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

160 reMeMBerINg the SpaCe age
boosters, who had long advocated more energetic eforts, fused their previous
visions of human-piloted voyages of discovery together with the heightened
Cold War national security concerns to frame the parameters of an urgent new
international competition—the space race.
president dwight david eisenhower tried to calm the alarm. his scientifc
experts saw no ICBM gap or even any parity in missile know-how between the
United States and the Soviet Union. had the White house pushed a program
similar to that which produced Sputnik, they advised, a U.S. satellite could
already have been aloft. While von Braun pressed for a crash program, promised
that his team could launch a satellite in 90 days, and called for building a space
station, eisenhower embraced a measured approach with lower costs and greater
focus on scientifc and military applications. the chair of eisenhower’s science
advisory committee, James r. Killian, issued a short Introduction to Outer Space
that downplayed manned fight and advocated carefully constructed scientifc
projects that employed automation and robotics. eisenhower ordered the
government printing ofce to distribute Killian’s pamphlet to the public for 15
cents a copy. 7
as a seasoned military strategist, the president had always been his own
most-trusted national security adviser. By 1957, eisenhower believed he
could see Soviet capabilities and likely military intentions more clearly than
ever before. the public did not know that he recently had gained access to
reconnaissance photographs taken by cameras carried on the newly operational
U-2 spy plane. U-2 fights over the Soviet Union, begun during the summer
of 1956, secretly confrmed the president’s judgment that military necessity
required no sudden change in strategic course. the U.S.S.r. had not raced
ahead in military might. Moreover, a U.S. satellite-based surveillance system
designed to replace the U-2 fights already had Ike’s full support. (Satellitebased
cameras would take their frst pictures of the Soviet Union several months
before Ike left ofce in 1961.) as a general, eisenhower understood the value
of aerial reconnaissance, and his backing of scientifc satellites before 1957 had
aimed to establish the precedent of free access in space—a principle that could
then be adapted to the advantage of military intelligence. Sputnik, ironically,
established this precedent, and eisenhower thus saw advantages to Sputnik that
military secrecy kept shrouded from the public. 8
7.
8.
McCurdy, Space, pp.56-58; Crouch, Aiming for the Stars, pp.143-150. Matthew a. Bille and erika
r. lishock, The First Space Race: Launching the World’s First Satellites (College Station, tX: texas
a&M press, 2004) provides a history of satellite development before 1958.
McCurdy, Space, pp. 58-59; robert a. divine, The Sputnik Challenge (New York, NY:
Oxford University press, 1993), pp. 11-12; On the background to and aftermath of Sputnik,
see especially Walter a. Mcdougall, . . . the Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space
Age (New York, NY: Basic Books, 1985), and paul dickson, Sputnik: The Shock of the Century
(New York, NY: Walker and Company, 2007).