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Progress in the Forty Years Since Sputnik

“I am going to lay the facts before you—the rough and the smooth.”

President Dwight Eisenhower on November 7, 1957
Professor Leon Tabak on October 14, 1997

Please come to the next meeting of Cornell College's Science Interest Group on Tuesday, October 14 at 11:10 a.m. in West Science 100.

I wish to share with you a little history of the origins of space travel, America's emotional response to the Soviet Union's launch of the first ever satellite, and recent echoes of that debate forty years ago about how the nation can best educate its young people. I have prepared a short presentation so that we might have time in the allotted hour for a vigorous discussion.

Although the Science Interest Group always welcomes to its programs all members of our community, this is my special invitation to you for this month's presentation and discussion. I quote from a paid, full-page advertisement that appeared in the New York Times during the autumn of 1957:

“ You don't have to be a scientist, Mr. President, to solve this problem. You must be a leader. ”

Please join us, even if you are not a scientist or a president, to hear and respond to criticisms of American education, and to imagine our future.

Hope to see you there!

Forty years and ten days ago, the Soviet Union launched into orbit the first ever artificial satellite. The Soviet achievement rang an immediate alarm in the United States. It shook the confidence of the American people. Politicians, journalists, editorialists, and educators pointed to the satellite over their heads as proof that the nation's leaders had failed the people or, alternatively, as proof that the people had failed themselves. Americans saw in Sputnik I evidence of Soviet military prowess and confirmation of its aggressive intent. That was the week that Soviet Premier banged his shoe on the podium at the United Nations. If the Soviet Union could propel a 184 pound radio all the way around the globe, it could also lob a heavier bomb just half way around the globe.

In 1957, the Soviet economy was growing faster than the American economy. Americans had invested their pride in a belief in their own inventiveness. Their sense of security rested on a conviction that personal freedoms would multiply the creativity of their scientists and that competitive markets would inevitably outperform command economies. The Soviet Union's priority in space convinced many Americans that their own future was not so well assured; that a rival nation might soon grow more prosperous and more powerful than the United States, that American ideals were imperiled.

Fifty years ago today, Chuck Yeager piloted his rocket plane, Glamorous Glennis , through the sound barrier. America's position in the 1950s was in fact strong. Sputnik's flight failed to perturb the calm attitude of the American president Dwight Eisenhower, but he knew more than he could share with the public or Democrats in Congress. Although he was not a scientist, he solicited the advice of scientists, felt comfortable in the company of scientists, and exhibited a keen grasp of the technical issues.

A later of generation of American commentators would dismiss the wringing of hands that had followed Sputnik. The space race was never a real race, they would conclude. In one view, the Soviet Union from the beginning pursued its own goals in space without reference to American plans or achievements; Soviet leaders never fixed their eyes on the moon. In another view, vastly superior technology assured from the start an American victory in the race to the moon. Both the first and the later popular views of the space race were wrong.

America's leaders gave less priority to the design and deployment of missiles because, even without missiles, the United States had means enough to threaten its adversary in the developing Cold War.

During the second world war, the United States built an enormous fleet of aircraft. The country maintained and further developed its air force in the peace that followed the war. No other nation in the world had so many airplanes or airplanes of equal sophistication. None possessed airplanes that could carry such heavy loads of bombs so far, so fast, and so high.During the war and in its aftermath, the United States also acquired numerous airfields from which to operate its air force, in western and southern Europe, northern Africa, the Near East, the Far East, and the far north of Alaska, Canada, and Greenland. They could reach targets inside the Soviet Union a few hours after rising from these bases, which lay all around the periphery of the Soviet Union.

Competition among the services also delayed the introduction of missiles into the American arsenal.

The Army's leaders chose to see in the new Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles a new kind of artillery and artillery is a weapon for the Army. A missile differs from a gun by the fact that it accelerates a projectile differently, but once accelerated projectiles launched by guns or missiles follow the same parabolic trajectories.

The Air Force knew it had responsibility for weapons that fly. A missile is an airplane without the pilot and wings.

The Navy based its bid for ownership of nuclear weapons upon a claim that it had always held the means of carrying military force to the enemy's shore.

