Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!att!cbnews!military
From: military@cbnews.ATT.COM (William B. Thacker)
Newsgroups: sci.military
Subject: Re: Lessons Learned
Message-ID: <13046@cbnews.ATT.COM>
Date: 11 Jan 90 05:00:27 GMT
References: <12601@cbnews.ATT.COM> <12694@cbnews.ATT.COM> <12762@cbnews.ATT.COM> <12860@cbnews.ATT.COM>
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories
Lines: 44
Approved: military@att.att.com



From: att!utzoo!henry
>From: pwilcox@paldn.UUCP (Peter McLeod Wilcox)
>The Atlas ICBM was well into its operational flight testing when Sputnik
>was launched...
>...the US certainly had orbital capability before the Soviets demonstrated
>it with Sputnik.

One need not invoke Atlas to demonstrate this; in fact, invoking Atlas to
demonstrate it is a bit silly.  Wernher von Braun's Army team had proven
capability to orbit a satellite well before Sputnik.  The launch of
Explorer 1, the first US satellite, was almost identical to a Jupiter C
test flight flown a year or so earlier.  The difference was that for the
test flight, WvB had specific orders that there were to be no, repeat no,
"accidental" satellites, and the fourth-stage rocket motor was therefore
to be a dummy, no excuses allowed.  He followed orders, but carefully put
the backup booster into protected storage in case there was sudden need
for it.  Which is how he got a satellite up on 90 days' notice when the
politicians finally let him.

>There are several possible reasons for this, the performance of Atlas
>was highly classified, Atlas was strictly a military operation and
>Vanguard was a more scientific oriented project, take your choice.

Again, there isn't really any secret about this.  Vanguard was the project
designated to launch the first US satellite, pure and simple.  Since that
decision was meant to resolve a long and bitter battle among the Army,
Navy, and Air Force, it was final and debate was closed.  The semi-
civilian nature of Vanguard was considered appropriate for something
as momentous as the first satellite launch, especially under Eisenhower
(who, despite his background, wanted the military kept in its place),
but the ban on competition was simply a matter of who won the turf battle.
In the end, of course, Vanguard was persistently under-funded and the
technical difficulties were persistently minimized, and when it was asked
for an immediate response to Sputnik, it couldn't deliver and the Army
could.  (Almost nobody remembers that Vanguard became a fairly successful
program once it was given a bit more time and money to debug the hardware.)

The ultimate resolution to the turf battles over spaceflight was, of course,
to transfer most of it to a new fully-civilian agency, NASA.

                                     Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
                                 uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu