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Sixty years ago, on July 29, 1958, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the National Aeronautics and Space Act into law, paving the way for the official opening of NASA's doors just a few months later, on Oct. 1.
The drive to create an American civilian space agency began with the shocking revelation on Oct. 4, 1957, that the Soviet Union had beaten the US to the punch and launched the first artificial satellite, Sputnik, aboard an intercontinental ballistic missile. The USSR was quick to tout its success in launching Earth's "second moon."
"Sputnik 1 was a phenomenon: You could go see it in your backyard," recalled physicist and engineer Guy Stever, who was on the faculty of MIT at the time, in a 1992 oral history workshop on the origins of the law.
Source: https://www.cnet.com/news/how-nasa-got-its-start-60-years-ago-sputnik-eisenhower/
(Score: 3, Informative) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Monday July 30 2018, @02:46PM (7 children)
And it was significantly less than the first initiative to go to space, as plans for the first American satellite were well underway before Sputnik launched. That article has a not-untypical tone that we were caught with our pants down and miraculously formed and agency out of whole cloth to launch the first US Satellite as pure reaction to the Soviets. The reality was plans were already well underway in the US to launch a satellite and the US already had a successful launch of a miltary rocket (Jupiter C) which was more than capable of delivering a satellite to orbit. Sputnik only accelerated the US timetable and NASA was created, in part, to make sure that the effort was A) civilian, and B) settled the Army-Navy spat as both had rocketry teams who wanted to be first. Von Braun was Army rocketry and on the NACA board, then went to NASA. But most histories I've read generally downplay the prior efforts towards an American satellite.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday July 30 2018, @02:59PM (6 children)
Given that the US went from establishment of NASA in 1958 to landing men on the Moon in 1969, I disagree. NASA signaled far more than a name-change, it was a reordering of the US's entire efforts in space to considerable near future success.
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Monday July 30 2018, @04:36PM (5 children)
I didn't say it was nothing more than a name-change. I agree that the coming of NASA brought a singular civilian focus to what were previously scattered military projects under the Project Orbiter umbrella which was coordinated by NACA.
I am saying that the first United States satellite launch has nothing to do with NASA, since it occurred well before the creation of NASA. NASA was established by law as above July 29, 1958. The Army's "civilianized" Explorer 1 launched January 31, 1958, in the wings of the December, 1957 failure of the Navy's Vanguard TV3. Thus the creation of NASA was not the first initiative to go to space. The ground had already begun to be paved by its predecessors.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday July 31 2018, @04:58AM (4 children)
Six months is not "well before". And who has been claiming that NASA launched the first satellite?
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Tuesday July 31 2018, @02:40PM (3 children)
"Well before," as in the Explorer 1 launch happened, unquestionably, before NASA was created. No rhetoric points there.
The first satellite was launched before NASA was created. The plans to do so were in play before NASA was created. Space initiatives were present before NASA was created. It's that simple.
So we agree that the first initiatives in space exploration existed before NASA, that NACA to NASA was a transition of an already functioning space program by mostly the same principals from the former to the latter, and that it became much better organized specifically for space exploration and funded post-change.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday July 31 2018, @06:03PM (2 children)
Neither happened in a day.
And yet, they greatly accelerated all those plans when Sputnik happened.
Yes and no. It's like claiming that sure we spent several times the initial value of a car in upgrading engine, suspension, body work, etc and then characterizing all that work as merely repainting the car. "Sure, it has triple the horsepower it originally had, but the car existed before we painted it red."
So first, we have a direction cause-effect chain between the launch of Sputnik, the creation of numerous US government committees to figure out how to deal with that a few weeks later, and the creation of NASA the next year with an explicit "context" of "large-scale development, management, and operations" (which the NACA didn't have). This is all completely unrelated to the launch of the first US satellite except as it didn't happen before the launch of the first Soviet satellite.
Another strike against your observation is that the first US satellite, Explorer 1 was launched by a Jupiter C [wikipedia.org] rocket which was US Army-built not NACA. NACA was a peripheral player at the time.
So let's review some of the major changes that went into the transition from NACA to NASA. First, the US shifted to an explicitly civilian, explicitly space program (NASA was no longer an aeronautics agency that dabbled in space with most of the work being done by the US military). Second, it meant even before Apollo a huge escalation in US space activities - there was now someone assigned to plan and enable big space projects). Finally, all the scattered space projects that had existed before NASA were grouped under NASA. That allowed for the epic development teams that created such things as the Saturn V rocket.
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Wednesday August 01 2018, @03:03PM (1 child)
The launch of Sputnik gave urgency and impetus to the space program, true enough, and NASA had a much more limited mandate with greater authority in that mandate than NACA did. (Limited in the sense of being more space-focused, but even then and continuing to today they have a role in aeronautics generally). And it was civilian and not military focused.
But the actual transition was subsuming all those disparate players into one agency. Much of the early leadership came direct from NACA (the peak of that being Hugh Dryden.) The ABMA, including Von Braun, were subsumed directly and became Marshall Space Flight Center.
Differences, sure there were differences! But I'd liken the analogy much more to having a 747 airframe at Boneyard 1, a pair of working engines at Airport 2, landing gears at airport 3, and a singular person buys all of them, gets them together at Facility 4, then purchases new avionics and hydraulics and incorporates them into the frame. Now you have a 747-800 VIP instead of a 747-200. (Yeah, the analogy falls apart a little because I think there were actually some airframe changes). I'll readily agree that it wasn't the "same" and wasn't just a name change - it became much more than that. But the core parts were already there, awaiting engineering and assembly.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday August 02 2018, @01:23AM
No, it's more like having a number of groups that know how to make some of these things at a much smaller scale, bound together by a business with massive funding, who then creates the plan for the 747 (none of the groups were thinking that big at the time) and then the groups, with the massive funding, develop everything, including most of the necessary technological know-how to make it happen.