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From: smb@ulysses.homer.nj.att.com (Steven M. Bellovin)
Newsgroups: rec.aviation,sci.space.shuttle
Subject: Re: Dynasoar (was rumors regarding SR-71)
Keywords: Where would we be now?
Message-ID: <11347@ulysses.homer.nj.att.com>
Date: 21 Mar 89 16:27:24 GMT
References: <524@gonzo.UUCP> <1475@petsd.UUCP> <13987@elroy.Jpl.Nasa.Gov> <94977@sun.Eng.Sun.COM>
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Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill
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In article <94977@sun.Eng.Sun.COM>, fiddler%concertina@Sun.COM (Steve Hix) writes:
> I think Eisenhower is to be credited (?) with ruling that the American
> manned space program *must* be run by a civilian agency.  

There's a wonderful book, ``The Political History of the Space Program'',
that I'd recommend to all readers of this book.  It is quite true that
Eisenhower *tried* to keep the space program civilian, but failed in
the face of the public reaction to Sputnik.  The story is quite fascinating.

First, in the 1950s there were two separate efforts in this country to
launch a satellite, the Army's Explorer program, using a converted Redstone
missle, and the Navy's Vanguard, which was designed from scratch as
a satellite launcher.  Despite pressure from the military -- which knew
around 1950 or 1951 how valuable spy satellites could be (there was a
Rand Corporation study) -- to move forward, Eisenhower favored Vanguard.
His reasons weren't entirely altruistic, of course.  First, it was
assumed that the USSR would claim that an American satellite was violating
Soviet air space (and they did indeed make that claim a few years later).
If the first American satellite was purely scientific, and under the
auspices of the International Geophysical Year, it would be much easier
to defend.  And that, of course, would set a precedent.  For that matter,
if the Soviets launched first, that would be an even better precedent.
It's easy for the U.S. to launch a satellite that doesn't pass over the
Soviet Union; the converse is much harder.  Thus, certain people in
the administration didn't even care much if the Soviets ``won'' the
race to orbit.  Finally, the book claims that Eisenhower was concerned
with the centralization of technology and innovation that would be
concommitant with a militarized space program.  To my way of thinking,
that claim is not as well supported by the evidence, but it's still
worth thinking about.

Anyway, the Soviets did launch first, and the U.S. public panicked.  This
was made even worse when the first Vanguard blew up on the pad.  Ike
gave the go-ahead to von Braun and the rest of the Army team; they launched
their converted missle successfully before Vanguard got off the ground.

Another tidbit from the book:  a primary purpose of the civilian space
program was military technology development.  More precisely, the Powers
that Be in the Pentagon realized that if there was another war, it would
not be possible to develop a state-of-the-art aerospace industry from
scratch.  Engineers (and for that matter factories and manufacturing
techniques) take years to train; there would be no time to build up the
necessary cadre in time to make a difference in the next war.  Thus,
they felt, the government had to maintain the industry just to keep the
design capacity available.  The civilian aircraft industry was fine, but
there were many aspects they weren't interested in.  And a large-enough
defense aircraft procurement policy was politically unsupportable.  The
space program, though, would push the state of the art, and could masquerade
as pure science.  And of course, the military did have their own uses
for orbiting satellites anyway.

		--Steve Bellovin