Word: spaces
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...President of the U.S. personally untangled some of the reins of that prematurely grey mare, the U.S. space program, last week. In doing so, he created a wonder that the thing had ever moved at all. And he notably missed a chance to give it a sharp slap on the rump and get it headed somewhere...
After an hour-long conference with his top space advisers, Dwight Eisenhower i) finally terminated the space mission of the Army, thus cutting down by one the roster of overlapping U.S. space agencies (TIME, Oct. 19), and 2) transferred the Army's 4,300-man ballistic-missile team led by Rocketeer Wernher von Braun to the civilian National Aeronautics and Space Administration (subject to congressional approval next session...
Thus the President put under one roof the responsibility for the space-engine program, which lags two to five years behind the Soviet Union's. Von Braun & Co. will have responsibility for developing the interim Saturn program and possibly NASA's longer-range F-1 Rocketdyne single-chamber engine of 1,500,000 Ibs. thrust, and beyond that, the giant Nova with 6,000,000 Ibs. of thrust. The U.S., said Ike at his Augusta press conference, would spend on the civilian space effort next year "something more" than the current $500 million a year...
False Concept. If, organizationally, the President's move was in the right direction, it also showed how many false moves had been made before. His order reversed his own decision of last year to let the Army keep its space mission and the Von Braun team, also heavily modified Defense Secretary Neil McElroy's order of last month that the Air Force would be responsible for space-rocket vehicles. Actually, many thoughtful Army officers were glad to be free of the costly distractions of space to concentrate on overdue modernization of equipment and tactics for atomic-war ground...
...organization untangling would ever get the space program going until the President abandoned the obsolescent concept that space can be divided into civilian and military sectors, hence can be organized by civilian and military agencies side by side. This concept developed logically enough when defense planners decreed that space projects should not be allowed to interfere with the military's urgent task of catching up on missile production. But today the U.S. missile program has gathered substantial momentum, while the Russians have demonstrated a firm intention to use space as a primary cold-war weapon...