Effects of War, Sequel Part 2 | 1958–1963: Education, Space and the Work of Discovery

Explorer 1 became the first American satellite on 31 January 1958. The undertaking brought together the Army Ballistic Missile Agency, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and a scientific instrument prepared under James Van Allen at the University of Iowa. NASA did not yet operate. The satellite carried a detector intended to measure cosmic radiation, giving the launch a scientific purpose that continued after the vehicle had reached orbit. ^[1]

Reaching orbit made observation possible. It also separated two kinds of achievement that could easily merge in the public account. A successful launch demonstrated that a vehicle and its payload had survived the journey. A scientific conclusion required the readings to be received, checked and understood. The most consequential question could emerge after the event that attracted the greatest attention.

This distinction brings the sequel back to the institutions described in the previous chapter. Their value would become clearer through the investigations they enabled. A laboratory supplied more than a place to assemble equipment; a university supplied more than a name attached to the payload. Together, they provided people who could ask what the instrument had recorded and continue working when the result was unexpected. The new satellite created an opportunity for discovery whose meaning still depended on work on Earth.

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Some of the detector readings were puzzlingly low. In their September 1958 paper, Van Allen, George Ludwig, Ernest Ray and Carl McIlwain examined possible explanations, including instrument failure and temperature effects. Explorer 1 transmitted when ground stations could receive it; Explorer 3 added a recorder that preserved measurements across an orbit. The expanded record helped the researchers investigate the pattern. ^[2]

They also exposed a spare flight instrument to an intense X-ray beam. Under sufficiently strong irradiation, the detector could produce a very low output. The apparent absence of counts could therefore indicate an intensity beyond the instrument’s useful counting range. The authors argued that the satellite had encountered a region of unusually intense radiation. Their explanation connected the orbital measurements to a test that could be repeated in a laboratory. ^[2]

The resulting discovery became central to the identification of Earth’s radiation belts. ^[1] It also illustrates a practical relationship between exploration and experimental judgment. An instrument does not explain its own limitations. The researchers needed to understand how their apparatus behaved before they could interpret what lay beyond it. Equipment, recordings and time to test alternative explanations belonged to the same investigation.

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The National Aeronautics and Space Act became law on 29 July 1958. NASA began operations on 1 October. Its central inheritance was the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, or NACA: approximately 8,000 employees, three major research laboratories and two test facilities. The new agency acquired an established body of aeronautical experience along with its new responsibilities. ^[3][4]

That inheritance matters to the chronology of scientific expansion. A change in the organisation chart could take effect on a particular date. The ability to conduct an experiment had accumulated through training, repeated measurements and the maintenance of facilities. NASA’s beginning joined a new political purpose to capabilities that people had already developed.

Existing work had to find its place within the new agency. Staff carried professional knowledge into a setting with wider obligations, while managers had to determine how established laboratories would contribute. A growing national programme needed the experience of people already at work and a way to prepare those who would follow them. That need for trained successors linked questions of organisation to questions of education.

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The original Space Act assigned NASA a broad task: to extend knowledge, develop capabilities, conduct studies and cooperate with other nations. It placed civilian space activity under the new agency while reserving activities principally concerned with weapons or military operations to the Department of Defense. It also provided for exchanges of information and for public access subject to statutory and security restrictions. ^[4]

These responsibilities created a continuing problem of judgment. Scientific investigation, vehicle development and national leadership could support one another, but they would not always ask for the same expenditure at the same moment. An agency responsible for several purposes needed ways to explain why a particular programme deserved resources and how its results would be used.

The distinction between civilian and military responsibility gave this work an institutional form. It did not remove the influence of national competition from civilian decisions. The law itself combined the advancement of knowledge with questions of capability and leadership. Later disagreements over the lunar programme would arise within that broad mandate. The issue would be how to sustain its different obligations when one objective acquired an especially powerful political claim.

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On 2 September 1958, President Dwight Eisenhower signed the National Defense Education Act. The law connected education to national security and authorised several forms of support, including student loans, stronger instruction and graduate fellowships. Science, mathematics and modern foreign languages received particular attention. The statute also reaffirmed state and local responsibility and prohibited federal control of curricula under its authority. ^[5]

Eisenhower’s signing statement described an emergency undertaking initially intended to last four years. It also recorded a disagreement: Congress had omitted the national-defence scholarships he had proposed. The measure he signed therefore differed from the programme he had requested. Its educational purposes had passed through legislative choices that changed the form of assistance. ^[6]

Expansion therefore depended on decisions made across many institutions, each with its own staff, students and resources.

