Wiesner Task Force Critical of NASA and DOD Space Efforts

One of the twenty-nine task forces advising president-elect Kennedy during the transition focused on “outer space.” The task force was led by Jerome Wiesner, a professor of engineering at MIT who had been involved in weap­ons research during World War II and had had a decade of experience dealing with the national security policy aspects of scientific and engineering issues. Wiesner had been a member of PSAC since its inception in 1957, but had not served on any of the PSAC subcommittees dealing with space issues. He had, however, most likely heard many of the briefings on space issues given to the overall committee. During the presidential campaign, Kennedy had sought his advice primarily on a possible nuclear test ban and other arms control issues. By the time the task force began its work, Wiesner had emerged as Kennedy’s most likely choice to be the presidential science adviser.

The other original members of the Wiesner “Ad Hoc Committee on Space” were:

• Edwin Purcell, the Harvard professor who had chaired the first PSAC study on space in 1958 and was chair of the PSAC space flight panel;

• Donald Hornig, professor at Princeton University and the PSAC member who was chair of PSAC’s space booster panel and had also led the PSAC “Ad Hoc Panel on Man-in-Space”;

• Edwin “Din” Land, President of Polaroid Corporation in Cambridge and an original PSAC member;

• Harry Watters, a top assistant to Land;

• Bruno Rossi, professor of physics at MIT; and

• Trevor Gardner, a former Air Force Assistant Secretary for Research and Development who also was chairing an Air Force committee in support of the service’s campaign for a larger role in space.

One indication that the decision to make Lyndon Johnson chair of the Space Council had been taken prior to December 17 was a meeting on that day between Jerome Wiesner, Kenneth Belieu, and Max Leher, who was the Senate space committee’s assistant staff director. The latter two, of course, worked for Johnson as committee chair. At that meeting, Wiesner expressed support for reestablishing the Space Council, and invited Belieu and Leher to join his task force.57 It is unlikely that this invitation would have been offered if it were not for the space policy role that Kennedy envisaged for Johnson.

Most of the members of Wiesner’s group were deeply familiar with space issues because of their past involvements. They chose to prepare their report without any briefings or other formal contact with NASA and DOD. The group met together only a few times before issuing its report; Robert Seamans, NASA’s associate administrator, notes that “alarming rumors” about what the group might say in its report “kept appearing in journals and newspapers.”58

On January 10, 1961, president-elect Kennedy met in Lyndon Johnson’s Senate office with Johnson, members of the Wiesner panel, Senator Kerr, and Representative Overton Brooks, chairman of the House Committee on Science and Astronautics, to be briefed on the panel’s report. Because por­tions of the report dealt with the military space program and other sensitive policy matters, the entire report was classified “confidential.” An unclassi­fied version was made public the next day.59

The twenty-four page report was admittedly a “hasty review” aimed at providing a “survey of the program” and identifying “personnel, technical, or administrative problems” requiring prompt attention. It listed five princi­pal motivations for the space program:

1. National prestige

2. National security

3. Scientific observation and experiment

4. Practical nonmilitary applications

5. International cooperation.60

The panel recognized that “space exploration and exploits have captured the imagination of the peoples of the world,” and that “during the next few years the prestige of the United States will in part be determined by the leadership we demonstrate in space activities.”

The task force felt “compelled to criticize our space program and its man­agement” because of “serious problems within NASA, within the military establishment, and at the executive and other policy-making levels of govern­ment.” The report was critical of the management of both NASA and DOD space efforts. With regard to NASA, it called for “vigorous, imaginative, and technically competent top management,” implying that NASA’s current top officials had not demonstrated these qualities. The report deplored the tendency of each military service to create an independent space program and called for one service to be responsible for space within the DOD. It was concerned with the lack of coordination among the various agencies involved in space and endorsed the revitalization of the Space Council as “an effec­tive agency for managing the national space program.” The use of the word managing was particularly noted; some took this as a suggestion that the Space Council would have executive, not just coordinating, responsibilities in space.

Only the scientific portion of NASA’s programs was deemed “basically sound.” Even so, the report noted that “too few of the country’s outstanding scientists and engineers” were working in the space field. Developing boost­ers with greater weight-lifting capability was “a matter of national urgency,” since “the inability of our rockets to lift large payloads into space is key to serious limitations of our space program.”

The report recognized that “man will be compelled” to go into space “by the same motives that have compelled him to go to the poles and to climb the highest mountains of the earth.” Thus, “manned exploration of space will certainly come to pass and we believe that the United States must play a vigorous role in this venture.” The ultimate goal of human space flight, the group recognized, was “eventual manned exploration of the moon and the planets.” The panel acknowledged that “some day” humans in space might “accomplish important scientific or technical tasks,” but in the short run human space flight “cannot be justified solely on scientific or technical grounds.”

The Wiesner task force called Project Mercury “marginal,” as had the PSAC report a month earlier, and pointed out that it was “very unlikely” that the United States would be first to send an astronaut to orbit. Echoing the PSAC position, it was critical of the relative priorities given to human and robotic flight: “The acquisition of new knowledge and the enrichment of human life through technological advances are solid, durable and worth­while goals of space activities. . . By having placed highest national priority on the MERCURY program, we have strengthened the popular belief that man in space is the most important aim of our nonmilitary space effort.”

The task force recommended that President Kennedy not allow “the pres­ent Mercury program to continue unchanged for more than a very few months” and that he not “effectively endorse this program and take the blame for its possible failures.” It suggested that “a thorough and impartial appraisal of the MERCURY program should be urgently made.” It recommended that “we should stop advertising Mercury as our major objective in space. Indeed, we should make an effort to diminish the significance of this program to its proper proportion before the public, both at home and abroad.” Of par­ticular concern was the potential death of an astronaut in a Mercury mis­sion, particularly if he were to be stranded in orbit. Rather than continue to put emphasis on human space flight, suggested the panel, “We should find effective means to make people appreciate the cultural, public service, and military importance of space activities other than space travel.” Finally, the panel recommended “a vigorous program to exploit the potentialities of practical space systems” for communications, navigation, and meteorological observation.

After the panel’s briefing, the president-elect described the report as “highly informative” and his meeting with the task force as “very fruitful.” Once the report became public, it was subject to criticism from space advo­cates, and at his first post-inaugural press conference Kennedy remarked that “I don’t think anyone is suggesting that their [the task force’s] views are nec­essarily in every case the right views.”61 In terms of the space program’s sub­stance, in contrast to management issues, the report seemed to endorse the civilian space program that had been pursued by the Eisenhower administra­tion; it certainly was not “the ringing denunciation of Eisenhower’s lassitude on space initiatives that Kennedy. . . might have hoped for.” According to one historian, Kennedy “treated the panel’s findings “like a skunk at a wedding.” There was even some question after the inauguration of whether Wiesner agreed with everything in the report of the task force he had chaired.62

The day after he received the report of the panel, Kennedy named Jerome Wiesner as his new science and technology adviser. Wiesner’s selection meant that Kennedy would hear both sides of the case for a high profile civilian space program focused on human space flight, one perspective from Lyndon Johnson and the other from Wiesner.