Remembering the Space Age. - Black Vault Radio Network (BVRN)

IMaGINING aN aerOSpaCe aGeNCY IN the atOMIC aGe
Ship but Congress would not authorize it, even though in his opinion it would
have been a very worthwhile project.” 27
the relation of prestige to spacefight has trickled down to the present day.
political pundits still routinely call the value of human spacefight into question.
NaSa is frequently attacked as a wolf in sheep’s clothing; that is, NaSa’s stated
peaceful exploratory goals are often argued to be merely a facade covering
deeper political and military motives. the origins of this dichotomy can be
traced directly back to the emphasis placed on prestige during the conception
of NaSa in the eisenhower administration, which was in turn based on the
experience of atomic foreign policy. By the time a man-in-space investigatory
panel was commissioned in 1959 by George Kistiakowsky, then head of the
pSaC, it was clear that putting humans in space was solely a prestige issue:
In executive session of the panel, we talked about these
things and I emphasized the need to spell out in our report
what cannot be done in space without man. My opinion is
that that area is relatively small and that, therefore, building
bigger vehicles than Saturn B has to be thought of as mainly
a political rather than a scientifc enterprise. 28
Indeed, it can be concluded that space represented a welcome new
opportunity for eisenhower’s continuing desire to demonstrate american
technological prowess because of a decline in the perception of atomic energy
as a positive international technology, a decline spurred on by rising fears
of global nuclear annihilation. Certainly the destructive element of nuclear
technology had been publicly decried immediately after the hiroshima and
Nagasaki bombings, but the shift in scale from local (bomber-delivered atomic
bombs) to global (intercontinental ballistic missile [ICBM]-delivered hydrogen
bombs) damned any hope for an unproblematic public perception of nuclear
technology. the frst hydrogen bomb tests by the United States in 1952 and
the Soviet Union in 1953 were followed by the irradiation of the Japanese
fshing boat Lucky Dragon 5 by the Castle Bravo test in March 1954, leading to
a widespread public concern over the efects of nuclear radiation.
an illustrative example of the qualitative transformation of atomic energy
in the public imagination can be drawn from science fction. Isaac asimov’s
Foundation trilogy, published between 1951 and 1953, portrayed humanity
in the far future as a galactic empire in decline. the Foundation, created by a
27. Supplementary Notes, Legislative Leadership Meeting, February 4, 1958, folder 18106, NaSa
historical reference Collection, NaSa headquarters,Washington, DC.
28. George Kistiakowsky A Scientist at the White House: The Private Diary of President Eisenhower’s
Special Assistant for Science and Technology (Cambridge, Ma: harvard University press, 1976),
p. 409.
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