Anatomy
Groups
Index

This Week in
American History

March 28 — April 3, 1958

President Eisenhower Establishes NASA under Civilian Control

After one of the hardest-fought battles of his Administration, President Dwight D. Eisenhower succeeded in sending to Congress, on April 2, 1958, a request for the creation of a National Aeronautics and Space Administration under civilian control, and an outline of government plans for space exploration and related scientific research. The National Aeronautics and Space Act was seen at the time as an answer to the Soviet Union's launch of its Sputnik communications satellite on Oct. 4, 1957, but Eisenhower knew the matter was more complicated, and that the nature of America's "answer" could determine its future.

After the death of President Franklin Roosevelt and the end of World War II, the United States and the Soviet Union had embarked on a nuclear-bomb and liquid-fueled rocket race, manipulated by the Bertrand Russell world-government cabal, whose strategy was: "You and him fight, while we take over." America's rocket effort was led by Wernher von Braun, the captured German V-2 rocket designer, while the USSR program was coordinated by the brilliant engineer Sergei Korolyev. Most of the scientists working in the military programs had come out of the civilian space-exploration societies of the 1920s and 1930s, but the only way they could obtain the funding to carry out their research was to do it under military auspices.

Meanwhile, the American public was being terrorized by the nuclear arms race, air-raid drills in the schools, and the Army-McCarthy Hearings. Added to this, was a spate of monster-from-space movies where aliens either tried to kill all Earthlings. or "benevolently" suggested, à la Russell, that they submit to being monitored by more advanced civilizations.

On the evening of April 5, 1950, a group of scientists met at the Silver Spring, Md. home of ionospheric physicist James Van Allen. They discussed the fact that the opportunities for doing high-altitude scientific work were waning rapidly, and that a major international scientific project was needed to guarantee funding for new types of rockets to carry scientific payloads into space. The precedent they had to work with was the First and Second Polar Years of 1882-1883 and 1932-1933. During those two projects, scientists from many countries had cooperated to study Earth's Polar regions.

The group at Van Allen's home decided to suggest a Third International Polar Year for 1957-1958, and by 1954, with input from other scientists around the world, the project was rechristened the International Geophysical Year (IGY) which would study Earth's oceans and atmosphere, as well as the Antarctic and outer space. A sub-committee of the IGY, set up to promote research on communication and data-gathering satellites, recommended that the attempt be made to orbit such satellites during the Geophysical Year.

In response, the Soviet Academy of Sciences named a blue-ribbon Commission for Interplanetary Communications which issued a paper stating that, "One of the immediate tasks of the ICIC is to organize work concerned with building an automatic laboratory for scientific research in space." On July 19, 1955, the U.S. government announced that it would launch a satellite during the IGY; the next day the Kremlin announced that it, too, would launch satellites that year. Few in America took the announcement seriously, for Soviet science was perceived as being behind America in rocket development.

But soon Korolyev had developed the world's first ICBM, which, after several failures, had a perfect test flight. Its existence was announced on Aug. 27, 1957, followed by an announcement on Sept. 17, that a communications satellite would soon follow. On Oct. l, the USSR announced the radio frequency on which the satellite would broadcast, and on Oct. 4, people around the world could hear the "beep, beep, beep" of the little satellite, the "Traveller," as it orbited the Earth.

The American public went into shock. Then, America's attempt to send up its own satellite fizzled after two seconds on the launch pad. Eisenhower, nonetheless, assured the country that the U.S. was not trailing the Soviet Union in space technology: He knew there were five rocket programs being pursued simultaneously, and that the satellite's failed rocket had been the most complicated and difficult of them. However, the public outcry for something to be done was growing ever louder, and Eisenhower realized that if he failed to take the lead in establishing a civilian program, there was another very dangerous direction in which public desperation might be led.

Due to the pressures of the Cold War, certain factions of the military had been lobbying for the militarization of space and for a military base on the Moon. Gen. John Bruce Medaris, the commander of the Army Ballistic Missile Agency at Huntsville, had submitted a 15-year space program which included a 50-man military Moon base by 1971. There were also people, both in and out of the military, who were happy that Sputnik was flying over America, and never challenged the Soviet Union's right to carry out such flights, because the National Security Council, in the early 1950s, had stressed the need for the establishment of "freedom of space," so that America could put up spy satellites with powerful cameras over the Soviet Union.

...more

Full article on separate page...