in the capsule Friendship 7. He made three orbits in just under five hours. During the second, a sensor in the capsule indicated that its heat shield had come loose, and the controllers, unable to tell whether the reading was true, instructed him to keep the spent retrorocket pack strapped over the shield during re-entry in the hope that it would hold the shield in place. The pack burned away in flaming pieces past his window. The reading turned out to have been a faulty switch.

Before he came down, the capsule communicator read him a message from Ernest IV, which the King had sent to the control centre that morning to be read out at whatever moment the controllers thought suitable. They chose the third orbit. Glenn answered with a sentence of thanks that the flight recording renders as mostly static. He was the most famous man in the Realm for the rest of the decade.

Gemini

Gemini, the second programme, flew ten crews of two in 1965 and 1966, and did the work that made the Moon possible: long flights of up to two weeks, rendezvous and docking between two spacecraft in orbit, and work outside the spacecraft. It was the agency’s most efficient programme and is its least remembered. Its first walk in space, by Ed White in June 1965, came three months after a Russian cosmonaut had made the first.

The most dangerous moment of Gemini came in March 1966, when Neil Armstrong and David Scott, having made the first docking between two spacecraft in orbit, found their joined vehicles tumbling faster and faster because one of their own thrusters had stuck open. Armstrong undocked, regained control using the thrusters intended for re-entry, and brought the capsule down early in the Pacific. The flight controllers’ report on his conduct was the reason, several of them later said, that he was chosen to command the first landing.

The budget grew with it. In 1966 the agency’s appropriation reached about four per cent of federal spending, its highest share before or since, and roughly four hundred thousand people in the Realm were employed on the lunar programme by the agency, its contractors and the universities.

The Apollo 1 fire

On 27 January 1967, during a rehearsal on the launch pad at Cape Canaveral, a fire broke out in the command module of the first Apollo crew. Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee were killed. The cabin had been filled with pure oxygen at above atmospheric pressure, in which a spark from damaged wiring became a fire that consumed the interior in seconds, and the hatch opened inwards and could not be opened against the pressure inside. The crew died before the pad staff could reach them.

The agency’s review board found that the spacecraft had been designed, built and tested without adequate attention to fire, and that the hazard of a pure-oxygen atmosphere on the ground had been known and accepted. Its report was published in full. In the Commons, a backbencher of the governing Labour and Social Democratic Party moved to suspend the agency’s appropriation until the design had been changed and the change independently certified. Because the motion came from the government’s own side, the whips could not treat it as an opposition manoeuvre, and it attracted support across the House. It was defeated by a handful of votes. Johnson, by then Prime Minister, told the House that suspending the vote would not bring the three men back and would not make the next capsule safer, and that the agency would make it safer or answer for it.

The capsule was redesigned, with a hatch that opened outwards in seconds, a mixed-gas atmosphere on the pad and fireproof materials throughout. No crew flew for twenty months.

Apollo 8

On 21 December 1968 Apollo 8 took Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders to the Moon and around it, the first people to leave the Earth’s neighbourhood. On Christmas Eve, in lunar orbit, the crew read the opening verses of the Book of Genesis in a broadcast heard by more people than any before it. Anders took the photograph of the Earth rising over the lunar horizon that has been reprinted more often than any other photograph the agency owns.

The reading produced a written question in the Commons from a member who asked whether it was appropriate for officers of the Crown on an official mission paid for by the whole Realm to read from the scripture of the established Church of America, and a complaint to the agency from two secular societies. The minister replied that the crew had chosen the reading themselves and that no instruction had been given or would be. The matter went no further.

Apollo 11

Apollo 11 was launched from Cape Canaveral on 16 July 1969 with Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins. On 20 July Armstrong and Aldrin took the lunar module Eagle down to the Sea of Tranquillity while Collins remained in orbit in the command module Columbia. The computer overloaded during the descent, and Armstrong flew the last part of it by hand, past a field of boulders, with less than a minute’s fuel left before the rules would have required him to abort. At the control centre in Houston the capsule communicator, Charlie Duke, answered the report that the Eagle had landed with the words “you got a bunch of guys about to turn blue; we’re breathing again.”

The landing came in the afternoon on the Realm’s eastern seaboard, after nine in the evening in London. Armstrong stepped onto the surface just before eleven at night eastern time, and said, “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.” It was nearly four in the morning in London, and Ernest IV stayed up for it, which the palace did not announce and the household staff did. The broadcast was carried by every broadcaster in the Realm together, under a pool arrangement agreed a month before, so that no single network could claim the pictures; the pooled feed was relayed to Britain and to most of the world.

The crew planted the flag of the Realm, set up experiments and collected rock and soil samples for two and a half hours. On a leg of the lunar module’s descent stage, which remains on the Moon, they left a plaque signed by the Prime Minister and the Speaker of the House of Commons, and by the three astronauts, which reads: “Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the Moon, July 1969. We came in peace for all mankind.”

They also left a second, smaller plaque, which had not been announced. It bore the royal cipher of Ernest IV and a single line, “With the good wishes of all who watched”, and it had been placed in Aldrin’s personal kit at the palace’s request, with the agreement of the Prime Minister and without the knowledge of the Speaker. Its existence was announced only after the crew had returned. The Speaker said publicly that he would not have signed a plaque intended to stand beside another he had not been told of. The Realm’s republicans, who had been pleased that the first plaque was Parliament’s, have never let the second one go, and a question about it is asked in the Commons every few years.

The crew returned on 24 July and spent three weeks in quarantine. They were then received by the King in London, at a small reception whose only remembered moment is the question Ernest IV asked Armstrong, and which the Realm has quoted ever since: “Was it quiet?” Armstrong said that it was.

In the honours that year Johnson offered Armstrong a peerage. He declined it in a letter of two sentences, and declined almost every honour he was offered for the rest of his life.

Apollo 12 to 17

Five more crews landed on the Moon. Apollo 12, in November 1969, was struck twice by lightning during its launch and landed within walking distance of an unmanned probe the agency had put down two years before. Apollo 14, in 1971, carried Alan Shepard, the first of the Seven to fly, to the surface at the age of forty-seven; its command module pilot carried several hundred tree seeds in his personal kit, which were germinated on return and planted as Moon trees in the capital of every polity. Several have since died and been replaced, quietly, with cuttings from the survivors.

