Winner of the Michael C. Robinson Prize for Historical Analysis given by the National Council on Public History While the glories and tragedies of the space shuttle make headlines and move the nation, the story of the shuttle forms an inseparabe part of a lesser-known but no less important drama—the search for a reusable single-stage-to-orbit rocket. Here an award-winning student of space science, Andrew J. Butrica, examines the long and tangled history of this ambitious concept, from it first glimmerings in the 1920s, when technicians dismissed it as unfeasible, to its highly expensive heyday in the midst of the Cold War, when conservative-backed government programs struggled to produce an operational flight vehicle. Butrica finds a blending of far-sighted engineering and heavy-handed politics. To the first and oldest idea—that of the reusable rocket-powered single-stage-to-orbit vehicle—planners who belonged to what President Eisenhower referred to as the military-industrial complex.added experimental ("X"), "aircraft-like" capabilties and, eventually, a "faster, cheaper, smaller" managerial approach. Single Stage to Orbit traces the interplay of technology, corporate interest, and politics, a combination that well served the conservative space agenda and ultimately triumphed—not in the realization of inexpensive, reliable space transport—but in a vision of space militarization and commercialization that would appear settled United States policy in the early twenty-first century.

This book explores the relationship between the religious beliefs of presidents and their foreign policymaking. Through the application of a new methodological approach that provides a cognetic narrative of each president, this study reveals the significance of religion's impact on U.S. foreign policy.

Featuring biographical chapters on the leaders who served in space roles in the U.S. Air Force, Army, or Marine Corps, including officers who experienced the celestial skies firsthand as astronauts, Space Force Pioneers aims to enhance the reader’s understanding of character and leadership in military space from the experiences of these elite, ground-breaking leaders. The opening chapter explains in detail how the United States Space Force evolved from the Air Force. It is followed by ten biographical chapters that examine the stellar careers of space pioneers and illuminate their varied leadership styles. The chapter authors, all experts on the subject matter, engagingly capture the essence of these impressive individuals by incorporating information derived from the personal papers of their subjects and—in some cases—oral histories and interviews, along with other historical sources. They make clear the lasting contributions each of these leaders made to military space while serving in or out of uniform. Space Force Pioneers offers insight and analysis into how these unique leaders have operated in the performance of their duties, as well as chronicling changes in military space over the past four decades. The volume concludes with a broad and probing interpretation of contemporary space leadership, which offers a vehicle for comparing the accomplishments of these distinctive military space leaders.

To contribute to the worldwide debate on President Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative, here are two important studies, Ballistic Missile Defense Technologies and Anti-Satellite Weapons, Countermeasures. and Arms Control. Originally published in 1986. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

The Cold War was a media phenomenon. It was a daily cultural political struggle for the hearts and minds of ordinary people—and for government leaders, a struggle to undermine their enemies’ ability to control the domestic public sphere. This collection examines how this struggle played out on screen, radio, and in print from the late 1970s through the early 1990s, a time when breaking news stories such as Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” program and Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost captured the world’s attention. Ranging from the United States to the Soviet Union and China, these essays cover photojournalism on both sides of the Iron Curtain, Polish punk, Norwegian film, Soviet magazines, and more, concluding with a contribution from Stuart Franklin, one of the creators of the iconic “Tank Man” image during the Tiananmen Square protests. By investigating an array of media actors and networks, as well as narrative and visual frames on a local and transnational level, this volume lays the groundwork for writing media into the history of the late Cold War.