New Moons Rising - GPS Declassified: From Smart Bombs to Smartphones - page 12

decision. Some see anti-German bias toward the Army's team of former Nazi
engineers, led by Wernher von Braun, which was responsible for the deadly
German v- 2 rocket. 61 Another viewpoint discerns partisan loyalties toward the
Navy among the members of the Stewart Committee. Furnas, who voted with
Stewart against Project Vanguard, later wrote that the decision was “purely
technical. No politics were involved.” 62 Still another claim is that the National
Security Council's secret directive prohibited using a launch vehicle already
intended for military purposes. 63 Motives are difficult to prove, but the text of
the declassified nsc directive stops short of an explicit prohibition.
nsc 5520 is a short document, consisting of a dozen paragraphs and three
attachments—a rough one-page budget, a discussion of technical matters, and
an endorsement by Nelson Rockefeller, who was a special advisor to Eisen-
hower. The directive's thrust was to support spending about $20 million (Proj-
ect Vanguard would end up costing $110 million) to launch a small scientific
satellite, provided it did not impede research and development of long-range
missiles or larger spy satellites the Pentagon was pursuing. When Vanguard's
major contractor, Martin, won a contract to work on the Titan rocket, the best
engineers who had worked on Viking were transferred to work on it. Thus, the
reverse happened. Work on an icbm impeded work on Vanguard. With the
Soviet Union on the brink of developing intercontinental ballistic missiles capa-
ble of carrying warheads, reconnaissance satellites offered a potential means
for keeping track of developments in that closed and secretive society. Unclear
at the time, however, was the legal status of orbiting satellites. The directive
authorized using a small, nonmilitary satellite to test the principle of “freedom
of space.” This doctrine held that national sovereignty of airspace did not
extend to orbital altitudes, making a satellite akin to a ship in international
waters. In an Oval Office meeting four days after Sputnik I passed over numer-
ous nations without any protests, Donald Quarles, who had been promoted to
deputy secretary of defense, observed that “the Russians have in fact done us
a good turn, unintentionally, in establishing the concept of freedom of inter-
national space.” 64
Two months after signing the nsc directive, on July 21, 1955, Eisenhower
proposed his “Open Skies” Treaty under which the United States and Soviet
Union would have permitted reciprocal aerial reconnaissance flights.65 65 He
hoped to reduce the temptation to launch a surprise attack and to begin a pro-
cess toward disarmament, but the Soviets rejected the proposal. Eisenhower
authorized secret flights over Soviet territory, in violation of international law,