Apollo 13 did not land. On 13 April 1970, two days out, an oxygen tank in the service module exploded, crippling the spacecraft’s supply of power, water and air. Jim Lovell, Jack Swigert and Fred Haise moved into the lunar module and used it as a lifeboat, swung round the Moon, and came home four days later in a command module that had been shut down to save its batteries for re-entry. While they were in danger, the House of Commons adjourned its business to hear the agency’s reports read by the minister as they arrived, and a large part of the House stayed in the chamber through the night. The crew landed safely on 17 April.

Apollo 15, 16 and 17, in 1971 and 1972, carried a lunar roving vehicle and stayed for three days at a time, and are the scientifically richest of the six. On Apollo 15 the crew carried several hundred postal covers to the Moon without authorisation, some of which were sold privately afterwards to a dealer in Europe; the three men were disciplined, removed from flight status, and did not fly again. Eugene Cernan, commander of Apollo 17, was the last person to walk on the Moon, in December 1972. Before leaving he wrote his daughter’s initials in the dust.

Apollo 18, 19 and 20 were to follow. They were cancelled by Parliament in 1970, in the middle of the Indochina war, when the estimates committee recommended, and the House agreed, that the hardware already built should be used for other purposes and the money saved should go to the war and to the domestic programmes the war was starving. The agency argued that three missions whose rockets had already been paid for were the cheapest science the Realm would ever buy. It lost.

The lunar samples returned by the six crews, 382 kilograms of rock and soil, are held by the agency in Houston and lent to researchers worldwide. Small pieces were presented in 1970 and 1973 to every polity of the Realm and to the League of Nations, each mounted with the polity’s flag, which had flown to the Moon. Several polities have since lost theirs. The agency does not say which, and the polities concerned have not volunteered it.

The whole lunar programme cost about A£25 billion at the prices of the time. The Treasury has never allowed the figure to be converted into present money in a written parliamentary answer, on the ground that any such conversion depends on assumptions that cannot be stated in a sentence. Members ask anyway, every few years.

In the 1960s the programme carried its own scandal of fraud: a contractor building the second stage of the Saturn V was found to have billed the agency for work on a separate contract and for test hours that had not been flown, and two of its managers were prosecuted and convicted in 1968.

Skylab and the German docking

The agency’s first space station, Skylab, was built from the spare third stage of a Saturn V left over from the cancelled missions and launched in 1973. Three crews lived aboard it for a total of 171 days, the last for eighty-four, then a record. It was left empty after 1974 and fell back into the atmosphere in July 1979, earlier than expected, scattering debris across the south of Western Australia in New Wessex. A local council sent the agency a fine for littering, which the Realm’s press paid by public subscription, and the government of New Wessex sent the government of the Realm a more formal bill for the recovery work, which was paid in full.

In July 1975 an Apollo spacecraft docked in orbit with a capsule of the German Empire’s programme, and the two crews shook hands through the open hatch. It was the first international docking and the only docking between spacecraft of two nations during the cold war, and it is the handshake in orbit the Realm remembers. No Realm spacecraft has ever docked with a Russian one. The German programme had flown its first crew in 1968, built on its own engineering and on the exchange of the Bonn Technical Agreement, and its capsules have docked with the Realm’s vehicles many times since.

The Space Shuttle decision

As Apollo ended, the agency proposed a reusable spacecraft that would take off like a rocket and land like an aircraft, formally the Space Transportation System and universally the Space Shuttle, and would reduce the cost of reaching orbit so far that the Realm could afford to do everything else. Lyndon Johnson’s ministry prepared the proposal in its last months; the decision to build it was taken in January 1972 by Richard Nixon in his first weeks as Prime Minister, from Johnson’s draft.

The case put to Parliament was that the Shuttle would fly about fifty times a year, nearly once a week, and would carry every payload the Realm needed to put into orbit, civil and military, so cheaply that it would pay for itself. The vote was carried comfortably. The best year the Shuttle ever achieved was nine flights. The cost of each flight, once the programme’s full cost was divided by the flights actually flown, came to about twenty times the figure given to the House, and that multiple is quoted in the Commons whenever a new space programme is proposed, generally by the member who is about to vote against it.

The promise failed for reasons that were each visible at the time:

• The heat shield. Each orbiter’s underside was protected by more than thirty thousand ceramic tiles, each individually shaped and fitted. They needed inspection and repair between flights that took months, not days.
• The military payloads. The design was enlarged and compromised, at considerable cost, to carry the largest military satellites and to meet the Air Force’s requirements for landing. The Air Force then continued to launch most of its satellites on its own expendable rockets, and after 1986 stopped using the Shuttle for them altogether.
• The Treasury. The development budget was cut by about a third during the design stage, and the flight rate on which the case had been made was not revised to match.
• The rate itself. The Intrepid inquiry, thirty years later, found that the figure of fifty flights a year had never been supported by any engineering study, and had been adopted because it was the figure at which the Shuttle could be shown to pay for itself, in order to win the vote.

The Space Shuttle flies

The first Space Shuttle orbiter, Constitution, flew on 12 April 1981, twenty years to the day after Gagarin. Four were built, all named for ships of the line of the Royal American Navy: Constitution, Intrepid, Resolution and Endeavour. Their names were chosen by the agency and approved by the minister, and the Navy was not consulted and said so.

Constitution’s first crew was John Young, who had walked on the Moon, and Robert Crippen, and the flight was the first time a crewed spacecraft had been launched on its first flight without an uncrewed test. The Shuttle flew twice more that year and settled, through the 1980s, into a rate of four to nine flights a year, far below the promise. From 1983 they carried Spacelab, a laboratory module built by the German Empire under the Bonn Technical Agreement’s successor treaty, in which German and Realm scientists flew together, and which gave the German programme its first long experience of crewed science in orbit. The agency’s partnership with Germany in crewed flight, which began with the handshake of 1975, is older and closer than any of its others, and was the model for the treaty that created Concord Station.

