I returned to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the summer of 1956 as a full professor of aeronautics and astronautics and, more tellingly, as associate dean of engineering. “More tellingly” because until then I had put off academic administration in favor of mounting a strong program of research and education. People I admired enormously—Jim Killian, president of MIT; Julius Stratton, chancellor; and C. Richard Soderberg, the new dean of engineering—had pressed me hard to take the job after finishing my tour as chief scientist of the Air Force. What I did turn down was an offer by Don Quarles, Air Force secretary, to be Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Research and Development after Trevor Gardner¹ resigned over what he considered inadequate funding for the missile programs. I wanted to be back at the university. I did accept Jimmy Doolittle’s request that I become vice chairman of the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board (SAB), to help Jimmy, its chair, thus broadening my coverage of Air Force science and technology.

In 1956 many forces were carving the adversarial terrain between the two superpowers for a quarter century. The intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) program was now a national priority, hard thinking was being done about how to defend the country against missile attacks, and

the United States and the Soviet Union had each committed to orbiting a space satellite. The Cold War was being hardened by new weapons and technologies, including development of a suite of intercontinental and intermediate-range ballistic missiles (IRBMs), the onset of small and lighter nuclear weapons to arm those missiles, confirmation that inertial navigation was both possible and reliable, and the very secret emplacement of a national program for reconnaissance—“spy satellites”—from the upper atmosphere and space.

The notion of mutual deterrence was now in play. “Mutual deterrence” was an evolved concept. The first major stage was “massive retaliation,” publicly articulated in a speech in January 1954 by John Foster Dulles, Eisenhower’s secretary of state. The nation’s security, he argued, should “depend primarily upon a great capacity to retaliate instantly, by means of and [in] places of our own choosing.”² There was at the time good reason for the policy. While we could never hope to match the Soviet’s land forces, we were far ahead of them in long-range bombers. And Eisenhower from the onset of his administration was determined to control the federal budget, not least military spending. He didn’t see military spending and economic strength as a zero-sum game, but rather saw disproportionate military spending as posing as great a threat to economic security as too little spending did to national security. He stated his feelings bluntly in a talk he gave to the American Society of Newspaper Editors in 1953 after just three months in office:

Indeed, Dulles cited the policy of massive retaliation as providing “more basic security at less cost.”⁴ Yet “massive retaliation” had the proverbial problem of using a flamethrower to kill a fly—that is, applying it to what on the scale of things are minor security threats to the United States, such as the Soviet suppression in 1956 of the Hungarian uprising. The policy invited “brinkmanship.”

And “massive retaliation” was credible as long as the other side

couldn’t respond. But the Soviets in the same year, 1957, tested an ICBM and launched Sputnik I, the first earth satellite. That and the increasing sophistication of weaponry—especially better guidance systems—led to a variant of massive retaliation called “first strike.” It was a counterforce strategy, destroying the other guy’s ability to retaliate. That policy was destabilizing, since both sides were now paranoid about a surprise attack, making imperative the urge to strike first. By the early 1960s, the concept of mutually assured destruction—MAD—emerged. This meant that even if the other guy attacked first, you still had more than enough left to destroy him. The United States was acquiring MAD capacity in the form of ICBMs moving into full production in the early 1960s, in missiles launched from submarines, and in missiles loaded into hardened underground silos.

As chief scientist I had worked hard on both sides of the missile business. First, how to defend against a missile attack, through my chairing the Anti-ICBM Panel of the SAB, and, second, on the development of long-range missiles. It’s a complicated story, made even more chaotic in the late 1940s and early 1950s by severe cuts in the federal budget, which decimated missile programs, and by the Air Force’s skepticism about the efficacy of long-range missiles compared to its very large bomber fleet. That changed sharply around 1954 when Eisenhower made the development of the ICBM a national priority and the Air Force created the Western Development Division⁵ to build the Atlas, the first ICBM. That missile—and Titan I, begun after the Atlas, using a different liquid propellant—had a special structure and a liquid propellant engine.⁶ But it was difficult logistically to handle a large liquid propellant rocket in the field, never mind the hazards and complexity of liquid propellant pumps. The same sort of problems afflicted Thor, an intermediate-range missile. The Army also had an IRBM⁷ in development, first called Redstone and then transmuting into the Jupiter. In any case, considerable attention shifted to solid propellants, led by the Navy’s development beginning in July 1956 of the solid-fueled Polaris fired from submarines. In early 1956 the Pentagon agreed to let the Air Force develop its own solid-fueled missile that could be launched within 60 seconds—the Minuteman. (See Table 5-1 for a listing of the various programs.)

We settled into our house and our old social life in Belmont. Young Guy was 9, Sarah 7, Margo 4, and Roy 2, all established in local schools. We came back in August and spent a good part of that month in Randolph, New Hampshire, and I spent some time fishing. One of our neighbors was James B. Conant, in wartime the deputy director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, OSRD,⁸ and founder of its London mission, former president of Harvard, High Commissioner to Germany and then our first ambassador there. I told Jim, like me a fisherman, that one of my favorite places was the Moose River gorge, where my father-in-law had introduced me to fly-fishing. It’s not a big river, but it has a beautiful wild gorge, well away from civilization, with an old, almost abandoned, railroad that had only one train go through each day. It’s a good hike to get into the gorge. I told Jim about this and he said, “Gee, I’d like to go there some time.” I said, “How about tomorrow?”

But he had a meeting in New York. The next day while I was fishing in my favorite hole in the gorge I saw a fisherman coming upstream. It was Jim Conant. Turned out his meeting had been cancelled. I invited him to fish at my favorite spot. He did that and soon netted five very nice fish, before going upstream. I resumed fishing, but there were no more fish to be caught. He used wet flies, I dry ones.

One more story about Jim Conant, this at the annual picnic in August of the Randolph Mountain Club, where we played charades. We did a scene from Don Giovanni. I played Don Giovanni and Mrs. Conant the statue of Il Commandatore murdered by Don Giovanni. Jim Conant was handling the stage effects, two children played a flute and violin duet, I sang “Là ci darem,” and then danced with a young lady, scheming to seduce her. The statue came alive, descended from its pedestal to drag me off to Hades, portrayed by “smoke” created with dry ice and alcohol by Jim Conant, a famous chemist. Mrs. Conant, to be a proper statue, had been wrapped from head to toe like a mummy with just two little openings for her eyes and nose. She immediately began to choke, not able to breathe because of the dense fog. Dr. Conant rushed on to the stage to rescue her. Everybody said it was a great charade. I don’t remember the word we were miming.

