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Beyond the Atmosphere:
Early Years of Space Science
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- CHAPTER 20
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- CONTINUING HARVEST: THE BROADENING
FIELD OF SPACE SCIENCE
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- [327] As the
decade of the 1960s neared its end, space science had become a
firmly established activity. While the past had been immensely
productive, world bent to the tasks that lay ahead. A steady
stream of results poured the future promised much more and
thousands of scientists around the into the literature;
universities illustrated courses in the earth sciences, physics,
and astronomy with examples and problems from space research, and
a few offered courses devoted entirely to space science. For their
dissertations graduate students worked with their professors on
challenging space science problems. With the loss of that air of
novelty and the spectacular that had originally diverted attention
from the purposefulness of the researchers, the field had achieved
a routineness that equated to respectability among
scientists.
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- Maturity underlay the field's hard-earned
respectability. Starting about 1964, in addition to the individual
research articles published in the scientific journals, more
comprehensive professional treatments of the kind that
characterizes an established, active field of research began to
appear.1 It is interesting, for example, to compare the book
Science in Space published in 1960 with the second edition of
Introduction to Space Science
issued in
1968.2 The matter-of-fact tone of the latter, which
discussed what space science had already done and was doing for
numerous disciplines, contrasts with the promotional tone of the
former, which could only treat the potential of space science,
what rockets and spacecraft might do for various scientific
disciplines.
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