A commander might doubt the usefulness of a weapon he cannot recall. A veteran of the great and bloody air wars over Germany and Japan might fear the kind of war that would deprive combatants of opportunities for valor by placing them in holes in the ground. President Truman and Vannevar Bush, the engineer who had led American scientific research and development during the second world war, had seen little prospect of missiles replacing manned aircraft as the nation's principal weapon of deterrence.

To a nation that lacked a significant navy, with an air force almost exclusively tasked to support the army rather than bomb distant cities, and which lacked airfields overseas, big rockets appealed much more. Premier Khrushchev had only recently emerged as the Soviet leader. Joseph Stalin had died in 1953 after a rule that had lasted thirty years. For Khrushchev, nuclear armed long range missiles offered a quick path to parity with the United States. For a devasted nation, desperate to rebuild, saddled with the expense of the world's largest army, nuclear weapons represented a cheaper way to assert military strength.

Khrushchev did not anticipate the Western response to his satellite. He had counted on impressing and intimidating political rivals at home, not abroad. He soon after used his new missiles to justify the release of a million men from the Red Army.

Both the United States and the Soviet Union had publicly announced their intentions of orbiting satellites during the International Geophysical Year, which began in July of 1957 and was to extend until December of 1958. Several dozens of nations focused their scientific attentions upon the earth's oceans, atmosphere, and interior during that the IGY. Everyone who cared foresaw the dawn of the space age.

But those who expected satellites could not predict the response to America's failure to reach space first. Sputnik beamed a continuous tone to earth-bound listeners for several weeks until its battery died. A second, much larger Sputnik followed the first into orbit before the United States even attempted to launch its own satellite; it carried a dog, Laika, sadly doomed to suffocate in space after a few days. Werner von Braun begged for permission to launch his satellite. His Army team had already demonstrated the means the year before, when von Braun's superiors had forced his group to load the top stage of his rocket with sand and denied him the prize.

President Eisenhower insisted that a civilian team go first into orbit. The scientific team at the Naval Research Laboratory (in those days before the buildup of the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, the Office of Naval Research underwrote much of the science in the United States) said they would be ready in March. Eisenhower ordered them to skip over incremental tests of their rocket and try for an orbit at the first opportunity. Their rocket exploded a few feet above its pad in December. The satellite fell from the top of the rocket. It rolled out of the smoke and flames, still functional, still beeping, in a spectacular failure witnessed by a gallery of journalists.

Eisenhower, embarrassed by the failure of the much anticipated Vanguard launch, moved by a rising chorus of criticism, and provoked by Soviet successes and boasts (they would roll out missiles like sausages) recanted. He gave von Braun authorization to go ahead. Von Braun said he needed only sixty days. Take ninety, he was told. Eighty nine days later, Explorer I flew.

(Professor James Van Allen at the University of Iowa led a team that designed instruments for the thirty pound, pencil-shaped vehicle.)

Von Braun's imagination permitted him to design not just the machinery but the organization that would make the journey to the moon possible. Possessing enormous powers of persuasion, able to draw great respect and affection from those who worked with him, he was willing to give up his own ideas when other offered better ideas. He had settled on his life's work in his early teens. Later, near the end of the Apollo program, he would complain: “ The problem is that we have run out of moons. ”

The civilian team redeemed itself in March, meeting the schedule to which it had committed itself before the Sputnik panic. On its third attempt, the NRL team succeeded in placing the Vanguard satellite into orbit. Technicians stenciled “ Love lifted me ” on the tail end of the missile. The nose bore the slogan “ Have ball, will orbit, ” a reference to the shape of the satellite, the fact that it fallen off the rocket and onto the ground during the first, failed attempt, and a popular television show of the day. Someone filed an engineering change order, with the rationale “ addition of divine guidance, ” that put a St. Christopher's medal into the vehicle.

The Soviet Union went on to set many other records in space. They were the first to reach the vicinity of the moon, to photograph the moon's far side, to land a vehicle on the moon, on another planet (Venus). Their ships carried the first man into orbit and the first woman. They were first to fly a spacecraft with a crew of several persons, the first to fly two manned spacecraft at once, the first to dock one manned spacecraft with another. Aleksey Leonov floated out through the open hatch of his spacecraft and into the vacuum of space before any other astronaut walked in space. Soviet spacecraft, of the same type that Soviet cosmonauts flew in orbit about the Earth, carried crews of turtles and other animals around the moon and home to earth in the months that immediately preceded Armstrong's and Aldrin's journey to the lunar surface. Robotic ships gathered and returned samples of lunar soil soon after.

