There is no end to space, and so far as the U.S. economy is concerned, there will probably be no end to the space program. Man has hitched his wagon to the infinite, and he is unlikely ever to unhitch it again. A failure or two in the sky can be only temporary, a spur to the next success. And the next success will be merely the prelude to even greater triumph—a project to build Fort Kennedy on the moon, bigger and better voyages to Mars and Venus, immensely costly expeditions to Jupiter, Saturn, Pluto, and so on ad infinitum. As D. Brainerd Holmes of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration remarks, “The lunar program makes sense only if we go on from there.” The space venture, in short, is likely to be more durably stupendous than even its most passionate advocates think it will be. It is bound to affect the nation’s economy powerfully and in many ways.

During the next decade alone the U.S. will loft several hundred scientific satellites and dozens of lunar and planetary probes, and undertake upwards of forty manned space flights. By 1970, according to the most conservative initial estimates, NASA and the military will be spending around $15 billion a year on space, including $5 billion on missiles. But almost every space project so far has cost two to three times its conservative initial estimates. Mistakes are bound to be made, failures are bound to occur, and costs and ambitions bound to soar. As the chart on page 125 suggests, the space effort (as it is coming to be known in official jargon) will very likely cost more than $20 billion a year by 1970.

Nothing is more fecund, industrially and socially, than large mobilizations of scientific knowledge and effort; and this is the greatest mobilization of them all. Precisely because the benefits it will bestow on the world will be incidental to the main effort, they may eventually come faster than man’s capacity to use them economically. The space effort has already given man an immense psychological boost. Just as the Russian space successes have bolstered Soviet power internally by winning world power and prestige, so U.S. space projects are fortifying the old American optimism, confidence, and audacity. In thousands of offices and plants as well as in the endless anonymous corridors of Washington, prudent men who customarily discuss mundane prospects warily now talk with easy assurance of landing on the moon and exploring Mars. And they are even more sure of the benefits flowing from space techniques. Hundreds of American-made satellites will soon be buzzing the globe, guiding its navigation, mapping its impenetrable jungles, solving the cosmic riddles of its erratic weather, searching its hostile terrain, and relaying libraries of information and millions of photographs to receivers below. In the long run the space effort promises immense consumption dividends, a “fallout” of better products and ways of doing things from generating power to calculating probabilities, from packing eggs to treating ailments, real and imaginary.

A military thrust, an inflationary boost

Too often forgotten, however, is the fact that such pleasant rewards will be bought at a heavy price—a price that, all other things being equal, the U.S. might be reluctant to pay. This decade’s program alone, which may be only preliminary, could impose unpalatable if not severe burdens on the nation. It will very likely kill all chances of reducing in our time the government’s share of the economy. It will change, strain, and probably distort the distribution of the nation’s resources. With all its emphasis on planning, both national and international, it could ultimately do violence to private enterprise itself.

Nor will the fabled practical benefits offset the cost of the program for a long time. Washington is teeming with lobbyists and other space partisans assiduously promoting the notion that space is the greatest surefire blue-sky investment ever, sure to pay off at 1,000 per cent almost immediately—as if the benefits were the primary aim of the program. Actually, the chief reason for allocating so prodigious a part of the national resources to an accelerated space program is the paramilitary necessity of being in space with the most and the best; and the fact that the U.S. has divided the effort into military applications run by the Department of Defense and general applications run by NASA does not alter the situation. (The Russians themselves regard NASA as a device for continuing space activities if an arms agreement is signed, which in a way it would be.) Although the space effort may realize a bonanza of practical benefits, it is hardly an efficient way of getting them.

By the time the satellites begin to pay off measurably, say 1970 at the earliest, the U.S. may have spent $75 billion to $100 billion on space activities, and another $50 billion on missiles. Annual interest on such sums, if reckoned at the prevailing government securities rate, will be around $4 billion, enough to pay the nation’s yearly shoe bill; and what might be called the accumulated interest will come to another $20 billion by 1970, enough to run the whole U.S. railroad system for two years or to pay for most of the country’s education for a year.

The space program is right now giving the economy a powerful and potentially inflationary boost. In the fiscal year ending this month, the military and NASA together will have spent about $2.5 billion on space activities (in addition to $6 billion on missiles and $7 billion on aircraft); in the coming fiscal year they are scheduled to get appropriations for $5 billion. Next year, in other words, the space effort alone is adding the equivalent of a good-sized industry to the economy. This boost, according to FORTUNE’s Roundup, will help push the economy to capacity by the middle of 1963.

