Word: setting
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Dates: during 1960-1960
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...began in 1955. In a broad survey of U.S. military strength for President Eisenhower, a blue-ribbon committee chaired by (then) Massachusetts Institute of Technology President James R. Killian Jr. recommended the construction of a fleet ballistic missile to be fired from a submarine. It was a suggestion that set up as complex a problem as ever faced the combined talents of U.S. science and technology. It called for a missile that could live in water, the earth's atmosphere, space and the re-entry zone. It demanded a method for handling dangerous fuels and explosives in a confined...
...Rear Admiral William Francis Raborn Jr., 55, a bluff, barrel-chested navigator who had never seen the sea before he got to Annapolis with the class of 1928. Burke gave Raborn orders to proceed with "all possible haste" to develop a fleet ballistic missile. He was authorized to set up a task force called, simply, Special Projects, which would cut across all the Navy's cherished bureaus. His work, Raborn was told, would get "Brickbat Zero One" priority; there was (and is) none higher. Target date...
...Army's liquid-fueled Jupiter missile. He was soon convinced that dangerous, liquid fuels sloshing around on shipboard would never prove practical. And when breakthroughs in the arcane art of missilery satisfied him that a seaborne solid-fueled bird could be built, he argued that the Navy should set out on its own-that it should start on Polaris...
Increased Pressure. Early in the game Raborn concluded that the management techniques of U.S. industry were not good enough for him; businessmen, he told his civilian assistant Gordon Pehrson, know figures, but they do not know what goes on in their plants. Raborn's management experts soon set up a system called PERT (Program Evaluation Research Task) that provided the boss with graphically charted records and computer-calculated time estimates for every milestone on his schedule...
...fired their first ICBM, and the oceans narrowed from thousands of miles to 30 minutes. The continental U.S. came within reach of a distant enemy firing from his own shore. On Oct. 4 that same year. Sputnik I soared into orbit. Official Washington, once it got over the shock, set about finding effective ways to respond to the increased Russian capabilities...