Word: sputniked
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Dates: during 1957-1957
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...Dwight Eisenhower had ever faced. The President had backed both the defense budget and the missile program, but the loudest noise in the defense area in recent weeks had been made by Charlie Wilson genially hacking away at military expenditures that he had let get out of hand. Militarily, Sputnik, plus Khrushchev's bold rocket-rattling, gave a bald warning about the grim missile race to come. Beyond all this, the President was bound to bear the brunt of a special American reaction: the U.S. takes deep pride in its technical skills and technological prowess, in its ability...
Last week, with post-Sputnik hindsight, Director I. M. Levitt of Philadelphia's Fels Planetarium called that 1955 decision an "astonishing piece of stupidity." Levitt's argument, echoed by Army missilemen: the Army's Jupiter intermediate ballistic missile, well along in 1955, could and should have been adapted for launching a satellite (a modified Jupiter has reached an altitude of 650 miles, higher than Sputnik's orbit). But when it was made, the National Security Council decision seemed sensible enough. The U.S. had committed itself to pass on to the rest of the world, including Russia...
...from speeding up, in fact, Vanguard lagged behind its original plan for a late-1957 launching of a 20-odd-lb. satellite (less than one-eighth as heavy as Russia's claim for Sputnik). The stretched-out schedule calls for launching smaller test satellites late this year, orbiting the first 21½-lb. ball next spring. The satellites themselves are ready to soar, reports Vanguard's softspoken, pipe-puffing Director John P. Hagen. But the launching vehicle is still undergoing tests. Its first stage, an adaptation of the Navy's Viking, has to work perfectly...
After the Russians got their Sputnik into its orbit, an Administration official said he felt an urge to "strangle" Budget Director Percival Brundage. But the Administration has budgeted for Vanguard all the funds that the men who run the project asked for ($110 million so far). And that stock villain, interservice rivalry, did not slow up the project, according to Vanguard scientists. In fact, the scientists, from Dr. Hagen down, insist that Vanguard has not failed, that it will reach its basic goal of orbiting a satellite before...
...midst of the cold war, Vanguard's cool scientific goal proved to be disastrously modest: the Russians got there first. The post-Sputnik White House explanation that the U.S. was not in a satellite "race" with Russia was not just an after-the-fact alibi. Said Dr. Hagen ten months ago: "We are not attempting in any way to race with the Russians." But in the eyes of the world, the U.S. was in a satellite race whether it wanted to be or not, and because of the Administration's costly failure of imagination, Project Vanguard shuffled along...