that a special committee should be set up to guide this program. Before he could recommend this formally, however, General Curtis LeMay, deputy chief of the Air Staff for Research and Development, wrote him that the Army Air Forces already had this research area thoroughly in hand through its NEPA (Nuclear Energy for Propulsion of Aircraft) project, "the sole approved activity to pursue research and development in this field." LeMay warned that "the establishment of a new and separate N.A.C.A. committee or group to pursue such work, would, in essence, duplicate to a large degree authority and responsibility already vested in the A.A.F. and, insofar as is presently understood, would be contrary to the desire of the Atomic Energy Commission." 54

Condon, a maverick who would soon run afoul of the witch hunt in Washington that accompanied the "red scare" of the late 1940s and early 1950s, chose to ignore LeMay's warning and recommended that the NACA go ahead with plans to establish its own committee. The NACA, however, was far more politic. It withdrew instead into the subordinate role dictated by LeMay. Although it did important research in this area at the Cleveland laboratory, it conceded to the military, as it had done in missile and rocket research, the leading and coordinating role it had enjoyed in such fields before World War II.55

Of course, supersonic flight, missiles and rockets, and nuclear propulsion for aircraft were only the most dramatic of the new fields of research into which the NACA moved in the late 1940s, but the Committee's record in these areas reveals the general drift of events. The NACA was clearly losing ground in the jockeying for position behind the scenes, even though the public image was one of achievement and triumph. Within six years after the end of World War II, the Committee had gone a long way toward restoring its reputation and dimming the memories of how it had been bested by Germany during the war. In those six years it won three of the five Collier trophies that it was to receive in its entire history, and the achievements that won those awards reflect the transition the NACA was going through.

Lewis A. Rodert won the trophy in 1946 for his work on thermal ice prevention. Two decades of research lay behind his accomplishments-the old, plodding, unglamorous, cut-and-try engineering so greatly appreciated by industry and the services and so true to the notion of a practical solution to a problem of flight. The following year John Stack shared the trophy with industry and the air force for breaking the sound barrier. As previously noted, this achievement was more important psychologically than technically: the barrier existed only in the minds of skeptics who thought it could not be broken. Once it was broken, the NACA could bask in the glory of a feat that had more popular appeal than technical worth. The symbolic importance of the

NACA veterans liked to claim that there was never a sound barrier. That view was not shared by staffers at the Ames laboratory who prepared this NACA exhibit for the Santa Clara County Fair in September 1947, just one month before the barrier was broken. (ARC)

Collier award for the NACA was that, by sharing the award with industry and the military as Dryden insisted, the NACA became publicly identified with the military-industrial teamwork that had dominated aircraft development in World War II.56

In 1951 John Stack shared the Collier trophy again, this time with his associates at Langley, for developing a transonic wind tunnel in which wall effects had been reduced enough to yield reliable data in the most troublesome of speed ranges. Although other researchers had despaired of achieving valid wind-tunnel results in the transonic range, Stack and his colleagues had persevered to a success emulated and copied around the world. Once more it was fresh, brilliant, daring research that was winning public accolades for the Committee in contrast to the more mundane achievements of icing research, even though the latter might benefit a larger group and be more widely appreciated by knowledgeable people.

The NACA could and did exploit all these achievements to win continued support from the Bureau of the Budget, the Congress, and the general public.57 Breaking the sound barrier was especially important, for it captured the imagination of those who knew little of the

Left, a worker examines a model in the test section of Langley's 16-foot high-speed wind tunnel in 1951, shortly after the tunnel was repowered and equipped with the new slotted throat that reduced wall effects and permitted accurate testing in the anomalous transonic region around mach 1. Right, two workers survey the return passage of the same tunnel; the diameter here is 58 feet. (LaRC)

John Victory (left) and Hugh Dryden (left, center) display some concern about the prospects of John Stack's (right, center) lasting out the evening of celebration in Hampton's Chamberlin Hotel, marking the award of Stack's second Collier trophy. The ever steady Henry Reid stands beside Stack. (LaRC)

technicalities of flight but could understand what it meant to fly faster than your voice and leave a sonic boom in your wake. But, to those who had a glimpse behind the scenes where the NACA was suffering from both internal dissent and unprecedented criticism from the industry and the military, the future looked less rosy. The new position into which the NACA was being forced in the late 1940s was neither as powerful nor as comfortable as that of the prewar years. On the NACA budget officer's copy of the "Estimates of Appropriations, Fiscal Year 1950," someone had penciled "whither are we going'." 58

11

Doubting Thomases, 1950-1955

All government agencies, the NACA included, run on money. Funding is a measure of institutional health and prospects. With more funding, an agency can presumably do more of whatever it does, be it defending the country, delivering the mail, or conducting aeronautical research. Over the years, especially through World War II, the NACA had always gotten pretty much what it wanted. It was a small, efficient organization with a good reputation in the Bureau of the Budget and in Congress, operating in a field where few bureaucrats or lawmakers were qualified to criticize its work. There is evidence that the NACA tended to ask for as much money as it thought it could get, leaving itself open to charges of conservatism and lack of vision; but it generally fared well in the Washington scramble for funding.

Even after World War II, when the Committee was at its nadir in reputation and influence, when it was losing important battles over the Unitary Wind-Tunnel Plan, missile-research coordination, and nuclearpowered aircraft, it still won steadily increasing funding from Congress.

Nothing prepared the Committee for the unprecedented funding reverses it suffered in the early 1950s. Shortage of money dominated these years, as never before in the Committee's past. Analysis of these money crises becomes an analysis of the Committee's political history as well, showing how the NACA budget (and hence the NACA) fared in comparison with aviation in general, the military services, and federal funding for research and development; why the NACA's funding was cut in these years and by whom; how the Committee responded to the cuts; and what all this portended for the future.

A REVERSAL IN WAR

The NACA had prospered in war. World War I had provided the impetus for its creation in 1915, after several aborted attempts in the preceding years of peace revealed how difficult it was to move Congress when the national interest was not transparently obvious. The