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

woman subtly suggested—however incorrectly—that the social as well as economic equality that Marxism-Leninism promised was obviously true in “the people's paradise.” Sally Ride, America's first woman astronaut—and the holder of a doctorate in physics from Stanford University—got to space on the shuttle Challenger on June 18, 1983, almost exactly two decades later.
    First quickly became the buzzword in the United States and elsewhere in the West as Korolev and his compatriots racked up one after another. The unstated but widely accepted implication was that a nation that was first in performing all of those feats had an energetic and robust space program with skilled personnel and excellent facilities. R-7s and other giant lifters were not fired from slingshots. The infrastructure, let alone the science and engineering, that was required to get people to space was formidable and reflected a basic strength that necessarily had to be extensive. Being able to stage such spectacular performances, in other words, was the sure mark of strength that extended to relations with the rest of the world. It made the difference between being a mere power and being a superpower.
    John F. Kennedy, who was so notoriously competitive that he even hated losing at touch football, knew that. The consecutive, daring Soviet achievements got the rapt attention of the American news media and briefly seemed to cast doubt on his country's leading the world in science and technology. It seemed to betray Edison, Morse, Ford, Lindbergh, Perry, Byrd, and the other inventors, adventurers, and explorers. It rankled. Space, as the Caltech geologist and space scientist Bruce Murray has said, is a reflection of Earth. 8 The prospect of the “greatest nation on Earth” (as the United States called itself) being repeatedly beaten in space and therefore seeming to be a second-rate power, at least in that realm, was not acceptable to JFK. Nor were things much better on terra firma. The civil-rights situation in the south had turned explosive; the Communist Pathet Lao were dangerously close to toppling the pro-American government in Laos; the Communist-led Vietcong, aided by North Vietnam, was waging a war against the pro–West South Vietnamese government; and the CIA-backed invasion of Cuba to remove Fidel Castro from power turned into a fiasco when the invading force of Cuban exiles, lacking the air cover they expected, was almost massacred at the Bay of Pigs. Then spacebegan to turn red, or so it seemed in the White House, with an impressionable Third World watching. The Underdeveloped World, as it had been called until recently, was taken—incorrectly—to be up for grabs in terms of Eastern or Western “influence.” Its leaders tended to play both sides against each other while steadfastly maintaining their independence.
    â€œThe President was more convinced than any of his advisers that a second-rate, second-place space effort was inconsistent with the country's security, with its role as world leader and with the New Frontier spirit of discovery,” Theodore C. Sorensen, Kennedy's special counsel, recalled years later. 9
    On the basis of advice Kennedy got from his inner circle, including Sorensen, he therefore made what he later called one of the most important decisions of his presidency: “to shift our efforts in space from low to high gear.”
    On May 25, 1961, in a speech to Congress that addressed “urgent national needs,” Kennedy mentioned several dangers that faced the United States, including Communist subversion. He then used the Sputnik and Gagarin flights, and their impact on “the minds of men everywhere,” to call for the United States to land a man on the Moon and return him safely to Earth before the end of the decade. “While we cannot guarantee that we shall one day be first,” he warned, “we can guarantee that any failure to make this effort