Call for Test Pilots

In the race for space, military honors are just as likely to go to an officer who is as much at home behind a physics book as he is behind a gun. Last week President Eisenhower set up for promotion two of the Armed Services' brightest new scientific lights:

Major General Bernard Schriever, 48, who organized and built up the Air Force's Ballistic Missile Division, will get a third star and be named chief of the Air Research and Development Command, B.M.D.'s parent group. German-born Ben Schriever (TIME, cover. April 1, 1957) grew up in Texas, took an engineering degree at Texas A. & M., got his wings in 1933. He worked as a test pilot, studied at Wright Field's Air Corps Engineering School, took time out to get a master's degree in mechanical engineering at Stanford University, was a B-17 pilot in the Pacific in World War II. Always immersed in research and development problems, he was assigned to the Pentagon after the war, there moved in on the ground floor of missilery.

Stepping into Schriever's shoes at B.M.D. will be his deputy, Brigadier General Osmond J. Ritland, 49, an old Air Corps test pilot who handled a long line of research and development assignments until 1950, when he was made commander of the Air Force Special Weapons Center's Test Group (Atomic) at Kirtland Air Force Base, N. Mex. Until 1953, when he went off to Washington to study at the Armed Forces Industrial College, Ritland was responsible for the air phase of continental nuclear testing, got his assignment under Schriever in 1956.

Rear Admiral John Hayward, 50, assistant chief of Naval Operations for Research and Development, will be promoted to vice admiral and put in the newly created post of Deputy C.N.O. for Development. "Chick" Hayward ran away from home (Great Neck, L.I.) at 15 to join the Navy, got an Annapolis appointment from President Coolidge, graduated in 1930, learned to fly at Pensacola, Fla., became a test pilot. Deeply interested in atomic physics long before the birth of the atomic bomb, he did graduate work at the University of Pennsylvania in the late 1930s ("I wanted to relax at night in some uplifting endeavor which had absolutely nothing to do with the Navy"). After combat duty in World War II, he was assigned to work on atomic-bomb projects, pursued further studies in physics at Caltech, the University of New Mexico and Stanford. Well regarded by civilian scientists and Pentagon brass for his background ("I am a Gung Ho pilot and a physicist third class"), Hayward was handed his job in R. & D. when the Navy created the division in 1957, has since been one of the strongest proponents of a unified national space program.

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