Purtill@MIT-MULTICS.ARPA (Mark Purtill) (10/17/86)
<Fnord>
Does anyone know how NASA did in the current budget?
Mark
^.-.^ Purtill at MIT-MULTICS.ARPA **Insert favorite disclaimer here**
((")) 2-229 MIT Cambrige MA 02139suzanne@unix.cis.pitt.edu (Suzanne Traub-Metlay) (06/18/91)
In article <30916@hydra.gatech.EDU> ccoprmd@prism.gatech.EDU (Matthew DeLuca) writes: >In article <1991Jun7.210944.22123@sequent.com> szabo@sequent.com writes: > >> >> >> >> >> > >Sputnik and Explorer had their origins in the days after World War II, long >before anyone thought about the IGY. Read some of the RAND reports (well, >read *about* them...some are still classified) from 1946, or the intelligence >agency reports in the early 50's...the space race was under way the day >V-2 rockets were captured from the Germans. > >> >> Actually, the "space race" began even earlier -- both the Soviets and the Germans (governments, that is) kept a watchful and interested eye on the doings of the amatuer rocket building clubs prevalent in their nations during the 1930s. Sergei Korolev, the "Grand Designer" of the Soviet space program during the 1950s and early 1960s, made a pilgrimage to the home of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky in 1935, just before Tsiolkovsky's death, just to meet the father of a space program both men considered already under way. The Tsar's science advisors considered Tsiolkovsky a crackpot but Lenin recognized the propaganda value of a "manifest destiny" program to spread socialism through the cosmos and he made Tsiolkovsky a "hero" of the Soviet Union sometime in the early 1920s. (This isn't as weird as it seems. Lenin at the time was desperate to promote his electrification program throughout the Soviet Union. Comic books and science fiction were popular among the very same youth he was trying to interest in science and technology; their parents might not understand why electricity was important in their village but students who wanted to be socialist cosmonauts certainly would and these boys would be the scientists and engineers Lenin needed to bring his new nation into the industrial twentieth century.) Stalin felt the same way. While he couldn't care less about the civilian applications of space technology, he understood the dramatic and romantic appeal an exploratory space program had among the populace. By 1953, he helped establish a Committee on Interplanetary Travel and enthusiastically promoted Soviet participation in the 1957 IGY. Suzanne Traub-Metlay Dept. Geology & Planetary Science University of Pittsburgh Pittsburgh, PA 15260