When I wasn’t fishing or trying to seduce young ladies in charades, I was associate deaning. When I started in the fall of 1956, I was asked right off the bat by Dick Soderberg to meet with all the department chairs in the engineering school to talk about their plans for promotion, for granting tenure, and for hiring new faculty. It was a great pleasure for me to do that, for the quality of this group of department heads in engineering was high. In aeronautical engineering, Charles Stark Draper had succeeded the longtime head of the department, Jerome Clark Hunsaker. In chemical engineering there was Walter Gordon Whitman, whom I knew well from our work together on nuclear-powered aircraft studies. For civil and sanitary engineering⁹ there was John Benson Wilbur, a strong civil engineer who was trying to adapt civil engineering to new powerful uses of computers. In electrical engineering there was Gordon Stanley Brown, whom I had met way back in World War II, and I worked with him quite a bit. In mechanical engineering there was Jacob Peter Den Hartog, a brilliant teacher and engineer who had come to MIT

from a position on the Harvard faculty after World War II (I met Den Hartog during World War II in Paris a few days after its liberation where he was serving as a captain in the U.S. Navy and as head of a group in technical intelligence work). In metallurgy¹⁰ there was John Chipman, a senior leader in the metallurgy field. In naval architecture and marine engineering there was Laurens Troost, Jr., a brilliant man from the Netherlands, which had a history of high-quality naval architecture and marine engineering.

These powerful leaders in their respective fields could be trusted to assure the future of their departments by recruiting and promoting the best. The problem was too few slots. I worked with Jay Stratton and Dick Soderberg in zeroing in on the strong cases and also the marginal ones where the department head was forced, sometimes several times, to make a stronger case—and sometimes lost. That often took months. There were some rough tussles. Dick Soderberg had strong opinions and the discussions would at times become acrimonious.

As with all great research universities, MIT had substantial research support from the outside, principally the federal government, which since the end of World War II had invested heavily in graduate research in the universities. Principal funding agencies included those focusing on fundamental research, such as the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, and more strongly applied agencies, such as those of the armed services¹¹ and the Atomic Energy Commission. These federal infusions of substantial funds weren’t controlled top down by the administration. Every “cask was on its own bottom,” meaning each professor had to find the support for his research, graduate students, and, at times, undergraduate students. Managing a professorate endowed with tenure and independent funds made for a complex management challenge (and still does). There were also some large laboratories, some controlled by one or two departments, others more autonomous. For example, the Research Laboratory of Electronics, which Jay Stratton, its first director, had helped pull together out of the remnants of the Radiation Laboratory, but with an accent more on the research side rather than the development of radar, was bridged between the departments of physics and electrical engineering. The Instrumentation Laboratory in Aeronautical Engineering, founded and led by Charles

Stark Draper, fit almost entirely into one department. The Lincoln Laboratory, set up to do highly classified work in air defense, was outside any department but nevertheless offered pertinent research to several professors and their students. The faculty members who did their research in one of these laboratories had their problems. The departmental structure was often so strong that people working in one of these laboratories had a harder time gaining departmental promotion and tenure, not least because many if not all of their publications, however excellent, were classified.

MIT not only led in securing federal funds but was also very aggressive in obtaining private support from companies, foundations, and individuals. I was directly involved in securing a large grant for the School of Engineering from the Ford Foundation, at the time a supporter of universities. Dick Soderberg put together a committee of very good and hence very busy people. To get us together he promised to hold meetings at the end of the working day and, since that was normally cocktail hour, to serve martinis. Sure enough, at one of the early meetings, out of a small office refrigerator came a jug of martinis. We never got to the second martini. Soderberg had mixed a large amount of the necessary components, gin and vermouth, and cooled them in the refrigerator. He forgot that normally the mixture is shaken with cracked ice to cool and dilute it. Without the cracked ice we relaxed too much and accomplished little. We stopped that routine. And we got the Ford grant.

The program supported by the grant had several parts:

• revision of the engineering curricula and teaching materials, including new texts ($3 million),

• development of instructional laboratories integrated with classroom theory ($1.5 million),

• endowment of seven additional professorships in newly emerging fields of engineering ($3.5 million),

• establishment of postdoctoral teaching internships and research fellowships to encourage young people to enter the field of engineering education ($1 million),

• fellowships and loans to graduate students anticipating teaching careers ($150,000), and

• faculty exchanges with industry and other colleges and education conferences as the program developed ($125,000).

The program was very successful. But most of the things high on our list for support in the late 1950s are still high today on people’s list. I have always believed that the important things in life never change quite as fast as people think they do.

Beginning my second year as associate dean in the fall of 1957, I realized what many others had found before me: academic administration is very repetitive. Obviously, course content, teaching methods, and the like change, but to administer it all, you repeat the formula: do the work to ensure a high-quality faculty and outside support because education is never fully supported by tuition. In any case, the problem of being bored by repetition was solved for me when Dick Soderberg retired at the end of the 1958–1959 academic year. While I was some people’s candidate to succeed him, I didn’t take it too seriously because I felt the top bosses at MIT had a better candidate. Gordon Brown, from electrical engineering, was selected, and I returned with some delight, to being a full-time professor in the Department of Aeronautical Engineering.¹² Some of the people who had wanted me to get the job would come up to me and say how sorry they were and I said, “Thank you very much for your sentiments.” But the best approach at that time was from General Jim McCormack, whom I had known in Washington when he was on active duty in the Air Force. He said simply, “Guy, into every life a little rain must fall.” I remembered that at other times of my life when, in fact, a little rain fell. I also remembered the comment by Theodore von Kármán when he learned I was going to become associate dean. He asked me if I knew what an associate dean was and when I said “No,” he said, “An associate dean is a mouse learning to be a rat.” I felt there was some truth in that too.

I remembered one other comment about deans. At an earlier time I was on a trip with George Kistiakowsky, a great Harvard chemistry professor. We roomed together, and one evening we were discussing the de-

bate on the formation of the National Science Foundation and how its grants would be given. I innocently asked, “Why do they fuss about all of this business of individual investigators and peer reviewers and so on? Why don’t they just pick good universities and give them money and let them select their best professors to support?” When I said that, George’s face got a little redder than normal and he raised his fists and shook them and pounded on the table, and he said, “By damn, I don’t want any [deleted] dean telling me what research to do.”

