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A Prime Space Operator

On May 2, 1946, the Air Force's fledgling "think tank," Project RAND, then housed in Douglas Aircraft facilities in Santa Monica, Calif., produced its first Air Force-requested study. The study carried the title "Preliminary Design of an Experimental World-Circling Spaceship." The report was mostly hardware-oriented. But its authors, in some comments projecting social and political implications of such a project, showed significant insight:

The achievement of the satellite craft by the United States, would inflame the imagination of mankind, and would probably produce repercussions in the world comparable to the explosion of the atomic bomb. A companion report, dated October 18, 1946, declared, Since mastery of the elements is a reliable index of material progress, the nation which first makes significant achievements in space travel will be acknowledged as the world leader in both military and scientific techniques. To visualize the impact in the world, one can imagine the consternation and admiration that would be felt here if the US were to discover suddenly that some other nation had already put up a successful satellite.

The RAND people could not have been more right. Their predictions were borne out, to the massive embarrassment of the United States, eleven years later. when it was the Soviet Union that launched the first man-made satellite into orbit around the earth. The Soviet "first" need not have happened. Why it happened is a complex story that can probably never be told in its entirety. But it is a chronicle that can be traced in its general outlines.

In the quarter of a century that has passed since the RAND report, enormous technological strides havc been plade. And in the thirteen years since Sputnik, what had been considered the fantasy of space travel has become reality. Already man has walked the surface of the moon. Later in this decade or early ill the next, there will be operational space stations, both American and Russian, in which highly trained crews of space engineers and scientists will perform significant observational tasks in orbit. As the years go by, mail will explore the moon in considerable detail, tramping its surface, overflying its wastes in rocket craft, and observing man's neighbor world from lunar orbit. There will be lunar bases. American. Soviet, perhaps even international. And eventually, unless the experience of coming years reveals some prescntly unknown impediment to further-out manned excursions, men will travel in spaceships to Mars and land on that planet. The cost will be hii-,h and the direct economic returns difficult to calculate. But Ih,' knowlcd`•c attained of the cosmos will be priceless.

The manned aspect of spaceflight, as dramatic as it has been, is in many ways dwarfed by the achievements on the unmanned side. For up to now, manned space-fliht has primarily been by way of dramatic demonstrations. Unmanned astronautics, almost from the start, has been productive. not only in the scientific sense (the discovery of the radiation belts around the carth, among many other revelations about "empty space") but also in terms of usable spaceborne weather observation, communications, and - an achievement of monumental importance in a world weary of war - strategic reconnaissance. It can fairly be said that the promise of unmanned space technology, the future yield of robot spacecraft coursing through the void, is ootentially enormous. As the reliability of space hardware increases, we can expect to see, as products of space technology, really long-range weather forecasting. air and sea navigation, extensive use of communications satellites for regional and, possibly, global educational purposes, the relay of huge amounts of computerized data of the business world, and large-scale survey of earth resources in a world threatened by despoilment at the hands of man. In the military field, we may expect even more complex and useful spaceborne strategic reconnaissance, plus missile-attack warning satellites, all of them contributing to the world's hope for viable conflict control.

Beyond flight itself, whether unmanned or manned, there are the less tangible, but in the long run equally important, influences on earth, of space technology. Space technology has not only placed great new demands far precision on American, Soviet, European, and Asian industry. But also the space revolution has had a major impact on education. particularly in the United States. Sputnik set off a spate of public questioning of the validity of the American educational system that thirteen years later is still having its effects. Although the words and the music have changed - "relevance" is the buzz-word today - the main question is stiff being asked: Is American education preparing children for a complex technological age in which science and technology need to be understood so that they may be properly harnessed for the good and safety of mankind? The question applies in suburbia, as well as the ghettos.

The earthbound effects of the advance into space have included, too, no less than the creation, here and in the Soviet Union, of vast new industries. built on the foundation of the aviation industries that had existed previously, but different in so many ways from their antecedents as to qualify for consideration as something very new in the world of work. This industry, as it has evolved. sometimes painfully and at great expense, represents what, for lack of a better term, might be called a group marriage of the arts of electronics, propulsion chemistry, computerology, nuclear physics, guidance, optics, materials-to mention only a few of the skills that have been combined in order to build the boosters and spacecraft in the hundreds that have been launched into space since 1957.

