Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Space Policy Edition: NASA and the American South

Episode Date: July 5, 2024

Every major NASA center built after the agency’s inception is located in the American South. Why? Dr. Brian Odom, NASA’s chief historian, joins the show to explore the relationship between NASA and the South, how politics and geography led to this focus, and why NASA’s expansion during the Apollo era was likened to a second reconstruction of a previously rural and underdeveloped region of the United States. Discover more at: https://www.planetary.org/planetary-radio/spe-nasa-and-the-american-southSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hello and welcome to the Space Policy Edition of Planetary Radio, the monthly show where we explore the politics and the processes behind space exploration. I'm Casey Dreyer, the Chief of Space Policy here at the Planetary Society. NASA's earliest crewed flights in the early 1960s, spaceflight was generally a mid-Atlantic endeavor in the United States. Although Shepard and Glenn launched from Cape Canaveral down in Florida, their training had taken place at facilities spread across Ohio, Virginia, and Pennsylvania. Mission control at the time of the earliest Mercury flights was in Maryland. But in the wake of Kennedy's challenge to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade and the vast expansion of NASA's budget that followed, nearly every state in the

Union vied to become home to the agency's core facilities to ensure the success of Apollo. home to the agency's core facilities to ensure the success of Apollo. But due to a mix of political clout and geographic opportunity, all of these subsequent facilities were established in the American South. This intro is adapted from a foreword in the fascinating new collection, NASA and the American South, a book co-edited by NASA's chief historian, Brian Autumn. He joins us today to discuss this relationship that NASA has with the South, how the South has influenced NASA as an organization, and really the broad historical and political context for this massive government investment that has led some to call NASA's presence there a second reconstruction at the time of Apollo.

Before we get to that, I want to mention that the Planetary Society, my organization, is an independent, member-supported nonprofit. This show and all the other work that we do happens because of those who become members and donate to our efforts. If you're not a member, please consider joining us at planetary.org slash join. Memberships start at just $4 a month and anyone can become a member. If you are already a member, thank you. Honestly, thank you for making this all happen. And you can consider increasing your membership level if you'd like to support even more of the great work that we do. That's all at planetary.org slash join. Here now is NASA's chief historian, Brian Odom,

to talk about NASA and the American South. Dr. Brian Odom, welcome to the Space Policy Edition. Thank you for being here today. Hey, thank you, Casey. Glad to be here. I have just read through your new collection that you edited with a number of great contributors called NASA and the American South. And this is a topic that I confess I've been fascinated with for a long time. I've done a number of trips and actually have done a road trip with a number of my colleagues here at the Planetary Society through all the Southern NASA centers a few years ago to look at the SLS and its human spaceflight implications. Before we kind of go into the broader sense of the

book, particularly for our listeners outside the United States, how do you define the American South? What makes it distinct to you? And I would say as a Southerner, right? It's funny that we still have these conversations quite all the time, right? I mean, do we consider Virginia to be Southern, right? Some people might consider Virginia to be the most Southern state, right? Some people would consider, you know, that to be kind of deep South, right? So you've got the, you know, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana area there. So yeah, in my mind, I think, you know, that Southern is kind of a geographic, obviously, that makes sense. But it is this kind of a cultural location, right? Where there are these places that are quint. But it is this kind of a cultural location, right,

where there are these places that are quintessentially Southern. A lot of people today consider, you know, Southern as, you know, this dichotomy between rural and urban, right? I mean, if you look at across the South today, the larger, you know, kind of larger cities that we come to associate with the South, you know, they're taking on more of a cosmopolitan feel. And I think Huntsville in Alabama kind of reflects that, right? Do we consider Huntsville to be a very essentially southern city, right? Well, geographically, obviously, but it's kind of, it's a lot more cosmopolitan in its makeup for a lot of the reasons that this book really gets at, right? This domestic immigration, you know, from all parts of the country, parts of the world. And

this has a profound impact on these societies. It's partly cultural, too, because I think, again, just for our international members, you know, Southern California isn't the South, even though it would be at the same latitude as parts of Alabama or Mississippi. And Texas maybe, I think, is kind of has its own distinct culture. But it strikes me as a very cultural aspect. In addition to kind of this inherited, as you say, immigrant and cultures that established in the, in the modern kind of us setting those distinct areas beyond it, but it definitely seems to represent a certain type of at least self-identified culture distinct within the United States. Is that a fair characterization?

I think it is definitely, I think without a doubt. And, you know, Nick, like I said, it depends on who you ask, right? A lot of people's cultural, I think, is one of the key pieces of that, right? So there are these things that are associated with Southern culture. You know, when you're riding down the interstate, you know, from Virginia to coming south there, you begin to see the Waffle Houses emerge. You begin to see, you know, grits rapidly replace, you know, oatmeal. Yeah, the Waffle House line is real. For sure. Without question. Yeah. So, I mean, I asked this because why is this relevant? What made you want to approach and

release a collection of essays about this? Why is it important to you that we evaluate and look at NASA through this regional lens of kind of this amorphous idea of this cultural South in the United States? Yeah, I think that's an important point, right? So one of the things we tend to think of these institutions, you know, agencies like NASA, we think of them as very unified, right? So we've got this idea in our head of what NASA is. and no matter where that logo, that insignia falls across the country, we expect to see a similar engineering, similar focus on science, you know, and to some degree you do, right? And that's because of this immigration of different folks from around the country. But I think these, you know, regionally, you know, we consider technology to be embedded in local societies as well.

