Asteroid Threat : Defending Our Planet from Deadly Near-earth Objects (9781616149147) by William E. Burrows Page B

there but that nothing could be allowed to happen there that would endanger US national security.
    In May 1946, with the guns of the world war barely cooled, the RAND Corp., a California think tank, issued the first in a series of studies ordered by the US Army Air Forces on earth-circling satellites in general and then on reconnaissance “platforms” in particular. The advantages of aerial reconnaissance had been appreciated since Chinese soldiers on kites were used to locate Mongol invaders and follow their movement. And using aircraft to do the same thing—aerial reconnaissance—had played a decisive role in both world wars. As everyone who had ever surveyed a neighborhood from a rooftop knew, the higher the observer, the more could be seen. The fact that a satellite was going to be able to see a great deal more than anyone in an airplane was a given. The first report, Preliminary Design of an Experimental World-Circling Spaceship , was completed and submitted in 1948 and was followed by several more specific and detailed studies. It was understood that the unmanned “recce” satellites would be part of an armada of robots that would forever change humanity's relationship with the space around Earth. The reconnaissance and surveillance satellites, together with those that would handle long distance communication, meteorology, navigation, and other important assignments, were to be the unmanned part of the space program. The manned program would be the other part.
    The epic meeting at the Hayden Planetarium and the Collier's series were extremely important for informing the public on what the budding aerospace community knew was coming. The community included members of the venerable National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), which was formed in March 1915 as an emergency organization to promote and coordinate action by the aeroplane industry (the manufacturers of what were then called aeroplanes), academe,and government in fighting the war. But with space operations in the offing, an organization that handled only aviation would obviously be wholly inadequate. One that would oversee all aspects of the civilian space program was obviously going to be needed. It was eventually decided that a single federal entity that was responsible for both air and space operations—they were taken to be a continuum, as the X-15 high-altitude experimental aircraft's forays to the edge of space showed—would be optimally efficient. And that entity would run and coordinate both of them. Advising in that circumstance was clearly a non sequitur. The NACA lived on, but tenuously.
    Then there was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. While the Soviet military was taken with utmost seriousness, Russia as a whole was the subject of derision and ridicule by people who, hearing that Russians not only claimed to have flown the first airplane in St. Petersburg in the early 1880s but also claimed to have invented baseball, tended to think of them as stoic workers, peasants, and soldiers whose vaunted Red Army turned back Hitler's previously invincible Wehrmacht, but they also thought of Russians as rowdy buffoons; bearded Cossacks in fur hats who danced the kazatsky and whose veins contained equal parts of blood and vodka. So there were “Russian jokes.” “What did the Russian people light their homes with before they started using candles?” one apocryphal story asked. Answer: “Electricity.” Another had Stalin noticing that there were mice in his study, so he complained to Mikhail Kalinin, the chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, who offered this advice: “Why don't you put up a sign saying Collective Farm? Half of the mice will die of hunger and the other half will run away.” Alexandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago , a widely read account of his and others’ experiences in Stalin's forced-labor camps (published in the West in 1973), confirmed the