pyotr filipivich wrote:
Jim Wilkins on Tue, 12 Jul 2011 19:04:55 -0700
(PDT) typed in rec.crafts.metalworking the following:
On Jul 12, 7:58 pm, pyotr filipivich wrote:
...
In something like the space program, the timeline for a return is
"too long" for a company which has to show improvements every ninety
days to keep the stockholders happy.
...
tschus
pyotr
The yearly federal budget cycle with no guarantee the project won't be
cut next year to fund new social entitlements isn't much better.

Yeah. But the original program was an R&D shop and cover for
military applications (satellites).
It was also before the Entitlement Mentality set in, which even
NASA succumbed to. "Cost plus" contracts to companies in the various
important congressional districts.


No, NASA was formed from NACA (National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics)
specifically to get to the moon...

"An Act to provide for research into the problems of flight within and outside
the Earth's atmosphere, and for other purposes." With this simple preamble, the
Congress and the President of the United States created the national Aeronautics
and Space Administration (NASA) on October 1, 1958. NASA's birth was directly
related to the pressures of national defense. After World War II, the United
States and the Soviet Union were engaged in the Cold War, a broad contest over
the ideologies and allegiances of the nonaligned nations. During this period,
space exploration emerged as a major area of contest and became known as the
space race.

During the late 1940s, the Department of Defense pursued research and rocketry
and upper atmospheric sciences as a means of assuring American leadership in
technology. A major step forward came when President Dwight D. Eisenhower
approved a plan to orbit a scientific satellite as part of the International
Geophysical Year (IGY) for the period, July 1, 1957 to December 31, 1958, a
cooperative effort to gather scientific data about the Earth. The Soviet Union
quickly followed suit, announcing plans to orbit its own satellite.

The Naval Research Laboratory's Project Vanguard was chosen on 9 September 1955
to support the IGY effort, largely because it did not interfere with
high-priority ballistic missile development programs. It used the non-military
Viking rocket as its basis while an Army proposal to use the Redstone ballistic
missile as the launch vehicle waited in the wings. Project Vanguard enjoyed
exceptional publicity throughout the second half of 1955, and all of 1956, but
the technological demands upon the program were too great and the funding levels
too small to ensure success.

A full-scale crisis resulted on October 4, 1957 when the Soviets launched
Sputnik 1, the world's first artificial satellite as its IGY entry. This had a
"Pearl Harbor" effect on American public opinion, creating an illusion of a
technological gap and provided the impetus for increased spending for aerospace
endeavors, technical and scientific educational programs, and the chartering of
new federal agencies to manage air and space research and development.

More immediately, the United States launched its first Earth satellite on
January 31, 1958, when Explorer 1 documented the existence of radiation zones
encircling the Earth. Shaped by the Earth's magnetic field, what came to be
called the Van Allen Radiation Belt, these zones partially dictate the
electrical charges in the atmosphere and the solar radiation that reaches Earth.
The U.S. also began a series of scientific missions to the Moon and planets in
the latter 1950s and early 1960s.
"
--

Richard Lamb
http://www.home.earthlink.net/~cavelamb
http://www.home.earthlink.net/~sv_temptress