NACA territory and made the Committee appear less unique, more duplicative, less indispensable.

In spite of these political vulnerabilities, the NACA seems to have felt as secure of its institutional survival in 1957 as at any time in its history. When Sputnik was launched by the Soviet Union on 4 October of that year-the event that triggered the demise of the NACA-the Committee took little notice. At its annual meeting less than two weeks later, the subject never arose.11

RECONSTITUTION

President Eisenhower was equally unmoved by Sputnik 1 and just as deaf to the implications of the event. He felt that he had answered the Soviet technological threat when he examined the missile situation in 1954 and 1955 and instituted a crash program to develop an American intercontinental ballistic missile. He did not want, nor did he see any need, to upset America's economic stability by investing in an expensive space program. To indulge the fantasies of the space enthusiasts"space cadets" was the contemporary sneer-would divert attention and resources from the more crucial missile program. Because much of the rationale behind his position was highly classified, he was at a disadvantage in public debate over the meaning of, and the appropriate response to, Sputnik. He and his staff adopted the unfortunate policy of discounting the Russian achievement as an attempt to draw the U.S. into "an outer space basketball game" of satellites, claiming that it did not worry the president "one iota." 12

The political winds, however, were blowing in the opposite direction. Many public figures and opinion makers, including key members of Congress, saw Sputnik in an entirely different light. Most important, they viewed it as a threat to national security, for it demonstrated a

missile capability more sophisticated than previously estimated, a capability that for the first time since the War of 1812 posed a realistic threat to the protection provided by the Atlantic and Pacific oceans against foreign attack. Second, Sputnik manifested a general advance in Soviet education, science, and technology that was already worrying informed Americans. And third, the Soviet feat was widely viewed as a psychological victory in the cold war; it could lead unaligned or wavering nations to conclude that the Soviet Union really was the rising star with which the countries of the third world should ally their futures. These concerns motivated calls for a national crash program in space to catch and surpass the Russians. The space race was on. 13

Hoping to stem this tide of public opinion, Eisenhower elevated his Science Advisory Committee to White House quarters and prestige, retitled it the President's Science Advisory Committee, and imported James R. Killian, Jr., from the presidency of MIT to chair it, anointing the 53-year-old engineer and administrator Special Assistant to the President for Science and Technology. To Killian and the rejuvenated PSAC, Eisenhower gave broad responsibilities for formulating advice on a wide range of questions involving national security, the first and most pressing being what to do about space.

14

But these first steps, positive though they were, did not satisfy. Sputnik 2 had gone aloft on 3 November, carrying a dog and more than 500 kilograms of scientific equipment. Even had the United States succeeded in launching its own satellite as scheduled the following month, it would have orbited less than two kilograms of payload. On 25 November Lyndon Johnson convened exhaustive hearings on the nation's missile and space program before his Preparedness Investigating Subcommittee of the Senate Armed Services Committee. The tenor of these hearings and the growing public concern over the issue soon made clear the political imperative for a major United States space program. The questions in 1957 were: Who would formulate it? Where would the program lodge? 15

In this charged atmosphere, the NACA came alive to the significance of Sputnik and its portent for the Committee. Spaceflight was in many ways an extension of the atmospheric flight and missile research that had been the NACA's prime concern. If fundamental research was to be done on spaceflight, the NACA was the logical agency to do it. Soon enough the Committee realized that the opposite was true as well; much of its current research could easily be done by a new space agency, were such an institution to arise. Far from ensuring the Committee's continued growth into a new branch of technology, the prospect of spaceflight jeopardized the very existence of the NACA and shattered the calm assurance of the months preceding Sputnik. In selfdefense the Committee would have to decide how to respond to the

challenge and where it would fit institutionally into the emerging controversy over developing a national space program. 16

As it had been wont to do in any crisis throughout its 42 years, the NACA began by creating a committee, in this case a Special Committee on Space Technology. When Hunsaker refused the chairmanship, it was offered to H. Guyford Stever, then associate dean of engineering at MIT. Because of the press of other business, Stever could not take up this post immediately, but this mattered little to the NACA. The purpose of what came to be called the Stever committee was not to quickly formulate a policy for the NACA, but rather to bring together under the NACA umbrella all the scientists and engineers in the United States who might play a substantial role in the development and execution of a national space policy. The Stever committee was more political than technological, intended to coopt possible critics of the NACA and guarantee it the best available grip on the course of events. It was unlikely that the NACA would be left out of any truly significant development if its committee membership included all the individuals who would contribute to those developments. 17

The Stever committee, however, had neither the opportunity nor the mandate to tell the NACA what to do next. On 18 December a meeting of key staff personnel from headquarters and all the laboratories debated the Committee's options; that night, chairman Doolittle hosted a still larger gathering of staff members that came to be called in NACA folklore the "Young Turks dinner." Here the younger engineers got a chance to say how they thought the NACA should respond to space. Opinion was divided, roughly along generational lines, between the young men who wanted the NACA to campaign for a broad new role in space and the old hands who preferred a more cautious expansion of the NACA's current activities. John Stack, the brilliant Langley engineer with two Collier trophies and an enormous ego in his corner, called Dryden an old fogey, or words to that effect. Though Stack was apparently voicing (however intemperately) the sentiments of the majority, he won little more than a debate-ending backlash from Dryden, who proceeded to "explain the approach that would be taken."18

