EDITORIAL INFORMATION

Americans hailed the first manned lunar landing as an unprecedented technological achievement, a triumph of American ingenuity, inventiveness, and enterprise, and a symbol of the nation's return to world technological preeminence. This praise for American technology obscured a fundamental reality: that man, not the machine, was the critical variable in manned spaceflight and that a major responsibility for controlling this variable lay not only with engineers and mission planners, but with life scientists as well.

(Extracted from the Preface, by the author)

GENERAL TABLE OF CONTENTS

-Contents.

-Preface.

-1- Medicine, Machines, and Manned Flight.

-2- The Human Factors of Project Mercury.

-3- NASA's Life Sciences Program.

-4- The Human Factor in Long-Duration Manned Spaceflight.

-5- Life Sciences Management in an Accelerated Space Program.

-6- The Biopolitics.

-7- Lunar Trajectories: Biomedicine in the Gemini and Apollo Programs.

-8- Directing the Life Sciences Program.

-9- A New Bioastronautics Crisis.

-10- Lunar Transit: Biomedical Results from Apollo and Biomedical Preparations for the Post-Apollo Space Program.

-11- Toward an Integrated Life Sciences Program.

-12- NASA Life Sciences from the Shuttle into the Future.

-Bibliography.

-Source Notes.

-Appendixes:

-A. Selected Biomedical Terms of Aerospace Interest.
-B. Organizational Arrangements for the Administration of Life Sciences Programs at Headquarters and Centers, 1958-1980.
-C. Formal Reviews of Organization and Management of NASA's Life Sciences Programs, 1960-1978.
-D. NASA's Life Sciences Programs, 1958-1980: Research, Development, Inflight Experiments.
-E. Medical Support for Manned Spaceflight Operations.
-F. NASA's Life Sciences Programs: Fiscal Year Appropiations, 1961-1978.

-Index.

-About the Author.

OUR REVIEW

The introduction of the human factor in the space adventure, the presence of man in space, caused a revolution in the technology of astronautics. How different it is to let the machines do all the work, or have the human being partake in all that. The survival of the astronauts and other living beings in such a hostile environment as that of microgravity, or the vacuum, is, gave rise to a whole new science, whose importance we hardly have begun to realise. In this work the author studies the research into the life sciences within the space environment, and especially in the program sponsored by NASA.

The work was prepared under the auspices of the NASA History Office, and it has the customary high level with respect to the documentary resources available to prepare it. In fact, almost half the book is devoted to the appendixes, which thus become as interesting as the general nucleus of the text. The latter examines the evolution of the presence of medicine, biology and biochemistry, besides other sciences, in the core of the NASA projects, both the orbital and the Moon ones. The human beings and their limitations are therefore studied as one of the main factors that shaped the success, the time and the cost of the different space programs of the agency.