The Other Space Race: Eisenhower and the Quest for Aerospace Security by Nicholas Michael Sambaluk (review)

Most accounts of the "space race" between the Soviet Union and the United States begin with the 1957 launch of the first artificial satellite, Sputnik 1, which panicked Americans into believing they had lost their technological (and thus military) edge over their cold war adversary. President Dwight Eisenhower's staid response failed to calm their fears; instead, it left many convinced that their avuncular but technologically naive commander in chief did not fully comprehend the strategic importance of outer space. Many authors treat Eisenhower's space policies of the late 1950s similarly, as little more than a reactive and reluctant prologue to the more ambitious and deliberate agenda pursued by Presidents Kennedy and Johnson in the 1960s: human spaceflight leading to the Apollo Moon landings.

In The Other Space Race, historian Nicholas Michael Sambaluk argues that Eisenhower in fact created a coherent, long-term space policy that was firmly grounded in national defense. However, the president's low-key leadership style, which served him well throughout his first term, ultimately worked against him as public confidence eroded in the wake of Sputnik. Long before the Sputnik crisis, Eisenhower focused on developing unmanned (and unarmed) reconnaissance satellites to provide intelligence on Soviet military preparedness. To further this strategic goal, the White House announced plans to launch a scientific research satellite during the International Geophysical Year of 1957–58. Eisenhower's real goal for this non-military project was to create a precedent for international "freedom of space," which would make it legal for the United States to overfly the Soviet Union using top-secret spy satellites still under development. Ultimately he achieved both ends: Sputnik's orbit over the United States delivered the crucial "freedom of space" precedent, and by the time John Kennedy took office, photographs from the CIA's Corona spy satellites developed under Eisenhower proved the fiction of the so-called "missile gap" on which Kennedy had successfully campaigned. Ironically, because Eisenhower refused to even hint at Corona's existence, the American public, Congress, and even most top military leaders incorrectly concluded that he had no space policy.

Although Eisenhower was mainly interested in reconnaissance satellites, Sputnik forced more visible action. In 1958 he replaced the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics with another civilian agency, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), in part to placate the public, but also to outmaneuver air force leaders who sought control of the nation's space program. And although he saw no practical function in human spaceflight, Eisenhower subsequently approved NASA's Project Mercury for similar reasons. While he tolerated NASA's non-military agenda, the air force's planned hypersonic space plane, which promised to deliver nuclear warheads from outer space, flew directly in the face of Eisenhower's express policy to avoid weaponizing space (p. 47). Dubbed "Dyna-Soar" (for Dynamic Soarer), the piloted craft would be boosted into orbit atop a rocket, then conduct its mission while gliding back to Earth at speeds approaching 25,000 feet per second (17,000 mph) (p. 72).

Sambaluk demonstrates how the postwar air force never doubted that it was the natural choice to lead the nation into manned spaceflight as an extension of its existing airpower doctrine, and shows how the program remained small enough to escape Eisenhower's notice until after Sputnik created considerable public outcry for decisive action to restore U.S. preeminence in space. By then, given Dyna-Soar's widespread popularity in military and political circles, coupled with Eisenhower's perceived weakness on space policy, the president felt that he could not cancel the program even though he clearly wanted to. Ultimately it was Kennedy (who initially favored the project as part of a massive defense spending program) who put the unfortunately named program on the path to extinction (p. 223).

Although the title does not mention Dyna-Soar by name, the air force's abortive...