SPACE: The Maze in Washington

Pondering the meaning of Sputnik I back in October 1957, the London Express confidently predicted that the result of the Soviet push into space would be a U.S. drive to "catch up and pass the Russians" in space exploration. "Never doubt for a moment that America will be successful." the Express added. The U.S. agreed with that statement: of course it would catch up, and quickly.

But two years later the U.S. is still running a poor second in the two-entry space race. And in high-level Washington last week, there still were no detectable signs of urgency about the U.S.'s space lag. The President, his advisers reported, was convinced that the U.S. space effort must be kept "within reason." Vice President Richard Nixon assured a press conference that the nation's space effort was "moving along at a reasonably good pace." Herbert F. York, the Defense Department's director of research and engineering, dismissed the Soviet lead in the space race as "more a question of acute embarrassment than national survival." Engineer T. Keith Glennan, head of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, called for a "sane course"—which in NASA bafflegab seems to mean the same program that has kept the U.S. lagging behind. Roy Johnson, head of the Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency, could offer no better proposal than the creation of a "psychological warfare department" to "answer" Soviet space feats.

Misnamed Project. Why has the U.S. failed to make an adequate national response to the challenge of space? The failure traces not to a lack of technological skill but to a lack of vision. In the confusion of U.S. space programs, the bulk of the blame can be laid upon no single person—except perhaps the man whose responsibility it is to boss the whole show: President Eisenhower.

But the U.S. space lag has its roots in the pre-Eisenhower era, beginning with the inability of President Harry Truman's scientific advisers, back in the mid-1940's to see any future in ballistic missiles. To carry a payload as big as a nuclear warhead, the scientists argued, a ballistic missile would have to be uneconomically bulky. So the U.S. channeled its missile efforts into now-obsolescent air-breathing missiles—Snark, Navaho, Regulus, etc.—that were inherently useless for space work. Meanwhile, the Russians were pushing ahead with ballistic missiles. By 1953, when a team of U.S. physicists headed by the late Hungarian-born John von Neumann devised a way of making a thermonuclear warhead small enough to be delivered by a ballistic missile of economic size, the Russians had a long head start in ballistic-missile development.