Introduction
Our goal is to encourage domestic and international space actors to collect and preserve aerospace history by providing pragmatic historical and policy justifications as well as archiving best practices, models, support networks and other assistance that will reduce your barriers to involvement.
“To Boldly Preserve” will be a conduit to aid that collection and preservation but not do any preservation itself. This both avoids potential professional conflicts of interest among its member organizations and allows more local initiative and experimentation.
This website, toboldlypreserve.space, is a vade mecum offering companies, organizations and individuals a framework to guide them in thinking about what they want to accomplish. We can show how to train people with basic historical and archival skills and connect them with professional archivists, records managers, historians and their networks.
The Toolkit Explores Four Basic Questions
Why should we preserve and collect our history?
What should we preserve?
How do we preserve our history?
What are common concerns to consider?
What should we preserve?
How do we preserve our history?
What are common concerns to consider?
Whether a corporation, association, nonprofit, or government entity, your work comprises part of the tapestry of the human exploration and exploitation of space. You know you are making history by venturing into space. To Boldly Preserve wants your records collected and preserved so that future generations will have an accurate and complete history of what happened. Your story – our larger story of space exploration and exploitation -- cannot be told without your data.
Why Should We Preserve and Collect Our History?
Consider why you want to do this. Beyond the principled goal to benefit the future, preserving history can be justified for pragmatic reasons. Mergers, moves, and milestones are the three most common prompts to preserve a firm’s history. The first two often necessitate reducing corporate records while the third is a celebration. All three are opportunities to start preserving your organization’s past as well as institutionalizing procedures to collect its ongoing work. The British Managing Business Archives offers an excellent explanation of how businesses benefit by maintaining their own archives.
Most concretely, archiving your firm’s history provides an anchor for corporate leadership. As firms like Daimler Benz have discovered, harnessing company history may also serve as an income center, a means of marketing and company promotion, and a way to strengthen company self-identity. Indeed, the Business Archives Section of the Society of American
Archivists found archives support eleven distinct business activities, ranging from litigation and trademark protection to staff training and investor relations. The Section stated,
Archivists found archives support eleven distinct business activities, ranging from litigation and trademark protection to staff training and investor relations. The Section stated,
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“The corporate archivist selects and preserves the key documents that reconstruct a company's history, products or services, and development. The result is a unique corporate asset--information and documentation that can be used for important legal, marketing, communications and financial decisions. A business archives can give managers perspective and the ability to make decisions today confident that they understand the historical context. “A business archives creates a reliable internal information system. It manages the information and significant records concerning a company's key strengths--and its weaknesses. Without the ability to select and retrieve archival materials and information, a company forfeits access to its own history lessons. With an archives, that same company gains the advantage of remembering what others forget.”
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The flow of government space programs from the early days of space exploration to today offer other examples of the benefits to a strong historic record. As NASA’s programs and priorities have shifted over the decades, they have often turned to or even leaned on their programmatic history to overcome mission challenges. The mission architecture of the current Artemis program offers a concrete example of the advantages of turning to history to build the future.
During the early development of the Space Launch System (SLS), which is designed to launch NASA’s return to the Moon, the agency turned to its past successes to inform the design. A new generation of propulsion engineers at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center used technical documentation dating back to the Apollo era to inform their decisions for powering SLS. In 2013, a team of engineers even went so far as to pull an Apollo-era F-1 engine from mothballs at the Smithsonian to test fire its gas generator. Ultimately, NASA turned to a different legacy program to power SLS. The first stage of NASA’s new Moon rocket will be powered by evolved versions of the Space Shuttle’s RS-25 main engines and extended solid rocket boosters.
In early 2020, NASA’s selection of the multi-company National Team to develop a lunar lander candidate for Artemis offered another example of the power of history and legacy to move the future forward. The team, which consists of Blue Origin, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Draper, is relying on proven hardware and technical knowledge dating back to the Apollo program for designing its integrated landing system. The press announcement at the formation of the team emphasized this depth of historic knowledge when making its case for its new lander. Historic thinking permeates the Artemis program through the emphasis on the use of “legacy hardware” as a means to reduce costs, accelerate development timelines, and build confidence in mission assurance and represents the practical application of historical preservation.
