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Peace in Space an Admirable Goal | This Week In Space History
by michael shinabery
That the Soviet Union launched Sputniks 1 and 2 on ICBMs, in late 1957, was an undeniable message to the United States that its Cold War enemy could quickly attack with a nuclear missile. America hadn’t even gotten a satellite into space yet when, on Jan. 12, 1958, President Dwight Eisenhower “proposed” to Premier Nikolai Bulganin “that Russia and the United States ‘agree that outer space should be used for peaceful purposes,’ ” said “Project Mercury: A Chronology” (NASA/1963).
By then, though, the U.S. military had been furtively eyeing space for more than a decade. The April 1949 Modern Mechanix reported the government was “working on plans for a satellite base … to revolve around the world like a miniature moon, as a military outpost.” The facility could “control the world” as “the whole earth would lie in the base’s bombsight.”
Three years earlier, according to the article, Gen. Curtis LeMay had buried “a cryptic item” in a report that “called for development of ‘flight and survival equipment for use above the atmosphere, including space vehicles, space bases and devices for use therein.’ ”
In 1959, Brig. Gen. Homer Boushey wrote in “Man In Space: The United States Air Force Program for Developing the Spacecraft Crew,” that “space vehicles” could carry out “bombardment” offensives.
“I use the term vehicles rather than satellites because I believe these weapon systems will be manned,” Boushey said. “Now, what would be the purpose of manned, bombardment-type space vehicles, and how could they function? Obviously they would serve as a deterrent to armed aggression, just as our Strategic Air Command bombers safeguard the peace of the free world today.”
Brig. Gen. Homer Boushey – NMMSH Archives
As a graduate student in 1941, at the California Institute of Technology, Boushey had flown the first airplane to utilize jet-assisted takeoff.
In “The Military Impact of Manned Space Operations,” another essay in “Man In Space,” Maj. Gen. Lloyd P. Hopwood, of the Air Command and Staff College, pointed out: “Unless we are extraordinarily careful and professionally responsible, the dawning era in which the conquest of space will be achieved may invite a continuing deficit in conceptual evolution. … Throughout history man with a club, man with a gun, or man with an airplane has been a more or less fallow combination until given the purpose inherent in mission and concepts and the strategy in support of an objective. Since objectives are the product of man’s desires and intellect then the concepts of men that evolve the doctrine on which strategy is built to support those objectives are the fundamental keystone on which the usefulness and reality of space systems must be developed.”
America may have had ideas for such plans, but the Soviets clearly had the technological upper hand. The U.S. didn’t even orbit a satellite until nearly four months after Sputnik I, the world’s first artificial satellite. The first U.S. satellite, Explorer I, lifted off on Jan. 31, 1958. That followed several high-profile failures of exploding Vanguard launches that mortified the Navy and embarrassed the Pentagon, according to “On The Seas And In The Skies: A History of the U.S. Navy’s Air Power” (Hawthorn Books/1970). The first catastrophe occurred on Dec. 6, 1957, when the booster “fell back to its pad and exploded” after only rising six inches, said “Rockets of the World: A Modeler’s Guide” (Peter Alway/1993).
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A booster carrying a Vanguard satellite explodes at launch. – NMMSH Archives
“The Russians did the job the way it should have been done; try it in private, before you start telling all the world what wonders you’re going to produce,” Astounding Science Fiction Editor John W. Campbell, Jr. declared in the March 1958 issue.
Campbell said he actually wrote the piece on Dec. 9, three days after the first Vanguard public failure.
“Not only did Russia do a good job of research and development on their satellite – in addition, we did a poor job, and have, throughout, displayed an exceedingly supercilious attitude before the world,” Campbell wrote. “We earned what we got – fully, and of our own efforts. The ridicule we’ve collected is our just reward for our consistent efforts.”
He further stressed that the news of the Sputnik launch should not have shocked Americans. Campbell revealed: “Throughout August and September (1957), Russian popular-science magazines and journals were publishing data concerning the Sputniks which, it was stated, would be launched later that fall. The Russian radio amateurs were informed of how to listen to the Sputnik signals. … No word of these publications was, however, publicly reported by the United States government; the preparations that Russia was making, and the progress made, was not considered fit news for American readers.”
The reality, he said, was that “the American Governmental policy has been to belittle Russian technical achievements.”
In 1958, the Soviets touted their scientific feats, as well as extrapolated the future, in “Sputnik into Space.”
“Its appearance in America provides a unique insight into Russian scientific achievement,” the U.S. publisher stated in a subsequent, English-language edition. The publisher noted that the book “was not intended to be read outside that country.” Chapter- and subheadings declared: “The beginning of a new era”; “The Glorious Undertaking”; “The relation of the masses”; “The Stages of the Great Offensive”; and, “The Assault on the Moon.”
Russia also had an organization much like the American Rocket Society, the British Interplanetary Society, and Germany’s VfR or Society for Space Travel. Russia’s stated rationale for the group was for “the avowed purpose of advancing space travel,” Willy Ley wrote in “Rockets, Missiles, and Space Travel.” He said that while the student organization “was short lived, which, in view of its name of ‘World-Center of All Inventors and Scientists,’ was probably just as well,” a “more serious society was formed” in 1929. That was named the “Group for Investigation of Reaction Motion.
Michael Shinabery is an education specialist and Humanities Scholar with the New Mexico Museum of Space History. E-mail him at [email protected].
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2013-01-14 12:45:42
Source: http://moonandback.com/2013/01/14/peace-in-space-an-admirable-goal-this-week-in-space-history/
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