SPACE: On Pain of Extinction

• Share

Just when U.S. space achievements were beginning to make up for Sputnik jolts to the U.S.'s pride and prestige, the Russians sent their Lunik soaring far beyond where any man-made object had ever penetrated before. Once again the world marveled at the U.S.S.R.'s technological prowess. Pressing and immediate question: Why is the U.S. still lagging in a race that may decide whether freedom has any future?

"The Russians' secret weapon," says a U.S. space expert, "is their early start." The U.S.S.R. began working on long-range ballistic missiles soon after World War II. The U.S. did not push ballistic-missile development until 1954, after U.S. physicists decided that they could do what they had said was impossible: make a nuclear warhead light enough to be carried in the nose of a missile.

Despite those lost years, the U.S. has just about closed the ballistic-missile gap. As most U.S. missilemen see it, the U.S.'s ballistic missiles are, militarily speaking, superior to the U.S.S.R.'s. The Russian rocket that carried the Lunik into orbit produced a lot more thrust than any U.S. missile, but if the military job of a ballistic missile is to travel accurately from one point on the globe to another with a warhead in its nose, U.S. missiles appear fit to do the job at least as well as their bulkier Russian counterparts.

But in its concentration on closing the military-missile gap, the Eisenhower Administration neglected the less pressing, less obvious challenge of space. While the Russians were working on big rockets capable of carrying hefty objects into outer space, U.S. missilemen were working on lighter, slimmer, more "sophisticated" missiles—marvels of engineering, but designed for earthly military tasks. Only in mid-1955, as part of the U.S.'s International Geophysical Year effort, did the U.S. at long last undertake its first serious satellite project, and even then the Eisenhower Administration, deciding to keep space research "peaceful" and separate from ballistic-missile programs, settled for sluggish, buggish Project Vanguard (TIME, Oct. 21, 1957).

Two Domains. Scurrying to make up for lost time after Sputnik I, the U.S. has put five satellites into orbit (Explorers I, III and IV, Vanguard, Atlas); fired two near-miss lunar probes (Pioneers I and III); started on an array of other satellite or space-probe projects; let development contracts with the Rocketdyne Division of North American Aviation Inc. for space-rocket engines with thrusts of 1,000,000 lbs. or more; pushed a man-in-space undertaking, Project Mercury, that is scheduled for announcement this month. But despite the flurry of projects, the U.S. has made disappointingly little progress toward deciding on large, long-range space objectives and creating organizations to carry them out.