Washington-U.S.A.

...got a late start on its space program and has never managed to catch up with the Soviet Union...

...The ABMA team will be kept intact at the Redstone Arsenal in Alabama...

...with his experience as an Air Force Secretary, and his knowledge of and interest in defense, has been able to dramatize the missile question...

...The exploration of space is to the 20th century what the exploration of North America was to the 16th century...

...There still appear to be, however, few legislative astronauts on the Capitol Hill horizon...

...When NASA was set up last year, it was envisaged as the agency which would carry out the space programs that have a purely scientific purpose...

...The cluster of rockets which will form the Saturn super-booster will provide the great surge of power needed to send such scientific projects aloft...

...Children talk of satellites, astronauts and the pear-shaped moon at the breakfast table as if these phenomena were baseball players or FBI agents...

...Unless Congress should overturn the President's decision to transfer the Army program to NASA, the military rocket projects will be largely if not wholly in the hands of the Air Force, where they would seem to belong...

...The scientists, the generals and the politicians who are genuinely concerned over the American missile lag hope that the latest reorganization of the programs will at last bring some order out of our diverse and discouraging efforts to explore the well-ordered universe...

...The leadership is apparently not going to come from the White House...

...There have been so many disappointments up to now, however, that few persons who know the situation are yet ready to believe that the programs are at last on target...

...von Braun has told Americans again and again, the U.S...

...Here would seem to be an opportunity for an enterprising and ambitious member of Congress to lead the way onward and upward into outer space...

...would quickly zoom past the Soviet Union...

...Not since the late Admiral Richard E. Byrd first broadcast from Little America 30 years ago have Americans been as interested in scientific exploration as they now are in the probing of space...

...NASA is in charge of such major projects as the man-in-space programs, the lunar shots and deep space probes...

...A year ago, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration sought to take over the Army Ballistic Missiles Agency, whose star performer is von Braun...

...There is, of course, the usual opposition to any proposals which would require the expenditure of more Government funds and perhaps lead to still higher taxes...

...Like the mountains that someone must climb simply because they are there, space, too, must be explored if the means to do so are readily available...

...The congenital optimists, who seem to be in oversupply these days, continue to maintain that in another year or two the U.S...

...General Medaris asked the other day...

...The space programs have been on an unnecessarily sparse regimen...

...The result has been that the Russians have been first with the spectacular space achievements that have fired the imagination of peoples everywhere...

...Our techniques as well as our funds seem to be in short supply...

...Then, too, there is the "gut" feeling which so many have in Washington that boondoggling has been allowed to get so far out of control in the Pentagon that if the military really needs a few hundred million more dollars it can lay its hands on the money without coming braid-ed-hat in hand to Congress for additional appropriations...

...The drawn-out controversy over the future of the corps of German missile experts headed by von Braun is only one example of the kind of indecision that has dogged the space program...

...will have caught up with, and indeed surpassed, the Soviet space achievements...

...But like so many other things, money alone is not likely to solve the nation's space problems...

...undoubtedly expressed the prevailing opinion when he said that he would support "any solution that will cut out the arguing and get people to work...

...But the supporters of the Army and von Braun shot down that NASA vehicle...

...The legislation which set up NASA gives Congress a veto power over the President's decision, but it seems likely that Capitol Hill supporters of von Braun and the Army will go along with the administrative change...

...Yet it is still difficult to understand why none of the many Democratic aspirants for their party's Presidential nomination has seized the space issue...

...Congress has even been reluctant to knock administrative heads together to end the bickering among the services over who is going to do what in space...

...But even if the organizational problem is on its way to a satisfactory settlement, the question of adequate funds remains unsolved...

...Now the President has ordered NASA to assume control of the ABMA's Saturn program, which has no real military potential but which should be able to boost a payload well beyond the moon if not around it...

...Major General John B. Medaris, the retiring chief of the ABMA...

...As the persuasive Dr...

...A good many Americans undoubtedly have been under the impression that we have been trying to compete with the Russians...

...Wern-her von Braun may have, they have as yet been unable to build the large rockets that are needed to send a satellite whirling around the moon, taking pictures as it speeds through space...

...Neat organizational charts do not necessarily mean orbiting satellites, but the curtailment of bureaucratic rivalries and snafus surely ought to be conducive to speedier and more successful programs...

...But perhaps the most important reason of all is the extraordinary complacency of the American people...

...Despite all the knowledge that such American space experts as Dr...

...Up to now, he observed, we have preferred to straddle the question rather than try to answer it...

...Not even Senator Stuart Symington (D.-Mo...

...It may be true that we have all the missile capability we need to attack the Soviet Union in time of nuclear war, but rocketry has become far more than a science of destruction...

...If von Braun's team is not splintered, and the President has promised that it will be held together, there does not seem to be any reason why it cannot build a Saturn rocket for NASA as easily as it could have for the Army...

...Are we or are we not going to compete with the Russians...

...Unfortunately for the U.S., it hasn't been quite that easy and is not likely to be any easier in the future...

...More money unquestionably would help...

...It may not be too much to hope, then, that the space programs will at last be logically divided according to their purposes...

...Yet, neither the Administration nor Congress has accorded the space program the priority which its champions believe it should have...

...But no one in a position to change the Government's response to the Soviet challenges in space and other areas has given any indication of seriously trying to meet the Soviet threat...

...Then the optimists were saying that it would be only a short time before the gap between Soviet and American space achievements was closed by the acknowledged superiority of American technology...

...Most of us have indeed never had it so good and are not easily persuaded that taxes ought to be increased to do such things as throw basketballs around the world or photograph the other, dull side of the moon...

...Yet neither in Congress nor in the Administration has anyone been able to arouse the Government and convince it of the importance of a sustained or even an expanded space program...

...Such a pessimistic view of present American achievements and the outlook for future developments may indeed be a valid assessment of the mood of the nation and the dangers it faces...

...That may be true, but it is sobering to remember that exactly the same arguments were made two years ago when the first sputnik was sent aloft...

...Many critics of the American space efforts indicate in their comments that if President Eisenhower would only ask Congress to appropriate a few hundred million dollars more for rocketry the U.S...

...Someone still needs to sound the alarm...

...The Administration's decision, taken early in the space race, to give priority to budget-balancing over missiles and rockets unquestionably has contributed to the failure of any political leader to alert the nation to the need for more emphasis on space...

...The NASA expenditures are now running at the rate of only $500 million a year, which is hardly a straw that would break the back of a $72-billion budget or a $400-billion economy...

...The United States does not yet have the know-how to send rockets aloft with Soviet-size payloads...

...By Julius Duscha Administration Apathy Hampers Space Program IT IS MORE than two years since the Soviet Union sent its first sputnik hurtling around the world, but the space programs of the United States still are not in orbit...

...There are those in Washington who see in the lethargic American space program the seeds of a disaster which the present national complacency may be planting throughout many vital areas of life in the United States...

...The total expenditures on space could easily be doubled without endangering the soundness of either federal financing or the nation's economy...

...It is difficult to determine why there is so much lethargy, if not downright apathy, toward an adequate space program...