So there is regional variation, you know, to some degree. Southern opinions about technology and about, you know, scientific progress. You know, that's all that's another story we could go down to, you know, politically how that might be. But I think, you know, for me, it was important to look at this to break down that homogeneous kind of, you know, that idea that all NASA is the same. No matter where it is, it just kind of comes in. It maintains its isolation from the communities it exists in. It performs its work and it goes about its business in a similar way wherever you find it. I think what we demonstrate in this book is that that doesn't happen.

Right. Regional variation within NASA. We talked about this idea that the South leaves an accent upon NASA, right? You know, in this Southern accent of engineering, engineers in this, you know, that are associated with Marshall Space Flight Center might have a unique variation between engineers in Southern California, as you say, or in New England or in Glenn Research Center. And so I think that was important to look at, you know, from a methodological standpoint, that was kind of, that was part of our primary focus. The other part of that is kind of the differences between the societies themselves, right? Obviously, in the 1950s and 60s,

we wouldn't consider the South and the North to be very similar in a lot of, they were dissimilar in a lot of different ways, right? We've got Jim Crow segregation in the South. So the political leadership of the South has, you know, varying interests from the political leadership in the North or the West or the Southwest. Jim Crow played a key role in that. But what I wanted to look at was, okay, so let's say these, you know, when NASA moves south, as we might say, what does that interaction look like? How does the political leadership in Alabama perceive the benefits of this space? And what do they see as being at risk? Well, in the late 1950s, early 1960s, that was where the battleground was, right? It was the racial line, the preservation of Jim Crow segregation,

but also the acceptance, as they had for a long time, of federal largesse. You know, we can talk about the impact of the New Deal, World War II, the DOD kind of infrastructure that was built across the South, and NASA kind of falls along on those same lines, right? So what was that impact and what did that political leadership, how did they see this? So I think that was, you know, to me, that's why this is regionally important. And then kind of lastly, you know, if we accept, you know, I think a lot of historians who look at issues like this do accept this as an idea that there's regional variation in this. Okay, how can we then apply this internationally?

in this. Okay, how can we then apply this internationally? How can we look at, say, regional variation in aerospace technology in Latin America, places like the, you know, what we refer to as, you know, global south, India, China, you know, Southeast Asia? How do they see those, you know, and so that might help us. And as a historian, we're always saying, what is the application to today, right? So, I think more studies like this can help us understand kind of where we are today and where, you know, where we're dissimilar and where we're similar. Yeah, and what I really enjoyed about this collection is that you have, beyond kind of the broader political and sociological consequences, you look at the cultural changes that happened in some of these places because of investment of these new

NASA centers, new being mid-20th century at this point. But let's start kind of with this growth and establishment of NASA in the U.S. South, because I think this is the, what's so interesting to me is whether it was, in a sense, a predestination, like it was guaranteed to be there because of geography, or if it was a unique happenstance of the politics of the United States at the time, right? So, NASA in 1958, when it's founded, is kind of cobbled together from existing NACA flight centers around the country. And those are in California, Ohio, Virginia, but nothing distinctly in the South, right? And I think you kind of touched on this. What was maybe let's step back one step and say, what was the South like during the Great Depression, industrial from an industrial perspective? And how does this play into this larger intent to establish or potential for building up new aerospace centers in this geographical area?

Yeah, you could go back a long way, right? You could go back to the idea of, you know, in the aftermath of the Civil War, right? So there's this major transformation of the economic foundations of the South with the, you know, the emancipation of slaves following the Civil War, you know, and the reconstruction process there. The planter elite, you know, historians for a long time kind of disagreed amongst themselves about what actually was taking place in the aftermath of the Civil War, whether or not the planter elites were maintaining, you know, that grip on society, on the culture, on the economy, or whether or not there was the emergence of a new class, kind of a new, stronger middle class,

the doctors, lawyers, and the merchants, and how they were beginning to take political power. So there was that struggle of power, but I think if you flash forward to, and there's a lot more to it than that, but if you flash forward to this Great Depression and the process of the New Deal that emerges there, I think we see that as the first time where, you know, FDR identified the South as being, you know, the nation's number one economic problem. You know, there's a liability here in the country.

The country can't be united because the economy is not united. deal was this attempt from FDR and the government to bring the South into the Union, you might say, right, economically. Change it from this, transform it really from this traditional foundations of agricultural, rural, non-industrialized area of the country to bring it more aligned, to introduce technology, to build hydroelectric plants, the electrification, build roads, build these things. Flash forward to World War II. So this edifice had been infrastructure, had been laid down by the New Deal investment from the federal government. World War II continued that process because you had that seed of the New Deal infrastructure. You could now lay another wave of federal improvement on the South.

That's kind of what happens here. And so in the aftermath of World War II, after that investment, you're left with these large DOD, these large bases in the South. And that was an important part of what's going to come next. So, yeah, you're right. When by the time you get to 1958, NASA's created, you see in most of your institutions, NASA's created, you see in the, you know, most of your institutions, the NACA, as you mentioned, that pre-existed, they were in, you know, Langley, Virginia, Cleveland, out in California, the aeronautics industry out in Southern California was massive. And it would continue

to be. And there was, you know, and people always forget that, you know, a lot of the backbone of the space program was built in Southern California and that that would remain. But what of the South? Right. So you've got this DOD infrastructure. You've got this even back to the New Deal, everything that was built up there. And you've got this attempt again in the late 1950s to really unify the nation behind this effort and to say, OK, now we've got another wave here coming. And that would be from, you know, by the time you get to John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, there really are behind this idea that it's kind of a second New Deal, right?

