The Fall 2024 issue of NASA History News & Notes features stories from NASA’s archives and the ways they contribute to missions being developed today. Archivists and historians from NASA centers across the country reveal the history of the collections and bring to light some of the stories revealed in NASA’s archival collections.
Volume 41, Number 3
Fall 2024
Featured Articles
From the Chief Archivist
By Christine Shaw
October is American Archives Month—a time to highlight the importance of historical records and the archivists who preserve them. For NASA, this month offers a unique opportunity to showcase the role that archives play in shaping our understanding of the agency’s activities in exploration and discovery. Continue Reading
Getting to Venus with an Assist from the Ames Research Center Archives
By April Gage
The Pioneer Venus mission materials held in the Ames Research Center (ARC) Archives illustrate some of the ways that archival holdings can have relevance to ongoing research. The way these materials are used also helps to dispel a common misconception about archives as out-of-the-way deep storage warehouses for information that has either been put out to pasture or saved for posterity to display during anniversaries. In truth, repositories like the ARC Archives are vibrant spaces that occupy physical and digital realms where the agency’s knowledge and culture are constantly being sought out, described, contextualized, organized, imaged, preserved, mined, and shared. Archives are not places where information goes to die. The NASA Archives have mission relevancy. Continue Reading
Robert R. Gilruth Papers Make Their Way Home to NASA
By Jennifer Ross-Nazzal
More than 50 years ago, only two months after the final Apollo lunar landing, NASA Historian Eugene M. Emme sent a letter to former Manned Spacecraft Center (MSC) Director Robert R. Gilruth asking if he had any personal records documenting his NACA/NASA experience. Emme identified Gilruth, then only 58, as “a key person in the history of NASA” and explained the importance of preserving his records and participating in oral history interviews to tell his story and that of the space agency. He recognized the notable events that stretched across Gilruth’s career, from his time at Wallops Island to the Moon landings “by way of Mercury and Gemini.” Gilruth had sat for interviews for previous history projects, but his “low profile” at NASA meant that he was “a serious historical problem to the casual student and certainly the serious historian.” Continue Reading
A NASA Internship in the Summer of 1969 Becomes Part of the Goddard Archives
By Christine Shaw
In the summer of 1969, Joanne Aaronson found herself in the midst of history. During one of the most exciting times of the Apollo program, she was working as an intern at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Code 641, part of the Laboratory for Theoretical Studies. Continue Reading
Building an Archive: The Complicated Archival History at NASA Headquarters
By Julie Pramis
The first—and longest-reigning— NASA Chief Archivist, Lee Saegesser, started the archives at NASA Headquarters in 1967. At the time (and for decades after), it was not called an archives; it was the Historical Reference Collection (HRC). The distinction is not just semantic. What records were collected and how they were collected was very different from the current process. Like everything in an archive, context will help to explain. Continue Reading
A Deep Space Network of History: The Jet Propulsion Laboratory Archives
By Victoria R. Castañeda, Kylie Neal, and Madison Teodo
The Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) is a federally funded research and development center that focuses on the construction and operation of planetary robotic spacecraft and Earth-orbit and astronomy missions, as well as the operation of the NASA Deep Space Network (DSN) … The JPL Archives reflect these diverse tasks, with collections representing high-level projects and instruments, Executive Council and JPL leadership through the years, and JPL’s organization. These collections showcase the work of JPL projects and include resources such as paper-based documents that represent. Continue Reading
Personal Histories Hidden in the Archives
By Kylie Taffer
For most of my life, Kennedy Space Center (KSC) has been kept a secret from me. When I saw my dad get out of his car after a long day in the office, the badge around his neck would swing back and forth, taunting me. It was his key to another dimension, a world that I was not allowed to be part of. My younger sister used to hide in the back seat of my dad’s car, hoping for a chance to sneak into KSC and see beyond the guards at its entry gates. My mother felt the same with her father as she watched him be swallowed by the gates that kept this part of our fathers’ lives a mystery.” Continue Reading
The Kennedy Space Center Archives: A Peek Inside
By Kylie Taffer
The KSC Archives holds in trust over 3 million pages of documents and more than 55,000 photographs. The archive holdings provide historical evidence of the growth and development of KSC from 1958 to the present. Continue Reading
to Dr. Ruth Cowan and Dr. W. David Lewis.
Houston, We Have an Archive: Real Use Cases of the Johnson Space Center Archives
By Jessica Kelly
As a new generation of scientists and engineers works toward the impressive feat of returning humans to the Moon for the first time in more than 50 years, they look back to Apollo records for guidance. During the height of the COVID pandemic, the project manager for Artemis Geology Tools requested help from JSC’s History Office to support their work “designing the next generation of lunar sampling tools and [ensuring they] took into account lessons learned from Apollo,” specifically starting with Requirements Documents and Design Review Milestones. Continue Reading
Glenn Archives Marks 25th Anniversary
By Robert Arrighi
In December 1986, historian Virginia Dawson wrote to NASA management, “As a professional historian and contractor for a book-length history of Lewis Research Center [today, NASA Glenn], I would like to bring to your attention the need for a Lewis Archives. It is extremely important that documentation concerning the center’s contributions to the history of aircraft and space propulsion not be lost.” Continue Reading
Rocket Science: The Wallops Flight Facility Photograph Collection
By Zoe Costanza
In 2015, a team of Wallops Flight Facility and Goddard Space Flight Center personnel performed a holdings review of a significant analog photograph collection, deeming it necessary (for purposes of preservation, risk reduction, accessibility, and information gathering) for these photos to be digitized and transferred to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). To accomplish this, the NASA Archives Program created a project to digitize the photographs and brought on Zoe Costanza as a project archivist to perform archival and logistical support for the process. Continue Reading
Marshall’s History Preserved for Generations to Come
By Jordan Whetstone
The first collection of the Marshall Space Flight Center Archives was the research and oral histories gathered to aid in the research of the center’s history book, Power to Explore: A History of Marshall Space Flight Center, 1960– 1990. Over the years, the collections have grown to include more than 2,000 linear feet of documents, audiovisual materials, photographs, and oral history interviews that chronicle Marshall’s many contributions to science, engineering, and spaceflight over the course of its almost 65 years of history. Continue Reading
A Dig into the Archives Reveals Archaeological History at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center
By Brad Massey
The documents in Box 8 in the “Community Relations Collection” in the Kennedy Space Center Archives reveal a complex story of the intersection of Saturn V rocket technology, ancient Indian burial mounds, and the ruins of a British plantation. It is a unique Florida space tale that highlights the veiled historic treasures that await discovery in the NASA archives. Continue Reading