In the wee hours of Friday morning, October 4, 1957, Bunny was awakened at our home in Belmont by the insistent ringing of the telephone. The voice said that he was a reporter for The New York Times and that he wanted to speak to Dr. Stever. When Bunny told him I was out of town, the reporter got rather excited, and said he had to speak with me because the “Soviets have just launched a satellite of the earth by rockets.” It was a 184-pound satellite about basketball size that emitted a continuous beep as it circled the earth every 98 minutes.¹³

Bunny wasn’t too surprised by the news. I had talked often about the satellites. And both the Soviet Union and the United States two years earlier had announced intentions to launch a satellite into space as part of the International Geophysical Year. Bunny told the reporter that reaching me was well nigh impossible “because he’s in the Maine woods with a friend, hunting deer with bow and arrow.” A long silence on the telephone followed, which Bunny and I later interpreted as the reporter thinking, “No wonder we’re behind the Russians.”

Although I wasn’t surprised that the Soviets had launched Sputnik, I was surprised by the immense reaction in the United States and indeed around the world. A Japanese paper, perhaps ironically but I doubt it, called Sputnik “a Pearl Harbor for American science.” The prime minister of Great Britain declared it “a real turning point in history. Never has the threat of Soviet communism been so great.”¹⁴ That apocalyptic reaction echoed what happened in the United States, where newspapers, Congress, and indeed much of the population saw Sputnik as a beeping symbol that our country was suddenly vulnerable to a frightening enemy,

that our vaunted technological superiority was delusional, and that our political leaders—notably, President Eisenhower—not only failed to anticipate the threat but even after Sputnik still didn’t grasp the magnitude of what had happened. That kind of reaction was capsulated in a little verse by the governor of Michigan, G. Mennen Williams:

It’s easy to pooh-pooh this as overreaction. It was, but even very savvy people, such as Jim Killian, whose life was transformed by Sputnik as was mine, confessed that the Soviet achievement found him “psychologically vulnerable and technically surprised.”¹⁶ In retrospect, all of us were a bit naive in underestimating public reaction and too complacent in our technological strength. The warning signs that the Soviets were capable— or at least felt themselves capable—of putting up a satellite were apparent since the idea emerged at the start of the 1950s. In 1950, several people met one evening in suburban Washington at the home of James Van Allen, then a physicist with the Applied Physics Laboratory of Johns Hopkins University, to plan for what would become the International Geophysical Year (IGY). They had a common purpose—global coordination of high-altitude research. One of the people at the informal get-together, Lloyd Berkner,¹⁷ suggested another International Polar Year, such as the ones held in 1882 and 1932. The timing they hit on was an 18-month interval from 1957 to 1958 when the 11-year sunspot cycle was at its maximum. Working through the International Council of Scientific Unions, their idea was accepted by 67 countries. The National Academy of Sciences, the national ICSU member, appointed a U.S. National Committee for the IGY in March 1953 and secured federal funding to prepare for the IGY. Most tellingly, a few months earlier, in 1952, Berkner and several of his colleagues in Rome waiting for a meeting to start had suggested that a space satellite to do science be part of the IGY.¹⁸ ICSU formally endorsed the idea in October 1954, and a few months later, in July 1955, both the United States and the Soviets announced on

successive days their intent to launch satellites.¹⁹ In September 1955 the Naval Research Laboratory’s Vanguard program was selected to launch the satellite using a Viking rocket. That decision didn’t go over well with all, especially the Army, which felt, rightly it turned out, that it had in its Redstone missile a reliable and virtually ready booster for launching a satellite. Then, the countdown came. In June 1957 a Soviet rocket scientist reported that a satellite was being readied for launch in a few months. In mid-September Radio Moscow announced that the Soviets were ready to launch a satellite. On October 1 the Soviets released the satellite frequencies. Three days later Sputnik was in space.

I returned from Maine to MIT on Monday, October 7, when fortuitously the MIT Corporation was meeting. Jimmy Doolittle, a member of the corporation, came over to my office to ask how the SAB (Jimmy was chair and I was vice chair) should adjust to Sputnik. First, we decided to accelerate the report of the study I chaired on military uses of space, focusing on cislunar space, the region between the earth and the moon. That study started in the summer of 1957, a few months before Sputnik, and we submitted our report²⁰ to the Air Force chief of staff, Thomas White, on October 9, five days after Sputnik. Our key message was that the successes so far of the missile programs would yield rocket components and other elements for military uses in space. We also strongly urged Air Force support for scientific research in space, arguing that what was learned would also serve whatever military functions in space the Air Force took on. And not least we noted the urgency of the Air Force working much more strongly on space flight.

Others joined these reactions of the Air Force. General Bernard A. Schriever offered a good sense of the climate and pressure in a 1995 talk:

Secretary of the Air Force James Douglas convened a committee chaired by Edward Teller²² to look at the future uses of military space. The committee met on October 21 and 22 and submitted its report six days later. The resulting report of the Teller Committee was a strong attack on the complacency and overorganization of the military bureaucracy, including that of the Air Force, in stifling technical advances critical to the Air Force in the space era. From the secretary of defense on down, the management and organization of missile and space programs needed to be consolidated and simplified. And, not least, it warned that there was no quick fix. An “attempt to counter the sobering effects of Sputnik . . . by a spectacular, but technically superficial demonstration would be to seriously and perhaps fatally deceive ourselves as to the gravity of the present technical position of the country.”²³

Jimmy and I also decided to modify the agenda for the fall meeting of the SAB, December 4–6 at the San Marcos Hotel in Chandler, Arizona, from a think session on limited war to a session on space. Coincident was a strong push to reassure the country that there was strength on the U.S. side as well, and the Air Force seized on the fall meeting of the SAB to make such a statement. Jimmy Doolittle, working closely with General White, arranged for presentations by the senior officers for the three services—General White, General Lyman Lemnitzer, and Admiral Arleigh Burke—and senior officials from the White House and the State Department. For the first time, the SAB got major publicity. A big spread in Life had pictures of the board and explained its work and composition.