This is an idea to unify the country in the process of unification would be this incredible investment that would come from the federal government there. Then we begin to see in, you know, 1958 forward, we begin to see, obviously, Florida makes sense for a good reason, right? You know, you want to have that launch capability there. You've got the Atlantic Ocean. There's a safety mechanism. There's the equatorial advantage you get by launching toward, you know, the further south you go. So all of that kind of makes sense, right?

But everything beyond that begins where politics really comes into play. You know, you've got these congresspeople and senators, you know, from all of these different places in Alabama, John Sparkman, he's incredibly important about bringing that investment here. Albert Thomas, responsible for getting the Space Task Group moved from Virginia to Houston, you know, what will become the Johnson Space Center. So that all kind of makes sense. But a lot of people didn't think that made a whole lot of sense to them. Why wouldn't you just build everything in Florida?

Well, there's a reason for that, right? There's a lot more to it than that. But that's kind of the, you know, it's important to see this in waves, right? We have to, we do have to go back. We have to contextualize. It's not that in 1958, someone had a bright idea to put all this infrastructure in the south. There are these there are these predecessor movements, predecessor investments that happen. And it's kind of just lays the groundwork going forward.

That's what, again, I find so fascinating about this and this interesting mix of it sounds like kind of this mix of geographical determinism of florida in particular but also the infrastructure that was then built from world war ii and the great depression so you you mentioned electrification like my father-in-law lives right on a tennessee valley authority lake still right and it's still a big part of their lives to this day and you had this maybe this and again you can just jump in and correct me as the actual historian here, but this, it seems like under-industrialization of this large region of the United States, and this kind of intent from the federal government to build this region up with the potential. But also, I wonder how much of it is because it had been under-industrialized that you have just the space to build big new things that you don't have to bump up against pre-existing issues, potentially with land ownership or if you need to launch or fire off big, loud rockets.

The consequences for acquiring that land is less than a more denser, highly industrialized area of the country. So I wonder if that plays into this as well, that I have this opportunity for growth. That's true. Part of that is true, right? So you've got some environmental advantages, right? So you've got the Tennessee waterway that connects you to the Mississippi waterway that gets you to the Gulf of Mexico, which gets you there. So there are these natural advantages. There's not a lot of population. There's not a lot of urbanization or urban centers here. So the idea that you do have small towns that can be either moved, that's a big part of this story as well, right? In the 1950s, early 1940s, you do see a lot of this, the government begins to come in and say, hey, this is for the betterment of the country that we're fighting a war. We need you to step up and we're going to basically move you off this facility so

we can build an institution here. Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville basically began that way. There were some small farms there, small towns, some especially African-American communities there. And they came in and said, you know, for the betterment of progress, we've got to move you off of this site. OK, well, that's interesting. You know, in South Mississippi, we'll see the same thing for Stennis Space Center. There were five towns there that Senator Stennis told them it was the, you know, the thorn before the rose, right? You're going to go through this pain now, but, you know, we've got to beat the communists, you know, so it's this idea of you come in. But, you know, the other thing about this was that, you know, we've got to beat the communists, you know, so it's this idea of you come in. But, you know, the other thing about this was that, you know, the government does have this power to move folks off these sites,

but you see who is being moved, right? African-American families, disadvantaged families, some poor whites and blacks who were moved off these sites. Huntsville is, you know, go back to Huntsville for just a bit in 1950 as the Korean War was breaking out, Sparkman was able to bring in a group to Huntsville that had been out in New Mexico, right? The von Braun team, the rocket folks, the Germans out there, they were kind of, as we say, languishing in the desert, and then they're brought in here for the war effort, and that begins to be that process. So there's a lot more to it than that. The other part of this story is a labor issue, right? So if we're going to build industrial lives, it's also useful to think about in terms of in the 1940s and 50s and 60s, you know, the South was very anti-union for a long time, right? Still to this day, maybe, right?

So this right to work, anti-union, you might have cheaper labor. You know, it may not be as, you know, the education system wasn't as built up here. So you might could find semi-skilled labor that would be relatively cheap. So the cheap availability of semi-skilled labor was quite a kind of a draw as well. And the idea that that would not be unionized was also a draw. So, all of these factors do come into play. I just want to highlight, there's a number of chapters or articles or pieces in this book collection that touches on the communities that were displaced in Merritt Island, as you said, around Stennis. And I thought that was just a really fascinating

piece of context that I hadn't thought about. I mean, NASA greatly expanded in those areas and someone had to move. And they're, you know, they're not, they're buying the land, but they're still kind of being pushed out. And interesting point that it tends to be people who don't have a lot of political power, which maybe fits in a larger historical trends. But there's consequences to that, to that growth. which maybe fits in a larger historical trends, but there's consequences to that growth. The other thing that was really interesting to me, particularly coming out of Andrew Dunbar's essay, and I want to get to some of the things you touched on later as well, because I think you had a really great essay about the labor and workforce challenges, particularly for

Black Americans and other minorities coming into the South. But first, before we get there, this idea of the politics that then also played into this that you mentioned earlier, that at this point in time, politically speaking, it's the Southern Democrats are in this kind of in the position that the Republican Party is in the South today, which is it's very deeply entrenched. Once you're elected through a primary, you're pretty much guaranteed to win. You have a very strong, politically powerful base there. And because of that, this interesting institutional consequence is that these Southern Democrats rise to the top of seniority, which makes them choice positions, particularly in the

