Science with a vengeance: how the military created the US space sciences after World War II

Abstract

With the end of World War II and the transfer to much of the remaining stock of German V-2 rockets to the US, a glorious opportunity for research opened up, to study the physics and chemistry of the upper atmosphere as well as the ultraviolet radiation that does not penetrate to the surface of the Earth. Within a very few years, a very active civilian programme in space research was developed in cooperation with the armed forces that controlled the rockets. By the International Geophysical Year in 1954, space science was a well established field. This book traces the development of rocket-borne research from the early experiments by Goddard in the US and Regener in Germany through the explosive development after the War. The author argues that it was, somewhat surprisingly, not the established researchers who made use of the opportunity to answer long-standing questions, but an entirely new group of scientists who could persevere in the face of technological and bureaucratic hurdles. The military patronage of research that proved so successful in the War was continued for fields of interest to the military, and this altered the direction and character of the research. The tasks involved in building and using apparatus to be flown in rockets required a degree of entrepreneurship not common in science before the War.

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