Asteroid Threat : Defending Our Planet from Deadly Near-earth Objects (9781616149147) Read Free

twice, racing smoothly past a starry background, before anyonerealized it was there. But then, when it sank in that a Soviet spacecraft was flying imperviously over their country, there was a storm of self-flagellation and recrimination, much of it directed at President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who was widely perceived as being an amiable man who was not intellectually up to serious statecraft; who was more interested in golf than in national security. That was manifestly wrong, as his advocacy of the Open Skies program and strong support of the nation's ballistic-missile program showed. His authorization of U-2 flights over the Soviet Union that began in 1956 and his approval of the Corona satellite reconnaissance program that immediately followed them showed that he was well aware of the Soviet threat and was acting aggressively to counter it. He gamely answered his critics by insisting—correctly—that the United States did not trail the Reds in science and technology. It was not Sputnik that troubled Ike, the National Security Council, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but the R-7 that sent it to orbit. They knew that a rocket that could send an 83.6-kilogram satellite all the way to space could also send a much heavier nuclear warhead to the United States over the Arctic at a much lower altitude.
    On October 1, 1958, almost a year to the day after Sputnik took to the sky and caused a lingering trauma, the NACA was transformed into the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) as a tacit acknowledgment that the Space Age had indeed dawned and that a permanent organization on the order of the Department of Defense and other federal departments was needed to run all US civilian space activities, manned and unmanned. (The armed services and the CIA would start their own, often competitive, space programs.) And in recognition of the air-space continuum, NASA was mandated to be responsible for both sectors. Less than three years later, the Russkies struck again.
    On April 12, 1961, an R-7 roared out of Baikonur, carryingYuri Gagarin in Vostok 1 on a complete orbit around Earth, making him the first mortal to reach space. “ Poyekhali! ” (“Here we go!”) said the exhilarated cosmonaut as the modified R-7 lifted slowly off the launchpad and began its climb to orbit at a little after nine o'clock on the morning, as Sergei Pavlovich Korolev, the space program's ingenious chief designer (its Wernher von Braun, and the man who conceived Sputnik ), and Valentin Glushko and Mstislav Keldysh (two colleagues), watched through periscopes in a nearby bunker. The twenty-seven-year-old test pilot made one complete orbit of the planet before climbing out of the capsule and parachuting separately to earth. To their other firsts, the Russians now added getting the first man to space.
    On April 13, under a “hed” that spanned four of the newspaper's eight columns—“RUSSIAN ORBITED THE EARTH ONCE, OBSERVING IT THROUGH PORTHOLES; SPACE FLIGHT LASTED 108 MINUTES”—the New York Times ran a photo of jubilant youngsters outside the Moscow Planetarium and another of their hero with the barest trace of a smile, like a cosmic Mona Lisa in a leather flight cap (he had worn a helmet to space).
    The “newspaper of record” ran a hastily assembled spate of sidebars that described the flight with maps and diagrams, provided background on the preparations for the mission, and even included a transcript of some of the hero's radio chatter with his controllers at the space facility at Kaliningrad. It also carried congratulations from President John F. Kennedy. NASA's chief designer, Wernher von Braun, also offered congratulations. The Times ran man-in-the-news profiles that were supposed to provide depth—the human “angle”—about newsmakers. Gagarin's showed a photograph of him beside his wife, Valentina, who was reading to their two-year-old daughter. In a reference that was to