Jeff Hamilton was born in 1958—the same year that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) was created—and grew up on a small farm outside Huntsville, Alabama.

Fifteen miles away was NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, where engines for the Saturn V rocket were being tested. When these tests took place, Hamilton recalled, “The ground would shake, the house would shake, the windows would rattle. I would run out into the yard, and you could feel it as a rumbling, you could feel it as a low-frequency thump in your chest, and you could see the smoke billowing up on the horizon.

That was real cool, for a kid growing up on a chicken farm.” Listening to the thundering roar of those rockets in the mid-1960s, Hamilton dreamed that one day he might get to work on those engines himself. He studied electrical engineering at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and joined the University’s Cooperative Education Program in 1979. That allowed him to take classes one semester and work the following semester for NASA’s Marshall Center. As luck (or fate) would have it, Hamilton’s very first assignment was to work in the exact same place where the Saturn V engines had roared.

“By then they had converted it for testing the Space Shuttle’s external fuel tank,” Hamilton explained. “But there I was, climbing around on the very same test stand that had called me to NASA as a young boy.” Thirty years after he started, Hamilton is still with NASA, having worked primarily as an aerospace engineer, but also in areas of administration and management.

The 2008 Smithsonian Folklife Festival program NASA: Fifty Years and Beyond presents these and other occupational traditions from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, an organization now celebrating its first fifty years. Approximately 100 participants are on the National Mall to share their skills, experiences, and traditions with members of the public. They include administrators, aeronautical engineers, analysts, archaeologists, astrobiologists, astronauts, astronomers, astrophysicists, atmospheric scientists, and avionics technicians—not to mention the occupational groups from the remaining twentyfive letters of the alphabet.

NASA: Fifty Years and Beyond builds upon previous Folklife Festival programs that have examined occupational traditions, such as American Trial Lawyers in 1986, White House Workers in 1992, Working at the Smithsonian in 1996, Masters of the Building Arts in 2001, and Forest Service, Culture, and Community in 2005.

Every occupational group—including actuaries, biologists, cowboys, dishwashers, engineers, firefighters, gaffers,
and haberdashers—has its own set of skills, specialized knowledge, and codes of behavior that not only distinguish it from other occupational groups, but also meet its needs as a community.

The engineers, scientists, and administrators who work at NASA may be surprised to find themselves regarded as bearers of tradition and thus the subject of study by folklorists. After all, NASA generally perceives itself as a paragon of progressive science, continually breaking new ground rather than conserving its culture. But another way of looking at occupational culture is to see it as distinctive to a particular agency, company, or organization.

As sociologist James Q. Wilson has observed, “Every organization has a culture, that is, a persistent, patterned way of thinking about the central tasks of and human relationships within an organization. Culture is to an organization what personality is to an individual. Like human culture generally, it is passed on from one generation to the next. It changes slowly, if at all.” The fiftieth anniversary of NASA in 2008 provides a wonderful opportunity for understanding and appreciating its organizational and occupational cultures.

Download NASA: Fifty Years and Beyond

PDF format, 2.7MB, 20Pages.

Steven J. Dick is the chief historian for NASA. He worked as an astronomer and historian of science at the U.S. Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C., for twentyfour years before coming to NASA headquarters in 2003.

Among his books are Plurality of Worlds: The Origins of the Extraterrestrial Life Debate from Democritus to Kant (1982), The Biological Universe: The Twentieth Century Extraterrestrial Life Debate and the Limits of Science (1996), Life on Other Worlds (1998), and The Living Universe: NASA and the Development of Astrobiology (2004).

Stephen J. Garber also works in the NASA History Division. He has written on a wide variety of aerospace topics, including President Kennedy’s Apollo decision, the Congressional cancellation of NASA’s Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Program, the design of the Space Shuttle, and the Soviet Buran Space Shuttle.

James I. Deutsch is the curator of the 2008 Folklife Festival program NASA: Fifty Years and Beyond. He previously curated the National World War II Reunion in 2004 and Festival programs on the Forest Service in 2005 and (as co-curator) the Mekong River in 2007. He is also an adjunct faculty member in George Washington University’s American Studies Department.

Visit NASA's Fiftieth Anniversary in 2008 Website

On October 28-29, 2008, the NASA History Division will host a conference in Washington, D.C. called  NASA's First 50 Years, a Historical Perspective. The purpose of this conference is a scholarly analysis of NASA's first 50 years. 

Over two days at NASA Headquarters, historians will discuss NASA's role in aeronautics,  human spaceflight, space science, life science and Earth science, as well as cross-cutting themes ranging from space access to international relations in space and NASA and the public. 

The agenda, bios of participants, abstracts of papers, and logistics for the conference are available at this link.

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