The Birth Of Nasa: The Diary Of T. Keith Glennan

The successful Soviet launch of Sputnik on 4 October 1957 created an enormous sensation in the United States, causing a great many Americans suddenly to doubt the effectiveness of American science, education, and military capabilities. Above all, they feared that the Soviet Union had obtained a lead in the race to develop long-range missiles. It was in this crisis atmosphere that President Dwight D. Eisenhower and the U.S. Congress created a new agency -the National Aeronautics and Space Administration- which officially came into being on 1 October 1958. In this fascinating book, part diary and part recollection, T. Keith Glennan -the first administrator of NASA- relates the story of how he and others both inside and outside of the agency worked within the circumstances created by the Sputnik crisis to plan and organize a viable space program that ultimately put 12 Americans on the moon. In the process, Glennan also reveals a great deal about Eisenhower as a human being and a president, about the nation's capital at the end of the 1950s and beginning of the 1960s, and about individuals like Wernher von Braun, the charismatic leader whose rocket team designed the Saturn launch vehicles that propelled the astronauts to lunar orbit. This diary is must reading for anyone interested in the early history of the U.S. space program and the atmosphere in which it arose. The narrative that Glennan wrote is supplemented by an introduction tracing his Yale education and subsequent career as an engineer, AEC commissioner, and president of Case Institute of Technology. It shows how this background prepared him for his role in creating a NASA "that could carry out a broad-based scientific and technological program" suitable for the post-Sputnik era. Also included in the book is a biographical appendix sketching the careers of the key participants in the story Glennan relates.