The Russians did build a moonship, but never succeeded in making it work and did not admit to a failed effort until the collapse of the communist government. The Soviets did not commit themselves to a landing on the moon until 1964, three years after the Americans had made the same commitment, in a year of political confusion as power passed from Khrushchev to Brezhnev. Personal rivalries frustrated efforts to move the moon landing project ahead; one design bureau denied rocket motors to another. A year leader, the Soviet's chief designer Sergei Korolyev, then still anonymous in the West, died in a botched surgery. He had survived many years in Stalin's prisons and labor camps.

Congress and the President created the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in 1958, building upon the much older National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics. Eisenhower created the post of presidential science advisor and nominated James Killian, the president of MIT, to fill it. The Department of Defense created the Advanced Research Projects Agency. Eisenhower allowed increases in defense spending but successfully resisted proposals to commit to a schedule of annual increases as large as twenty percent. The National Science Foundation quintupled its investment in science education. The National Defense Education Act put the federal government in the business of subsidizing education.

Americans thought the new role for federal government a necessary response to an emergency; some, including the president, believed that they were allowing only a temporary reassignment of responsibilities.

President Eisenhower suffered a stroke a few weeks after the launch of Sputnik. His physical weakness made him more vulnerable to accusations of complacency.

The Soviet's success in orbiting the earth first in the end played into Eisenhower's hand. The year before Sputnik, he had given the CIA permission to fly U-2 spy planes over the USSR. Both nations were arming themselves with terrible weapons, Khrushchev boastful and belligerent rhetoric ( “ We shall bury you. ” ) was alarming, and the United States needed a way to discern Soviet capabilities and intentions.

President Eisenhower feared the loss of an airplane. He feared provoking the USSR with his clear violation of international law. Sputnik in the night sky over Kansas and Washington established a new principle: space was beyond national boundaries. Eisenhower had a spy satellite in the works to replace the ultimately vulnerable U-2. The Soviet's pioneering venture into space preempted objection and controversy when America was ready to fly its camera-laden satellites over closed nations.

Six months after the launch of Sputnik, in an article published by the New York Times Magazine, a professor of history asked rhetorically: How can I teach students in the space age who do not the names of Kepler and Galileo? How can a university award an advanced degree in a social science to a person who admits to no study of physics or chemistry since grade school? He complained of schools that resembled cafeterias, on whose menus snack foods greatly outnumbered main courses, and in which students frittered their time away. He called for more selective admissions not only to colleges but also to the college preparatory programs in the high schools. He dismissed the value of teachers' training, insisting that knowledge of the subject to be taught should count most in the qualification of teachers, and suggesting that since universities trust people who have never taken a course in methods of teaching to teach, high schools should try doing the same.

Sputnik fueled a debate about education. That debate, marked for example by the development of the Physical Sciences Study Curriculum and the publication of Why Johnny Cannot Read, had begun before Sputnik. The maturing of a baby boom generation promised big changes in the school with or without a space race. School buildings were overflowing and numerous better paying options in industry tempted teachers, especially those with scientific training, to leave their profession. The move to a new relationship between government and the universities, and for a new public role for scientists, had begun six years before with the founding of the National Science Foundation.

Science magazine reported that the America's colleges and universities could not find enough professors of physics to hire. They had allocations in their budgets to hire more than 400 PhD physicists but did not expect to find more than about 250. The article's author estimated the size of the deficit at 688 physicists in year in which universities granted just 444 doctoral degrees to physicists and half of the graduates chose full time research rather than teaching. The shortage of teachers meant that those scientists who did teach accepted responsibility for more classes and students than the accepted norm, and so had less time to participate in research.

Numerous authors contrasted the number of years an average student in an American high school devoted to the study of mathematics, science, and foreign languages with the number of years a European enrolled in a lycee or gymnasium invested in the same kinds of learning. The critics ignored claims that elitism characterized the European system and a broader reach, more consistent with an inclusive democracy, distinguished the American system. They instead argued that American schools stretched over twelve years what European schools accomplished in ten. Standards were too low. A confused commitment to a false understanding of egalitarianism was costing the most talented their opportunity to excel.