The aerospace industry, which didn't even have a name a few short years ago, has become, certainly in this country, a major economic force, employing hundreds of thousands of people of various skill levels. Through its "multiplier effects," the economists' term for the ancillary enterprises - the supermarkets, the shoe repair shops, the restaurants, and the like that have crowded around the space installations to serve the technologists and production people of the aerospace industry - it has created a sizable amount of new wealth. In the years since Sputnik, in this country, whole communities have been transformed economically and politically by the space enterprise. They have boomed, and now many slump, as a measure of the economic health of the industry.

Looking Ahead

Now it is 1970 - twenty-five years since the end of the second world war. The impossible dream of man in space has been fulfilled. Unmanned satellites work away in the blackness hundreds and thousands of miles out. We are still at it. The Russians are still at it Western Europe is looking for ways to operate in space in cooperation with the United States while at the same time retaining some measure of technical and fiscal independence. Japan promises to become a space power. Red China has launched a satellite.

Here, while war still rages in Southeast Asia and domestic crisis has become routine, NASA and military space planners are finally bringing the space program back closer to earth. Coming are American manned space stations and a space shuttle that will carry men and supplies from earth to orbit. Coming are unmanned satellites whose complexity will dwarf the intricate hardware of today. Coming is a future the shape of which we cannot discern with precision but a future inevitably influenced by man's physical and mental leap beyond the planet he has till now called home.

The US Air Force's role in this vast effort has been, at the same time, staggering and often frustrating. Against a background of internecine rivalry among the services over the missile mission in the early 1950s, and relegated after Sputnik to a support, rather than dominant, role in the national space program, the Air Force has managed since 1957 to provide to NASA a major portion of the systems management and launch capability and the space-medical expertise without which the civilian agency could not have gotten off the ground. At the same time, the Air Force's own manned spaceflight programs have several times been shot down. The Man In Space effort of the 1950s, which was incorporated into Mercury, the Dyna-Soar orbital glider, and the Manned Orbiting Laboratory project of the 1960s, not to mention the unaccepted Air Force plan for a manned moon landing offered prior to the Kennedy Apollo commitment, all died. And today, on the manned spaceflight front, the Air Force is a junior but insistent partner with NASA in the projected space shuttle, campaigning for militarily useful capabilities on the craft.

But, withal, the Air Force, as prime space operator in the Defense Department since 1961, has developed a huge unmanned space program geared to strategic observation, early warning, and satellite-borne defense communications. For the most part, the Air Force's space program is based on the passive military use of unmanned spacecraft. Certainly the wild-eyed military moon-base ideas that infected sonic Air Force planners in the late 1950s have gone by the boards. But, at the same time, thought has to be given, and is being given, within the Air Force to the future. Active space weaponry, at least in terms of devices to counter hostilc activity by others, has to be studied. Although not much is said about it these days, it is a fact that the Soviets have the devastating capability to attack the US from orbit with nuclear weapons. Counter techniques, perhaps laser weapons or other devices using exotic technology as yet unperfected, may well be needed in the future to protect the US against spaceborne Pearl Harbors. What the Soviets can do now, the Chinese may be able to do the day after tomorrow - despite all the international proscriptions against the deployment of weaponry in space.

The Air Force's existing array of passive space devices - particularly the unmanned observation satellites that have been orbited since 1960 - has already played a major role in the keeping of the peace in a spaceage world still plagued with conflict. And in an era in which superpowers, fearful of their own strength. seem to be groping toward some sort of agreed-on standoff, for mutual protection, that role will probably enlarge during the uncertain years to come.

William Leavitt, Senior Editor/Science and Education. The Air Force and Space. Air Force Magazine. September 1970.

A History of Space Exploration: And Its Future The launch of the first liquid-fueled rocket in 1926 led to the development of the first long-range missiles of WWII, which in turn led to an intercontinental ballistic missile that formed the basis of the first launch vehicle to carry a satellite in 1959, marking the beginning of the Space Age. Examine in detail this history and take a look at the future possibilities.

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