The work of the Teller Committee and my cislunar group overlapped, and since members of both groups were at the meeting, the board quite sensibly directed us to come up with a unified report and recommendations. An ad hoc committee²⁴ on space technology that I chaired sent its report to General White a few days after the meeting. We recommended prompt and vigorous action:

1. Obtain a massive IRBM and ICBM capability as soon as possible.

2. Establish a vigorous program to develop second-generation IRBMs and ICBMs having certain and fast reaction to Russian attack.

3. Accelerate the development of reconnaissance satellites.

4. Establish a vigorous space program with the immediate goal of landings on the moon.

5. Obtain as soon as possible an ICBM early-warning system.

6. Pursue an active research program on anti-ICBM problems. These were decoys, discrimination, and radar tracking. When these problems are solved, a strong anti-ICBM system should be started.

All of these recommendations moved forward in the Air Force, although the problems of an anti-ICBM system proved much more difficult than we thought at the time.

The aftershocks of Sputnik continued. The day after we finished our fall meeting, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev boasted that the Soviet Union would surpass the United States in heavy industry and consumer goods, piling on to the earlier claim that the Soviets had an operational ICBM.²⁵ And the same day of Khrushchev’s boast, President Eisenhower gave a long television and radio speech to the nation on science and national security in which he sought to reassure Americans that we were not ignoring space, that we were strong in many ways,²⁶ and that he was appointing Jim Killian to be his special assistant to the president for science and technology. In concert, the Office of Defense Mobilization’s Science Advisory Committee was reconstituted as the President’s Science Advisory Committee, or PSAC. Those events formalized at the presidential level the strong postwar role of science and technology in the U.S. government.²⁷ At the same time, the tremendous influence that Dr. Killian had because of the nature of the crisis—the country reaching out almost in desperation to him—has, in my mind, never been equaled since, although all presidents since Eisenhower have had a science advisor in some form.

The launch of Sputnik, and with it the debut of the Space Age, gave my expertise a bright new polish. Soon, instead of being just an aeronautical engineer or guided-missile expert, I became an expert on space flight. Just a few small changes in my curriculum vitae did that, since I had effectively been in that business since World War II, albeit on the military

side. And we changed the name of our department at MIT from aeronautics to aeronautics and astronautics. This was done in the usual academic fashion—awkwardly. After a long and sumptuous dinner at Lock Ober’s, then the place for seafood in Boston, the professorate from the department, augmented by humanists from Harvard and MIT, hit on “Department of Archophorics,” incorporating supposedly the Greek words for propulsion and direction. The next day I told people who weren’t at the dinner what the name was to be. I got blank looks until one of the secretaries looked up the word in a dictionary, and the closest definition she could find was a reference to diseases of the rectum. It became the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics.

Once Sputnik forced the issue of how the country’s space programs were to be organized, an above-average state of confusion hit Washington. There was most obviously a dichotomy between military and civilian interests, echoing the debates during the creation of the Atomic Energy Commission that led to placing nuclear energy and weapons under civilian control. Space posed some of the same issues. There would be intense use of space by military and national security agencies. For example, the secret satellite reconnaissance program—spy satellites—was well under way, something the country was told about but paid little attention to in a New York Times report 10 days after Sputnik.²⁸ But important civil and commercial applications were also emerging. Bell Telephone Laboratories was far along in building Telstar, the first communications satellite.

Another facet of the civilian versus military management of space was that many of the scientists who wanted to do research in space and eventually explore the planets understandably wanted to do it in the open—as unclassified nonmilitary programs. They worried that excessive classification and military control would severely hamper their efforts. There were other confounding factors. What would be the future role of the military in space and, more particularly, the respective roles of the three services? Where were the boundaries of civilian and military space programs, especially since the large boosters were military? What was to be the driving philosophy for the nation’s venture in space: na-

tional and secret or international and open? And what were the prospects for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA)? Politics, of course, was in this stew. The Senate and House, both controlled by the Democrats, each established their own committees to deal with space. In the Senate it was the Special Committee on Science and Astronautics, chaired by Lyndon Johnson with the rest of the members serving as chairs of other committees, and in the House the Select Committee on Astronautics and Space Exploration, chaired by John McCormack. These were politically powerful committees—especially so in the Senate given Johnson’s ambition—meaning that whatever new space organizations emerged would have strong political backing. And they were also counters to the powerful armed services committees, meaning that civilian goals would dominate the new organization.

But what were the goals? Pursued by what organization? The goals were first defined by the PSAC in a report issued publicly on March 16, 1958, entitled Introduction to Outer Space,²⁹ endorsed by President Eisenhower, including the goals³⁰ it set for the nation’s venture into space. These goals proved durable, set the tone for the debate that followed, and are worth quoting:

• The first [goal] is the compelling urge of man to explore and to discover, the thrust of curiosity that leads men to try to go where no one has gone before. Most of the surface of the earth has now been explored and men now turn to the exploration of outer space as their next objective.

• Second, there is the defense objective for the development of space technology. We wish to be sure that space is not used to endanger our security. If space is to be used for military purposes, we must be prepared to use [it] to defend ourselves.

• Third, there is the factor of national prestige. To be strong and bold in space technology will enhance the prestige of the United States among the peoples of the world and create added confidence in our scientific, technological, industrial, and military strength.

• Fourth, space technology affords new opportunities for scientific observation and experiment that will add to our knowledge and understanding of the earth, the solar system, and the universe.

As to the organization, many variants were flying around—for example, NACA proposed a space program under joint control of the Department of Defense, NACA, the National Academy of Sciences, and the National Science Foundation. But what was key to the new organization

was a bill drafted by PSAC and submitted to the Congress on April 2, 1958. The bill proposed the establishment of a National Aeronautics and Space Agency into which the NACA would be absorbed. This agency was to have responsibility for civilian space science and aeronautical research. Civilian space programs under the new Advanced Research Projects Agency in the Department of Defense would be transferred to the new agency.³¹ The bill underwent some changes but not major ones. Separation of civilian from military space programs bedeviled much of the debate, even if there was tacit understanding that in many instances the separation was artificial. The “agency” became an “administration,” then thought a step up in the Washington pecking order. After a final negotiation between Eisenhower and Johnson, the bill creating the National Aeronautics and Space Administration became law in July 30, 1958, and NASA was legally born on October 1, 1958.³²

I entered into the arguments about the future organization of space because I was working so closely with Jimmy Doolittle on the military space programs of the Air Force. Jimmy, in addition to chairing the SAB, was NACA chairman. The NACA director was Hugh Dryden,³³ a fine aeronautical scientist and soon to be a fine space scientist. Hugh called me about a week after the SAB meeting in Chandler, Arizona, and after the announcement of Killian’s appointment, to say that NACA was going to try to become the space agency as well as the aeronautical research agency. He wanted me to chair a committee to advise how to do that— what technology programs, what research and development, etc., would be needed. I was pretty busy with SAB work, but after meetings with Doolittle, Dryden, and Killian, I agreed.