The approach was a series of studies and papers in which the NACA made its formal claim to be selected as the agency that would conduct U.S. space research. First came "A National Research Program for Space Technology," a staff study completed on 14 January 1958, in which "the Soviet . . . bid for world supremacy" was characterized as "a most serious challenge to the United States and the Western world," calling for "an energetic program of research and development for the conquest conquest of space." The study recommended "the pattern . . . already developed by the NACA and the military services"

and exemplified in the X-15 program, wherein "the scientific research [would] be the responsibility of a national civilian agency working in close cooperation with the applied research and development groups required for weapon-systems development by the military." This study was swallowed whole by the NACA Executive Committee two days later, reappearing in a "Resolution on the Subject of Space Flight," which became the basis of further staff action. 19

On 10 February 1958 the staff published "A Program for Expansion of NACA Research in Space Flight Technology with Estimates of the Staff and Facilities Required," a remarkably prophetic document covering virtually every aspect of spaceflight from exotic propulsion technology to the mechanics of rendezvous in orbit, and concluding that the NACA should more than double its staff and operating budget over a two- to three-year period and should undertake a $655 million construction program, including vast expansion of the existing laboratories and creation of a new laboratory. On the same day, the Committee published "NACA Research into Space," a catalogue of all NACA work over the years that could be construed as contributing to space flight. The jewel in this diadem, as in the other NACA papers on space, was the 1952 consideration of the Woods proposal to investigate the possibilities of spaceflight. Now the NACA was claiming that it "in 1952 initiated studies of the problems associated with unmanned and manned flight'" into space when, in fact, it had (on Dryden's recommendation) actually weasel-worded the resolution at the time, resolving that "a modest effort be devoted by the NACA to the definition and formulation of the problems associated with unmanned and manned flight" into space. 20 Once more the NACA was tarnishing a commendable record by claiming overmuch for itself.

By this time (February 1958) other hats were in the ring and Eisenhower had to choose one, or Lyndon Johnson and the Democratic Congress would do it for him. Chief contender, and in many ways the most logical choice, was the Department of Defense, and particularly the air force. For years, when it was unpopular and politically dangerous to do so, a group in the air force's Ballistic Missile Division (formerly the Western Development Division) of the Air Research and Development Command had been planning and advocating military space activities. A comparable group in the army, centered on Wernher von Braun's Development Operations Division of the army's Ballistic Missile Agency at Redstone Arsenal in Alabama, had similar plans and ambitions. Eisenhower opposed the choice of either, because he was reluctant to fuel the military-industrial complex that was becoming for him an increasing source of concern, and because the "missile mess" and the interservice rivalry at the Pentagon over roles and missions— not only in space but on earth as well-did not suggest to him that the

services could take on this new mission without further stimulating their counterproductive and exasperating struggle for position, prestige, and budget. 21

In Congress there was some sentiment for entrusting America's space program to the Atomic Energy Commission, which appeared to be enormously successful in managing large-scale technology of both military and civilian dimensions. Sen. Clinton Anderson, chairman of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, led this crusade but never made much progress at the White House. Others suggested creation of an entirely new agency, perhaps modeled on the AEC, perhaps cut from whole cloth. The American Rocket Society and the Rocket and Satellite Research Panel, for example, joined in recommending a National Space Establishment independent of the military and free to pursue the scientific, commercial, and cultural aspects of space travel and exploration.22

All these proposals had supporters and opponents, as did the NACA's bid. Many in the aviation community publicly endorsed the NACA as "the Logical Space Agency" and a "Spearhead of Progress.' But some in the scientific community considered the NACA too small, too inexperienced, and above all too conservative to rise fully to the challenge of space. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory of the California Institute of Technology, for example, made just such an argument to Killian, but undermined the force of its criticism by suggesting that JPL should be "the national space laboratory."23

The competition ended on 4 February 1958 when a PSAC panel that had been investigating the problem since December formally recommended that a new civilian agency be created around the nucleus of the NACA. Eisenhower quickly embraced this proposal and directed that legislation be drafted embodying the concepts in the PSAC presentation. Ideas were still vague at that point, and generalization was the order of the day. It was possible for all the participants to see in the proposed plan the acceptance of their own views; it was especially easy for the NACA to do so. Victory wrote to a former NACA member on 20 February: "Don't be surprised if you see some Congressman introducing legislation to change our name to National Advisory Committee for Astronautics, or Aeronautics and Astronautics." 24

This, however, was not to be. The legislation incorporating the administration plan would be drafted not by Congress but by the executive branch, specifically by a team composed of members from the PSAC, the NACA, the Rockefeller Commission on Government Organization, and the Bureau of the Budget. The scheme was to survey comprehensively the organic legislation of all comparable federal agencies, including the case law resulting from the legislation, in order to formulate a single organic act incorporating the best recent experience