Beyond the Atmosphere:
Early Years of Space Science
CHAPTER 22
REVIEW AND ASSESSMENT
lamque opus exegi, quod nec
Iovis ira, nec ignis,
Nec poterit ferrum, nec edax
abolere vetustas.
Ovid,
Metamorphoses
[393] Viewing
events in retrospect one cannot but be impressed with the seeming
inexorability of human progress toward spaceflight, particularly
in the 20th century. There is a temptation to claim that once
Tsiolkovsky, Goddard, Berth, Von Braun, and their followers took
aim at outer space, the large rocket and spaceflight were
inevitable. Certainly by the time Sputnik 1 went into
orbit, a substantial groundwork had been laid by a large number of
pioneers working assiduously through many decades.
But the character of the space program
that emerged in the late 1950s and 1960s was not so predictable.
Many, if not most, of the early workers were primarily interested
in interplanetary travel and high-altitude research, but for the
most part had to rely on the military for support. In providing
support the services naturally were considering the potential
military uses of space, and indeed the first major rocket to go
into operation was a weapon, the V-2. Because of the importance of
atmospheric and ionospheric data for applications of radio and
radar, and in the design, construction, and operation of various
military systems, the services supported a considerable amount of
high-altitude rocket research during the 1940s and 1950s. In the
normal course of events one could thus visualize a U.S. space
program, including space science, as evolving over the years,
emerging quietly as a part of military research and development.
Under such circumstances the ability of space scientists to devote
their research primarily to the most important scientific problems
would have been hampered by the requirement to contribute in a
demonstrable way to more immediate military needs. In addition as
the experiences of the Upper Atmosphere Rocket Research Panel
during the 1940s and 1950s showed, there would have been
[394] the constant threat of being pulled under the
cloak of military secrecy-a restriction fundamentally incompatible
with the scientific process.
Such limitations on the U.S. space program
were avoided when the administration and Congress, reacting to the
Sputnik challenge, decided that in the best interests of the
country most of the space program should be conducted openly under
civilian auspices. Moreover the vagueness and grand sweep of the
National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958 gave the NASA
administrator a great deal of flexibility in specifying the
content of the NASA program. As one consequence, under NASA
management the space science program became very much a creature
of the nation's interested scientists.
When the Soviet Union surprised the world
by launching the first artificial satellite into orbit, the
shocked reaction of the United States tended to distort the
country's perception of what was happening. The weight of
Sputnik 2 and 3
showed how advanced the USSR was
in rocket payload capability, and it was easy to focus on this
factor while underestimating the importance of the work that the
United States had already done in the field. Looking back, it is
now clear that America, while lagging in rocket propulsion, was
more than competitive in communications, tracking, and telemetry,
in guidance and control, and in sounding rocket research. Taking
all factors into consideration the imbalance was not so great as
had been imagined. Proceeding from its substantial state of
readiness the United States built an enviable record of success in
space over the next dozen years, culminating with the Apollo
missions to the moon.
Space science contributed its share to the
overall success. Indeed, for most of the 1960s applications and
science missions provided most of the return on the nation's
investment in space, and it was not until the Apollo lunar flights
that the manned spaceflight program began to generate the
prodigious quantities of data that continued to flow from it
during the first half of the 1970s.
One can use several criteria in assessing
the success or failure of the space science program. The simplest
is whether the program achieved what its planners set out to do.
By this criterion the space science program must be adjudged
successful. In every area-earth and planetary sciences, solar
physics, stellar astronomy and cosmology, and to a smaller extent
biology-substantial progress was made, bringing a number of
important discoveries. Successful unmanned scientific spacecraft
missions were legion, including thousands of sounding rockets;
dozens of Explorer satellites; solar, geophysical, and
astronomical observatories; Pioneer space probes; Ranger, Lunar
Orbiter, and Surveyor spacecraft to the moon; and Mariners to Mars
and Venus. Sharing in some of these successes were many other
countries, taking part in a quite extensive international
cooperative program.
A more substantive criterion of success is
whether what was achieved was worthwhile. This is more difficult
to judge, but that hundreds of first-[395] rate
scientists chose to devote their personal careers, or a
substantial part of them, to space science is evidence of the
program's success. The numbers of scientists working in the field
and the voices of scientists raised in strong support of important
projects and equally strong protest against proposed cuts had to
be important considerations to the administration and Congress in
deciding the extent of support to accord to space science.
Success in the space science program was
not bought without some failures. Indeed, for the first two years
failures seemed at times to eclipse successes, although before the
end of the 1960s the success rate had risen well into the 90
percent range. Both failures and successes had their lessons to
convey, and there was much to be learned by participants in the
space science program, not only of a scientific nature but also
concerning organization and management, and the perplexities of
human relations.