The implications for 1970 and beyond are portentous. Barring a genuine arms agreement—i.e., barring a revolution in the Soviet state religion—military costs other than missiles may well rise from their present $43 billion to more than $70 billion by 1970. So military and space outlays together could come to $90 billion or more a year. What could this mean? In its projections of the U.S. economy of the 1960’s, FORTUNE estimated that G.N.P. (in 1959 prices) would rise from about $500 billion in 1960 to $750 billion a decade later, or at a compound annual rate of 4.2 per cent. So far, this appears a sound projection. FORTUNE also estimated that by 1970 defense outlays, including several billion a year spent overseas for military aid, etc., would not exceed 10 per cent of G.N.P., or $75 billion. But if defense plus space outlays rise to more than $90 billion, the growth of the rest of the economy will be correspondingly retarded unless people work longer or raise their output per hour. Only an industrially opulent country can mount a space effort worthy of the name. But even the most industrially opulent of all nations cannot take the imponderable demands of a huge space program in stride unless it uses its resources with sharply increasing efficiency.

Fewer and bigger contracts

The immediate effect of the space venture on the U.S. economy, besides pumping a lot of money into it, has been to change the pattern of much business profoundly. Space vehicles are the most complex structures ever built, running to thousands of components, subassemblies, and specialized devices; no single company yet has the immediate resources to manufacture whole vehicles. A given project is ruled by the prime contractor, which practices what is known as systems management: the integration of production and research and development, including its own and that of government and university laboratories, into a final working vehicle. Many companies handle more than one prime contract, but in addition they usually are subcontractors on several others, and thus no one company covers the biggest programs exclusively. The giant North American Aviation Corp. (page 145), for example, is the prime contractor for the Apollo lunar spacecraft, but it is also a large subcontractor. McDonnell Aircraft estimates it has called in more than 4,000 subcontractors and suppliers on the $145-million Mercury capsule contract alone.

But even this pattern is changing rapidly as the central effort of the aerospace program shifts from missiles to propulsion and electronics. Missile production, after rising a little, may peak off at something above $5 billion. Other outlays by NASA (for such things as the moon program) and by the military (for such things as propulsion systems) are climbing toward the $10-billion mark, which they may reach as early as 1965. “Already,” says Harry H. Wetzel, vice president of the Garrett Corp. of Los Angeles, which makes environmental control systems, “the aerospace business is a new game.” As Wetzel and others see it:

1) There will be fewer and bigger contracts.

2) Production runs will decline steadily, and completely reverse the traditional four-to-one ratio of shop to engineering personnel. That is, companies will spend more on engineering and less on actual production; in fact, straight production capacity is already excessive. In 1960, Lockheed says, the company’s R. and D. awards came to more than the whole nation spent on defense R. and D. in 1950.

3) The aerospace companies will need not only engineers, but physiologists, psychologists, space-medicine men—see “Life (and Death) in Space,” page 161—chemists, and systems engineers.

4) As the space program proceeds to moon shots and planet exploration, reliability will become increasingly more important, and will demand more research facilities that can simulate space environments, more control engineering, more surveillance of subcontractors’ and suppliers’ quality controls.

This trend may be hard on small business, and doubtless will result in many mergers—of small companies with big, and small with small. For the important contracts from 1965 on will be based on ground support and airborne guidance and control systems, which require large engineering organizations. “We can’t exist without small business,” cautiously explains Jack Parker, General Electric’s vice president in charge of electronic and flight systems. “Yet as the emphasis on quality and complexity becomes greater, it is apt to reduce the amount of work small business may want.” Says a blunter spokesman for another large company, in authentic space jargon, “Captive production will increase not only because companies will want to maximize dollar volume in-house, but because schedules must be met reliably. The need for specialized equipment and technical sophistication will inevitably reduce off-site work.”

NASA is going out of its way to encourage little business; and the very nature of the space and missile program, with its demand for all manner of custom-made specialties, may continue to favor small firms devoted to electronic devices, engineering techniques, special research, and other relatively esoteric services and products. Small companies, as a matter of fact, can offer scientists unique advantages such as participation in top-level decisions; some offer higher salaries and more fringe benefits than big companies, a few offer more money than their own top executives get. T. F. Walkowicz, aeronautical engineer and associate of Laurance Rockefeller, who helped establish such Rockefeller-financed companies as Itek (information technology) and Geophysics Corp. of America (instruments for space research), concedes there will be a shake-out, just as there was in electronics, but argues that the brightest companies will survive and grow. “Brains are what count today, and nobody has a monopoly on brains.”

