Word: nasa
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...York, the Defense Department's director of research and engineering, dismissed the Soviet lead in the space race as "more a question of acute embarrassment than national survival." Engineer T. Keith Glennan, head of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, called for a "sane course"-which in NASA bafflegab seems to mean the same program that has kept the U.S. lagging behind. Roy Johnson, head of the Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency, could offer no better proposal than the creation of a "psychological warfare department" to "answer" Soviet space feats...
Squabbles in the Web. The U.S.'s efforts to narrow the space gap since Sputnik I have slogged along under a heavy handicap of organizational confusion. Central in the confusion is an arbitrary, irrelevant division of space programs into "civilian" (Glennan's NASA) and "military" (Johnson's ARPA). Coordination between the two domains is supposedly achieved by the Civilian-Military Liaison Committee, the real purpose of which seems to be to provide a roost for amiable, ineffectual William M. Holaday, who was head of the abolished guided missiles office. But that basic split-up is only...
...Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency, headed by Roy Johnson, sometime General Electric executive, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, headed by T. Keith Glennan, engineer, ex-Hollywood studio manager and president-on-leave of Cleveland's Case Institute of Technology. Neither ARPA nor NASA has enough authority or resources to set long-range goals and march toward them. Splinters of space programs are further scattered among the Army, Navy and Air Force, and the Defense Department's Office of Research and Engineering. Result: a maze of divided responsibilities in which appalling amounts of time...
Last year J.P.L. was taken over from the Army by the newly created NASA. J.P.L. still does specific military work, but its main job is basic and applied research to further the U.S. push into space. One laboratory investigates the behavior of fuels, plastics and other materials at temperatures simulating space's icy cold. Long-range planners devise methods to map the far side of the moon. Biggest single project is Vega, the U.S.'s most advanced space vehicle. Expected to fly in about 18 months, the first Vega will use an Atlas D as its first stage...
...soon as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration revealed last spring the identities of the seven Project Mercury astronauts (TIME, April 20), newspaper chains, magazines and radio-TV networks bombarded NASA with bids for exclusive rights to the great adventure story. Firmly NASA turned down all comers: the U.S. taxpayer, who was financing the man-into-space project, was entitled to the full official story-free. But in disclaiming its own right to merchandise the personal accounts of the seven chosen astronauts, NASA passed that right to the spacemen themselves...