New Moons Rising - GPS Declassified: From Smart Bombs to Smartphones - page 13

and in 1960 the Soviets shot down Gary Francis Powers in a u-2 spy plane over
their soil and a second reconnaissance airplane in international airspace. A
few months later, the first corona reconnaissance satellite made further over-
flights unnecessary. 66
nsc 5520's language occasionally reflects the gap between what adminis-
tration officials said in public and what was said in confidential meetings. The
first sentence of paragraph 6 is revealing: “Considerable prestige and psycho-
logical benefits will accrue to the nation which first is successful in launching
a satellite. The inference of such a demonstration of advanced technology and
its unmistakable relationship to intercontinental ballistic missile technology might
have important repercussions on the political determination of free world coun-
tries to resist Communist threats, especially if the USSR were to be the first to
establish a satellite” (emphasis added). 67
President Eisenhower publicly disavowed the idea that the United States
was in a “space race” with the Soviet Union and in the aftermath of Sputnik
projected an unworried response, playing golf that weekend (October 4, 1957,
was a Friday) and waiting five days before holding a press conference. On the
morning of October 9, Eisenhower released a prepared statement before field-
ing unusually contentious questions from the press corps. 68 His statement
included these lines: “ Speed of progress in the satellite project cannot be taken as
an index of our progress in ballistic missile work . Our satellite program has never
been conducted as a race with other nations. Rather, it has been carefully sched-
uled as part of the scientific work of the International Geophysical Year”
(emphasis added). 69 Eisenhower defended the decision to keep the igy satel-
lite effort separate from military programs, asserting that if the United States
had used a military rocket, it could have put a satellite into orbit before the
Soviets, but doing so would have been “to the detriment of scientific goals and
military progress.” 70 Nevertheless, the day before the press conference Eisen-
hower authorized Army officials to begin preparing the Redstone as a backup
for Vanguard. 71 They were more than ready.
Since the Stewart Committee's decision two years earlier, Maj. Gen. John
B. Medaris, who commanded the U.S. Army Ballistic Missile Agency (abma)
at Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama, and his outspoken chief engineer,
Wernher von Braun, had openly sniped at administration policies and covertly
found ways to keep their rocket team in position to launch a satellite. When
the Pentagon denied earlier requests for Redstone to be named officially as a
backup program for Vanguard, they quietly found ways to keep their satellite