Senate for committee assignments that control where funding goes that controls the policies for NASA, and they can throw their weight around. And so you highlighted a couple of people from Alabama and Texas. And also then Lyndon Johnson, of course, from Texas, who starts as a senator and becomes vice president. But there's a lot of intention wrapping up in this broader activist government ideal at this time that I want to loop this back into, right? So, you have these highly represented areas and positions of power in Congress with this attitude that the federal government should or could actively invest in these areas to improve the economies, the industrial base, the workforce. And then suddenly, here comes this huge Cold War Apollo program that touches on this national issue, but then feeds right into this

attitude to begin with. And suddenly, oh, it makes a lot of sense. Why should we put Johnson in Texas and then expand out in Florida and build out these places in Mississippi for rocket testing. And it's just interesting to me that it's because of this political accident, almost, that you have this power base that is also supporting that. So, maybe the question is for you, how much of that is intentional? Because I kind of got both perspectives from that in the book, whether James Webb, who was running NASA at the time, saying, no, we selected these spaces, it makes sense to us that, you know, this is the place we need to fit all these criteria. But then you have members of Congress saying, oh, absolutely, we'll do this because it'll be in my district or in my state.

How much of that was intentional, ultimately? Quite a bit. Yeah, I would argue quite a bit. Right. So the seniority system that you identified there with the southern senators, right, there have been this huge Dixie Crat revolt. system that you identified there with the southern senators, right? There had been this huge Dixie-Krat revolt, right, that had occurred kind of earlier where, you know, because of a lot of things in terms of race and lots of other issues that basically the Democrats in the South had revolted, but they were very solidified among themselves, right? They all agreed that this was the system you know, they kept their

seats. There wasn't a lot of opposition to them internally. They understood that if they could keep these seats, they could keep the money coming, but maybe and also control the liabilities that that funding might bring with it, right? So, there is this dichotomy of a distrust of a distant federal government or a dislike of what the power of federal government might have if you accept and build a system like this. But if they can control these committees, they could then control what they would have considered to be the negative effects. I think we see by the time you get to Brown versus Board of Education in 1954, I think you see that play out again, right? This idea that the solid

South federal funding might create the liabilities that they may be unable to control that they'd been as they'd been before. But yeah, I think once you get to the Manassas years, 1958 to 1961, where a lot of this activity is actually happening. These people are critical. John Sparkman in Alabama was critical to that, to making sure that that investment came to Huntsville. First off, in 1950, moving it from New Mexico to Alabama, keeping it in the aftermath of the end of the conflict in North Korea and Korea, and then maintaining it and then building it up from 1960 when Marshall Space Flight Center is kind of formed out of that core group from the Army Ballistic Missile Agency there. So Sparkman is kind of behind the scenes, you know, orchestrating that. And he's able to do that because of the power that he has.

We see the same thing in southern Mississippi there. John Stennis, who has been a senator there for a long time and would remain a senator there for a very long time, he was important about, okay, we want to bring some of that largesse here. We want to be able to control it. We've got a spot in South Mississippi that's perfect to test large rockets, whereas Huntsville was beginning to increase in population. So maybe we can you know we're gonna you know if we test the Saturn 5 here too many times or you know God forbid we test a Nova rocket which would uh you know basically shatter everybody's with the you know the 12 square mile radius there in South Mississippi you've got this area Stennis is able

to come in he's able to secure that investment he's able to move those populations convince them to go, and then maintain it over these years. And that's the thing, too. Just getting it is one thing, but being able to maintain it, you know, in the aftermath of Apollo, that's when the, you know, when it really got critical, moving quite, you know, a little bit beyond our area of focus here. But yeah, that's really critical. And what was happening in Texas, you know, Lyndon Johnson, the outsized role that Lyndon Johnson had in an overall creation of the space program, putting his, you know, kind of stamp on every aspect of it. You know, it makes sense that Houston, Texas is going to have a huge role in this because literally, you know, we understand why Cape Canaveral is there for, you know, physics. You know, we understand that. but everything past that, you know,

the space task group moving from Virginia to Houston, you know, George Smathers, who was a Senator from Florida, who was very close with John F. Kennedy, you know, he was able to kind of orchestrate all of these things for him, but he wasn't able to convince Kennedy to just move the space task group to Florida, you know, right beside Kennedy's, you know, what would become Kennedy Space Center, you know, because you kind of see that the reason is to spread this thing out across the region, right? We've got to, we can't advantage one group over another, one state over another, we might create conflict. So we've got to have

enough here to spread out. So there's a big piece of it. I just find it really, it is part of this parochial politicking. But again, what strikes me is that it almost requires this baseline of acceptance of it still fitting into this broader national goal. You had an interesting piece in the collection about the Appalachian development. I'm forgetting the exact name of it, but this focused federal effort to improve economics of Appalachia. And that is, again, this kind of interesting contrast because it requires this acceptance

that this is a valuable thing too. Like it's not just throwing money around. It's not just parochial. I mean, Kennedy understood it. Johnson understood it. Other members of Congress understood it, that this was fitting into this broader effort. And it was a scene, it seemed to be seen as an explicit benefit of the space program is that it is driving investment into these underdeveloped areas.

