How Do Moon Missions Reflect Changes in Science’s Social Contract?
Artemis II’s recent launch and circuit around the moon showed how NASA’s missions communicate powerfully across the nation’s divides. Since the space agency’s formation during the Cold War, it has worked to connect the public to its complex engineering feats and role in national security. The Apollo missions mirrored the postwar “social contract” between science and society, ensuring that federally funded scientists worked in the public interest. But by the 1970s, falling public support required that NASA reconsider how it connected to society. As the public’s expectations changed, the agency evolved to incorporate them in its missions and day-to-day practices. Today, NASA does much more than fly missions to the moon: it also contracts with businesses to build rockets and with universities to experiment with payloads—and partners with toy companies to extend the agency’s iconic brand.
Recent funding cuts, layoffs, and administrative changes at federal science agencies are reconfiguring the social contract for science that has been in place for the past 75 years. Examining NASA’s experience could offer insights about how the public’s participation in the contract has shifted.
On May 20 at 3:30 PM ET, join us for a conversation on how space missions have reflected changes in science’s social contract—and how they might inform its future.
REGISTER HERE
Panelists
- Amy Kaminski, author of The People’s Spaceship: NASA, the Shuttle Era, and Public Engagement after Apollo
- Katie Mack, theoretical astrophysicist, Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics
- Zachary Pirtle, Deputy Director of CSPO, former NASA engineer
- Moderator: Nsikan Akpan, Council on Foreign Relations