In 1983 the orbiter Intrepid carried Sally Ride, the first woman from the Realm to fly in space, and two months later Guion Bluford, the first Black astronaut from the Realm. In 1984 Kathryn Sullivan became the first woman from the Realm to walk in space. In 1999 Eileen Collins became the first woman to command the Space Shuttle. In 2002 John Herrington, a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation, became the first Native astronaut; he carried the Chickasaw flag and an eagle feather lent by one of the compact nations, and returned both.

In 1990 Resolution carried the Hubble Space Telescope, named for the astronomer Edwin Hubble, into orbit. Its first images were blurred. Its main mirror had been ground to the wrong shape, by a very small margin, because a testing instrument at the contractor’s works had been assembled incorrectly and the error had not been caught by any independent check. The minister told the Commons that the contractor had been at fault, and the contractor was fined. In December 1993 the crew of Endeavour fitted corrective optics during five walks in space, and the telescope has worked ever since. The agency counts the repair among its best work.

In 1998 John Glenn, by then a member of the House of Commons for a seat in Ohio, flew again on Resolution at the age of seventy-seven, partly as the subject of a study of ageing in orbit. The Commons paired him for the nine days of the flight, the only time a sitting member has been paired from orbit.

Concord Station

Main article: Concord Station

After the Commons refused the Realm’s own Station Freedom twice in committee, the agency won approval in 1993 for an international station under the Treaty of Kyoto, shared in equal shares with Great Britain, the German Empire, Japan and the Empire of China; Russia was never asked and France has never joined. Its first module, Franklin, was carried up by Endeavour in 1995, and it has been occupied without interruption since 2000. The agency operates it day to day for the partners’ Concord Council, and the Realm, which built about forty-five per cent of it, was repaid the difference over twenty years. It is named as a deliberate echo of Concorde, which a French minister called “a compliment paid with a missing letter”.

Derzhava

Main article: Concord Station

The Russian Republic built its own station, Derzhava, meaning “the power”, launched in 2001 into a higher orbit than Concord’s and occupied by Russian crews alone, which the agency tracks more closely than it admits, through the Space Service’s instruments. In 2019 an unannounced change in Derzhava’s orbit brought it close enough that Concord’s crew sheltered in their return capsules for forty minutes; Moscow never explained the manoeuvre, and it remains the most serious incident between the Realm and Russia in space.

The loss of Intrepid

On 1 February 2003 the orbiter Intrepid broke apart over Texas while re-entering the atmosphere at the end of a sixteen-day science mission, and all seven people aboard were killed. Among them was Kalpana Chawla, an officer of the Empire of Raj, who was flying under the partnership agreement between the Realm and the Raj and was the first of the Raj’s astronauts to fly on a Realm spacecraft twice. Intrepid was the orbiter that had carried Sally Ride and Guion Bluford, the first woman and the first Black astronaut from the Realm, twenty years before.

Eighty-two seconds after launch, sixteen days earlier, a piece of insulating foam the size of a briefcase had broken away from the external fuel tank and struck the leading edge of the left wing. Engineers at the agency saw it on the launch films the next day and asked for the damage to be photographed in orbit by the Space Service’s instruments. The request was refused by the agency’s own management, which judged that foam strikes had happened on earlier flights without harm and that nothing could be done in orbit if the damage were serious. During re-entry, hot gas entered the wing through a hole in its leading edge and destroyed it from inside.

The inquiry was chaired by a retired admiral, Harold Gehman, and Sally Ride sat on its board. Its report, published in August 2003, found the physical cause in the foam and the organisational cause in the agency. Its central finding is quoted in the agency’s training to this day.

The inquiry recommended that the Shuttle be retired on a fixed date, that a replacement be built, and that an independent safety office be created with power to stop any launch. The Shuttle did not fly for two years. The Administrator, Sean O’Keefe, remained in office until the inquiry’s recommendations had been accepted and resigned at the end of 2004. The government of the Raj received a formal apology in the House of Commons, remained in the partnership, and began building its own crewed spacecraft, which first carried a Raj crew in 2016.

After Intrepid

The Shuttle returned to flight in 2005 under the scrutiny of the Independent Flight Safety Office, which the Intrepid inquiry had proposed and Parliament created by statute. The Office reports to Parliament, not to the Administrator. It has twice grounded the Shuttle over the agency’s objection, once for a repeated fault in the fuel tank’s insulation and once for cracks found in the wing structures of an ageing airframe, and on both occasions the agency’s appeal to the minister was refused.

The retirement date the inquiry required was set by Parliament. It has been extended twice, both times because the Shuttle’s replacement was late, and both times the safety office agreed to the extension in writing, subject to conditions on inspection, flight rate and crew size that it publishes. It has also said publicly, in each of its annual reports, that it regards continued operation of the fleet as intolerable and accepts it only because the alternative is to abandon the station. The Space Shuttle is still flying to this day, on three orbiters: Constitution, Resolution and Endeavour. No crewed spacecraft the Realm has built has served longer, and several of the engineers who maintain it were not born when it first flew. Each has been allocated in advance to a museum on retirement, Constitution to Florida, Endeavour to Houston and Resolution to New Westminster, and three polities that asked for one and did not get one have not forgiven the decision.

From 2015 to 2016 Scott Kelly spent 340 days on Concord Station while his identical twin brother, Mark Kelly, a retired astronaut, remained on the ground, for a comparison of the effects of long-duration flight on two people with the same genes. The twin study found changes in markers of ageing, in the immune system and in the eye, and its findings are cited in the League of Nations’ standards for long-duration flight. It is the most cited single study the agency has produced. Kelly’s 340 days remain the Realm’s endurance record.

Commercial crews

The agency began buying flights to Concord from private companies in the 2010s, first for cargo and then for crews, on the argument that the Shuttle was too expensive to fly for routine work and their replacement was years away. Two companies hold the contracts, Halcyon Launch and Brandywine Orbital, and since 2020 they have carried crews to the station alternately. Parliament distrusts the arrangement, and says so in every debate on it.

Halcyon Launch was founded by Declan Voss, who owns it outright and is among the richest men in the Realm. In 2022 one of Halcyon’s rockets failed shortly after launch and its debris fell across Baja California, then Mexican territory. Nobody was hurt. Mexico protested formally, and the incident was quoted repeatedly in the debates on the purchase of the peninsula that became the Territory of Loreto in 2027. The Commons science and technology committee summoned Voss to explain the failure. He refused, and appeared only when the committee began proceedings to have him held in contempt of the House. His evidence, when he gave it, was brief, and the committee’s report described it as unhelpful. The Commons has disliked him since, and has not been able to do without his rockets.