There was a lot of noise to do something in a hurry. This worsened when a Vanguard test failed the day before Eisenhower spoke to the country to reassure it and to announce Killian’s appointment. The Army, led by Major General John Bruce Medaris, head of the Army Ballistic Missile Agency, renewed its demand that its Jupiter missile be used to launch a scientific satellite. That was approved, and on the night of January 31, 1958, the first U.S. satellite, Explorer I, was launched using a Jupiter

rocket. More U.S successes—and failures—followed, as did Soviet ones, summarized in Table 5-2. The Soviets didn’t tell us about their failures, but we eventually learned that there were at least four Soviet launch failures during the period covered by Table 5-2, both in their Sputnik and Luna series.

The Special Committee on Space Technology³⁴ I agreed to chair on defining the future of NACA met for the first time on February 13, 1958. It was heated and tense. While there was convergence among the scientists and engineers involved in space as to objectives, the political battle on the form the new agency was to take was boiling. NACA conducted its political battles quietly, trying to prove it was strong enough to take on the job. The Space Technology Committee was certainly part of the campaign. But there were tough opponents with a lot of political clout, with the Air Force and Army pushing hard to control the total space program, including basic science, arguing that the most important applications of space were military. In February 1958 Eisenhower had approved deployment of four Thor, four Jupiter, and four Titan squadrons (see Table 5-1), that is, Air Force and Army intercontinental and intermediate-range missiles.³⁵ In a novel maneuver, Secretary of Defense Neil H. McElroy, in mid-January 1958, just before the Space Technology Committee met, created the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) to be “responsible to the Secretary of Defense for the unified direction and management of the antimissile missile program and for outer space projects.” Most presidential historians and scientists involved in defense matters credit Eisenhower with the creation of ARPA. He was determined to bring some rationality to the rival and redundant missile programs of three military services, and that was the initial ARPA mission.

I got some early warnings of what a brutal business politics could be. I was asked by Hugh Dryden to help him with the two committees established in each House to deal with space. I went with Dryden to the House hearing, chaired by John McCormack. It was a very good session. I was even invited to report on what we were finding in the Space Technology Committee. A little later I went with Dryden to the Senate com-

mittee chaired by Lyndon Johnson. Dryden was treated badly. He was raked over the coals by Johnson, who implied that Dryden didn’t know what he was doing and asked why NACA hadn’t led the Germans during World War II in transonic and supersonic aircraft, jet engines, and rockets. I was shaking in my boots when my turn came, but I was treated politely and positively. Afterwards, I asked Dryden why the difference. He simply said, “Guy, you are a private citizen and I am a civil servant.” I remembered that years later when I was director of the National Science Foundation and had my turn at rough treatment by some members of Congress.³⁶

As our NACA Space Technology Committee proceeded through the summer and fall of 1958, it became obvious that NACA would become NASA and that some of the lifting capabilities of the Army and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory would be transferred to NASA. The committee became a much happier group, and we could now turn to recommending specific programs for the new agency. Von Braun took a strong lead on this because he was already thinking about getting to the moon, even though the next steps for NASA were clearly to do what the Soviets were doing: get satellites up and start a manned program. And the scientists who wanted to explore deep space were also demanding their place.

Who would lead NASA? Hugh Dryden asked me to be associate director, with him as director of NASA. Hugh felt strongly that he could lead NACA reincarnated as NASA. However, Hugh was not in favor among some in Congress—witness his brutal treatment by Lyndon Johnson—and the politicos in the White House knew it. Why? After all, NACA had run civilian programs, such as they were, since 1915. Yet NACA had no strong allies in the fierce battle that was under way. Few of its funds went to private contractors, in contrast to the heavy private investments by the military. It had a limited role in aeronautical research, although within that it did some effective things, particularly building and operating wind tunnels. But it was seen by some as unimaginative and narrow in its vision. Fairly or not, Theodore von Kármán labeled it “skeptical, conservative, and reticent.”³⁷

When I talked with Jim Killian about Hugh Dryden’s invitation, he pointed out that there was no chance Hugh would get the call. He wasn’t going to lead NASA. I felt for Hugh but was glad to have an easy deci-

sion. I had the same feelings about that job as when I had to choose between being Assistant Secretary of the Air Force and going back to MIT. I still felt that my life was in New England—Boston, Cambridge, Belmont, and MIT. Until I talked with Killian I hadn’t turned Hugh down. I did then. Soon Hugh himself knew that he would not get the top job. Since Jimmy Doolittle had been the chair of NACA, he was also offered the post, but he turned it down, feeling that as a military man he was not the right person to lead a civilian agency. Then T. Keith Glennan, president of the Case Institute of Technology, was selected, accepted, and turned out to be a very good choice.³⁸ Dryden became second in command. Right after Keith took the job in August 1958, he came to MIT and asked if I could come down from Randolph, New Hampshire, to talk with him. We had a good discussion about the Space Technology Committee, and he urged me to keep that going. He asked if I would join him at the new NASA. I told him that I would help as much as I could but that I was going to stay at MIT. That also had some benefit to NASA. Many of my students went on to work for NASA, two as astronauts: Buzz Aldrin, the second man to step on the moon, and Rusty Schweikert.

I helped NASA more directly through the report of the NACA cum NASA Special Committee on Space Technology, entitled Recommendations to the NASA Regarding a National Civil Program. Issued in October 1958, the same month NASA opened for business, the report defined the scope and priorities for the nation’s endeavor in space. We argued, in considerable detail, that “the major objectives of a civil space research program are scientific research in the physical and life sciences, advancement of space flight technology, development of manned space flight capability, and exploitation of space flight for human benefit. Inherent in the achievement of these objectives is the development and unification of new scientific concepts of unforeseeably broad import.”³⁹ Perhaps the most salient of our many recommendations, most of which bore fruit in the following two decades, was our firmness on then a contentious issue—manned space flight. While “instruments for the collection and transmission of data on the space environment have been designed and put into orbit about the earth . . . man has the capability of correlating unlike events and unexpected observations, a capacity for

overall evaluation of situations, and the background knowledge and experience to apply judgment that cannot be provided by instruments; and in many other ways the intellectual functions of man are a necessary complement to the observing and recording functions of complicated instrument systems.”⁴⁰ This was, again, a recommendation that turned out to have legs.