Calling education a security need could strengthen the argument for public spending. The practical educational question remained more particular: what assistance would reach a person, through which institution, and in time for which course of study? Those questions began to acquire answers during the first months of administration.

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The Office of Education’s contemporary account in School Life followed the first loan cycle closely. By the 6 January 1959 deadline, 1,227 institutions had applied. Allocation notices went out on 30 January for approximately $6 million. The report, describing the first week of February, said loans were beginning that semester; federal checks were expected in mid-February. Students applied through their own institutions. ^[7]

Demand greatly exceeded the initial allocation. Even after institutions reduced their requests, the total approached $62 million. ^[7] This gap was part of the programme’s working conditions. Colleges had to make decisions with the funds available while further support remained under consideration.

For a student, the significance of the programme lay in the possibility of continuing an education. For an administrator, that possibility arrived as a set of applications to be judged against a limited fund. These perspectives belonged to the same transaction. Assistance had to be substantial enough to matter to a borrower and manageable enough for an institution to deliver.

The loan form also placed a future obligation beside the present opportunity. It could help someone study by making money available before that person could earn enough to pay. Its value would depend on the terms of borrowing as well as the amount offered. A history of educational access must therefore attend to the form of support. A loan, a scholarship and a paid research position create different relationships between a student’s present work and future life.

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The graduate-fellowship provisions addressed another part of the educational system. Under Title IV, approved programmes had to be new or expanded, and preference went to applicants interested in teaching in higher education. The design sought both more graduate-training capacity and a wider geographical distribution of it. Support could go to the fellow and to the institution providing the training. ^[5]

In early February 1959, forty-eight institutions were nominating the first 160 fellows. The Office of Education scheduled individual award announcements for 10 March; the remaining authorised first-year fellowships still required additional funding. ^[7]

This arrangement looked beyond the next intake of undergraduates. More students would require people able to teach them, and those teachers needed advanced preparation themselves. Expansion could consequently create a demand that it could meet only gradually. A graduate student supported now might help educate a later generation, after completing years of study and entering a suitable position.

It also made the institution part of the investment. A fellowship could sustain an individual through demanding work, while an expanded programme could remain available to later students. The two purposes depended on each other: a place on a course had little educational substance without instruction, and a capable teacher needed students with the means to attend. The next example shows how even an established research laboratory could depend on access to a classroom beyond its own walls.

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Mary Jackson had joined NACA’s segregated West Area Computing section at Langley in 1951. Working subsequently with engineer Kazimierz Czarnecki, she entered a route towards promotion that required graduate-level mathematics and physics. The University of Virginia administered the after-work courses, but they met at segregated Hampton High School. Jackson had to obtain permission from the City of Hampton to attend. She completed the courses and became an engineer at Langley in 1958. ^[8]

The obstacle was attached to an ordinary professional requirement. Advancement required further study; access to that study was restricted by race. Jackson’s qualification for a new role consequently depended on overcoming a racial barrier that white students did not face. The injustice concerned her right to pursue that education and career, independently of any later benefit to a national programme.

Her work also survives in the technical record. In September 1958, Czarnecki and Jackson published NACA Technical Note 4388 on how cone angle and speed affected where airflow near a surface became turbulent. Their experiments used Langley’s supersonic pressure tunnel. The report describes models being repolished and tests repeated when surface damage might affect the results. Two or more readers examined the photographs used to identify transition, and their readings were averaged. These were the coauthors’ reported procedures; the paper does not assign each operation to a particular person. ^[9]

Such details give professional substance to a career milestone. Jackson appears in the history as a researcher contributing to a problem that required careful observation and comparison. The promotion and the paper belong together: one records a change in her professional position, the other makes visible the scientific work associated with it.

Her preparation had its own chronology. Nothing in these records connects the courses to the newly enacted education law. The relationship is instead a question the two episodes place before the reader. When a government seeks more scientific ability, it must consider the conditions under which people can acquire and exercise it. An expanded fund and an accessible classroom address different parts of that responsibility.

