0.8 The golden age: 1957-67  (Page 3/10)

One month after that—on December 6, 1957—a Vanguard rocket attempting to launch the United States’ first satellite exploded after takeoff. Finally, on January 31, 1958, Explorer I was successfully launched by an Army Jupiter rocket.

Psac

Conditions were clearly ripe in post-Sputnik 1957 for the establishment of an effective presidential science advisory system. The Bureau of the Budget, frustrated at the continuing refusal of the National Science Board to coordinate policy as legislated by the National Science Foundation Act and reiterated by Executive Order in 1954, was intent on establishing an alternative mechanism in the White House or the Executive Office of the President. Author interview with Elmer Staats, December 29, 1986 (unpublished). And Eisenhower was predisposed to having an expert, non-governmental body to counterbalance the Pentagon.

PSAC members were appointed for four-year rotating terms. Virtually all charter members had had extensive experience working with the federal government during World War II, and most were well acquainted with one another. The charter members of PSAC were: Robert F. Barker, California Institute of Technology (physics); William D. Baker, Bell Telephone Laboratories (physical chemistry); John Bardeen, University of Illinois (physics); Lloyd W. Berkner, Associated Universities, Inc. (physics); Hans W. Bethe, Cornell University (physics); James H. Doolittle, Shell Oil Co. (aeronautical engineering); James B. Fisk, Bell Telephone Laboratories (physics); Caryl B. Haskins, Carnegie Institution of Washington (genetics, physiology); Charles C. Lauritsen, California Institute of Technology (physics); James R. Killian, Jr., Massachusetts Institute of Technology (administration); George B. Kistiakowsky, Harvard University (physical chemistry); Edwin H. Land, Polaroid Corp. (physics); Edward M. Purcell, Harvard University (physics); Isador I. Rabi, Columbia University (physics); H.P. Robertson, California Institute of Technology (mathematical physics); Jerome B. Wiesner, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (electrical engineering); Herbert York, Livermore Laboratory (physics); and Jerrold R. Zacharias, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (physics); Bacher, Fisk, Haskins, Land, Lauritsen, Rabi, and Zacharias were carryovers from SAC/ODM. David Z. Beckler served as executive secretary to SAC/ODM from the Truman administration and as executive secretary of PSAC until it was abolished by President Richard Nixon in January 1973. William T. Golden, ed., Science Advice to the President (New York: Pergamon Press, 1980), viii-ix. They comprised a remarkably elite, homogeneous group. Among the sixteen members (including Killian), nine came from private Eastern universities (three from MIT, two from Harvard, one each from Cornell, Columbia, and the Rockefeller University); one from the Associated Universities, Inc., a consortium of Eastern universities which that managed the Brookhaven National Laboratory; two from the California Institute of Technology, and one from the University of California, Berkeley. All members of SAC/ODM and PSAC, with their affiliations and terms of service, are given in Golden, ibid., vii-ix. The remaining four came from Bell Laboratories (two), Land Polaroid, and Shell Oil. Ten were physicists, two physical chemists, two engineers, and one a biophysicist.