Schools of education emphasized methods of teaching; teachers in training did not learn well enough the subjects they were to teach. The teachers' colleges ought to be abolished. Discussions of personal hygiene and family relationships displaced much more valuable courses in the high school curricula. The elective system rested on the false premise that children knew enough to choose the right courses. America was spending more than any other country on its schools, and getting less return.

Sputnik sharpened the debate. The nation suddenly needed scientists and engineers to match the Soviets in space and to guarantee availability of the best weapons to America's military. Critics of American education called for more publicly funded scholarships and fellowships, to keep any student with the talent to study science from losing the opportunity for lack of financial means.

Some writers took exception to the narrow focus on science. They admitted to fears that an increased emphasis of science would mean diminished attention to the humanities. Because of the narrowness of their training, technical experts might make decisions for the nation without due regard for the larger contexts of the problems they were given to solve. A few saw the irony of a nation trying to show the superiority of a market economy by adopting a five year plan ( “ to land a man on the moon and return him safely to the earth by the end of the decade ” ). Because the larger goal was to counter the influence of Marxism, they argued that the United States should balance its investment in materialistic science with a proportionate attention to humanism and religion, action with reflection, and educate, in the words of President Eisenhower, not just Einsteins and Steinmetzes but also Washingtons and Emersons.

Admiral Hyman Rickover, who led the Navy's nuclear power program, pointed not to a lack of specialists-who could be a specialist in brand new fields like nuclear power and rocketry?-but to a lack of students who possessed a sufficient foundation that would allow a productive study of the technical subjects. Similarly, Milton Eisenhower, the president's youngest brother and himself the president of Johns Hopkins University, advised against pushing more science upon students in the high schools. Like Rickover, he favored the restoration and reinvigoration of the liberal arts as a means of qualifying students to meet the challenges of a scientific age.

President Eisenhower believed that the rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union would last decades ( “ thirty or forty years ” ). He wanted to build up a capability to prevail over the long haul. To that end, he resisted calls to enter into meaningless competitions and to make compromises for short-term gains.

In the year following Sputnik, Americans finalized a new social contract that Vannevar Bush had first proposed in his “ Science-The Endless Frontier ” report at the end of the second world war. The federal government committed itself on a large scale to the support of research, to the training of teachers, and to financial assistance for undergraduate and graduate students. In return, scientists promised to contribute to the nation's military security, the betterment of public health, and the economic development of the country.

The end of the cold war, large federal deficits, greater skepticism about the efficacy of government, and some public disillusionment with science has in the last decade prompted government and the scientific community to revisit the terms of their contract. Adam Frank, writing to the editors of Physics Today, tells that magazine's readers:

“ When I was a child and dreamed of being a scientist I felt that my country was urging me to join in the adventure of building that future. Today I feel like my country has changed its mind. It is simultaneously sad and confusing. ”

The thrill is gone, for Frank and for other young scientists who cannot find employment. Glen Crawford, in the same issue of Physics Today, explains that a professor at a research university guides, in his lifetime, approximately ten students to their PhDs. This is exponential growth, a phenomenon that physicists well understand. The only thing funding for research produces with certainty is demand for more funding for research.

Who could have ever doubted the inevitability of a Malthusian collapse in this system? Crawford forsees PhDs reduced to driving taxis on the information superhighway. Nobel laureate Leon Lederman thinks the end of the Cold War ought to have freed up a lot of money that government had been using to buy weapons. Now it can spend the money on science. He wants to triple government's spending on science. He acknowledges a 4% annual growth rate in the number of scientists, 40% real growth in the federal science budget between 1983 and 1991, and 8% growth in President Bush's 1992 budget for science but says it's not enough. He dismisses the idea of economy for the sake of bringing the federal budget closer to balance; the real deficit, he says, lies in unmet social needs, for which science can provide solutions. Scientists were claiming to be embroiled in a crisis even before the money available to them began to shrink.

Congressman George Brown chastises scientists, a privileged group, for supposing that their economic suffering is unique. Other congressmen, who accepted and repeated in public debates wildly inflated claims of what benefits might follow an investment in a particle accelerator, have expressed their anger at the physicists who fed them predictions of cures for AIDS and new methods of finding oil, and at scientific societies that failed to correct their most creative and vocal members.