Wanted: a million more scientists and engineers

The space effort is the first paramilitary effort in history not accompanied by a demand for heavy hardware and mass-produced materials. Its great demand, instead, is for professional people, and it may relatively soon employ up to a million. Since more and more money will go into manpower, particularly engineers and other technical specialists, the well-worn question of whether the U.S. is producing enough professionals is no longer academic. By 1970, thanks in large part to the space venture, the U.S. will need more than two million scientists and engineers, or about double the number employed in 1959. A million more will be hard to find. NASA itself will have hired 4,500 specialists by the end of fiscal 1963; since, however, it has gone to a great deal of pains to get talent and also because many professional people would rather work where the big decisions are made at relatively low salaries ($8,000 to $20,000), it has managed to hire about 2,000 and expects no great trouble in corralling the other 2,500. Some experts argue that if engineers and high technical talent were used efficiently—i.e., not assigned to sales work and routine technical jobs—the shortage would not be so bad as it seems. But the majority agree that the shortage is already severe, and is bound to get worse as the space industry expands and R. and D. becomes more intensive.

The adventures of a job broker named David O’Brien, who calls himself a headhunter and patrols the country for talent, are to the point. Every week O’Brien gets 200 to 300 job “descriptions” or requests for men, and has to scratch hard to fill a tiny fraction of them. Recently, he says, it took $9,000 worth of newspaper advertisements to recruit two engineers, and $35,000 worth of his time produced only thirty-eight people. To get a couple of plasma physicists, one firm offered to form a small subsidiary for them. Companies everywhere are hoarding talent, just as industry hoarded lower skills during World War II; and outfits that don’t need scientific personnel interview continuously simply to find out what other companies are doing. A class of mobile technicians somewhat like the old-time railroad boomer has sprung up; they work a while for one company, and then pick up and leave for another one. Many firms welcome them because the itinerants can often give them a good line on what the competition is doing.

To complicate the manpower problem, observes Herbert E. Striner, director of Stanford Research Institute’s urban-studies program, many colleges and universities are not training scientists and engineers as well as they should. Most universities and colleges are avid for government research contracts, which frees money for other research facilities, fellowship funds, and salaries. But some, Striner argues, put graduate students to work on applied research instead of giving them a sound training in basic research.

The President’s Science Advisory Committee hopes to make specific recommendations for stimulating the production of scientists, and many other authorities are discharging wisdom on the subject. So as the demand for professional and scientific personnel rises and is reinforced by incentives, the supply is certain to rise eventually too. For a while it probably will not rise fast enough to meet the demand, and important civilian research and development may be temporarily deprived of talent.

In the longer run, however, the space effort will be the prime force in increasing the U.S. scientific and professional population. And in the process it will accelerate greatly the secular tendency for U.S. business to depend more and more on R. and D. This trend, in turn, according to a preliminary study made by Dr. Howard Vollmer of the Stanford Research Institute (sponsored by the Air Force), may eventually change the “organizational structure” of all U.S. industry. That is, it may make U.S. industry less bureaucratic and more intellectually challenging, “with greater opportunity for professionals to participate in work-related decisions.”

Mass production in space

The first large-scale matching of corporate enterprise with the commercial possibilities of space is taking place in the communication-satellite program. Possibly no invention will have ever jumped the rugged gap between concept and commercial application so quickly and dramatically as the communication satellite. Like much in the space effort, it has been overtouted. No less an authority than Lloyd V. Berkner, chairman of the space-science board of the National Academy of Sciences, has predicted that it could eventually earn $100 billion a year. Although such talk has already run aground on cruel reality, the principle of the communication satellite does make economic sense. What it amounts to is a device for the mass production of long-distance wireless communication; once it achieves volume and overcomes a host of problems, it could be nicely in the money.

The economic validity of the communication satellite rests on a genuine technical advantage. Because lower frequencies are overloaded, progressively higher frequencies are necessary to handle the growing volume of radio communication. But when frequencies attain thousands of megacycles per second, the waves travel in a straight line from the transmission tower, are blocked by hills or buildings, and cannot reach beyond the earth’s surface or the horizon. Even in flat country, therefore, their optimum range is about thirty miles. There is no technical problem on land, where relay stations can be built at appropriate intervals; but it makes microwave radio impracticable over the ocean. Transoceanic communication is limited to submarine cables or relatively small capacity or lower-frequency radios. Hung high in the sky, satellites could relay a huge volume of traffic, including TV and data-processing signals, across the seven seas.

