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.

It ranks as one of the Eisenhower Administration’s greatest achievements that the U.S. managed to make up for the lost years and close the military-missile gap. The military job of a ballistic missile is not to go to the moon but to hit an earthly target from a launching site elsewhere on the earth, and U.S. missiles appear to be about as fit for that job as their Soviet counterparts. But in concentrating on closing the gap in military-missile technology, the Eisenhower Administration neglected the challenge of space. When the U.S. undertook its first serious space project in mid-1955, as part of the International Geophysical year effort, the Administration settled for a minimal, low-priority program, misnamed Project Vanguard. In retrospect, it was no wonder that the U.S.S.R. got into space first.

Squabbles in the Web. The U.S.’s efforts to narrow the space gap since Sputnik I have slogged along under a heavy handicap of organizational confusion. Central in the confusion is an arbitrary, irrelevant division of space programs into “civilian” (Glennan’s NASA) and “military” (Johnson’s ARPA). Coordination between the two domains is supposedly achieved by the Civilian-Military Liaison Committee, the real purpose of which seems to be to provide a roost for amiable, ineffectual William M. Holaday, who was head of the abolished guided missiles office. But that basic split-up is only the beginning: assorted segments of the U.S. space effort belong to the Air Force, Army and Navy. Crisscrossing all the civilian and military groups is a misbegotten organizational web that at last count included 42 committees.

In this maze, lines of authority get tangled and jealousies flourish. Nobody in the Pentagon, from Defense Secretary Neil McElroy down, has been able to explain where Roy Johnson’s bailiwick ends and Herb York’s begins. York considers himself Johnson’s boss; Johnson disagrees. Last year ARPA and the Air Force got into a prolonged squabble over whether or not U.S.A.F. would be stenciled on an Air Force rocket assigned to ARPA.

Two years after Sputnik I, the U.S. still has no broad, coordinated space program with clearly defined, long-range goals. When a congressional committee tried to find out a few months ago what overall goals the various programs were pushing toward, ARPA’s Johnson testified that he did not know of any “total long-term space program.” Echoed Lieut. General Bernard Schriever, Air Force research and development chief: “I am not aware whether or not there is an effort being made to lay out one single program.”

In theory, overall policymaking is done by the top-level National Aeronautics and Space Council, chaired by the President himself. But NASC meets seldom, spends much of its time deciding which organization-chart rectangles various projects belong to. The Mercury man-in-space program, for example, has migrated during the past two years from the Air Force to ARPA to NASA, inevitably losing momentum with each shift.

Sophisticated Hardware. Despite messy organization and murky purpose, U.S. spacemen have managed to put a dozen satellites into orbit since Sputnik I. But the Russians keep scoring the big firsts. U.S. defense and space officials have tried to counter the Soviet feats with talk, arguing that while Soviet space rockets are bigger and more powerful, U.S. space hardware is more “sophisticated.” The U.S., they like to say, is ahead in everything except rocket thrust, meaning the power to get the bird into the air. As recently as last January, NASA’s Glennan boasted that the U.S.’s satellite communications equipment is “far better” than the U.S.S.R.’s. But the U.S.S.R.’s bigger rocket thrust (along with plenty of sophistication) enables the latest Russian moon probe to carry a radio with at least five watts of power—upwards of ten times as powerful as the best space radio the U.S. has orbited.

The plain fact is that, with all its sophisticated space hardware, the U.S. cannot match the U.S.S.R. in space performance until the U.S. gets a big, powerful rocket; as aircraftmen know, there is no substitute for horsepower. Yet the Administration seems to be in no great hurry to drive hard toward more horsepower. Under development as a NASA project is a Rocketdyne single-chamber engine designed to develop 1,500,000 Ibs. of thrust, far more than any known Soviet rocket engine. But it will not be ready to do any space hauling until the mid-1960s. Meanwhile, the U.S. seems to be set to resign itself to being outperformed in space. A crash program to develop a big-thrust rocket would do no good, the Administration argues; development programs can go only just so fast, and pouring in more money cannot hurry them up.

Project Saturn. Some U.S. spacemen disagree. Among them: ex-German Rocketeer Wernher von Braun. At the Army Ballistic Missile Agency at Huntsville, Ala., Von Braun and his team of seasoned, enthusiastic spacemen are working to achieve a breakthrough in rocket thrust by clustering eight Jupiter rockets in a package capable of developing 1,500,000 Ibs. Last week, when they should have been pushing full speed ahead on their project, called Saturn, Von Braun and his ten laboratory directors huddled around a table for six solid hours figuring out ways to trim the project to conserve its funds. Under the present minimal Saturn program, budgeted for some $70 million in all, Von Braun hopes to get half a dozen Saturn lash-ups test-fired by the end of 1964. With $175 million, he thinks, he could achieve the same result by next fall. Far from rushing to give Von Braun that extra $105 million, upper echelons of Washington’s space maze are currently debating whether Project Saturn ought to be abandoned altogether.

From the Sidelines. The Administration’s inability to see the urgency of speeding up U.S. progress toward a big-thrust space vehicle derives from a fundamental defect of vision: a failure to view the space race in the broad context of the cold war. Apart from yet-unimagined power advantages that primacy in space may bring, the space race is a prestige competition in which the U.S. cannot afford to lag behind indefinitely. Watching intently from the sidelines are all the uncommitted nations of the world, and what impresses them is getting there first with the most.

In that competition, the U.S. must somehow find ways to overcome the handicaps of service rivalries, bureaucratic jealousies, organizational complexities, budgetary qualms and failures of vision. It will matter very little whether the rocket that successfully carries the first man to the moon is a slender sophisticate or a bulky monster. It will also matter very little whether the man inside the payload capsule is an Armyman, a Navyman, an airman or a civilian. But it will matter very much whether he is a citizen of the U.S. or of the U.S.S.R.