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Educational assistance also carried political conditions. The original NDEA required individual recipients to make a disclaimer concerning beliefs and associations connected with the unlawful overthrow of the government, as well as taking an oath of allegiance. ^[5] In his October 1962 statement supporting a change, President John Kennedy reported that thirty-two colleges had refused the student-loan programme because of the disclaimer affidavit. Others, he said, had participated reluctantly. ^[10]

The dispute affected the relationship between institutions and their students. A college that regarded the condition as an infringement of freedom of thought faced a decision about participation in a programme offering financial help. The conflict entered the administration of assistance, where a government’s eligibility requirement could shape the opportunities available through a particular campus.

The amendment became law on 16 October 1962. It removed the disclaimer affidavit while retaining the constitutional oath. Other restrictions included disclosures of specified convictions and pending charges for certain fellowships and stipends, and a prohibition on applying for or using assistance by members who knew that their Communist organisation was registered or under a final registration order. The scope differed across forms of assistance. ^[11]

This was a revision of the conditions of support. It shows that the terms under which education expanded could themselves become objects of political argument and legislative change. The size of a programme was only one of its defining features. Its rules expressed judgments about who might receive public help and what a recipient had to declare in return.

The same years also brought another form of expansion across the Atlantic. At CERN, the immediate question was how an international laboratory’s people and equipment would produce an experimental result—and how the opportunity to use that equipment would be shared.

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On 1 October 1958, Physical Review Letters published “Electron Decay of the Pion,” by T. Fazzini, G. Fidecaro, A. W. Merrison, H. Paul and A. V. Tollestrup. The authors worked at CERN. A footnote identified Alvin Tollestrup as a National Science Foundation Fellow on leave from the California Institute of Technology. The fellowship discussed as an institutional possibility in the previous chapter now appears beside a named researcher in a particular collaboration. ^[12]

Giuseppe Fidecaro’s later account follows the experiment’s preparation. Detector work began in February; the first run with the beam took place on 23 June. The researchers stopped positively charged pions in a scintillator and used the resulting signals to distinguish a rare direct decay into a positron and neutrino from the more common sequence through a muon. A positron is the electron’s positively charged counterpart. The experiment depended on recognising different sequences in the instrument’s record. ^[13]

Fidecaro reports forty candidate events against an expected four false events. Establishing the decay’s frequency required further work on detection efficiency: how many relevant events the apparatus would register. Julius Ashkin contributed calculations, first using a computer in Rome and subsequently CERN’s Ferranti Mercury, towards the fuller result published in 1959. ^[13]

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CERN’s Proton Synchrotron reached 24 GeV on 24 November 1959. The laboratory’s annual report treated this as a major technical achievement while explaining that running-in, measurements and adjustments remained necessary before regular experimental use. This first high-energy milestone opened a new range of possibilities; making those possibilities dependable was the next task. ^[14]

The older synchrocyclotron already showed how demanding a working programme could become. In 1959, thirteen CERN groups and six visiting teams used its beams. Requests exceeded the available time even with three shifts a day, six days a week. Some groups were completing experiments or preparing to move towards the new machine. ^[14]

A September 1959 allocation review described visitors’ share as below 30 per cent and proposed raising it to 40 per cent during the opening months of 1960. Its account combined recorded use with a forward schedule. It identified several difficulties: CERN teams needed to finish work before leaving the division, external positive-pion beams had caused problems, and visiting groups were not always ready when time became available. ^[15]

The review makes the meaning of access unusually concrete. A visiting team required a suitable beam, a prepared experiment and a period in which both were available together. A place in a schedule could not compensate for an experiment that was not ready or a beam that did not meet its requirements. Cooperation therefore involved coordination between the laboratory and the institutions sending researchers to it.

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University expansion required a similar examination of working capacity. In West Germany, the Wissenschaftsrat’s recommendations drew on questionnaires, visits during the winter of 1958–1959 and consultation within disciplines. The report appeared in November 1960. It approached the universities as institutions whose needs had to be investigated before a national programme of expansion could be specified. ^[16]

The recommendations included approximately 1,200 additional professorial chairs. They also argued that enlarging existing institutions would not be sufficient and that new universities were needed. Recruiting teachers, providing premises and strengthening administration would condition implementation. These were connected requirements within the proposed expansion. ^[16]

The report also belongs to a longer sequence of planning. The federal–state agreement establishing the Wissenschaftsrat dated from 5 September 1957, before Sputnik’s launch. ^[16] The subsequent recommendations addressed a problem with its own institutional history. International competition formed part of the period, but it cannot supply a single starting point for every educational change.