You know, that's, that's an interesting point that you bring up. And it kind of is that the foundation of all of this is, you know, the idea of modernization theory, right? This idea that there is a path that societies take on their way to becoming modern. And that's the Wal Rostow of the world. He was very close to Kennedy and Johnson. And he was very influential to the way they thought about the world, right? So you can inject technological regimes,

give incredible amount of funding to these regions to get them kind of kick-started to a tipping point in which they become modern states, right? So there is this idea that this path was almost scientific, right? So there's, and I believe, you know, Kennedy definitely believed that. He was very, you know, into this idea. Johnson, without a doubt as well, Eisenhower, probably not so much, but this idea that, you know, you can say, okay, we're going to start you on the path to becoming modern and it will only improve, you know, all the rising tide lifts all boats, right? We will build a powerhouse. And what began to happen was TVA became the model for that, right? So look at

what, you know, they could say, look at what we did with tva and people from around the world would come to the region and they would say oh my god look at the electrification here that happened look at look at how these states are you know they're now advancing uh their economies are improving maybe we can export this and ultimately what that leads to is the via you know in vietnam uh is the end of modernization theory for all intents and purposes is this idea that you can export these things in very, you know, distinct packages and it will, you know, have the intended effect of what you're looking for. I think the creation of NASA kind of falls in that vogue of when modernization theory was kind of dominant. It's a story in and of itself, and it's very well encapsulated by the apollo

program apollo is you know modernization theory right yeah i mean it's like the essence i mean the it's the myth-making aspect of it that it worked but it has yet to functionally be replicated as that speaking of this again this this point in time is johnson am i correct is that the last the or the manned spacecraft center at the time, is that the last NASA center? Is that the newest NASA center functionally in the country? I mean, there's the independent verification facility, which is also in the South. It's in West Virginia, also relating to a very powerful Southern Democrat at the time. But I guess that's kind of a NASA center, but it's not really a full center, right? I think it's managed by Goddard. Is Apollo basically the era

of NASA expansion of facilities, and then that's pretty much it? Yeah, that's it. And this is kind of the, you know, all the pieces are in place. You know, the chess board said, and this is what we'll have, right? And really these, you know that from that point forward and you know it is in 1961 really where a lot of this effort is kind of underway you've got the michu assembly facility which basically is run by marshall space flight center stennis space center really you know it's a mississippi test facility for a long time that's run by marshall and it will become kind of independent later on but yeah johnson is kind of one of these later especially with the large flights it's uh it's always fascinating to me that then it basically ends there and then everything since has been reconfigurations of these existing facilities

built at this time and i think maybe goes to that point you were talking about of this modernization theory or this period of political interest of active industrialization and investment and then that kind of ends in at least in modern american politics at least at the level that nasa is able to spend and we have the facilities that we functionally have i live in the pacific northwest no nasa centers around here and no nasa centers in the new term right that we anticipate but again and i think it's just easy to forget that the newest center is basically what what, 1965 is when the manned spaceflight center started. And notably, too, I think they all became named after their political benefactors after the fact, right?

Then a space center was named not when it was created. But later, I think maybe acknowledging parts of this. We'll be right back with the rest of our space Policy Edition of Planetary Radio after this short break. The Planetary Society is strongly committed to defending our planet from an asteroid or comet impact. Thanks to the support from our members, we've become a respected independent expert on the asteroid threat. So when you support us, you support planetary defense. We help observers find, track, and characterize near-Earth asteroids. We support the development of asteroid mitigation technology, and we collaborate with the

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Thank you. I do want to shift a little bit to talking about some of the implications of establishing all this in the South, because this is also where it becomes really interesting. And this is a topic that you've written on quite a bit and was the subject of your last collection, which is the, as you already mentioned, the South at this point is still highly segregated. And the civil rights movement is kind of forming around NASA at the time and really building a national politics at the time. And that creates some interesting tensions because you're, in a sense, creating this very futuristic, forward-looking, brand new establishment of these NASA facilities, yet they are not hitting their

mark in terms of hiring people of color or hiring anywhere near some of the other facilities because of their location in the south. Let's talk about that a little bit because you have a whole essay about trying to struggle with this both on the it seems like the the ability to hire and the desire that the institutional racism of not hiring black Americans but also interesting the challenges of training engineers and scientists for aerospace from these historically black colleges and universities that had gone into very specific lanes about where they saw their graduates going and not being able to provide that initially. So you have a dual challenge from the top and the bottom in terms of the input process, it seems like.

Yeah. And, you know, like you said, you know, from my research, that was one of the most interesting things that i came across you're right is coming at this from all different angles we tend to oversimplify processes right so in historical moments and we tend to think of them as you know kind of monolithic and there's a narrative that's created but one of the things as with anything the more you look into it the more complicated it becomes right uh and so you know really this is huge investment, you know, like we've mentioned these, these congressionals, this seniority system, and how this was brought into play. They wanted this investment, because obviously, it benefited their, you know, local constituents, but they wanted to control who had access to that, and what problems that might cause for them,

right? And Jim Crow was the Achilles heel of the whole process, especially from March of 1961 forward when President Kennedy makes equal employment a key piece of this. There had been desegregation processes going forward in connection to the DOD, right? So, these bases were being desegregated as early as the Truman administration. But what Kennedy really did was he understood that if we can tie creating access to jobs, we're going to create a lot of jobs here. And we're going to make sure that those jobs are, everybody has equal access to those jobs. And in March of that year, 61, he puts forth the executive order that makes equal employment opportunity a key hinge of this. What he basically said was, you know, and it's the first time in that order is the first time we see the phrase affirmative action show up.

