The Future of Human Spaceflight: Objectives and Policy Implications in a Global Context

Contributors

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Authors
David A. Mindell, Scott A. Uebelhart, Asif A. Siddiqi, and Slava Gerovitch
Project
Reconsidering the Rules of Space

Slava Gerovitch is a lecturer in the Department of Mathematics and the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research interests include the history of mathematics, cybernetics, and computing; space history and space policy; history of Russian and Soviet science and technology; history and memory; and rhetoric and science. He is the author of From Newspeak to Cyberspeak: A History of Soviet Cybernetics (2002) and numerous articles on Russian science and technology. He is working on a book on human-machine issues in the Soviet space program.

David A. Mindell is Dibner Professor of the History of Engineering and Manufacturing, Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics, and Director of the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is a principal in MIT’s Space, Policy, and Society Research Group. As an engineer and historian, his research focuses on the relationships of people to machinery in broad technical and social context. His most recent book, Digital Apollo: Human and Machine in Spaceflight, was awarded the Eugene M. Emme Astronautical Literature Award from the American Astronautical Society.

Asif A. Siddiqi is Assistant Professor of History at Fordham University. He specializes in the history of science and technology and modern Russian history. He has written widely on the Cold War space race between the United States and the USSR. He was a visiting scholar at the MIT Program in Science, Technology, and Society in 2008–2009 while working on a history of the Indian space program. His forthcoming book, The Rockets’ Red Glare: Spaceflight and the Soviet Imagination, 1857–1957, is due out from Cambridge University Press in 2010.

Scott A. Uebelhart is a postdoctoral associate in the MIT Program in Science, Technology, and Society, and helped establish the Space, Policy, and Society Research Group. Before this he supported space shuttle operations as a senior member of the technical staff at the C. S. Draper Laboratory. He earned a doctorate in aeronautics and astronautics from MIT, with a research focus on space telescope structural dynamics and control in the Space Systems Laboratory.