Brandywine Orbital is a joint venture of the Realm’s two largest traditional aerospace contractors, Carrow Aerospace and Allegheny Dynamics, which also lead the consortium building the Shuttle’s replacement. Its crew capsule entered service two years later than its contract required.

In 2020 Great Britain flew its first crew of its own, the last of the Concord partners to do so, on a Halcyon rocket. In 2024 Voss paid for Ed Dwight, the Black test pilot whom the agency had dropped in the 1960s, to fly on a Halcyon suborbital flight at the age of ninety, which the Commons found hard to criticise and did not try.

Pathfinder and Meridian

The Shuttle’s replacement is a capsule, Pathfinder, and a heavy rocket, Meridian, built by a consortium led by Carrow Aerospace and Allegheny Dynamics. The pair are intended to carry crews both to Concord Station and to the Moon. They are seven years late and well over their budget, and the reason given by the agency’s own inspector-general is that the contracts paid the consortium its costs plus a fee, rather than paying for results, so that every delay was paid for by the agency. Meridian carried an uncrewed Pathfinder around the Moon and back in 2022, on the flight the agency numbers Pathfinder 1.

Pathfinder 2, the first flight with a crew, was launched from Cape Canaveral at twelve minutes past seven in the morning on 2 November 2028, on a free-return course around the Moon of about ten days, the first crew to leave Earth orbit since Apollo 17 in December 1972. Its four crew are officers seconded from four services: Commander Joanna Vail of the Navy, commanding; Lieutenant-Colonel Marcus Delahaye of the Air Force, the pilot; Major Ruth Calloway of the Marine Corps; and Major Tomás Echeverría of the Space Service. They named the capsule Steadfast. The Independent Flight Safety Office cleared the launch the day before, on conditions it published that evening. The flight lands nowhere and does not answer the Commons motion of 2024, and it leaves the Space Shuttle where it was: Pathfinder must still be certified for regular crewed flight before the Shuttle’s retirement date can be fixed.

In 2024 the House of Commons passed a motion declaring that the Realm should return crews to the Moon. The motion attached no appropriation, the Lords were not asked to agree to it, and the minister told the House that funding would follow in future estimates. Nobody believed that it would soon, and the motion is generally described as a return to the Moon voted in principle.

Scott Kelly’s appointment

In 2025 Scott Kelly was appointed Administrator on the advice of Thomas Markham, in the last weeks of his ministry and a short time before his death in office. Ana Valdez, forming her government after the election that followed, chose not to reverse the appointment, although the Administrator serves at the pleasure of the Crown on ministerial advice and she could have done.

The Commons science and technology committee’s pre-appointment hearing raised the question of whether a subject of the agency’s most cited study should run the agency that owned the data. Kelly agreed to transfer the twin study’s data to an independent archive, and the transfer was completed within the year. His brother, the member for Phoenix East and Tempe, then sat on the science and technology committee; he declared the relationship in a statement to the House the day the appointment was announced, did not take part in the hearing, withdrew from the committee’s sessions with the Administrator thereafter, and took no part in any vote on the agency’s money, as he had since his election. The question ceased to arise in September 2028, when the House elected him Speaker and he ceased to vote at all. When the Commons created its register of members’ interests in 2027, the relationship was among the first entries in it.

Organisation

The Administrator and the minister

The agency is headed by an Administrator, appointed by the Crown on the advice of the Prime Minister and holding office at pleasure. The Administrator is the agency’s accounting officer, answerable to the Commons public accounts committee for every pound it spends, and gives evidence to the science and technology committee several times a year. By convention a nominee appears before that committee before the appointment is made, although the committee’s view does not bind the Prime Minister and has once been disregarded.

The Minister for Science answers for the agency on the floor of the House and in the cabinet, where the office has sat in most ministries since the 1970s. The minister sets the agency’s policy within the Act, negotiates its share of the estimates with the Treasury and makes its statements to the House, including, when the occasion comes, statements that a crew has been lost. The division of labour is not always clean. Ministers have announced programmes the Administrator had not recommended, and Administrators have told committees things their ministers would rather they had not. The office of Minister for Science also covers the research councils and the national laboratories, and the agency is, in money, by far the largest thing the minister is responsible for.

The agency’s headquarters is in New Westminster, in a building a short walk from Parliament, chosen so that its senior officials could be in a committee room within a quarter of an hour. It employs about a thousand people there. Everything the agency actually builds, tests or flies is done elsewhere.

Staff

The agency’s eighteen thousand civil servants are engineers, scientists, technicians, flight controllers, contract managers and administrators, of whom about a third work at Houston and Cape Canaveral. They are members of the federal civil service and are represented by the civil-service unions, which negotiate with the Treasury on pay and with the agency on everything else. The flight controllers at Houston have their own branch, and have taken industrial action once, in 1979, for a single day during which no flight was in progress; they announced beforehand that they would return at once if one began.

The agency’s workforce has been older than the civil service’s as a whole for most of its existence, because the Apollo generation stayed, and much of the knowledge of how to fly the Shuttle is now held by people approaching retirement. The inspector-general has described the agency’s failure to plan for their departure as a risk comparable to the ageing of the airframes themselves.

Oversight

Three bodies watch the agency from outside it. The Independent Flight Safety Office, created after Intrepid, reports to Parliament and can stop any crewed launch, including launches by commercial companies carrying the agency’s crews. The agency’s inspector-general, an office created in 1978 after the Saturn fraud prosecutions had shown how little the agency knew about its contractors, audits its contracts and publishes its findings; the inspector-general’s reports on Pathfinder are the most widely read documents the agency has produced in the present century. The Office of Commercial Spaceflight, which licenses every launch and re-entry from the Realm’s territory, sits under the Ministry of Transport, alongside the Civil Aviation Authority of America, and is separate from the agency by statute, so that the agency does not license the launches of its own contractors.

