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Aviation History
1960
1960 - 1238.PDF
*•»' i 176 FLIGHT, 5 August 1960 SPACE SPECIAL SPACE is a political issue in the United States this year. Whatthe Russians had not done to make it so, American politi-cians have done—or will do between now and November, when the national elections are held. America's second place inspace, tacitly admitted by Dr T. Keith Glennan, Administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, has longproduced an uneasy feeling in the minds of many Americans. Public-opinion polls, usually insensitive to more than likes anddislikes for individual candidates, have picked up the general public's feeling of shame, surprise, embarrassment and more thana little fear that "we're behind in space." This feeling was evidenced even last year on many a residentialstreet in the US, when a surprising number of people could be found standing in the middle of the street at dusk better toobserve the reflected light from the fast-moving Sputnik 3 as it passed overhead. It was further shown when Congress quicklypassed a record $915-million budget for NASA for the year that began July 1, 1960, and opined that supplemental appropriationswould be available later on if NASA saw the need. The Space Committee of the House of Representatives went further, andspanked NASA for not moving ahead at a faster pace, for a "lack of urgency," and for not having a programme ambitious enoughfor the needs of the next decade. NASA's problems have been many and varied from the start.Originally, it was presented to the public as a sort of emerging butterfly of space from the chrysalid of the old aviation-orientedNACA. A stroke of the presidential pen ejected an entire civil service organization from the safety of the atmosphere to theuncertainty of space. That there was floundering is not surprising. The Administration also took over established space facilitiesand personnel from the Navy, Army and Air Force—which meant that a lot of roots were torn up from Service soil and replanted inold NACA soil, with the inevitable shifting around and soul- searching among the people concerned in the various units. Launch of Atlas-Agena carrying Midas 2 satellite on May 24 AMERICA'S SPACE PROGRAMME By a Special Correspondent When it was created on October 1, 1958, NASA had a staff of8,040 people who came from NACA. These were located for the most part at the Langley Research Center in Virginia, the AmesResearch Center in California and the Lewis Research Center near Cleveland, Ohio, in addition to headquarters personnel inWashington and a small group of flight test specialists at Wallops Island, Virginia. By June 30, 1961, NASA expects to have a total of more than16,000 employees and will pay them salaries adding up to $171 million per year. Some 2,000 of them will be at the new GoddardSpace Flight Center near Beltsville, Maryland, now under con- struction as the future headquarters of all NASA spaceflightactivities. In addition, NASA acquired some 400 people about 18 monthsago from the US Navy's Naval Research Laboratory. These were Vanguard specialists who were transferred to the space agency.Then, last year, NASA took over contract operation of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Pasadena, California, from the US AirForce, and this brought 2,700 contract employees under NASA direction. Only a few weeks ago NASA took over the MarshallCenter at Huntsville, Alabama, from the US Army. In the pro- cess it got Dr Wernher von Braun and his tightly knit, able andpublicly recognized crew who developed the Jupiter and Redstone rockets, and who launched the first successful US satellite. Some5,500 people are involved in the latter transfer, the largest single body of personnel NASA has absorbed. As a result of these shifts,NASA has had to spend much time so far just working out the problems of its own management. NASA plans for this decade call for some 250 major launchingsof space vehicles, including flights to circumnavigate Mars and Venus. There are to be unmanned landings on the Moon, andperhaps even return flights, but no man is to be put on the Moon until the 1970s, according to present schedules. This is one thingfor which NASA is criticized in Congress for "lack of a sense of urgency," inasmuch as a number of US scientists have suggestedthat a manned lunar landing could be made as early as 1968. Undoubtedly the Space Administration's spending will in-crease. Dr Glennan has estimated that it might reach two or three billion dollars a year during the next decade, and perhapseven more. Predictions here are at best only estimates, and rather wild ones at that in view of the diversity of programmes underway and the inter-related way they will affect one another in the years ahead.Since it came into existence, NASA has had to rely upon military equipment to conduct most of its space research, but italways realized that it would have to go far beyond the boosters and other equipment available from the Air Force, Army andNavy if it were to accomplish its basic mission. The space agency has been faced with the need to bring theUSA abreast of the Soviet Union in space, to develop and prove new instruments to conduct investigations of space, todemonstrate communications and meteorological satellites, to develop new and very much larger boosters for deep spaceresearch, and to develop propulsion techniques for use in outer space. At the same time it had to carry on its regular quota ofaeronautical research, including the X-15 programme. To date NASA results are at best spottv, with two happyevents as prime examples of its best effort. They are the Tiros 1 weather satellite, which transmitted 22,952 cloud-cover photo-graphs in the 89 days its instruments functioned, and the success- ful Pioneer 5 paddlewheel probe that has transmitted space-environment data from more than 20 million miles out. NASA is now entering a new period in which it is more masterof its own house, and the rate of progress will be much faster. Even so, this progress must come in orderly, logical steps ofprogression. Instruments must be designed, built and space- tested before they can be utilized in space vehicles. The spaceenvironment must be investigated and better understood before manned flights deep into space, or even as far as the Moon, can beattempted. To accomplish these things, NASA has undertaken a vast programme of scientific research. Larger space probes ableto penetrate either deeper into space or to carry more and heavier equipment are needed now, but this programme is frustrated bythe lack of large-scale boosters and must await the development of Centaur, Saturn and Nova. Meanwhile, Project Mercury, to put a man into a low orbitaround the Earth, is going on as a more or less special project, somewhat peculiar unto itself. Like it or not, the US, in announc-ing Mercury, got itself into a tough race with the USSR. Tha unmanned capsule the Russians put into orbit at the time of the
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