In early 2020, NASA’s selection of the multi-company National Team to develop a lunar lander candidate for Artemis offered another example of the power of history and legacy to move the future forward. The team, which consists of Blue Origin, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Draper, is relying on proven hardware and technical knowledge dating back to the Apollo program for designing its integrated landing system. The press announcement at the formation of the team emphasized this depth of historic knowledge when making its case for its new lander. Historic thinking permeates the Artemis program through the emphasis on the use of “legacy hardware” as a means to reduce costs, accelerate development timelines, and build confidence in mission assurance and represents the practical application of historical preservation.
What Should We Preserve?
Saving everything you generate is expensive and unnecessary. Archivists historically collected written material like lab notebooks and company correspondence but increasingly have expanded to oral, photographic, video, and digital material. The Hagley Museum and Library, one of the largest repositories of business archives, lists as priorities:
- Foundational documents like charters
- Meeting minutes of boards of directors, subsidiaries, and special committees
- Executive officer correspondence, email, and records
- Financial records
- Departmental records
- Images and recordings (including PowerPoint presentations)
- Publications
As well as suggestions about what to collect for a firm, the British Managing Business Archives website offers guidance specifically for Research and Development. Large research organizations, like the Smithsonian Institution, have internal preservation and archiving requirements which may be relevant.
Oral histories are increasingly important for preserving memories and adding perspectives that often are not captured by documents. A strong institutional and academic framework supports the growing popularity and increasing quality of oral history efforts. The Oral History Association offers a wealth of information, including helpful best practices for individuals and organizations considering starting to collect oral histories.
Many historical repositories maintain active oral history programs as part of their collection development (Computer History Museum, Science History Institute, Hagley Museum & Library, The Museum of Flight, Huntington-USC Aerospace History Project) as well as archives and special collections housed at academic institutions such as University of Houston Clear Lake, University of Alabama Birmingham, and Purdue University. Some professional organizations and cultural heritage businesses (IEEE History Center, Winthrop Group) will consult on or even undertake oral history projects.
Physical Artifacts
If you have physical artifacts you think should be preserved, a museum and not an archive is the place to contact. Like archivists, however, museum curators seek accompanying documents to understand the objects and place them in their historical context. You should contact a space-oriented museum like the Seattle Museum of Flight, which seeks items that its curators consider historically important and match the museum’s interest. The Smithsonian National Air & Space Museum has seven criteria for collecting:
- “The object is consistent with the Museum's goals.
- It is appropriate for exhibition purposes and proves useful as an educational tool within an exhibit.
- The object was associated with a notable, historical event related to aviation and/or spaceflight or depict such an event.
- The object was owned by, associated with or created by a notable person associated with the history of aviation and/or spaceflight.
- The object has significant intrinsic value because it is the best of its type or one of a kind.
- The object will contribute to research and scholarship in disciplines related to the history of aviation and/or spaceflight.
- The object represents a technological innovation or invention associated with the history of aviation and/or spaceflight.”
How Do We Preserve Our History?
The toboldlypreserve.space toolkit provides a wide set of options depending on your interest, commitment, and
organization. The two basic rules of establishing a preservation policy are 1) do no harm, and 2) think through what
you want to accomplish before beginning.
organization. The two basic rules of establishing a preservation policy are 1) do no harm, and 2) think through what
you want to accomplish before beginning.
At the small end are having a records management policy as basic as keeping an updated backup of materials and conducting occasional self-conducted oral or written responses to a set of questions by key individuals. The growing practice of personal archiving offers useful guidance for such efforts. At the other extreme, a large firm like Boeing may have its own archive and archivist. In between are numerous options to collect, preserve, and sometimes disseminate corporate history including preserving your materials in-house, outsourcing or hiring archival experts (e.g., Winthrop Group or a free-lance archivist), or depositing or donating records with the Hagley Library, The Museum of Flight, the University of Alabama, Huntsville, the Huntington Library or other academic or 501(c)3 repositories.