Administrators

Centres

The agency works through a headquarters, a mission control and a handful of large centres, most of which were chosen for reasons that had as much to do with Parliament as with engineering.

Launch Operations Center, Cape Canaveral

The agency’s launch site occupies Merritt Island and the coast north of Cape Canaveral in the Republic of Florida, on Crown land acquired in the early 1960s, beside the older military range of the Air Force and now of the Space Service. The site was chosen because rockets launched eastwards over the Atlantic from so far south gain a useful push from the Earth’s rotation and drop their spent stages into the sea. Every crew the agency has flown has left from here. Its enormous assembly building, built for the Saturn V, is visible from thirty miles away.

The launch centre is not named for Kennedy. In 1966, after his assassination, a proposal to rename it was made in the Commons and declined by the agency, which said that its centres should be named for places or for people whose work was in the agency’s own field, and the minister accepted that.

Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville

The rocket centre at Huntsville in Alabama was transferred to the agency from the army in 1960 and named for George C. Marshall, the soldier who had surrendered his command to serve as Governor-General from 1937 to 1947. Its first director was Wernher von Braun. It designed the Saturn rockets and the Space Shuttle’s propulsion, and it now leads the work on Meridian.

Huntsville is the agency’s standing irony. Alabama has long been among the polities most suspicious of federal power, and it holds the largest concentration of federal industry in the Realm. The Premier of Alabama who fought the desegregation of the polity’s schools and public services in the early 1960s lobbied the Commons for the Huntsville centre’s expansion in the same months, and the agency, with the minister’s backing, made the desegregation of its Huntsville contractors’ workforces a condition of the money. The contractors complied, and the Premier did not mention the condition in public. Huntsville is now Alabama’s largest city and the fastest-growing part of the polity, and it votes differently from the hills around it.

Johnson Space Center, Houston

The Manned Spacecraft Center at Houston was built from 1962 to train the astronauts and control their flights, on land given by a university. It was sited in Texas because of Lyndon Johnson, whose party’s votes had carried the appropriation for the Moon, and Johnson never denied it. It was renamed the Johnson Space Center after his death in January 1973. Mission control, the room from which every crewed flight since Gemini has been directed, is there, as are the astronaut corps, the lunar samples and the training facilities.

Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Pasadena, in the Commonwealth of California, is run for the agency by the California Institute of Technology under contract, so that its staff are employees of the institute and not federal servants. It builds and flies almost all of the agency’s probes to the planets, including the Voyagers and the Mars rovers. The arrangement gives it a university’s independence and a university’s habits, and the agency has more than once found it easier to admire than to direct.

White Sands Test Facility

The agency’s rocket-engine and materials test ranges are at White Sands, in the New Mexico country of the March of Arizona, alongside the military ranges where the Realm’s wartime rocketry was first tried. Engines, propellants and the materials used in spacecraft are tested there under conditions it would be unwise to create anywhere near anybody. Like the rest of the March’s defence lands, the facility is under civil authority.

John H. Glenn Research Center, Cleveland

The propulsion and power laboratory at Cleveland in Ohio was one of the National Advisory Committee’s original laboratories and was known as the Lewis Research Center for most of its life. It was renamed in 1999 for John Glenn, who had represented an Ohio seat in the Commons for many years. The agency’s other old laboratories, in Virginia and California, continue the aeronautical research that the Committee began in 1915 and that the agency’s name still promises.

Astronauts

Secondment

Every crew member the agency has flown has held the Crown’s commission. The Aeronautics and Space Act 1958 forbade the agency to employ its own pilots, and the rule has been read ever since to cover everyone who flies. Pilots and commanders are officers of the Royal American Navy, the Royal American Air Force, the Royal American Marine Corps, the Royal American Army and, since its creation, the Royal American Space Service, seconded to the agency for a term of years and returned to their service when it ends. The Space Service, which has never flown a person of its own, lends the agency officers like the others.

Civilian scientists and engineers selected as mission specialists are commissioned into the Royal American Naval Reserve, at the rank of lieutenant-commander, for the duration of their selection. They are never required to drill, go to sea, or do anything else a naval reservist does, and the commission is an admitted fiction, adopted in the Shuttle era when the agency first began to fly civilians and needed a way to do it without amending the Act. It has one real consequence: the reserve commission carries the oath of allegiance to the King, so that every astronaut the Realm has flown has sworn it. Those who object to swearing it may affirm, and a few have.

The arrangement has been criticised from both directions. The services complain that they lose their best test pilots to the agency for years at a time and receive them back with habits the services do not want. The agency complains that it cannot recruit, promote or keep the people it has trained. Proposals to amend the Act have been made several times, and have failed each time on the argument that won in 1958.

Selection

The agency has flown about three hundred and fifty astronauts since 1961. There are about forty-five active at any time, of whom roughly half are civilians holding reserve commissions. New classes are selected every four years, from several thousand applications; a class is between eight and twelve people.

For its first two decades selection was confined to military test pilots, which meant that it was confined to white men. The thirteen women who passed the tests in 1961 were refused under that rule, and Ed Dwight was dropped from it. The first class to include women and Black candidates was selected in 1978, when the agency first recruited mission specialists, and flew from 1983.

Training

A new class spends about two years in training before any of its members is eligible to be assigned to a flight. The training is conducted at Houston, and consists of the systems of the spacecraft and the station, walks in space rehearsed underwater in a pool large enough to hold a full-size module of Concord, survival training in desert, sea and cold-weather conditions, flying in the agency’s jet trainers to keep pilots current and to teach civilians what a cockpit under pressure is like, and languages. Every astronaut assigned to Concord must be able to work in German and Japanese at a basic level, and since 2000 in Mandarin, because the station’s partners are equal and the station’s procedures are written in all their languages. The language requirement is the part of training that astronauts most often say was hardest.

Assignment to a flight is made by the chief of the astronaut office, an astronaut, with the approval of the director at Houston. The process is not published and has always been resented. Astronauts who have left the agency have written that assignments rewarded loyalty to the office as much as ability, and the agency’s reply, that crews have to trust one another and that trust is not a matter for a published scoring system, has satisfied nobody outside Houston and most people inside it.

