Notes and Sources

The relative importance of written and oral records varies from section to section and even within sections, as does the balance between primary and secondary sources. In chapter one, for example, secondary sources were the only ones I had access to.

Even when there are records, they can be scanty or one-sided. The IGY, for example, is well recorded by the National Academy of Sciences, but the individual scientists, such as Verner Suomi, do not have extensive records. Often, the scientists and technologists were too busy as pioneers to record in detail what they were doing, and posterity was the last thing on their minds.

The NAS archives, which were of importance to the prologue; chapters two, three, and eleven; and to parts of the other sections have been well mined, and others have written extensively of the IGY and its relationship to the subsequent development of space science in the U. S. My “angle” was to explore the same material for the seeds of space technology and of application satellites.

Both oral and written primary sources are of equal importance to the navigation section. The pre-Transit chapters were possible only because of long and repeated interviews, while the chapters on Transit were possible only because of the material in APL’s archives.

The meteorology section is based on interviews, a few primary sources, and secondary sources. It provides the clearest example of the emergence of application satellites from the IGY. But access to declassified primary sources will eventually make the history of meteorology satellites much more complete.

The communication section is the most heavily based on primary source written records, supplemented with a few interviews.

Prologue

The primary source of material for the prologue (also for chapters two, three, and eleven) is the archival material about the International Geo­physical Year stored at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, DC.

Of particular importance were minutes of the USNC Committee of the IGY; minutes of the Executive Committee of the IGY, and the minutes of the Technical Panel on Rocketry The account of James Van Allen’s din­ner party (page 1) comes from an oral history given by Dr. Van Allen to David DeVorkin in February, June, July, and August of 1981 for the National Air and Space Museum.

Observations about Lloyd Berkner’s character were pieced together from impressions gained by reading minutes of IGY committee meetings (page 1). His name crops up in records for communications and meteorology satellites and in the development of early U. S. space policy. The biograph­ical files at the NASA History Office describe a naval officer who, when he died, was buried with full military honors and someone who opposed scientific secrecy. Besides being the originator of the idea for the IGY, Berkner was president of the International Council of Scientific Unions.

Drawer 1 of the archives of the National Academy of Sciences contains program proposals for the IGY, including one from Paul Siple highlight­ing concerns then felt about global warming (page 3).

Drawer 2 of the NAS archives contains the minutes of the first meeting of the U. S. National Committee for the IGY held 26-27 March 1953. Also in drawer 2 are to be found tentative proposals for the IGY 1957-1958 prepared by the USNC for the IGY, 13 May 1953 (page 3).

The anecdote that administration officials said, “Joe, go home,” was related by Kaplan himself in a speech to mark the tenth anniversary of Explorer (page 4). A copy of the speech was among Verner Suomi’s papers.

The account of what happened in Rome in 1954 and the budget figures for the IGY are found in Vanguard—A History, by Constance Green and

Milton Lomask (page 4). The book is part of the NASA History Series, SP4202.

Information about President Eisenhower’s intelligence needs (p. 4-5) and his national security policy comes mainly from. . . the Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age, by Walter McDougall (Basic Books, 1985). This book addresses what has been the central mystery of the U. S. space program—why the Eisenhower administration chose the Vanguard rather than the Explorer program for the development of the first U. S. satellite.

The existence of the Killian panel is well known, and its existence is writ­ten about in numerous accounts of the time, but McDougall’s discussion is the most exhaustive I encountered (page 4).

The most detailed and up-to-date information about the Killian panel (page 4) and its influence on the Eisenhower administration’s policy and of the way that national security considerations impacted the develop­ment of the IGY are to be found in R. Cargill Hall’s article “The Eisen­hower Administration and the Cold War, Framing American Astronautics to Serve National Security,” in Prologue, Quarterly of the National Archives.

The exact sequence of events in which Donald Quarles, assistant secretary of defense for research and development, approached senior scientists of the IGY is not clear when one looks at Cargill Hall’s article and the sequence of events that surrounded planning of the IGY (page 5). How­ever, minutes of the IGY suggest that in the light of Cargill Hall’s article, some senior scientists other than Joseph Kaplan knew or guessed the national security agenda that necessitated developing a satellite with a largely civilian flavor.

The first meeting of the USNC of the IGY was chaired by Joseph Kaplan (page 3).

During the third meeting on November 5 — 6, 1954, James Van Allen commented on the usefulness of rocketry studies. At this time, though various international bodies had endorsed the idea of a satellite program forming part of the IGY, Van Allen’s presentation referred to sounding rockets, i. e., those that carry instruments aloft but fall back to Earth with­out entering orbit.

During the fourth meeting, on January 14 and 15, 1955, Harold Wexler spoke of gaps in the meteorological data, and Homer Newell, in the absence of James Van Allen, told the committee that the sounding rock­etry work would be undertaken entirely by the agencies of the Depart­ment of Defense, provided that the National Science Foundation secured the necessary funding from Congress.

By this time, much of the debate concerning the importance to the United States of adopting a satellite program as part of the IGY had moved to the USNC’s executive committee and to a working group of the technical panel on rocketry (see notes and sources for chapter three) as well as to the National Security Council.

Reports on Leonid Sedov’s announcement at the sixth meeting of the International Astronautical Federation in Copenhagen appeared in the Baltimore Sun as well as in other newspapers, dateline August 2, 1955 (page 6).