So it's not just that you have to not be discriminatory. You have to have an affirmative program to overcome the challenges that you will face in a place like Alabama for hiring African-Americans who are trained for these jobs. Why are there no African-Americans in Huntsville who are readily trained for these jobs in the aerospace industry? Well, there's a lot of reasons and a lot of history for that, right? Black education being separate as part of Jim Crow, separate but equal, was not true, right? It was very unequal. Access to, from the funding agent standpoint, Alabama down in Montgomery, why would they why would it be that in their mind, why would they want to fund, you know, high level mathematics

for African Americans when they were looking at agricultural jobs, right? So this is this is what their justification for that was. By the time you get to 1961, there's a process where, okay, there's been inequality in this system for ever, you forever, for hundreds of years. How do we automatically catch up? And so the justification for not hiring would be, I can't find candidates who are trained for the jobs. Well, what Kennedy did with EEO was he said, you have to go find them. And that created this huge impact in the local area of saying, okay, where are African American students who we can find and invest in? And one of the places nearby in Huntsville was, you know, and a lot of, and it's not just Huntsville that this happens in, it happens across the South in these communities.

You know, where are the historically Black colleges and universities nearby? Where are the training centers for them? How do we invest in those and keep them separate? But how do we invest in them? How does the federal government come in and do that? Well, it was tricky because this didn't just apply to the federal government, it applied to the contractors as well. So when Boeing, IBM moved to Huntsville and create this huge complex of jobs here, this applies to them as well. And if you don't demonstrate that you have an affirmative action program, not only do you lose your contract, but you're prevented from bidding again for that contract in the next round. So it would exclude you from the job. And if we know

the history of the space program back in Apollo, there were very few companies who could manage to do the work that they were. So from NASA's perspective, if Boeing, if IBM or any of these companies are excluded from working on the Apollo program, because so there's a mutual interest there. And so what you begin to see as a coordinating committee kind of emerge between the industry, the government and the local community, where they begin to work in unison with each other to figure out ways to get candidates, African-American candidates for these jobs and build training programs at these local institutions out in the community in the industries themselves. So there are federal

programs for this. There are also non-governmental things like the Ford Foundation and all of these groups are also heavily involved in this because they have the resources to come in and invest as well. So this goes on for quite a long time, right? And it's a way to do it. But the other thing that you have to do in the meantime, while these programs are being put in place, it takes a long time to get a pool of candidates like that. And it's not just colleges, right? It's at the high school level, at the elementary level. All the while, this is all still separate, right, in the South. There's been this massive resistance to Brown versus Board of Education. The governor of Alabama at this time is George Wallace, who basically ran on the idea that segregation now and segregation forever, he's going to block this

as much as possible. So all of these things are taking place at the same time. In the meantime, you have to go out and find people where they are. So they had NASA, the industry, they would go out and they would have recruiters who would travel the country to places like MIT, to places in Chicago and in California, and try to convince African-Americans in 1963 who had engineering degrees and science degrees, physics degrees to move to Alabama when every day in 1963, what they saw on TV was fire hoses, police dogs. I can make more money working here. Why would I move there? So there is this huge problem, even for the people who are very well intentioned and actually trying to solve this problem of the lack of what they would refer to as a lack of qualified candidates. And so what you began to see is just a lot of different things that government industry

and the African-American community did. The other main piece of this, though, is with the in the community are the activists, the African-American activists for civil rights, you know, for the end of Jim Crow. They understood this problem as very well. And they understood this was the Achilles heel of these Southern cities, that if we can bring leverage and visibility to what you're doing here, and that's when the sit-in movements began in these communities and they become very, very important. People begin to be, you know, they sue the school boards for access to education to break down those Jim Crow barriers. It's that leverage that's provided by this process that really allows change to come in that process of desegregation. It's not an accident that the first African-American child to attend a previously

segregated school in the state of Alabama happened in Huntsville, Alabama in 1963 in September of that year. You know, because on Friday, there were four cities around the state. There were African-American attempts to enroll students at those schools. And George Wallace put the troopers out and he denied that. Over the weekend, all of these contractors, the presidents, the VPs of these companies called George Wallace and said, do you have any idea what you're doing and what's at risk here? And the next day, that next week, Monday in Huntsville, Alabama, Sonny Hereford, the fourth

young child attends Fifth Avenue Elementary School for the first time. George Wallace continued to block in other cities, but he didn't in Huntsville. And that begins this process of unfolding a separate vehicle to education. So, like you said, there's a lot to it there, and it's fairly deep, but there's a meaningful, there's something that really happens here as part of this process that brings about change in these communities. One of the problems that we have, though, is this, you know, post-history looking back at these moments and people thinking, yeah, it happened in Huntsville because Huntsville was different. Huntsville was a progressive oasis. It was an island of progressive thought in the middle of Alabama.

That's not true at all. And that's not to say that it was an evil place or bad. You know, but we look back and we say that's why it happened. No, that's not why not true at all. And that's not to say that it was an evil place or a bad, you know, but we look back and we say, that's why it happened. No, and that's not why it happened at all. It was agency of people who were trying to bring about change, who understood the situation well enough to apply leverage to bring about that change. Yeah, it's a fascinating part of this history. And again, I just, it's just really striking to think about. It's not just as simple as plopping something new in this pre-existing culture, in this pre-existing place and say, go forward and act like where you are doesn't mean anything. And I think that goes back to this regionalism. And Roger Launius's essay that opens the book, he highlights some of the challenges of these black Americans coming down to Marshall, going into a segregated southern state. And I was just like, my breath was taken away. Julius Montgomery, it says here, had to deal with NASA co-workers who were members of the Ku Klux Klan and refused to acknowledge him or shake his hand.

