Shades of Gray (Library of Flight Series) Review

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(More customer reviews)This is an important, impressive, and infuriating book that should be on the shelf of anyone interested in the history of space policy. Practitioners should also read it for the story of how military space policy originated and evolved since the 1950s. The author notes that the U.S. government supports three separate space programs. The first is a national security space program which served as the wellspring for the other two. It was established to ensure that reconnaissance information about the Soviet Union and other potential enemies could be secured with a minimum of risk. The replacement of other methods of securing this information moved to spacecraft in the 1950s and has continued to evolve ever since. This program is highly secretive and its details virtually unknown. The other two programs are a civil program managed by NASA and conducted with considerable fanfare and public scrutiny and a military program built around intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM). There is also a fourth commercial space program, but it is not conducted by the federal government, only regulated by it.
Temple's emphasis in this book is clearly on the first of these three government space programs, and he has assembled a broad analysis focusing on its development over the last fifty years. This work represents the most in-depth study of the national security space effort yet published. The level of detail is impressive and represents an important statement of the state of knowledge on the subject. It is also infuriating because of the lack of historical narrative--the chapters read more like individual essays taking on a specific theme--and the text raises as many questions as it answers. That is in no small measure the result of the exceptionally high classification of information about the national security program. While I wish this were not the case, I cannot blame the author for this fact. But, as a result, this is far from the last word on the subject.
Temple argues that the early years of these three programs witnessed considerable synergy and mutual support. He believes that they converged, however, beginning in the 1970s over the nature of the launch vehicle to be used for reaching space. NASA pressed all entities of the federal government to launch its payloads on the Space Shuttle then under development. "When they shared a large stable of related expendable launch vehicles," he noted, "they could work quietly to schedule launchpads and minimize conflicts that otherwise would highlight the most secret of the programs" (p. 593). Reliance on the shuttle, however, forced interdependence in ways that were detrimental to all of the nation's space programs. Temple concluded, "That was more than a simple policy failure and created problems that still ripple through all of the U.S. space programs" (p. 594). Temple ends by noting that the era of spaceflight has just begun and that the U.S. will have an important role to fill in the future with its national security program.
This is a significant work and I urge all who are serious about understanding the development of the national security space arena to read it.

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The United States has developed the most expensive and capable reconnaissance satellites the world has ever seen. American satellites can photograph terrorist bases, listen in on radio conversations, sniff out clandestine nuclear tests and spot rocket launches anywhere in the world. The goal of these assets, simply put, is to prevent surprises. In Shades of Gray, Dr. L. Parker Temple III describes the development of these capabilities in unprecedented historical detail and context. He taps recently declassified documents and melds them with his own behind-the-scenes experiences as an Air Force space expert at the Pentagon in the 1980s. In this work, Temple tracks the evolution of space reconnaissance systems from their seeds in the painful lessons of Pearl Harbor through the challenges of today. More than any other book, Shades of Gray places development of these capabilities into their proper context with the overall U.S. space program.

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