Another consideration is to capture the recollections of key personnel through oral histories, in particular those who may be outgoing or already retired from your organization. As earlier generations of researchers, engineers, technicians, administrators, and users retire, they form both a treasure of untapped personal histories about the first decades of spaceflight and a disappearing source as people age and die. As John L. Goodman wrote in his 2018 History and Archives Contribute to the Success of Space Flight Programs, “I ask engineers to talk to me about organizational structure, not personality. That gets engineers talking. I regret I did not record older engineers with fading memories earlier, so I tell younger engineers to record themselves now.”
An expanding world of resources exists to help you. We strongly urge you to consult with an archivist, historian or other professional preserver. Two potential sources of support are a local archive, often found at a nearby university or historical society, and your professional society which may have a history committee, like the IEEE History Center and the AIAA History Committee.
Resources
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Community-Driven Archives
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The Library of Congress, “Personal archiving”
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Special Collections, Williams College, “Personal archiving”
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Libraries and School of Information Studies, Purdue University, “Personal digital archiving”
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The Society of American Archivists, “Donating Your Organization's Records to a Repository”
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What are Common Concerns to Consider?
Collecting and preserving your history will demand sustained effort and resources. To Boldly Preserve wants you to be active; we also want you to appreciate what you are initiating. Resources are a major concern: You should tailor your efforts to be as thorough and efficient but also affordable as possible. Take advantage of the specialists in archiving and history to develop a program that meets your needs while producing high-quality results.
Legal concerns about archiving aerospace history fall into three areas: complying with International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR), keeping Personal Identifying Information (PII), and fear of exposure to lawsuits by keeping records. The first two areas are usually addressed by your existing records management procedures.
Fear of attracting lawsuits is sometimes used as an argument against preserving your history. Some firms do practice “archiving by lawyers,” systematically throwing away everything not required for immediate corporate operations or legal requirements. In reality, keeping documentation helps your legal case, not hurts, because that collection enables you to fully tell your story. For patent cases, a well-organized archive like the AT&T Archives and History Center can provide a formidable defense and offense.
Perceived company “failures” also represent common concerns when considering what to archive but may yield important historic insight. Failure is rarely discussed but is normal, especially in high technology fields. From a historical perspective, a canceled project or closed firm can be as interesting as an ongoing success. Preserving records seen as failure from a business
perspective, however, often proves difficult for reasons ranging from a reluctance or embarrassment about the unsuccessful venture to the disappearance of a failed firm.
perspective, however, often proves difficult for reasons ranging from a reluctance or embarrassment about the unsuccessful venture to the disappearance of a failed firm.
When viewed from the perspective of history, however, even so-called dead ends can add valuable insight and depth of knowledge. Boeing’s Dyna- soar as a predecessor to the Space Shuttle, and the evolution of the Iridium satellite constellation into Iridium NEXT following the original company’s bankruptcy offer just two examples of history made richer by events that could be seen as business failures.
A separate issue is what level of access and openness you want. You may feel comfortable putting some documents online or you may prefer to restrict your materials for a decade or more. There is a distinction between the practices of historical preservation and education/communication.
If your company has historically significant records which should be preserved but is not comfortable having those records in the public eye at this time, there are several solutions. Perhaps the simplest is to keep those records internally for potential disclosure at some future time. If internal preservation is undesirable or impractical, external preservation in a museum or archive may still be possible.
Museums will often work with donors (whether corporate or individual) to make sure their records are handled according to their wishes. This includes restrictions around sensitive material. Collections containing sensitive correspondence, for example, may be held away from public access until some designated event takes place such as the passing of the donor, or even their descendants. For corporate archives, the Hagley Library offers another option: Donations can be taken in with an embargo built into the agreement that records not be released until a certain designated amount of time has passed.
By separating the preservation and communication aspects of historic recordkeeping, companies, archives, and museums may be able to overcome concerns about public disclosure while simultaneously capturing a more robust account of corporate history.
For those interested in communicating their heritage, the Engineering and Technology History Wiki (ETHW) may be a good option. Sponsored by nine engineering societies, the wiki offers a wealth of historical information, documents, and oral histories.