I wouldn't want to move to Marshall either. I mean, it's incredible that they were able to get anybody. But then also that just demonstrates the level of difficulty that you're highlighting here from institutionally, culturally, even with this federal support. And I think there was a couple of times where this extraordinary moment occurred where you had Robert Kennedy, who's the Attorney General, coming and excoriating James Webb and Lyndon Johnson for not pushing this equal employment hard enough within NASA centers and seeing some real consequences from that. But as you point out, it took a lot of agency from a lot of different people to start to this long process of starting to break these chains. Yeah, without a doubt.

You know, in these communities, you have people like L.C. McMillan, who came from Prairie View A&M to head what they call the Association of Huntsville Area Contractors, which was kind of this coordinating committee board that managed this process. You know, an African-American who worked here, who became integral to this process, you know, Richard Morrison, the president of Alabama A&M University, he had to skirt a fine line, right? Because if he looks like he's radical, right, in the eyes of white community, if he looks like somebody who's pushing for revolution, basically, in the 1960s, which meant supporting students to sit in downtown. You know, he's going to come in. He's going to say, look, that's not that's not the way to change. I want my students to be more moderate because I've got to continue to have a healthy funding line from Montgomery, Alabama.

They're the ones who are going to provide us the funding for these programs that I'm trying to put in place that are preparing you for these jobs. But also in the black community, he can't be someone who looks like, you know, he's, you know, supporting white ideas about where African Americans should be, right? It's the W.E.B. Boy, you know, Booker T. Washington kind of dichotomy there, right? So he's in a very delicate position in 1963, but he's able to get together the funds that he has, secure the accreditation that he needs to develop these new programs and, you know, minor in physics and convince faculty to come down from, you know, African American faculty to come from places like these. Right. I mean, that's like another example of the institutional channel you had to even hire the faculty to teach students to be trained in these fields like you're

you're really starting from a bad tough position and you know and so there are programs that are put in place you know then the other thing he has to do is he has convinced the faculty to come down but he also has to convince the students who are from these communities to realize that things are actually changing. And that's a hard push in 1963, right? I mean, because everything they see is telling them that this is not true. Everything they see and everything they know in their life is that these opportunities are not going to be available to them. The promise is going to go away. So I'm going to risk a whole new career path based off a promise from the white community that they're going to provide me with, you know, they're going to enable me

access to jobs. Okay, that takes a lot of, it takes a lot of, you know, good faith. And it takes a strong character. And you're thinking about 18, 19, 20 year olds who are having to make these decisions. You know, these are people we should really know more about, right? Because this is this is radically risky, what they're doing, but they're very brave in the face of this. So would you say that kind of like industrialization and economic benefit? Was this explicitly seen as an intentional benefit of building up NASA from, I'd say, the government leadership at the time from the Kennedy or Johnson administration? Was this a part of it? Or how did this kind of rank in the intentionality, I guess, in terms of trying to engineer some sort of social change in these southern segregated states? Well, I think you pointed it out, right?

It's real enough that you've got Bobby Kennedy showing up to meetings wanting to know about progress. Are you making progress on this? And then very much going after people saying, look, you keep telling me this and you keep telling me this, but I don't think it's right. There's a whole other world that Bobby Kennedy's kind of looking at across the South here

as the attorney general there, trying to make people get in line with this. So, you know, it's very intentional. Lyndon Johnson, and you go back to this modernization theory, right? And these advisors that Kennedy's surrounding himself with, that Johnson is surrounding himself with, that this is, these are the theories that they're pushing, right? That these things actually will bring radical transformation to these societies. You can be a cynic here too, right? That these things actually will bring radical transformation to these societies. You can be a cynic here too, right? You can say, I now know enough about this that I can be very cynical about it as well, right? Is Lyndon Johnson trying to enable, you know, to build a

Democratic Party that's unified and also assure himself re-election? Is that what Kennedy's doing? You know, that's okay. But is there still something very positive coming from this outcome and it's very intentional yes without question it is so at this point we've touched on a lot of basically of this apollo era which is just seems again very important and transformative for the south and nasa obviously how has this kind of evolved over time how would you i mean is it even possible to even ask this question the way I'm about to, which is, or fair, which is how does the South see its relation to NASA at this point? I mean, you had a number of, again, articles in this, in this collection

talking about these interesting tourist opportunities, seeing NASA as a way to redefine perhaps how the rest of the country sees parts of the South, the religious kind of relationship or local relationship, mixed feelings about NASA centers nearby. But you say, is there a broad or holistic kind of summary that you can give from your perspective that would sum up the South's relationship to NASA kind of as we speak here in the 21st century? Yeah, I think, you know, that's a great question, really. And it just depends on who you ask, right? So there are multiple perspectives here about all of this and what does the South still

see, you know, NASA as an integral part of what it does? You know, that just depends. I think one of the things you have to think about is how far beyond the gate does this go, right? People in Huntsville, you know, do they think, do people in the city of Huntsville think that NASA is really important? Yes, without a doubt. It's written in everything here. It's in the signs. It's like you said, the tourism. You've got U.S. Space and Rocket Center here.