The next task was to locate decisions in particular places. General recommendations could identify the need for additional capacity. Creating it required governments and universities to settle questions of organisation, recruitment and physical space. At Bochum, those questions became the work of founding a new institution.

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On 18 July 1961, the North Rhine-Westphalian parliament selected Bochum as the site of a new university. A founding committee chaired by Hans Wenke developed structural plans, with recommendations published in December 1962. The university archive places this work within overlapping state and national planning: the state education minister had already presented an initial conception in July 1960. ^[17]

The 1962 memorandum described an ambition extending beyond the addition of places. Its proposed departments and institutes were intended to connect disciplines that established faculty boundaries could separate. Engineering was to develop close relationships with natural sciences and humanities. A unified campus was meant to support research, teaching and contact among its members. ^[18]

Where a university placed its subjects, how it grouped appointments and which facilities it shared could make some forms of cooperation easier. Founding a new institution created an occasion to examine those choices before established arrangements became difficult to change.

The memorandum also recognised the limits of design. A structural plan could provide a framework; the people recruited would have to realise the connections through their initiative and daily work. It therefore called for academic appointments early enough for the appointees to participate in shaping the university. ^[18]

The plan connected institutional design to recruitment. By 1963, appointments would begin to give those proposals a working academic community.

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While new places were being planned in West Germany, an existing route to education was interrupted in Berlin. Construction of the Wall began on 13 August 1961. Students living in East Berlin and the German Democratic Republic who had attended the Freie Universität in Dahlem were cut off from their university in West Berlin. The university’s history identifies students including Detlef Girrmann among those who organised escape assistance. It also records arrests and convictions of students involved in such activity by the end of 1963. ^[19]

The Wall interrupted education already underway: residence could prevent a student from attending an existing university. Elsewhere, new capacity was being planned, but opportunity also depended on freedom of movement. The students’ loss mattered in its own right, beyond any research or professional work they might later have produced.

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Earlier that year, on 25 May 1961, Kennedy proposed to Congress that the United States commit itself to landing a person on the Moon and returning that person safely before the decade ended. He presented the undertaking as a sustained national obligation, requiring substantial resources and a willingness to carry the programme through. His address also acknowledged the demands it would place on other work. ^[20]

The goal gave a developing programme a destination and a deadline. Those features made political commitment unusually explicit. Success could be described in terms that people outside the laboratories could understand, while the work required to reach it remained technically demanding and uncertain.

A deadline also changes the relationship between present decisions and future possibilities. Activities that directly serve the chosen objective can acquire a claim on resources that other investigations find harder to match. Training and exploratory research have consequences that may extend beyond the date selected for a mission. Their advocates must explain why the institution should sustain them alongside the work most visibly connected to its public promise.

The lunar commitment thus intensified a question already present in NASA’s founding responsibilities. How should an agency organise itself around a major national objective while preserving the breadth of scientific and technical work needed for its longer life? The question became explicit in the exchange between the President and NASA’s administrator.

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On 30 November 1962, NASA administrator James Webb wrote to Kennedy following their meeting earlier that month. He argued for a broad programme of scientific and technological development alongside the lunar effort. Drastically reducing ongoing work to accelerate the Moon landing, he maintained, would damage the longer-term national interest. Universities, research centres and industry belonged to the wider capability he wanted the space programme to strengthen. ^[21]

There is a practical difference between assembling the means to complete an assigned task and sustaining a community able to formulate the next task. The first demands concentrated effort. The second also depends on education, the development of instruments and room to explore questions that have not yet become political priorities. An institution may need both, but the relationship between them requires decisions about actual people and resources.

Webb did not have to diminish the lunar objective to make that case. His letter placed it within a larger programme whose strength would depend on several kinds of work proceeding together. It gives the chapter an internal account of the choices created by expansion: even within an agency associated with a celebrated national goal, the purposes of public investment remained open to argument.