The manned space program became a prestige race between the USSR and the United States. Both countries started astronaut training programs, and the USSR scored first with Yuri Gagarin, first man in space, followed by Alan Shepard and John Glenn in orbit. Then the manned space program got in effect unlimited political support for Apollo and landed several times on the moon. It cost $25 billion; was, I think, the greatest engineering program in history; and was shut down when the “unlimited” political support disappeared. With Apollo, there were other space thrusts, including the manned U.S. Space Lab, and many civilian and military satellites for communications and intelligence. By the end of the Apollo program, several distinct space communities had emerged to battle for dollars. The strong military and intelligence community quietly but effectively got the most money, often spinning out technology improvements to the civilian space programs. The Space Shuttle has its pros and cons. It is good for ferrying into space very large items such as the Hubble Space Telescope and the pieces for the Space Station. For space science we now have much smaller, lighter-weight, unmanned launch rockets that have proven valuable. But manned and unmanned all compete for space dollars in the annual budget, which itself is shrinking. I expect the government will keep a tight lid on any new ventures. The legs of manned flight are tired but still useful. If plans to build a manned station on the moon or for a manned visit to Mars ever develop strong public and political support, they will require much more effective propulsion devices than the chemically fueled rockets we have now—more on this in Chapter 10.

In short, the Space Technology Committee strongly supported a civilian space agency. One could ask “why not?”; but again the military fought hard for control of the nation’s space program. And the military after NASA still had a very powerful presence in space.³⁷ But for all my strong career in military space and astronautics, I felt that space science, exploration of the solar system and of deep space, would not be well

served by the military. Although the military in fact created many of the technologies on which NASA would have to build, NASA soon developed its own industrial sources and laboratories. And it was a lot easier for us in the academic world to get research results from a civilian space agency than a military one.

In a way that belief in a duality of military and civilian space roles reflected what I was doing in the Sputnik era. I was trying via the NACA/ NASA Space Technology Committee to help a new civilian agency think about its goals. At about the same time, I agreed in the summer of 1957 to chair a new committee of the SAB to examine the entire organization for research and development in the Air Force. So in parallel with my work on missiles, reacting to Sputnik, and teaching and research at MIT, I spent a good part of my time in 1958 and 1959 chairing the Air Force’s ad hoc committee on research and development.⁴² We met for the first time on November 21, 1957, when Air Force Chief of Staff General White asked for an “impartial and searching review of the organization, functions, policies, and procedures of the Air Force and the Air Research and Development Command in relation to the accomplishments in research and development over the past seven years” (i.e., since the Ridenour Committee). And he asked us to recommend “how we can do the job better in the future.”⁴³

Like the Ridenour Committee, we came to our task during a budget crunch, with another president determined to stay under the debt ceiling of $275 billion. But this time, rather than the newly born Air Force looking at bombers versus missiles, it had to examine its mission in space. What did the term “military space” mean in this new era? And what was the role of research and development in whatever the space mission was? What would the Soviets do, and how should the Air Force respond? On a different plane, many in the Air Force were embittered when Secretary of Defense Neil McElroy in effect blocked the Air Force’s plans to accelerate ballistic missile plans in the wake of Sputnik (and in the process favored the Army’s IRBM program, the Jupiter, over the Air Force’s Thor missile).⁴⁴

When we were about to write our report, it was decided we needed a quiet, remote place to do our work. We wound up north of the Salton Sea in Indio, California, at the desert ranch of Floyd Odlum and his wife, Jacqueline Cochran. Both were Horatio Alger stories: Jackie, an orphan, succeeded in the cosmetics business, learned to fly, raced airplanes, set speed records, ferried Lockheed Hudson transports to Britain during World War II, and founded and led the Women’s Air Force Service Pilots. Floyd, who had to work to support himself at a young age, put himself through college and became a major financier and head of the Atlas Corporation. Not least, he cashed the corporation out of the stock market before the October 1929 crash, putting himself in a powerful financial position. Their ranch was well set up for our needs, with pleasant cottages for our members and an immense meeting center with conference rooms and an unbelievably large sitting room. We made good use of the swimming pool, from which Floyd Odlum often conducted his business floating about on a rubber raft, with a drink, his papers, and telephone on a tray in front of him.⁴⁵

We submitted the report to Jimmy Doolittle on June 20, 1958, and then briefed it to senior Air Force officers, General Sam Anderson, head of the Air Research and Development Command, and General Curtis LeMay, who had left the Strategic Air Command to become vice chief of staff. It turned out that Sam Anderson had given a speech the day before at the Air War College in Montgomery, Alabama, which to Sam’s great embarrassment had made it into the Washington Post because of its strong criticism of the administration and Congress for cutting the Air Force budget and for micromanagement. Because my friendship with Sam started way back in London during World War II, I thought I could start the briefing with a flip remark to LeMay: “Curt, we’ve written this report to help Sam Anderson make better speeches.” Anderson turned brick red in the face. LeMay broke into a big grin that he quickly wiped off. As far as I was concerned, I’m the only one who ever made him smile.

Our report wasn’t universally pleasing to the Air Force. We expected

resistance, especially by Sam Anderson and his colleagues in the Air Research and Development Command, ARDC. While we praised the progress made since the Ridenour report that had looked some seven years earlier at Air Force research and development, we also wrote that budget problems and “excessive administrative controls” had eroded these gains. Decision making on R&D had become too ponderous and slow for an effective and responsive program. Our principal recommendation was that the heavy hands of the higher echelons of the Air Force should be lifted from its R&D centers, which had both very good scientists and engineers and very good managers. We redeemed ourselves with the Air Force headquarters a bit by telling it to work to get the Department of Defense and even Congress off its back. And we pointed out that the budget constraints imposed by Secretary McElroy were seriously handicapping progress on ballistic missiles, aerodynamic research and development on new aircraft, and new electronics. That recommendation sat well with the Air Force. What sat less well were our recommendations on organization and management—to correct duplication, micromanagement, flawed procurements, and poor support of basic research. The Air Force rejected our suggestion for reorganizing Air Force laboratories around military systems and that the ARDC adopt a systems strategy for its research and development. But like bad weather, you sometimes need to wait a while. Sure enough, when Bernard Schriever took over the ARDC in April 1959, he immediately set about implementing our recommendations. And in April 1961 the ARDC was reorganized into the Air Force Systems Command and the Office of Aerospace Research.