So space camp. So people think about that. You can see the test, so Space Camp, so people think about that. You can see the test stand in the distance, even from off the center. You can see all the rockets that are kind of all over the place in the names of businesses. But the further away from Huntsville you travel, does that ripple continue, right? That's probably the better way to think of it right uh you know is this still something that's important to southern politicians yes without without question you can see in how hard they uh you know that one of the things that happened not

too long ago was uh Space Force right so this new idea that okay who's going to benefit from space force right this is another uh the creation of something else not on the same scale as create what when the creation of nasa or specifically the apollo program because that's one of the other things that we forget is that you know in 1965-66 funding for the space program represented basically you know five percent of the discretionary budget of the discretionary budget of the United States government. It's not that anymore, but that's, you know, that's okay. But does that reduction change things? Well, without a doubt, right? You know, it's not going to give you the, it's not going to provide the leverage for change that it once did, especially,

you know, beyond the gates of those communities where it exists. But yeah, you could say the same thing about Florida. I mean, Florida, obviously, when people think NASA, there are certain centers that they think about, and there are other centers that they don't, right? So if you ask the American public, when you can think about NASA, what do you think about? Well, mainly they think of Florida and Houston, right? These are the two centers. Everybody else just kind of gets lost in the shuffle. There are people in the state of Alabama who aren't sure there's a NASA presence here, right? These are the two centers. Everybody else just kind of gets lost in the shuffle. There are people in the state of Alabama who aren't sure there's a NASA presence here,

right? They think of, oh, yeah, there's that space camp in Huntsville, but they don't understand, you know, they may not know that there's, oh, yeah, and there's also a huge research complex there. There's Marshall Space Flight Center. There's all these things that are here. It's never going to be on the scale that was for apollo how far beyond the gate does it does the ripple of uh you know uh reputation go but yeah does it still matter to the states uh oh without a doubt without well and i wonder too with the expansion and maturation of commercial space and this new era we're entering into the second order consequences of all of these southern nasa centers and launch facilities in the south is is where bulletproof spacex is functionally

moving to it's southern texas look where the a number of companies setting up shop right around kennedy to have access to and the that also relationship to right from the local political institutions trying to entice companies to set up shop in Florida and other places in the South. And I'm sure you see things like that around Marshall as well. So it's almost like these become these focus points of future development because of this pre-existing infrastructure that has been built. And I wonder if that will change in some level or expand, you know, as you've said, that go further beyond the gate as we kind of enter into the strange new world of private and commercial spaceflight. Yeah, you know, I think that that's one of the things about commercial,

I mean, there, it just depends on what we mean by commercial, right? Are we talking industry? I mean, because I think what you could look back in, you know, if you look back in Apollo, and you look in these communities in the south, you know, one of the first things that NASA did was convince those communities to move near the centers, right, to be near the action, right? So that's what you begin to see, especially in Huntsville today. We have something, Cummings Research Park, that is kind of a tech center of the world, right? I mean, there's a huge amount of aerospace industry that's located there. It's growing every day. I can tell you here on site, you know, the commercial companies that are here just down the street, you know, down the interstate there, we've got, you know,

United Launch Alliance, right? So, United Launch Alliance, again, is kind of a piece of this as well. You know, it's government, it's industry, you know, hand in hand. But then you also have Blue Origin setting up shop right down the street, right? And Intuitive Machines centering in Houston, right? Those aren't accidents. They're kind of building on these infrastructures from, like you said, this pulling in this contractor base along with the NASA centers themselves.

Yeah, and, you know, that's the same thing as what we've seen, right? And it's what we've talked about this whole time is that you do see these waves and you see these layers, right, that are added to this mix, mix. Right. You know, we're back from the New Deal to World War Two to the Cold War missile environment. And then NASA and now commercial space. And and there are these layers in these places. You know, if you're looking for expertise, you know, and that's the thing that we're talking about now, but goes to the criticality of what we've what we've talked about as well these companies are moving to these places because this is where the expertise for that field

is that's where it's located go where the experts are build your company where the experts are have access to you know to the government but you also got access to this infrastructure uh the number of people one of the things that we're beginning to see is that it is a small world out there in aerospace, really. I mean, it feels huge at times, but what you see is this expertise moves around, right? It moves around industry. It might have a startup. It might go back. You know, it might work, you know, that someone may work for the government. They may work for Blue Origin. They may work for ULA and they kind of move around. And so these communities of knowledge really is what we're talking about, are so critical that we maintain those and we support

those because once it's lost, it's gone, right? We're not just going to reinvent this world somewhere else. It's got to continue to be, you know, nurtured and supported. And, you know, that's what the, you know, that's what the political folks are for, right? They do a great job within these regions to maintain that. That's something that we mentioned. It's not only getting the, you know, the funding put in place and building the infrastructure, but it's maintaining it over time. And that's where we are now, right? The care and feeding of these institutions, these communities of knowledge, I think commercial is part of that conversation. It's not different from.

It is part of that. And it's the same as it's been since Apollo. It took a lot of – one of the things that we forget is how large that investment for Apollo actually was in terms of this, the transformation of these communities that it brought with it, and now this world that it has created that everybody exists within. It's very unique, and it's very unique around the world, and you just don't find it everywhere. Well, Brian Odom, thank you so much for your time today. Brian is the chief historian of NASA,

which is probably one of the best jobs on the planet, and the co-editor of the new collection, NASA and the American South, which, as you probably can tell, I very much enjoyed and found fascinating. Thank you again for being with us today. Hey, thank you, Casey. Enjoyed talking to you. Thank you for joining us. As always, you can find more episodes of the Space Policy Edition, as well as our weekly show, Planetary Radio, at planetary.org slash radio, or on every major podcast distribution network. If you like these shows, please subscribe, share, and drop us positive reviews

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