[January 27th
marks the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 1 tragedy,
one of many setbacks and challenges that didn’t deter from the US manned space program from
making history. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy five moments or contexts for
NASA’s early years. I’d love your responses and thoughts in comments, as
always!]
Three moments
and figures that (along with yesterday’s international influences) contributed
to the space agency’s starting points:
1)
NACA: NASA’s predecessor in the federal
government, the National Advisory
Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), dated all the way back to March 1915,
when it was founded as part of the nation’s responses to World War I (although
President Taft had proposed a somewhat similar National
Aerodynamical Laboratory Commission as early as 1911-2). After a few years
of explicitly war-related activites, NACA began to expand and deepen its research
interests in 1920, when President Woodrow Wilson appointed aviation pioneer Orville
Wright to the agency’s board. Wright would serve on the NACA board for 28
years, helping bridge the period between these World War I origins and the
post-World War II transitions into the atomic age and the origins of the space
race. During that time, NACA was involved in a number of prominent and
influential projects, including the supersonic research exemplified by test
pilot Chuck Yeager’s famous 1947 flight.
2)
Robert
Goddard: Interestingly, the man who came to be known as the father of
rocket propulsion was (as far as I know) never officially part of NACA. But
over the same early twentieth-century decades that Wright and his fellow NACA
members were expanding their pioneering efforts, Goddard was performing his,
exemplified by his March 19, 1926
launch of the first recorded liquid-fueled rocket in Auburn, Massachusetts.
Goddard’s subsequent experiments were funded by both the government (in the
form of the
Smithsonian Institution) and the Guggenheim Foundation (thanks to the
support of Goddard’s longtime
friend Charles Lindbergh), reflecting the role that both public and private
enterprises played in furthering these advances. Between them, the work done by
NACA and Goddard in the 1920s and 30s not only led directly to the space
program, but proved invaluable to the Allied
cause in World War II.
3)
Dwight
Eisenhower: As I wrote in this
Talking Points Memo piece, we tend to give presidents more of a central
role in particular periods or histories than they necessarily deserve. But at
the same time, expanding our histories to include other figures and influences
shouldn’t mean forgetting or eliding the role that presidents can and do play,
and Eisenhower’s
contributions to the origins of NASA are a case in point (as is John F.
Kennedy’s subsequent role, on which more tomorrow). In part that meant, as it
often does (but as, now more than ever, we unfortunately can’t take for
granted), agreeing with and supporting the
recommendations of his scientific advisors and the wider research community.
But as reflected in his
signing statement for the July 1958 National Aeronautics and Space Act (the
law that established NASA), Eisenhower was also well aware of the significance
of these efforts, both in continuing the work done by NACA and others and in
moving closer to genuine global as well as national progress in the exploration
of space. One more inspiring and influential figure and moment in the
multi-decade origins of NASA and the US space program.
Next NASA post
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other NASA takes you’d share?
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