A seconded officer typically spends ten to twelve years with the agency and flies two to four times. Most return to their services, some to senior commands; a smaller number resign their commissions and stay on as civil servants in management; a few go into politics, the Commons having returned John Glenn and Mark Kelly, among others.

Pay, badges and suits

Seconded officers keep their service pay and their seniority, and continue to be promoted by their service while they are away. Civilian astronauts are paid on a civil-service grade. Nobody is paid danger money for flying in space, which the astronauts regard as an old grievance and the Treasury regards as settled.

Astronauts wear the agency’s civil astronaut badge, to which each service adds its own device. The Navy’s device is the older, a matter naval astronauts mention and Air Force astronauts dispute.

The flight suit carries the flag of the Realm on the left shoulder. Since 1983 it has also carried the flag of the astronaut’s home polity, a practice begun by a crew that included astronauts from Texas and Louisiane who wished to carry both and were allowed to.

Memorials

The names of the agency’s dead, and of those killed in training accidents in aircraft while serving as astronauts, are carved on a mirror wall at the Launch Operations Center at Cape Canaveral, which reflects the sky through the letters. Grissom, White and Chaffee, and five of the seven of the crew of Intrepid, are buried in the Robert E. Lee National Cemetery at Arlington, where the crews of both disasters have memorials on the burial slope near their graves, one of only two exceptions to the cemetery’s rule that group memorials stand off it. The anniversaries of the fire and of Intrepid fall within a week of each other at the end of January, and the agency observes them together.

Programmes

Probes to the planets

The agency’s robotic programme has done more science than its crewed one, for a fraction of the money, and the Realm has never quite believed it. The two Voyager probes, launched in 1977, flew past Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune between 1979 and 1989 and have since left the region dominated by the Sun’s wind, the most distant objects ever built. Each carries a gilded golden record of sounds and images of the Earth, intended for anyone who might find it, and on each the spoken greeting from humankind is not from any head of state but from the Secretary-General of the League of Nations, recorded in each of the League’s official languages. The decision was the agency’s, and it was taken on the argument that no government of a single nation could speak for the planet and that the League had been reconstructed in 1945 precisely to do so.

On Mars, the two Viking landers of 1976 were the first spacecraft to work on the surface. They were followed by the small rover Sojourner in 1997, the twin rovers Spirit and Opportunity in 2004, the last of which was designed for ninety days and worked for fourteen years, and the larger rovers Curiosity in 2012 and Perseverance in 2021, the second of which is collecting samples for a return to Earth that has not yet been funded. New Horizons, launched in 2006, flew past Pluto in 2015 and sent back the first detailed images of it.

Telescopes

The Hubble Space Telescope has been in orbit since 1990 and was serviced by Shuttle crews five times, the first to correct its flawed mirror. The James Webb Space Telescope, launched in 2021 in partnership with Britain and the European partners who later founded the European Concert, observes in the infrared from a point far beyond the Moon. It was named in 2002 for James E. Webb, the Administrator who ran Apollo. The name was kept despite objections, raised by astronomers and by members of the Commons in 2021, to Webb’s record as a senior official of the federal government in the 1950s and 1960s, when gay civil servants were investigated and dismissed; the agency’s historians found no evidence that Webb had directed the dismissals and much that he had presided over a department that carried them out, and the agency concluded that the name should stand. The objectors did not accept the conclusion and still refer to the telescope by its initials.

Earth observation and navigation

The agency builds the Realm’s civil weather and Earth-observation satellites, which are then operated by the federal weather service. The climate-monitoring missions among them have been the most politically exposed part of its work. A ministry in the 2010s proposed to cancel several, on the ground that climate monitoring was not exploration, and the cancellations were written into the estimates. The Lords, which cannot amend the estimates, defeated the order that would have closed the missions’ programme office, and the ministry abandoned the cancellations rather than fight the House over it. The missions flew.

The agency does not touch military satellites. Reconnaissance, early warning and military communications were run by the Air Force until the cold war eased and have belonged since to the Royal American Space Service. The single exception is navigation. The Realm’s satellite navigation system is operated by the Space Service, but its satellites are built by the agency, on the argument that nearly all of their use is civil, by aircraft, ships, lorries and telephones. The exception was argued over for two years before it was agreed, and the services still describe it as a favour.

Planetary defence

In 2022 the agency flew a spacecraft into a small asteroid, the moon of a larger one, at high speed, and measurably changed its orbit, the first demonstration that an object threatening the Earth could be deflected. The mission was flown under a mandate of the League of Nations, which had asked member states with the capability to test it, and its results were delivered to the League before they were published in the Realm.

International partnerships

Concord and the partner programmes

The Realm’s closest partners in space are the four with which it shares Concord Station, each of which also flies crews of its own. The German Empire first flew a crew in 1968, the Empire of China in 1999 (to orbit only; its first astronaut aboard Concord, Yang Liwei, arrived in 2003), Japan in 2011, and Great Britain in 2020, the last of the partners, on a Halcyon rocket. The Empire of Raj is not a partner in the station, but its astronauts have flown on the Realm’s vehicles under a separate agreement since the 1990s, and after the loss of Kalpana Chawla on Intrepid it built its own crew vehicle, which first flew a Raj crew in 2016.

The partnership with China is ordinary and has been from the start. It has not been seriously controversial in Parliament in any decade, which surprises foreign observers more than it surprises the Realm.

The Treaty of Geneva and the mining protocol

The Realm, with Great Britain and the German Empire, drafted the Treaty of Geneva on Celestial Bodies, which the League of Nations opened for signature in 1967. It forbids any nation to claim sovereignty over the Moon or any other celestial body, and it forbids weapons in outer space. The Russian Republic signed it in the same year.

The idea of licensing the mining of the Moon and the asteroids, rather than forbidding it, was the Realm’s. It was added to the treaty by a protocol of 1979, drafted by the Realm’s delegation, under which extraction is permitted under international licence with environmental assessment, registration and a contribution to the League, and confers a right to the material extracted but no right to territory. Russia signed the protocol a decade later. No licence has ever been issued under it, because nobody has yet applied for one with a spacecraft capable of using it.

Russia and France

The Realm has never docked with a Russian spacecraft and has never invited Russia into Concord. Its relations with the Russian programme are conducted through the League and consist, in practice, of the exchange of orbital data required to keep the two nations’ spacecraft from colliding, and of the one occasion, in 2019, when that exchange failed or was withheld.