I learned something from that experience. Most people in government work hard to improve the system, but when they hear a new idea they may resist it for a while. With time they see the good parts and begin to accept it, especially if you can convince them that it was their idea in the first place. However, General Schriever gave our committee full credit.

I continued with the Air Force SAB—as vice chairman until December 1961 and as chairman from January 1962 until 1968. It was an extraordinary time. Ballistic missiles moved from development to production to deployment. The space race intensified. The decision to go to the moon in May 1961 and the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962 loomed. And of course there was a sharp change in administrations, from

Eisenhower to Kennedy, with the sharpest change for the Air Force (and the other services) being the arrival of Robert S. McNamara as secretary of defense. McNamara had established his reputation at the Ford Motor Company, where he and his colleagues—the “whiz kids”—had put into place “system analysis” methods to manage programs, measure results, and control costs. McNamara was the first “outsider” to become president of Ford, taking the job the day after Kennedy was elected and five weeks before he accepted Kennedy’s invitation to become secretary of defense.

McNamara immediately questioned the quality of the huge number of Department of Defense laboratories, including those of the Air Force. The Air Force had in retrospect anticipated McNamara by having the redoubtable George Valley with several well-qualified colleagues⁴⁶ look into how the Air Force could build stronger ties in basic research with the universities. The panel affirmed that the Air Force laboratories had many very good scientists but that in many cases they had tasks in which they were neither particularly competent nor interested. Bureaucratic obstacles to research contracts with universities amplified these failures in research management. The Air Force, despite its obvious need to maintain technological supremacy, was doing a poor job at being an active player in the larger research community.

But McNamara wanted more, not only strengthening basic and applied research in the military but also technological development. General LeMay, who became Air Force chief of staff five months before Kennedy’s election and McNamara’s nomination, embraced the charge, building on the work of the Valley Committee and a second committee, chaired by Leonard Sheingold, just starting his term in July 1961 as the ninth chief scientist of the Air Force. The Sheingold Committee added one strong recommendation to that of the Valley Committee: that the research and development agencies in the Air Force get direct control over sizeable research funds now in the military construction budget.

Things moved rapidly. LeMay approved a new research and technology division within the Air Force Systems Command⁴⁷ to respond to the Valley Committee’s criticism and giving control over funds directly to the new division in response to the Sheingold recommendations. Thirty-seven laboratories across the country were merged into seven within the

research and technology division. And each laboratory was given its own line item in the budget, showing, said the director of the research and technology division, Major General Marvin C. Demler, that “someone really trusted the Lab Directors to do a good job with these unfettered funds.”⁴⁸

These moves to strengthen research and technology development in the Air Force were remarkably well timed. Already in 1960 the role of information technology for communications, command, and control of military operations was emerging. And while liquid-fueled ballistic missiles were coming online, they were to be relatively short lived, removed from operational status by 1966 in favor of solid-fueled missiles, including the Minuteman ICBM and the submarine-launched Polaris. The concept of multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles emerged in the 1960s. Investments in reconnaissance from space were ramping sharply upward as its technological frontiers continued to be pushed hard. And, finally, the art and science of space communication systems was gathering speed.

In short, postwar investments in military science and technology were in the early 1960s reaping a revolutionary transformation in military strategy and tactics. It was a heady time. One had a confluence of a new generation of computers; the realization of their deep application to military communications, command, and control systems; and a very dangerous world of nuclear-armed missiles and airplanes. We had created a world vulnerable to horrific destruction through “accidental” war. Each side could now destroy the other—and a lot of the human race with it. It was now extremely urgent for critical information to be accurate, usable, and available for military and political leaders to make quick and effective decisions. The SAB through various panels worked on these problems, notably on reducing the danger of unauthorized attacks, of false alarms, misinterpretation, and communication failures.

The SAB hit problems in the early 1960s, coincident with the start of the Kennedy administration. One was size. The other was conflict of interest, now chronically familiar but then a more muted issue. The SAB was extraordinarily busy and productive. In 1961, for example, the board produced 21 formal reports and 29 special memos and held 86 panel or ad hoc meetings.⁴⁹ Sustaining that required a lot of people, all of whom

had “daytime jobs.” Thus, the board in 1962 had 88 members, a reality that got the attention of Secretary McNamara who in turn “suggested” to Secretary of the Air Force Eugene Zuckert that the number go from 88 to 20. After some brouhaha over the matter, an agreement was negotiated that capped the SAB at 70 members and also gave the secretary of the Air Force approval over new appointments along with the Air Force’s chief of staff.

The conflict of interest issue hit the fan with several articles in December 1961 in the New York Times on the propriety of General Donald L. Putt serving as chair of the board while also a senior executive with the United Aircraft Corporation, a major Air Force contractor. The board of course had been aware since its creation after World War II that given its tasks conflicts were sure to arise. It had handled them by biasing its appointments wherever possible toward people from universities and nonprofits and by trusting to the integrity of its members. Those days were over. The Times, for example, questioned why the Atomic Energy Commission declared Don Putt ineligible but not the Air Force.⁵⁰ Don Putt, citing the press of business but more likely because of the conflict issue, declined reappointment as SAB chair. I was appointed chair, although my formal appointment was held up until the attorney general issued a report on the matter. On February 26, a presidential executive order set forth new procedures for using advisors in the government, requiring, among other things, federal agencies to update semiannually financial holdings for each advisor and their immediate family.⁵¹ And I became the SAB chair in name as well as in fact in April, after my financial and related information had been vetted.

