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ceived the experiment and had personally struggled with the intricacies of calibrating the measuring instruments, could reduce the data properly to remove ambiguities and errors that would otherwise make the data useless to other researchers. In return for the exclusive use of data for a mutually agreed time, NASA required an experimenter to put his data in suitable form for archiving and use by other researchers. This was the taxpayer's quid pro quo; without such an arrangement, the taxpayer would not be getting his money's worth.

The time required to put data in order varied from case to case and was negotiated between the agency and the experimenter. For a simple experiment, perhaps a repetition of a previous one, a few months might suffice. A more complicated, more subtle experiment might take the investigator a year or more to work up the data and publish his first paper. As an illustration, NASA could point to the ionospheric experiment devised by J. Carl Seddon and colleagues at the Naval Research Laboratory for sounding rocket experiments at White Sands.30 Simple in concept, the experiment ran into tremendous difficulties in practice. The idea was to measure the effect of the ionosphere on radio signals from a flying rocket and to use that effect to deduce the electron densities in the ionosphere. But the influence of the earth's magnetic field, the splitting of the radio signal into separate components, and reflections of the signal from inhomogeneities in the ionosphere required many years to decipher. Until that was done, the data would have been useless to other researchers. But once the various physical processes were understood and could be unraveled, the analysis of data from a new set of measurements could be accomplished in a few months.

Pictures were a special case. That was where the greatest public interest lay, and NASA adopted a policy of releasing pictures as soon as they could be put in suitable form. Often this was virtually immediately, as with much lunar photography. But pictures of Mars received with low signalpower usually took a great deal of electronic processing to bring out all available detail and it could be many weeks or months before they were ready for release.

PUBLICATION OF RESULTS

Important to the scientific community was the question of where scientific results from the space program would be published. Publication in the open literature is, of course, a fundamental aspect of the scientific process. Both the outside scientists and those who had joined the agency were dedicated by training and habit to open publication. In this they ran head on into NACA tradition and practice of issuing research results in series such as NACA Reports, Technical Notes, and Technical Memoranda.31

NACA papers were highly respected in the field of aeronautics and aerodynamics. They were carefully critiqued and severely edited within the agency before being widely distributed to aeronautical centers, appropriate military offices in the United States and elsewhere, and industrial and academic libraries around the world. It was NACA's position that the procedure ensured both high quality in its publications and provided for getting them to those who needed them in their work. Moreover, the existence of such series of NACA publications was the best possible advertising for the agency.

NACA was not alone in this practice. Both the Bureau of Standards and the Bell Laboratories put out journals of their own; and, during the Rocket and Satellite Panel days, the Naval Research Laboratory had issued much of its rocket-research results in NRL reports.32 In the space science field, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory began putting out a Technical Report Series under the imprimatur of JPL and the California Institute of Technology.33 In academic circles Gerard P. Kuiper, noted astronomer of unbounded energy and wide-ranging interests and head of the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory at the University of Arizona, put out a series entitled Communications of the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, listing the University of Arizona as publisher.34 In the Communications Kuiper and his colleagues published a great deal of excellent material, much of it from research supported by NASA. But Kuiper was severely criticized by his scientific colleagues for using this means of bringing his work to the community. Their reasons for criticising were fundamental, deeply rooted in the scientific process. First, it was pointed out, the usual scientific journal accepted an article for publication only after it had been given a careful review by one or more impartial experts in the field addressed in the article, whereas a scientist publishing in what amounted to his own journal could hardly subject his own work to the same kind of review. Secondly, the limited distribution of a publication to a selected list of recipients was bound to miss persons who had not only a legitimate, but often a significant, interest in the material, for how could one individual or a small group hope to be aware of all such interests? This point was particularly pertinent in a rapidly growing field with imprecise and fluctuating boundaries. In contrast, regularly published journals, open by subscription to all who were interested, were widely known in the scientific community; a scientist from another discipline could quickly find his way to material of importance to his work. Although the NACA had had a very large organization to draw upon for reviewing papers before publication, the same sort of criticism had been leveled at the NACA publication policy.

For NASA's first year, the question of publication remained in the background, with the NASA scientists assuming that the policy was to publish the results in the open literature, and former NACA people tending to expect a collection of NASA publications to evolve. Harry Goett,

director of the Goddard Space Flight Center, precipitated a confrontation when in May of 1960 he proposed to issue NASA papers that had been given at a meeting of the international Committee on Space Research in a NASA series. 35 When the proposal reached Thomas Neill, an employee in the Office of Advanced Research and Technology who had carried over from the NACA the responsibility for overseeing the publication of inhouse reports, Neill refused to permit the COSPAR papers to go out as NASA technical reports. Neill's position was that the papers had already been published in the COSPAR sphere and to put them out now in a NASA series would be wasteful duplication. It was an understandable position, but it stood squarely in the way of those who wanted to build up NASA's own fine "fourteen foot shelf" of space science literature, as Abe Silverstein described it.