France has never joined any of the Realm’s crewed programmes. It flies instruments on the agency’s probes, and its scientists work with the agency’s through the European partners, and the French government’s formal position is that it will consider participation in a future station on terms that do not require it to occupy a module named after its own airliner with a letter missing.

Commercial spaceflight

The agency buys launches, cargo flights and crew flights from private companies under fixed-price contracts, an arrangement introduced in the 2010s after the cost-plus contracts for the Shuttle’s replacement had become the agency’s best-known failure. Halcyon Launch and Brandywine Orbital carry its crews; several smaller companies carry cargo and satellites. The companies’ launches are licensed by the Office of Commercial Spaceflight, not by the agency, and the Independent Flight Safety Office must approve any flight that carries the agency’s crews.

Parliament distrusts the arrangement, for reasons that differ by party. The Labour benches object to public exploration becoming dependent on private fortunes. The Conservative and Crown Union benches object to the Realm’s access to its own station depending on one man’s company. Members of every party object to Declan Voss. The agency’s answer, which it gives in every debate, is that commercial flights cost a fraction of a Shuttle flight and that, while Pathfinder remains untried, they are the only means besides the Shuttle by which the Realm can reach its station. Nobody has yet proposed an alternative that the Treasury would pay for.

Finance

The agency is funded by a separate annual vote in the federal estimates, a provision of the 1958 Act that its founders intended as a mark of importance and that has made it, in practice, the easiest large item in the budget to find and argue about. The vote is debated every year, and in most years at least one member proposes to reduce it by the cost of a hospital.

At its peak, in 1966, the agency’s appropriation was about four per cent of all federal spending. It fell by more than half within five years of the first landing, as the Indochina war and the domestic programmes of the Johnson and Nixon ministries claimed the money, and has declined slowly since. It is now about half of one per cent of federal spending. The agency employs about eighteen thousand civil servants, and the contractors, universities and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory that do most of its work employ several times as many.

Roughly a third of the budget goes to crewed flight, including the Space Shuttle, Concord Station, the commercial crew contracts and Pathfinder; roughly a third to science, including the probes, the telescopes and Earth observation; and the rest to aeronautics, technology, the centres and the headquarters. The proportion spent on the Shuttle and Pathfinder together has been the subject of every one of the inspector-general’s major reports since 2010, because money that goes to keeping ageing airframes flying and to a late replacement does not go to anything else.

The comparison with hospitals is a fixture of the annual debate. In most years a member proposes an amendment reducing the vote by the cost of building a named hospital in the member’s own constituency, the amendment is defeated, and the member publishes the division list at home. The agency’s ministers have tried several answers over the decades: that the agency’s budget is a very small fraction of what the Realm spends on health; that its satellites forecast the weather that saves lives in every hurricane season; that its research gave the Realm’s hospitals several of their instruments. None of them has ended the comparison, and the agency’s own view, expressed by a former Administrator in evidence, is that a publicly funded agency whose budget cannot be compared with a hospital’s is one whose budget nobody is looking at.

The agency’s accounts are audited by the Auditor-General of the Realm, and no year’s accounts since 1968 have been qualified, which the agency mentions often and its critics say proves only that it spends money exactly as it says it will, including on things that do not work.

The published figures its critics quote most are three: the cost of the lunar programme, about A£25 billion at the prices of the time, which the Treasury will not convert; the cost of each Shuttle flight, about twenty times the promise made in 1972; and the overrun on Pathfinder and Meridian, which is larger than the whole cost of the robotic programme over the same years.

Criticism and failings

The agency’s failings are part of its official history, which it publishes, and the Register sets out the principal ones plainly.

The French documents

The Realm’s rocketry was built on the technical documents of a weapons programme that used the forced labour of camp prisoners, several thousand of whom died building the rockets. The Realm refused to employ the men who had run the programme and prosecuted its chief designer, and its record in that respect is better than it might have been. It nevertheless used the documents from the beginning, without acknowledgment for many years, and the agency’s first official history, published in 1966, described the origins of the Realm’s rocketry without mentioning the camps. The omission was corrected in a revised history in 1985, after a French historian published an account of the Jura works that named the agency’s inheritance from them. The agency now acknowledges the camps in its histories and at the Marshall centre, and it has never honoured the designer in any form. Its critics note that it has also never proposed to stop using what he built.

Two lost crews

Ten people have died in the agency’s spacecraft: three in the Apollo 1 fire in 1967 and seven aboard Intrepid in 2003. Both inquiries found that the deaths had causes known to the agency beforehand, a pure-oxygen atmosphere that it had judged acceptable and foam strikes that it had come to consider routine, and both found that the organisation had allowed schedule and budget to shape its judgement of risk. The second inquiry found in particular that the lessons of the first had been learned as engineering and forgotten as culture. The Independent Flight Safety Office exists because Parliament concluded, after Intrepid, that the agency could not be trusted to judge its own safety alone.

The Space Shuttle’s promises

The Space Shuttle was sold to Parliament on a flight rate that was never supported by engineering, as the Intrepid inquiry later found, and on a promise of cheap access to space that it never approached. It cost about twenty times its promised price per flight and flew, at best, nine times a year. The decision to build it shaped the Realm’s space programme for half a century, confined its crews to low orbit for all of that time, and left the Realm with no means of reaching the Moon from 1972 until a vehicle that has not yet carried a crew.

Cost-plus contracting and Pathfinder

Pathfinder and Meridian are seven years late and well over budget, under contracts that paid the consortium its costs plus a fee, so that the consortium was paid more the longer the work took. The inspector-general’s reports have found that the agency wrote the contracts that way, and extended them twice, because the consortium’s members were the largest employers in several polities whose members sit on the committees that vote the agency’s budget. The same two companies own Brandywine Orbital, whose crew capsule was also late. The agency has since moved to fixed-price contracts for commercial work, but it cannot cancel Pathfinder without abandoning the only vehicle designed to take crews to the Moon. The first crewed flight, in November 2028, changed none of the inspector-general’s findings, and the reports since have said so.