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Canada’s Alouette programme shows how another route into space could be organised. Following an American invitation to collaborate in 1958, John Chapman, Eldin Warren and colleagues at Canada’s Defence Research Telecommunications Establishment developed a proposal to investigate the ionosphere from above. The resulting Canadian-built satellite was launched by the United States on 29 September 1962. ^[22]

The investigation addressed a region of the upper atmosphere important to radio communication. Canada contributed a scientific purpose and the spacecraft developed to pursue it; American launch capability made the orbital investigation possible. The division of responsibilities gave each participant a substantive role in the common undertaking. ^[22]

The American report on space activities during 1963 recorded that Alouette continued to perform well and return valuable data. ^[23] By this chapter’s endpoint, the cooperation had therefore moved beyond a proposal and a successful launch into continuing observation. That sequence returns the story to the distinction encountered with Explorer. A mission’s scientific life proceeds through the information it makes available and the questions researchers can bring to it.

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At Bochum, the first full professor was appointed on 17 April 1963. Teaching would begin only in November 1965. The interval was part of the university’s formation: appointments could help build an academic institution before students arrived for its first courses. ^[17]

The university archive supplies a more detailed view of the work underway in 1963. Chancellor Wolfgang Seel began working locally in September, using premises adapted from a former mining company. On 3 December, fourteen appointed professors met under Hans Wenke, who had recently received the duties of founding rector. Administration and academic organisation were acquiring people and a place of work. ^[24]

Other preparation was less conspicuous. Staff assembling the university’s book collections had begun work in May 1962, in a disused colliery. By November 1963, they had gathered more than 100,000 volumes. ^[24] A future university’s intellectual resources were taking physical form before its teaching programme opened.

The books and appointments mark the work between authorisation and teaching. A university required people who could organise knowledge, build collections and prepare courses; those responsibilities had begun before its opening became a public event.

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The report on United States space activities in 1963, transmitted to Congress in January 1964, described another investment whose consequences would unfold over time. NASA’s Sustaining University Program had been established in 1962. In its second year, 786 graduate students entered training under predoctoral grants to eighty-eight universities. These were students beginning supported training, with their subsequent work still ahead. ^[23]

The arrangement placed university education within the continuing development of space capability. It addressed a need different from the completion of a spacecraft or the scheduling of a launch. Research organisations required people able to understand difficult problems, develop methods and eventually take responsibility for new investigations.

There was a connection here with both the NDEA graduate provisions and the planning at Bochum. Each treated the preparation of future teachers or researchers as an activity requiring present resources. Each also depended on institutions capable of giving that preparation substance. Financial support could secure time for study, but the educational work still had to occur through supervision, instruction and research.

These commitments created obligations extending beyond the enthusiasm surrounding an initial announcement. A student entering advanced training needed a credible course of study. A university preparing to teach needed staff and resources that could continue together. The growth described in this chapter therefore involved decisions about duration as well as scale: how long institutions would sustain people, equipment and programmes after the decision to begin.

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The period leaves a record of achievements at different stages. An experimental paper, a loan allocation, a professorial appointment and a student entering training each represents something real. Their significance becomes clearer when the work already accomplished is placed beside the work that remained.

Across these cases, scientific capability developed through relationships between different kinds of work. A detector needed researchers who understood its behaviour. A shared accelerator needed prepared visiting teams. A new university needed administrators and collections alongside professors. Public resources became productive through these connections, each of which could take time to establish and continued attention to maintain.

Access remained part of the same history. Jackson’s route to the required courses, the terms attached to student assistance and the interruption of study across Berlin’s border show how political and social arrangements entered educational life. Their effects reached people at particular points in a career or course of study. The expansion of an institution could widen opportunity while leaving other barriers in place.

The effects of war and the competition that followed can therefore be traced through identifiable decisions. A security rationale helped justify education spending. A national commitment concentrated attention on a lunar objective. An international laboratory and a shared satellite mission organised cooperation around investigations that participants could undertake together. These arrangements shaped the uses of scientific ability; the actual knowledge still had to be produced through observation, calculation, criticism and teaching.

A signal became knowledge through sustained investigation. The institutions examined here were building the means for more people to undertake work of that kind. After 1963, the history continues with the demands placed on those growing institutions, the results they produced and the opportunities they sustained. Continue with Universities, War and the Uses of Science, 1964–1969.

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