You can’t be a respectable professional in science or engineering without belonging to the principal society in your field. When I was a young scientist in graduate school and then at the Radiation Laboratory, my field was physics and I considered radar and radiation and all of that a branch of physics, so my principal society was the American Physical Society, and my key publications were Physical Reviews and the Review of Scientific Instruments. Then, one day, after some time in the MIT De-

partment of Aeronautics and Astronautics, I mentioned to the department head, Jerome Hunsaker, a publication I had just submitted to the Review of Scientific Instruments. Jerry said quietly and almost haughtily: “Guy, the society for aeronautical engineers is the Institute of Aeronautical Sciences.” I got the message and became active in the institute. The institute was founded in 1932, and its first president in fact had been Hunsaker. Another of my mentors, Jimmy Doolittle, also served as president. So I was greatly honored when I was elected institute president in 1961. It was for a one-year term but a very busy one, not least that I got the momentum moving to reconcile the increasingly clumsy institutional division between travel in air and in space, including the large overlap between the aircraft and space industries, which were asked to support both the Institute of Aeronautical Sciences and its counterpart for space, the American Rocket Society. The division no longer made sense, and after a considerable amount of work the two groups merged, becoming the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.

On yet another track, I had since I finished my tour as chief scientist of the Air Force in 1956 served as a consultant to the United Aircraft Corporation.⁵² I did that for 18 years, helping initially on propulsion systems for missiles and rockets, a new area for the company and one to which they were latecomers.⁵³ Nevertheless, the corporation, especially when it acquired new leadership at the top, made solid gains in propulsion systems. It started on a guided-missile program and established a development and test center in Florida for liquid-propelled rockets and a similar facility albeit for solid propellants in Palo Alto, California. Don Putt directed the latter after he retired from the Air Force in 1958. It was this job combined with his chairing the SAB that got him front and center in the New York Times. I also worked hard to involve first-class scientists in helping the corporation in other areas, including Frederick Seitz, a solid-state physicist of world stature; I. I. Rabi, the Nobelist who had for a time been at the Rad Lab; and George Kistiakowsky, the Harvard chemist I mentioned earlier who devised the explosive mechanism for triggering the atomic bomb and succeeded Jim Killian as presidential science advisor.

Amidst all that, the Stever family in June 1960 embarked on a 12,000-mile trip to the West, a first for our four children—Guy, 13;

Sarah, 11; Margo, 8; and Roy, 6. The trip took two months and had its moments. Roy refused to eat or drink anything other than peanut butter sandwiches, ice cream, milk, and Coca-Cola, until he discovered that he also liked Dinty Moore beef stew. Bunny taught Sarah French. Margo and Bunny had a scary nose-to-nose run-in with a moose. The moose retreated. A bear pillaged our cooler at one campsite. And we saw the West at its most spectacular. For example, we went through the Wind River range in Wyoming through Lander just across the Continental Divide. I returned to that spot some 17 years later when Roy, just out of college, laid out a 17-day trip above 10,000 feet for me in my first summer after I retired from service in the White House.

We returned to our home in Belmont about three weeks before the start of the MIT fall 1960 term. My return signaled another change in my professional life. Dean Gordon Brown and now President Jay Stratton had for some time been trying to persuade me to head up two departments, the excellent mechanical engineering one and the much smaller but very distinguished naval architecture and marine engineering. This was a rather unusual assignment. It came about in part because Dean Brown wanted to fold the naval architecture and marine engineering department into the very large mechanical engineering department. Also, he needed a new head of mechanical engineering, following rough times with the two previous department heads. I told him that the department of naval architecture and marine engineering was a jewel. Why should he bury it in a much larger department?

The day I accepted the dual assignment I called the president of Yale to decline for the second time an offer to become its dean of engineering. There were many reasons for turning it down, including our love of Boston, of MIT, and of Randolph, New Hampshire, where we now purchased a place to relieve the pressure on the Risleys, a place we called Cair Paravel, the magical castle in C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.⁵⁴ Four English children discover a magic land that lies beyond an ordinary wardrobe closet. In this land, Narnia, one of the children, Edmund, betrays his siblings to the wicked White Witch, who

has been holding all Narnia in thrall to winter. Only when the lion Aslan agrees to die at the witch’s hand can the betrayal be forgiven and spring come to Narnia.⁵⁵

There was no betrayal but Randolph became our Cair Paravel. Bunny and I when we were married in 1946 went to Randolph sparingly—it wasn’t ours but that of Bunny’s parents and so we went as guests. And it wasn’t winterized. Fifteen years after we married, we took possession of our own place at Randolph, now with four children and a firmer financial base with my increased MIT salary and consulting. We started winterizing as soon as we could, finishing up shortly after Christmas 1961.

The original land was seven acres of mostly woodland, a large house, and a small garage. Over the years we added a large barn-garage, which I had the pleasure of designing myself and that has become a major part of our existence. We helped Guy, Jr. and Debra buy land across the road, and they built there. Later, when he and his wife and child moved to a larger house nearby, we bought their original property for a spillover for our other children’s families as they grew up. Also, since Bunny and I grew more and more allergic to dogs and cats, we named that spillover home Casa di Cani, the dog house. Visiting dogs and cats were always put over there, along with their owners, and we were dog-free and cat-free at our house.

By several purchases the woodland grew to about 20 acres, with several healthy soft wood stands of white pine, spruce, balsam, hemlock, tamarack, and white birch, as well as hard wood of maple and oak. Bunny had five flower gardens that she loved, and I had a couple acres of lawn that I mowed. The whole family helped cutting trails and firewood with an assortment of chain saws. We all kept healthy.

We made many friends, many having also made Randolph into a summer retreat for their families. There were constant movable feasts with different groupings centered on one or more of the activities. For example, there was a group that just loved to square dance and we had a lot of fun doing that. Another group liked golf. Others were particularly interested in climbing, but we all shared and had a wonderful set of relationships. Tops on many of our families’ list was fly-fishing for trout in the wild streams of the area, Bunny having taught me and I willing to

teach the children. Both Roy and Margo became expert. Lots of skiing in the winter, downhill and cross-country.

We unified around the Randolph Mountain Club, which kept open a hundred miles of trails, using, usually, the younger members of our families; our children served as hut boys at a couple of the cabins. The Randolph Mountain Club also had a tea to open the summer season. And an annual picnic that was the high point of the summer, with elaborate charades competitions and group singing. There was a regularly scheduled Tuesday climb and a Thursday climb, one more difficult than the other. You could sign up for those, and the attendees would vary from 3 years old to 90.

Cair Paravel was the vital balance to the pressures of my professional life in the 1960s: presidency of the Institute of Aerospace Sciences, vice chairman and then chairman of the SAB, growing consulting responsibilities with the United Aircraft Corporation, teaching and research, and now head of two engineering departments at MIT. Both my professional life and my personal life ahead seemed clear and even predictable. Little did I know.