Who was not selected

For twenty years the agency flew only white men, under a selection rule that required military test-pilot experience that women could not acquire and that Black officers were rarely permitted to. Thirteen women who passed the agency’s own physical tests were refused in 1961, and a Commons committee that heard their evidence in 1962 did nothing. Ed Dwight was put forward and dropped. The rule was the agency’s own and was not required by the Act, and the agency’s defence at the time, that it was not its business to change the services’ promotion practices, was not true of a rule it had written itself. The first women and Black astronauts were selected in 1978. The agency’s historians now say plainly that the delay was a choice. Sally Ride, the first woman to fly, kept her own private life private for the rest of hers; her partner of twenty-seven years was named publicly only in her obituary, in 2012.

Secrecy and the services

The agency is civil by statute, and it has worked beside the services throughout its history in ways that have not always been disclosed. The Shuttle was designed around military requirements that were not fully explained to Parliament in 1972, several Shuttle flights in the 1980s carried classified payloads for the Air Force, and its engineers have always moved between its centres and the defence industry. The Realm’s critics of the military-industrial connections of the 1960s named the agency among them, and the agency’s reply, that it had never built a weapon, was true and not quite an answer.

Public perception

The agency is well liked in general, in every survey the Realm conducts, and poorly understood: most people substantially overestimate its budget, and when told the true figure, most say it should be larger. It is unpopular whenever its budget is named in the same sentence as a hospital’s, a comparison members of the Commons make every year and which the agency has never found a way to answer. Its astronauts are more popular than it is.

Astronauts visit schools. The agency’s outreach office arranges several hundred visits a year, divided among the polities by population, and a Commons answer in the 2010s disclosed that every polity capital had received at least one astronaut visit in every year since 1970. The visits are among the most popular things the agency does and among the cheapest, and several astronauts have said that they were first interested in flying because an astronaut came to their school. The agency’s own surveys find that the proportion of the public who can name a serving astronaut is lower than it has ever been, and the proportion who can name Neil Armstrong is higher than for any other person in the Realm’s twentieth-century history except its Prime Ministers and Kings.

Apollo in memory

The Moon landing is the most widely remembered event in the Realm’s twentieth century after the two great wars, and it is remembered largely as an American achievement rather than a parliamentary one. Mark Kelly’s remark that the landing was a parliamentary achievement and not a heroic one, and that the Realm has never understood that about itself, is quoted by the agency’s historians with approval and by almost nobody else. Kennedy’s phrase “I ask this House, not the nation” is better known than the vote it asked for.

John Glenn, Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins each made something different of their fame. Glenn sat in the House of Commons for an Ohio seat for twenty-four years and flew again at seventy-seven. Armstrong taught aerospace engineering at a university in Ohio, gave very few interviews, and refused almost every honour he was offered, including a peerage. Aldrin campaigned for decades for crewed flights to Mars, spoke publicly about his depression and alcoholism, and struggled in public for years in a way that the Realm’s press was not always kind about. Collins ran the National Air and Space Museum in New Westminster, a Crown institution and not the agency’s, which is the reason an astronaut seconded to a civil agency could be appointed to direct it; he wrote the best book any of the three wrote.

The hoax

A small number of people in the Realm believe that the Moon landings were staged. The belief has been investigated, refuted and discussed at length elsewhere, and it has appeared in Parliament once. In the 1990s a member asked the Minister for Science a written question inviting the government to publish its evidence that the landings had taken place. The answer, one sentence long, is the most reprinted written answer in the agency’s history.

Relics

The Moon rocks presented to the polities in the 1970s have had mixed fortunes. Most are on display in polity museums or legislative buildings. Some are in store. Several have been lost: stolen and sold, thrown out in the clearance of an official residence, or found decades later among a former premier’s private papers. The agency keeps a register of every sample it has given away and will say, when asked, how many are unaccounted for; it will not say which polities have mislaid them, on the ground that the gifts belonged to the polities and their loss is the polities’ own business. A retired agency investigator who spent twenty years recovering missing samples has written a book about it, which does not name them either.

The Moon trees, grown from the seeds carried on Apollo 14, stand in the grounds of polity capitols and government houses. Their survival has been uneven, and several polities have replaced dead trees with cuttings from living ones without announcing that they have done so. The agency regards the practice as reasonable and has not asked to be told.

Film and the Realm’s culture

The agency has been the subject of more films than any other institution of the federal government except the police. The best known is Apollo 13, made in 1995, in which Tom Hanks played Jim Lovell. It was faithful to the engineering in a way the agency admired, and less faithful to the Commons, which does not appear in it at all. Hanks became an advocate of the agency afterwards, and gave evidence to a Commons committee in the debates on the Shuttle budgets after Intrepid.

The agency’s insignia is a straight-sided delta, an arrowhead pointing upwards, bearing a single four-pointed star above a field of thirteen small stars, one for each of the founding colonies, set within a ring that carries the agency’s full name. It was adopted in 1985 for the Space Shuttle programme and replaced the blue disc of 1959, with its white stars, orbital path and red wing-shaped vector, which the agency still uses as a heritage mark on Apollo anniversaries and on material from the lunar years. The delta is issued in three division colours: gold for command, the headquarters and the flight crews in command; red for operations, engineering, and the launch and flight centres; and blue for science, the laboratories and the probes. Staff wear the colour of their department on their badges, and astronauts wear the colour of their role on each flight, so that a mission specialist who later commands a flight changes from blue to gold. Neither mark has ever carried a crown, deliberately. A proposal to add one to the disc in the 1970s, and a second to add one to the delta during the redesign, were both rejected by the minister on the ground that the agency’s civil character had been Parliament’s choice and was not the agency’s to alter. The Realm’s republicans regard the two insignia as the most successful pieces of republican design in the Realm, a description the agency has never accepted or denied, and the delta has since been imitated so widely in the Realm’s films and novels about space that many people assume the agency borrowed it from them.

Trivia

See also

• Mark Kelly
• John F. Kennedy
• Lyndon B. Johnson
• Dwight D. Eisenhower
• Richard Nixon
• The Second Great War
• Royal American Armed Forces
• Civil Aviation Authority of America
• League of Nations
• State of Alabama
• Republic of Florida
• March of Arizona
• Russian Republic