Word: sputnik
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...chairman at upwards of $285,000) is an attractive, extraverted salesman-impatient with details or lengthy briefings, a man who shrinks from offending a friend or customer, who agonizes over difficult decisions. In his 26 months as Defense Secretary, which began so dramatically only five days after the first Sputnik soared into history, McElroy has had a hit-or-miss record (TIME, June 22). As a salesman, succeeding rough-handed "Engine Charlie" Wilson, he did a brilliant job of persuading Congress to accept his budgets-and then some. Congress, in fact, gave him some $806 million more than he asked...
...steady progression of Russian experiments-from Sputnik to hitting the moon to photographing the moon's far side, to extensive space tests with animals-indicates a Soviet determination to get man into space, and get him there as fast as possible. It also indicates that the moon is the Russians' first space objective...
...while after the first Sputnik soared aloft two years ago, all Soviet scientists suddenly became ten feet tall, with brains to match. Since then, U.S. scientists have flocked to Russia and under the rules of the current thaw, have seen things that no Westerner had ever seen before. Interviewing the returnees produced a calm, post-panic assessment of just how good (and how backward) Russia's science is. See SCIENCE, Scouting the Russians...
Even before the Sputnik era, emphasis on science and learning taken on their own merits was increasing, and the demand for General Education was on the wane. A similar transformation taking place within Harvard has put more and more emphasis on professional training and scholarship...
...division of responsibility has lost months for Von Braun's Saturn program, the U.S.'s best chance to match the big Soviet moon rockets in the mid-1960s. Von Braun proposed Saturn, with rocket engines designed to generate 1.500,000 Ibs. of blast-off thrust, after Sputnik I revealed the U.S.S.R.'s enormous launching capacity. Nobody in authority responded until the Russians blasted 7,000 Ibs. into space with Sputnik III in May 1958. Then the Pentagon ordered Von Braun to get to work on Saturn. The Budget Bureau promptly tried to stop it, and Director...