"You are watching NASA television" space, science, and NASA’s governmental television model
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Abstract
This dissertation explores the relationship between NASA and television. The notion of NASA television often evokes associations with Cold War propaganda, which scholarship on the topic has largely centered. However, not only have many NASA television activities served internal operational purposes, but most have occurred after the Space Race period. Since that era, the agency has created its own satellite television network (NTV), bolstered its production capabilities, developed new forms of television to target different audiences within and outside its walls, and taken its television online. In parallel, television and its logics have continued to pervade NASA’s exploration, engineering, and scientific work. Using a television and media studies approach, this dissertation explores the agency’s extensive engagements with television, highlighting the continued importance of television in NASA’s history and analyzing some of the ways NASA’s specific political economy impacted these practices. Because NASA is a federal agency, I argue that its television belongs to a model I call “governmental television,” a type of television that differs from prevailing understandings of television in the U.S. This affects its content, funding and distribution structures, accessibility, intellectual property regime, and relationships to other entities and their television. NASA television also operates in particular physical (outer space), cultural (scientific and technological), and institutional (executive branch) environments. As a result, it at times challenges, and at others nuances, expands, or reinforces some of the concepts and attributes historically associated with television, such as liveness, commercialism, and the public interest. Ultimately, by examining NASA TV’s content, audiences, television forms, scientific discourse, and military and commercial connections, this dissertation reveals that the government has been much more involved in television than dominant histories have conveyed. Furthermore, television has played a profound role in the operation of government by shoring up support for government activities and agendas, and by shaping and reinforcing power relations that benefit the United States and its economy. As I will show, the framework of governmental TV makes legible the ways various government agencies operate in and through TV. The case of NASA television provides unique insights into the relationships between television and science, physics, and the terrestrial; between the civilian and defense sides of government; and between the government and the commercial space and media industries.
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2025