THE NATION: Anniversary Jolt

Two years to the day after the beeps of Sputnik I proclaimed the beginning of the space age, the U.S.S.R. celebrated the anniversary by announcing a far more advanced step into space: a rocket shot that this week sent a 600-lb. instrumented payload hurtling into space on a trajectory calculated to curve around the moon and swing back toward the earth. The moon probe (see SCIENCE) required a rocket thrust of at least 600,000 Ibs., twice the thrust of the U.S.’s most powerful rocket engine. The Soviet feat was all the more embarrassing to the U.S. because U.S. spacemen had been forced to postpone their moon shot, scheduled to soar on or near Sputnik I’s second anniversary, when the Atlas-Able rocket that was supposed to do the job ignominiously blew up on its Cape Canaveral launching pad in a static test fortnight ago.

Out of Complacency. The U.S. can count up a dozen successful space shots of its own since Sputnik I, but in a broad view of the space-technology race, the U.S. has greater cause for alarm in October 1959 than it had in October 1957. Two years ago it seemed certain that the U.S., jolted out of complacency by Sput nik I, would proceed to catch up in a hurry. But the U.S. is still lagging behind.

Official reassurances that U.S. space programs are really “in very good shape” (Defense Secretary Neil McElroy, November 1957) keep oozing out of Washington, but they seem fatuous in view of Soviet space performances. With their boasts about the U.S.’s more “sophisticated” space hardware, Washington officials sometimes sound as if they think that U.S. and Soviet rockets are engaged in a beauty contest instead of a race for national prestige, power, and perhaps survival. The plain fact demonstrated by the latest Soviet moon shot, and the shot that hit the moon on the eve of Nikita Khrushchev’s visit, is that Soviet rockets are still outperforming the U.S.’s best.

Out of the Maze? What is wrong? The Eisenhower Administration’s space programs are beset by the confusion of purposes and the scattering of authority. Reflecting an arbitrary division of space programs into “military” and “civilian,” the nation’s space effort is split up between two separate bureaucratic domains, both ineffectual: the Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency, headed by Roy Johnson, sometime General Electric executive, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, headed by T. Keith Glennan, engineer, ex-Hollywood studio manager and president-on-leave of Cleveland’s Case Institute of Technology. Neither ARPA nor NASA has enough authority or resources to set long-range goals and march toward them. Splinters of space programs are further scattered among the Army, Navy and Air Force, and the Defense Department’s Office of Research and Engineering. Result: a maze of divided responsibilities in which appalling amounts of time and effort go into switching programs around on organizational charts instead of into making technological headway.

It is all very well for Washington to sit around and talk sportily about ultimately outdoing the Soviets through longterm, highly sophisticated space programs. But while the U.S. is talking a good game, the U.S.S.R. is out playing it—for keeps.