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Although Nikita Khrushchev’s boastful dismissal of the American Vanguard satellite as a “grapefruit” played to American worries that Sputnik constituted a “technological Pearl Harbor,” President Dwight Eisenhower sought to assure Americans that the Soviet lead in technology was more illusory than real. Eisenhower had access to classified information that he couldn’t share with the public, yet he had far less information than he wanted about what the Soviets were doing. This information problem was just one of the challenges American policymakers faced as they decided how to run their space program in 1958. One of the many reasons Sputnik made it into orbit ahead of American satellites was that the Soviets operated in secret yet could keep track of the latest events in the open American program. The Soviet space program was at that time a grouping of often feuding design bureaus headed by chief designers—of whom Sergei Korolev was first among equals—that operated as a subsidiary of the Soviet military. When the race to the moon gained momentum in the mid-1960s, the structure of the Soviet space program was found wanting. But in the late 1950s, sheltered by secrecy, it was giving Khrushchev plenty to crow about. In truth, much of the U.S. space effort also was carried on in secret, 10. The Birth of NASA The Roman Empire controlled the world because it could build roads. Later—when men moved to the sea—the British Empire was dominant because it had ships. In the air age, we were powerful because we had airplanes. Now the communists have established a foothold in outer space. It is not very reassuring to be told that next year we will put a better satellite into the air. Perhaps it will also have chrome trim and automatic windshield wipers. Sen. Lyndon B. Johnson,  notably the corona reconnaissance satellite project. Yet the bulk of America ’s space efforts in the late 1950s took place in the glare of publicity and public criticism. The Soviets had also been successful in avoiding the interservice rivalry that had erupted in the United States over missiles and satellites . A first step to quashing that rivalry had occurred in 1956 when the U.S. Air Force was assigned long-range missiles, the navy missiles launched at sea, and the army missiles with a range of two hundred miles or less. Still possessing the von Braun team and an aggressive leadership under Major General Medaris, however, the army had not given up. The Army Ballistic Missile Agency put the first U.S. satellite into orbit, and von Braun and Medaris looked to further triumphs in space. Even the creation of the Advanced Research Programs Agency (arpa) inside the Defense Department in February 1958 and its interim takeover of U.S. space programs didn’t discourage them. The partial separation of America’s first satellite program, Vanguard, from the military reflected the views of many in the government and the scienti fic community that many space activities should be run without military control. Eisenhower himself thought at first that the military could operate the space program as a matter of efficiency, but soon he changed his mind. “Information acquired by purely scientific exploration could and should, I thought, be made available to all the world,” he wrote later. “But military research would naturally demand secrecy.” The president concluded that the United States should have separate military and civilian space programs. Memories of the battles in the late 1940s over control of America’s atomic energy facilities were still fresh, and Eisenhower sought to build a consensus for his space plans by asking James Killian, by then his science advisor, and the President’s Science Advisory Committee (psac), to design a structure for the space program. Killian, backed up by other scientists, was concerned that a space program controlled by the Defense Department would concentrate on military work and ignore science. Historians David Callahan and Fred I. Greenstein have written that Eisenhower knew that Killian shared his ideas on the space program and that the president’s handling of the problem was a good example of his “hidden hand approach to leadership.” Killian and psac soon concluded that the new civilian space agency should be established on the foundation of an existing agency, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (naca), a modest but respected agency that 164 | the birth of nasa [18.116.239.195] Project MUSE (2024-04-24 21:07...

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