Life in Space explores the many aspects and outcomes of NASA's research in life sciences, a little-understood endeavor that has often been overlooked in histories of the space agency. Maura Mackowski details NASA's work in this field from spectacular promises made during the Reagan era to the major new directions set by George W. Bush's Vision for Space Exploration in the early twenty-first century. At the first flight of NASA's space shuttle in 1981, hopes ran high for the shuttle program to achieve its potential of regularly transporting humans, cargo, and scientific experiments between Earth and the International Space Station. Mackowski describes different programs, projects, and policies initiated across NASA centers and headquarters in the following decades to advance research into human safety and habitation, plant and animal biology, and commercial biomaterials. Mackowski illuminates these ventures in fascinating detail by drawing on rare archival sources, oral histories, interviews, and site visits. While highlighting significant achievements and innovations such as space radiation research and the Neurolab Spacelab Mission, Mackowski reveals frustrations-lost opportunities, stagnation, and dead ends-stemming from frequent changes in presidential administrations and policies. For today's dreams of lunar outposts or long-term spaceflight to become reality, Mackowski argues, a robust program in space life sciences is essential, and the history in this book offers lessons to help prevent leaving more expectations unfulfilled.

In 1958 the United States launched its first satellite and created the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to oversee its new space program. By 1961 NASA was confident enough to put a human being into space. But how had it acquired enough medical knowledge to ensure an astronaut's safety in just three years? It hadn't. The credit goes instead to decades of military medical research. Witnessing the first German missile attack on London in 1944, U.S. Army flight surgeon Harry Armstrong had been immediately concerned that aeronautical engineers would transform the A-4 (V-2) into a vehicle for transporting soldiers. He vowed, as founder (in 1934) of the military's only aviation human-factors research lab, to make such trips survivable. Efforts at Wright Field and the army's School of Aviation Medicine, which Armstrong had also turned into a world-class research institution, were the real reason for the successful start to America's manned space program. In Testing the Limits, Maura Phillips Mackowski describes the crucial foundational contributions of military flight surgeons who routinely risked their lives in test aircraft, research balloons, pressure chambers, rocket-propelled sleds, or parachute harnesses. Drawing on rare primary sources and interviews, she also reveals the little-known but vital contributions of German emigre scientists whose expertise in areas unknown to Americans created a hybrid specialty: space medicine. She reveals new details on human aeromedical experimentation at Dachau, Washington's decision to limit astronaut status to males, and the choice to freeze the air force out of the research specialty it had created and brought to fruition.