Rustum Roy, in his letter to Physics Today, claims that because science has been so successful, there is much less left remaining to be discovered. Scientists are approaching the limit of what can be known, he says. Scientists have produced few theories that apply to all phenomena since they developed the quantum theory seventy-five years ago. John Horgan has taken deliberate aim at Vannevar Bush's notion of an “ Endless Frontier ” in a book he has entitled The End of Science. One does not have to accept the implications of that title to recognize growing doubts about the value of science even among the scientists themselves. As one wag suggested, if NASA's claim of a seven dollar return in spin-offs for every dollar invested in space is true, why not give NASA $500 billion and thereby retire the national debt?

According to Edward M. Dickson, the British have coupled great success in uncovering and explaining basic scientific phenomena with a poor record of exploiting their discoveries in practical inventions. As he sees it, the Japanese have reversed the British record: little new basic science but outstanding success in applying the knowledge that others have produced. There is no automatic or direct link between investment in research and the economic strength of a nation. The old contract in any case said little about how discoveries might move from the laboratory to the factory.

A vice president of IBM, asked how he defines basic science, answered by saying that he can recognize the person at his company who does basic science as the one who has never visited any IBM building but his own and cannot name any of his employer's business units. Rustum Roy predicts a uniform and deserved fate for public and private laboratories that lose touch with their sponsors' goals.

Thomas J. Kelly helped build the ship that carried astronauts to the moon and remembers his experience:

“ We learned firsthand the miracle that can be wrought by ordinary people inspired by extraordinary challenges to set new standards for dedication, quality, and accomplishment. ”

Can a big enterprise, that spends billions of dollars annually and enrolls tens of thousands of people, sustain idealism over decades? Has science become for those who do it just another job? For the public who pays for it, is NASA now just like the IRS, the Postal Service, and Bureau of Motor Vehicles?

Scientists of the 1950s did not like President Eisenhower's approval of the decision to revoke Robert Oppenheimer's security clearance; as a result, some did not like President Eisenhower. Yet they willingly accepted a charge to work to make the nation strong. Eisenhower thought that the scientists whom he knew distinguished themselves by their commitment to public service in a government he judged to be full of people eager to advance their own causes.

In contrast to the earlier and unashamed patriotism, Lederman, in his recent proposal of a new social contract, rejects as too parochial a goal of world leadership for his own country. He suggests instead a more “ dynamic ” society, preservation of the world's natural environment, and global economic development. Can such goals motivate scientists? Can they win the support of taxpayers?

Peter Denning, a computer scientist at George Mason University, warns against the kind of arrogance that would too quickly dismiss lay criticism of universities. The public has seen scientists&emdash;David Baltimore and Robert Gallo, to take two very prominent examples&emdash;charged with fabrication and falsification of data. The public's naiveté in equating contact hours with hours worked is matched only by the professors' naiveté in repeating requests to “ buy out of teaching ” and “ reduce the teaching load. ”

Tuition paid by undergraduates, not overhead from research contracts, underwrites the university's operation. (If everyone is to be educated, who is left to pay except for current students, future students, and former students?) Even some within the system have begun to compare research programs to athletic programs: deceptively costly and contributing little to the education of most undergraduate students, even if they do garner publicity for the university.

Denning wants to give all students an opportunity to learn about the processes of invention. He wants to end the kind of thinking that set research apart from other kinds of learning and reserved the privilege of research to a small elite. He wants to broaden the definition of scholarship and thereby free most professors from the burden of thinking that they must produce truly original results that extend the frontier.

The most abundant opportunities for research are interdisciplinary: specialists in one field can find ways to apply their expertise in another specialist's field. Students need more opportunities to apply their knowledge in realistic contexts early in their academic careers. They need practice satisfying clients and working in teams, recognizing unmet needs, discerning requirements, proposing, persuading, negotiating, cooperating.

Universities can no longer assume that students will find a way to make use of knowledge learned in school, but instead must help students make connections between school and the rest of their lives. In the scientific and engineering disciplines, teachers are presenting too much technical detail of short half-life. The only way to cope in a fast changing field is to focus on the most stationary principles. Denning favors a completion and competency model of education. He would quit trying to measure education by the amount of time a student sits in a classroom and instead measure it by the student's ability to perform. He promotes advanced study as a means of learning how to work in a broader context with greater responsibility, rather than as a path to greater narrowness and specialization.

Quotations taken from articles and speeches published in the months following the launch of Sputnik, in which various public figures react to the Soviet achievement.

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