Research

Resoundingly reviewed as “a must-read,” Ronald Reagan and the Space Frontier is the latest publication from award-winning author and Elliott School Professor Emeritus John M. Logsdon. With what former NASA Chief Historian Roger D. Launius calls “verve and style” and “unparalleled knowledge,” Dr. Logsdon has crafted the first comprehensive telling of the Reagan administration’s civilian and commercial space policies. Gilbert Rye, the former National Security Council director for space programs, went so far as to describe the book’s “insightful analysis” as “a critical foundation that will benefit students, public servants, and industry executives for many years to come.” In the run-up to the book’s official launch, Dr. Logsdon offered further insight on his groundbreaking publication:

“Ronald Reagan and the Space Frontier is my third (and likely last!) study of presidential decision-making on space, following John F. Kennedy and the Race to the Moon (2010) and After Apollo? Richard Nixon and the American Space Program (2015). Reagan was personally the most pro-space president in US history, and made decisions with respect to the space shuttle, a space station, international space cooperation, and space commercialization that merited a full treatment.

Although Reagan viewed space as the ‘final frontier,’ his administration’s decisions on space were much more pragmatic than visionary. I might have expected him to set ambitious goals for NASA, but he did not impose his perspectives on what policy options were offered him. Instead, he allowed the alternative futures in space to be defined by often contentious interactions among his advisers, and chose the path forward from what they defined as feasible, given the president's concern about budget deficits and his other priorities. Reagan was, of course, a “great communicator,” and dressed his space decisions in rhetoric about 'American exceptionalism' and the rightful role of the United States as a global leader.

Some have accused Reagan of ‘sleepwalking through history.’ That is not the image of Ronald Reagan that comes through in my book. He had a particular style of leadership, setting out his broad priorities and allowing his staff and agency heads to devise ways of achieving them. He thought through the options presented to him, then chose a course of action that fit into his overall image of where the United States should be headed. He was not a detail-oriented, top-down decision maker, but he was a leader.”

John M. Logsdon

Professor Emeritus of Political Science and International Affairs

In their Smithsonian Magazine article, “What We Learned About Our Human Origins in 2018,” Smithsonian experts, paleolithic archaeologist Ella Beaudoin and paleoanthropologist Briana Pobiner, outline a year of significant discoveries in human evolution. For Beaudoin and Pobiner, among all the discoveries of the past year that allowed the world to better know what it means to be human, those resulting from Elliott School Professor of Anthropology and International Affairs Alison Brooks’ work at the Olorgesailie site in southern Kenya rank in the top six. For years, Professor Brooks and Smithsonian paleoanthropologist Rick Potts have co-lead a team exploring archaeological and paleoenvironmental records at Olorgesailie. In 2018, the Olorgesailie team published three papers in Science documenting human behavioral change and climatic variation. Among other exciting findings, Brooks and Potts’ work indicates that early humans responded to climatic uncertainty with enhanced innovation, social connection, and symbolic communication. For further information on these discoveries, please see their Science papers:

• “Long-distance stone transport and pigment use in the earliest Middle Stone Age,”
• “Environmental dynamics during the onset of the Middle Stone Age in eastern Africa,” and
• “Chronology of the Acheulean to Middle Stone Age transition in eastern Africa.”