Media, NASA, and America’s Quest for the Moon. Harlen Makemson. New York, NY: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., 2009. 272 pp.

Harlen Makemson has written a thorough and well-researched history of America’s lunar program through three perspectives. The charge given the National Aeronautics and Space Administration at its birth in 1958 was to provide “the widest practicable and appropriate dissemination of information concerning its activities.” But the agency had no guidelines for how to accomplish that goal. Makemson, an associate professor in the School of Communications at Elon University, details some of the internal battles within the agency and between its early public relations apparatus and the press as NASA struggled to find a balance between information control and transparency. During some early crises, critics charged that NASA actually stood for “Never A Straight Answer.”  [Read more...]