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From: suzanne@unix.cis.pitt.edu (Suzanne Traub-Metlay)
Newsgroups: sci.space
Subject: Re: NASA Budget
Keywords: geophysics
Message-ID: <140789@unix.cis.pitt.edu>
Date: 17 Jun 91 17:27:13 GMT
References: <18194@venera.isi.edu> <1991Jun7.210944.22123@sequent.com> <30916@hydra.gatech.EDU>
Organization: ANSMET, The Antarctic Search for Meteorites
Lines: 47

In article <30916@hydra.gatech.EDU> ccoprmd@prism.gatech.EDU (Matthew DeLuca) writes:
>In article <1991Jun7.210944.22123@sequent.com> szabo@sequent.com writes:
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>Sputnik and Explorer had their origins in the days after World War II, long
>before anyone thought about the IGY.  Read some of the RAND reports (well, 
>read *about* them...some are still classified) from 1946, or the intelligence
>agency reports in the early 50's...the space race was under way the day 
>V-2 rockets were captured from the Germans.  
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Actually, the "space race" began even earlier -- both the Soviets and the
Germans (governments, that is) kept a watchful and interested eye on the 
doings of the amatuer rocket building clubs prevalent in their nations during 
the 1930s. Sergei Korolev, the "Grand Designer" of the Soviet space program 
during the 1950s and early 1960s, made a pilgrimage to the home of Konstantin
Tsiolkovsky in 1935, just before Tsiolkovsky's death, just to meet the father
of a space program both men considered already under way. The Tsar's science
advisors considered Tsiolkovsky a crackpot but Lenin recognized the
propaganda value of a "manifest destiny" program to spread socialism through
the cosmos and he made Tsiolkovsky a "hero" of the Soviet Union sometime in the
early 1920s. (This isn't as weird as it seems. Lenin at the time was desperate
to promote his electrification program throughout the Soviet Union. Comic
books and science fiction were popular among the very same youth he was trying
to interest in science and technology; their parents might not understand why
electricity was important in their village but students who wanted to be
socialist cosmonauts certainly would and these boys would be the scientists
and engineers Lenin needed to bring his new nation into the industrial 
twentieth century.)
	Stalin felt the same way. While he couldn't care less about the 
civilian applications of space technology, he understood the dramatic and
romantic appeal an exploratory space program had among the populace. By 1953,
he helped establish a Committee on Interplanetary Travel and enthusiastically
promoted Soviet participation in the 1957 IGY.


Suzanne Traub-Metlay
Dept. Geology & Planetary Science
University of Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh, PA 15260