An essay printed in March 1958 issue of Saturn magazine, a few months after the Soviet Union had launched the Sputnik causing public outcry in the USA over the effectiveness of the American space program.
A mountain of self-deception came crashing down on the heads of the Western world on October 4, 1957, when the ominous beep-beep-beep of a man-made moon came circling the globe. For that satellite, the first actual step in the conquest of outer space, was not—as ten thousand science-fiction stories would have had it and as millions of lines of smug newspaper and magazine stories had predicted—was not an American invention.
Only a few weeks earlier Russian claims to having perfected a powerful rocket capable of intercontinental cargo travel (the cargo being, of course, atomic warheads) were pooh-poohed. From the White House on down to the lowliest politicos, the report was greeted with shrugs, smiles of scorn for such obvious poppycock, and jeers that it was mere propaganda. But as it turned out the Soviets were not making scarehead stories, they were coldly stating facts.
They produced a rocket capable of penetrating outer space. They blasted off a miniature globe many times heavier than our most ambitious plans had projected and at a higher altitude—and they then said that it was just an advance trial, a mere preliminary to the real thing.
And while the Russians were preparing to complete this first successful space breakthrough, what were we doing? We had postponed our efforts at putting up an earth satellite from an indefinite time in the fall of 1957 to an equally indefinite time in the early summer of 1958. Our officials were engaged in refereeing a ridiculous dispute between the Air Force and the Army as to which of several half-finished rocket programs should be scrapped and which kept. The earth satellite we planned and couldn't bring about on schedule was to be a piddling little thing of about twenty pounds, to be sent up—if we were lucky—to about three hundred miles.
Of course once the Sputnik, as the Soviets call their moon, was up and going, there was a great scurrying and to-do in the circles of the brave gentlemen who compose the United States rocket leaders. Efforts were made to say that, well, the Russians were a little ahead of, but not much—a few months maybe—we weren't in a race anyway—besides we'd soon outstrip them with our know-how.
The facts are otherwise. The size and weight and height of the Sputnik shows that the Russians are not just a few months ahead, but at least two years ahead; that they possess the means and technique to plan space operations many times greater than those in our present capacity; and that they are forging ahead without halt, without inter-departmental arguments, and without a lot of shoddy lobbying to see into whose corporative pockets the new few billions of defense money is going to be funnelled.
In plain language, this is all going to mean that the Russians are going to be the first to conquer space, the first to reach the moon, the first to set up a permanent base on the moon.
We are sorry to have to make this observation so bluntly. But it is the peculiar quality of a magazine of this sort, a science-fiction magazine whose readers are accustomed to view the future with intelligent eyes rather than with the blinkers that “family” magazines impose, to be able to present an unpleasant aspect of the future in its true light.
I know that it is possible to raise objections, but for the most part these objections will be derived from the soft soap that is going to be dished out heavily by the culprits who were responsible for our fumbling failure to keep ahead of the Soviets in a field where we certainly once had a head start. Raise these objections if you will, but a two-year lead in rocketry with the full consciousness of the importance of the outcome is not to be overcome so easily. The Soviets, having brought to world attention their leadership in the field, must now redouble their national effort to keep it. You can rest assured that they know this and that, while we are holding post-mortems and emergency committee meetings, they will be plunging ahead with tests, plans, and vaster engineering operations. They have publicly stated their objectives—and stated them without all the evasiveness we give to ours.
