The Prematurely Grey Mare

The 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 troops.*

But no 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.

The division of responsibility has lost months for Von Braun's Saturn program, the U.S.'s best chance to match the big Soviet moon rockets in the mid-1960s. Von Braun proposed Saturn, with rocket engines designed to generate 1.500,000 Ibs. of blast-off thrust, after Sputnik I revealed the U.S.S.R.'s enormous launching capacity. Nobody in authority responded until the Russians blasted 7,000 Ibs. into space with Sputnik III in May 1958. Then the Pentagon ordered Von Braun to get to work on Saturn. The Budget Bureau promptly tried to stop it, and Director Roy Johnson of the Advanced Research Projects Agency (who is resigning soon) got it going again. Then Dr. Herbert York, the Defense Department's director of research and engineering, opposed it because, so said York, it had no clear military requirement. Johnson saved it again. Last week, in limbo between the Army and NASA, Saturn was limping along at Huntsville on a 40-hour week while a NASA spokesman dubbed as "premature" any speculation that Saturn might be speeded up.

Such is the state of the whole U.S. space program that not one U.S. space project has a firm target completion date. The nation's space leaders are not necessarily space enthusiasts.

Readymade Model. The U.S. does not have to put the space program under military command to get going. But the fact stands that civilians now in command of vital elements of the space program, notably NASA Administrator T. Keith Glennan and Pentagon Research Director York, do not have experience in the tough kind of getting-things-done that the occasion demands. One way to resolve the space tangle once and for all would be to set up a unified, civilian-military space organization similar to the World War II Manhattan District in which scientists such as Dr. Robert Oppenheimer developed the A-bomb under the get-things-done command of the Army's General Leslie Groves. A get-things-done type from the military today would be of the caliber of Air Force Vice Chief of Staff Curtis E. LeMay, a man-to-the-moon enthusiast and organizational genius, or Air Force Lieut. General Bernard Schriever, who brought the Atlas ICBM to operational capability, or Admiral Arthur Radford, the retired chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Said a senior civilian missileman in California last week: "There is really nothing we can do in the short term in the way of getting something up there that will match or surpass the Russkies. We can rejigger things, but that would be a stopgap measure and not a program. The important point--the crucial point--is that decisions must be made now if the future is to bear fruit."

-*When Major General John Medaris, head of the Army Ordnance Missile Command at Huntsville, Ala., last week announced his retirement, Spaceman von Braun and Army pressagents played it as a protest against the space mixup. But Medaris, 57, made it clear that he had decided to retire two months before to get a toe hold in private business or education before he reached the retirement age of 60.

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