Word: vanguard
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...main reason for putting Vanguard into a separate, low-priority compartment was that the Pentagon wanted to keep the satellite project from interfering with the U.S.'s top-priority program of military ballistic-missile research. For eight lost years after World War II, the U.S. had spent an average of less than $1,000,000 a year on long-range ballistic-missile projects. The Eisenhower Administration decided in 1954 to push ballistic-missile development, after the physicists decided that they could make a hydrogen warhead light enough to be carried in the nose of a missile. The Russians, well...
Once the NSC reached the decision to box off Project Vanguard, it made sense to let the Navy take charge: in experimenting with its Vikings and Aerobees, the Navy had pushed a lot farther ahead in high-altitude-missile research than either the Army or the Air Force...
...impression on Administration policymakers. Asked at a November 1954 press conference whether he was concerned that the Russians might win the satellite race, Defense Secretary Wilson snorted: "I wouldn't care if they did." If the Administration had wanted to win the race, it could have speeded up Vanguard's schedule or got the Army going on a crash satellite program utilizing Jupiter (Army missilemen boasted last week that they could get a satellite into an orbit on a month's notice). But the Administration did neither...
...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...