Word: space
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Misnamed Project. Why has the U.S. failed to make an adequate national response to the challenge of space? The failure traces not to a lack of technological skill but to a lack of vision. In the confusion of U.S. space programs, the bulk of the blame can be laid upon no single person-except perhaps the man whose responsibility it is to boss the whole show: President Eisenhower...
...space lag has its roots in the pre-Eisenhower era, beginning with the inability of President Harry Truman's scientific advisers, back in the mid-1940's to see any future in ballistic missiles. To carry a payload as big as a nuclear warhead, the scientists argued, a ballistic missile would have to be uneconomically bulky. So the U.S. channeled its missile efforts into now-obsolescent air-breathing missiles-Snark, Navaho, Regulus, etc.-that were inherently useless for space work. Meanwhile, the Russians were pushing ahead with ballistic missiles. By 1953, when a team of U.S. physicists headed...
...moon but to hit an earthly target from a launching site elsewhere on the earth, and U.S. missiles appear to be about as fit for that job as their Soviet counterparts. But in concentrating on closing the gap in military-missile technology, the Eisenhower Administration neglected the challenge of space. When the U.S. undertook its first serious space project in mid-1955, as part of the International Geophysical year effort, the Administration settled for a minimal, low-priority program, misnamed Project Vanguard. In retrospect, it was no wonder that the U.S.S.R. got into space first...
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...
...years after Sputnik I, the U.S. still has no broad, coordinated space program with clearly defined, long-range goals. When a congressional committee tried to find out a few months ago what overall goals the various programs were pushing toward, ARPA's Johnson testified that he did not know of any "total long-term space program." Echoed Lieut. General Bernard Schriever, Air Force research and development chief: "I am not aware whether or not there is an effort being made to lay out one single program...