There was a great deal of discussion of this issue during the spring and summer of 1960. The scientists, recognizing the intense desire of the NACA people to build up a library of NASA publications along the NACA lines, favored dual publication. A check with a number of scientific societies revealed they would be willing to accept papers for publication that had previously been put out under a NASA cover, since they did not regard the latter as genuine publication. This was the view of Lloyd Berkner, president of the American Geophysical Union, when the author called him on 19 May 1960. For AGU's own publication, the Journal of Geophysical Research, Berkner was sure there would be no problem, and he thought there should not be any difficulty for the Physical Review-which was later confirmed by the editors.36 Several other journals took the same position; of those queried only the American Chemical Society expressed disapproval. Taking smug satisfaction in the considerable evidence they had gathered that NACA or NASA reporting was not generally viewed as genuine publication, the NASA scientists persevered in urging a policy that space science results would be published in the open literature, but that where desired duplicate NASA publication would be permitted. Dryden approved the idea and asked that an appropriate paper be drawn up articulating the policy, which led to more discussions but no clear statement of policy that could be given formal approval.

Instead the policy was established by practice. Space science results were published in the open literature, and management issuances pertaining to the program presumed such a policy. In international, cooperative space science projects, implementing agreements called for publication of results in the open literature. 37 Simultaneously in-house publications took a variety of forms. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory report series has been mentioned. From time to time the Goddard Space Flight Center issued bound collections of reprints of published papers by Goddard authors.38 In September 1959 Abe Silverstein was considering establishing a NASA journal, much like that of the Bureau of Standards, which was cited as an

example.39 But such a NASA journal did not materialize. Instead there evolved the NASA Special Publications, an aperiodic series, generally book length, devoted to the whole spectrum of NASA's activities. The Special Publications were an excellent means of publishing under the NASA imprimatur integrated reviews of a topic or field, but were not usually suitable as an outlet for original scientific research. They were in fact accorded the same sort of mild disdain the academic community reserves, not always with justification, for most government publications.

UNIVERSITIES

NACA had had a rather small involvement with the universities.40 What university research NACA did pay for usually was tied into research projects going on at the NACA laboratories. For NASA, however, relations with universities would be more extensive and different. This was especially true in space science, where the number of disciplines encompassed in the program dictated that a great deal of the work would have to be done outside and largely in the universities. Much of this would be an extension of a university's own research, with the addition of new tools— rockets and spacecraft. NASA would accordingly be funding university research as a major part of a broad space science program rather than as specific support to in-house projects. By undertaking to carry out a substantial part of the national space science program, the universities became allies of NASA.

But when NASA also decided to create space science groups at the Goddard Space Flight Center, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and other centers, the universities found themselves in the role of rivals to NASA. For, the in-house groups would inevitably be in competition with those outside for funding of their research and for accommodation on scientific flights, as mentioned earlier. A number of the mechanisms that NASA devised for working with the scientific community were influenced by the need to moderate the tensions that soon appeared. For this reason the responsibility for selecting space science experiments and experimenters was kept in headquarters even during periods when there was a general attempt to decentralize authority by transferring to the field many functions previously handled by headquarters.

Work with the universities was sufficiently important to the space program—particularly to the space science program-that NASA established an organizational unit specifically for handling university relations. The university office guided NASA's work with the academic community, not hesitating to experiment with new ideas on governmentuniversity relations. More attention is given to the NASA university program, particularly as it bore on space science, in chapter 13.

SCIENTIFIC SOCIETIES

In seeking to bring the scientific community into the space science program and in insisting on publication of results in the open literature, NASA could hardly escape a close association with the scientific societies. The societies afforded the most common meeting ground of the scientists, and their journals formed much of the open literature.

A number of scientific societies soon became involved. The American Astronomical Society's interest was at first tentative, although a number of its leading members were fully committed to space astronomy—like Richard Tousey of the Naval Research Laboratory, Leo Goldberg of the University of Michigan, Gerard Kuiper of Yerkes Observatory, and Lyman Spitzer of Princeton. Spitzer had been among the first, in the mid-1940s, to write about and advocate the use of satellites for astronomical research. In the sounding rocket program of the 1940s and 1950s, Tousey had been one of the pioneers in rocket astronomy. And no sooner had NASA opened its doors than Leo Goldberg was urging support of a solar astronomical satellite project which the McDonnell Aircraft Company had designed with advice from University of Michigan astronomers. Under the pressure of such widespread interest, the American Astronomical Society's participation grew steadily throughout the 1960s. Papers appeared in its journal and at its meetings, and the society began to promote important aspects of space astronomy. The spectacular results of planetary missions, particularly in 1969 and early 1970s, helped dispel the disdain and lack of interest with which astronomers had regarded the planetary field for decades.

Among the first learned societies to show strong interest were the American Physical Society and the American Geophysical Union. In April 1959-six months into NASA's first full year-the Physical Society sponsored, along with NASA and the National Academy of Sciences, a symposium on space physics, which was well attended. 42 Anticipating the importance of space science for extending geophysics to other planets, the Geophysical Union went even further. In November 1959, AGU officers considered the question of providing a home for space science. Encouraged by the show of interest, NASA's Robert Jastrow and Gordon J. F. MacDonald, a brilliant young geophysicist, on 10 December 1959 wrote to President Lloyd Berkner recommending that the union create a section on planetary physics. 43 After consulting with AGU officers, Berkner responded by inviting the author to become chairman of a Planning Committee on Planetary Science, with members Jastrow (secretary), Leroy Alldredge, Joseph W. Chamberlain, Thomas Gold, MacDonald, Hugh Odishaw, Alan Shapley, Harry Vestine, Harry Wexler, Charles Whitten, and Philip Abelson (and later Walter Orr Roberts), all of whom had had important roles in the International Geophysical Year program. For the next two years the committee organized sessions on space science for the union meetings, and promoted the interests of space science within the union.

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