Word: projects
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Club. The project, called SCORE (for Signal Communications by Orbiting Relay Equipment), was begun last June in Convair's beige-carpeted board room in San Diego. Gathered there were Convair officials and the Pentagon's Roy Johnson, chief of the new Advanced Research Projects Agency. Subject of the discussion: Sputnik III. Said Johnson: "We've got to get something big up." Replied J. Raymon Dempsey, manager of Convair's Astronautics Division (since named a vice president): "Well, we could put the whole Atlas in orbit...
That was it. Johnson left Convair experts to work out the details, returned to Washington to push the program through. The decision was made to keep the project secret, and secret it was: no more than 88 people ever knew of it. One day early last week, a few Army Signal Corps technicians showed up discreetly in the President's office, recorded the satellite message that Ike himself had written, tucked it away till it was needed at Cape Canaveral. Even the button pusher who fired the Atlas from the Cape blockhouse did not know that the bird contained...
...firing indicated that a missile, guided into orbit, could also be guided to intercept an enemy satellite or missile. For another, it proved that the Air Force's Ballistic Missile Division, under Major General Bernard Schriever, had been solidly on the right track in missile development. Said Schriever: "Project SCORE shows that we have a booster capable of putting something the size of a capsule and a man into space. We're making the progress that we thought was possible when we started the program on a high-priority basis in 1954. And it shows that the military...
...Martin concept: replace live professors wherever possible with filmed lectures, projectors and closed-circuit television rigs. The project is going strong: 919 students at Compton (enrollment: 4,800) taking a first-year psychology course need never face a flesh-and-blood lecturer, and 1,099 students in freshman algebra and English courses are film-fed most of the time. Their education is largely seen to by a woman worker in a central control room, who feeds the proper reels into the correct machines, and a faculty-member monitor, who patrols four TV theaters at a time, sees that sets work...
Martin rammed through the project without bringing his teachers into the planning and faculty feathers are ruffled. Some objections: students are supposed to bring questions to teachers, "but several of us have the impression that the students are just letting their questions go rather than take the trouble"; day-to-day happenings cannot be related to course material; teachers filming new courses have to be careful not to drag in anything topical. Said one teacher plaintively: "They say it takes the pick-and-shovel repetition out of teaching. But some teachers like to teach...