Spaceship Earth: The Urban Crisis and NASA’s War on Poverty

Neil Maher

NJIT

"Spaceship Earth: The Urban Crisis and NASA’s War on Poverty"

This paper combines methodologies from environmental history, the history of technology, and political history to analyze the historical interplay between the space race and the civil rights movement of the “long 1960s.”  It does so by first examining how during the early 1960s NASA hired ecologists to help design its Apollo space capsules to function, as one NASA administrator explained, like “the environment found on the surface of the Earth.”  Yet as NASA continued to launch its capsules into space during the early 1970s, civil rights activists increasingly criticized the space race, and protested in the streets against NASA, for siphoning federal funds away from more pressing problems on Earth.  In particular, civil rights leaders argued that urban housing, rather than “homes” in space for astronauts, should be America’s top priority. In response to such civil rights protests, in 1972 NASA created a special Urban Systems Project Office within the space agency to develop spinoff technologies such as satellites used to track city sprawl and assess urban air and water pollution.  Such efforts intensified during the mid-1970s when NASA’s Urban Systems Project Office initiated a cooperative venture with the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to “spin-off” Apollo’s ecological, energy-efficient space capsule technology for use in low-income housing projects in American cities. One such housing project was located on the outskirts of Newark, New Jersey, which in 1967, due in part to poor housing conditions in the city’s African-American neighborhoods, experienced one of the worst urban riots in American history.  By tracing this energy history from NASA’s space capsules to Newark’s housing projects, “Spaceship Earth” unearths a new historical role for nature and technology during the postwar urban crisis.