Essentially, there are two types of satellites: passive, which are merely metallic balloons that reflect or bounce back signals from the earth; and active, equipped with instruments that amplify and relay back the signals. As FORTUNE noted last July (“Laying the Great Cable in Space”), both active and passive systems could be orbited at altitudes up to 7,000 miles. To cover the world at such altitudes—i.e., to make sure a satellite is always visible to ground stations—twenty to thirty satellites would be needed. They would also require powerful ground transmitters and sensitive and expensive receiving equipment.

On the other hand, it would take only three active satellites to cover nearly the whole world if lofted 22,300 miles above and parallel to the equator; at this altitude and placement, they would appear fixed in the sky. But they would be expensive to build, hard to launch and hard to spot, and could be kept in place only by intricate controls. Most engineers tend to favor the high-altitude (“synchronous”) system because, among other things, it would eliminate the need to switch from one satellite to another as successive satellites rise and set over the horizon. But they concede that complex and expensive launching facilities still have to be developed. And neither system could operate until frequency assignment and other international problems were solved.

In an analysis of the potentials of both a high-altitude system and a low-altitude system, William Meckling of Rand Corp. gets down to dollars and cents. The low-altitude system, with as many as 120 satellites in constant orbit (depending on the control system), would be subject to some interruption, says Meckling, as the number of operating satellites declines; the high-altitude system would work constantly until one of the satellites failed, whereupon it might take days or even weeks to restore service unless a spare satellite were kept handy in the sky. But given reliability, such systems would have enormous capacity. A worldwide low-altitude system would provide 7,800 transoceanic channels or about twenty times the number now serving the U.S., says Meckling, and a single twenty-four-hour satellite 4,800. Used at capacity, a low-altitude system (with an average life of two years) might cost $8,500 a year per channel, and a high-altitude system (with an average life of one year) $10,000 a year per channel—against $27,000 a year per channel for a new underwater cable system.

But, of course, no company could hope to start out at capacity. So assuming a fair advance sale and a growth of 15 per cent a year compounded—considerably more than the growth rate of international communications since World War II—Meckling figures that a company could achieve close to capacity operation in fifteen years. Meantime, its average annual costs per channel would be roughly three times as high as the capacity estimates, or about those of new submarine cables.

The big question: can the satellites generate enough business to operate at close to capacity? A satellite company, to get the volume that would enable it to realize its potentially low costs, would have to cut rates deeply—a familiar business situation, and one full of risks, including the risks in coming to terms on rates with foreign government-owned companies. Since companies now pay $240,000 a year for one voice channel in old, high-cost cables, however, there is plenty of margin for rate cutting. Nobody knows exactly what a system would cost, but experts think that $400 million or so would buy one, and that it could break even before the end of the decade and could be earning good money for its owners by 1975. No wonder that a good many companies not given to throwing money down holes are eager to get in space, so to speak, on the ground floor.

Whose C.S.C. will it be?

The American Telephone & Telegraph Co., which cooperated with NASA by building the ground stations for the first passive Echo satellite, favors a system of twenty to thirty satellites at 6,000 to 7,000 miles, owned and operated by FCC-authorized companies. The company is now launching its Telstar or active low-altitude satellite, which it hopes will provide enough know-how to put a whole communication system in operation by 1965.

But the Administration, on the grounds that A.T. & T. should not dominate the new industry and that the taxpayers, who will have invested $175 million in research on the system by 1963, should be allowed direct participation, proposed to charter a $1-billion Communications Satellite Corp., financed by Class A stock, selling at a minimum of $1,000 a share. The Class A shares of C. S. Corp., to be sold to both the public and the communication companies, would have voting privileges and get all the dividends. Communication companies could also buy nondividend-paying Class B shares, and would realize profit on them by including the cost of the shares in their rate base and so in effect get higher returns.

Almost everybody remotely concerned wants a role in shaping the relationship between space and private enterprise. Senator Estes Kefauver, not surprisingly, thinks the government should own and operate the project. Representative Emanuel Celler characteristically argues that “since it is almost impossible to regulate A.T. & T. on earth, we should need divine guidance to regulate A.T. & T…. way above us.” R.C.A. and Western Union, among others, are for the Administration proposal, even though R.C.A.’s General David Sarnoff has testified that investment in the satellite corporation would be speculative. (R.C.A. also has come out for a high-altitude synchronous system, which it probably would like to build.)

Since getting on with the job is important, FCC Chairman Newton N. Minow would limit ownership of the government sponsored corporation to communication companies. However, the influential Senate Space Committee accepted the government plan in principle, and reduced the price of a share to $100; but it would give the companies a break by providing for only one class of stock, to be sold equally to the public and the companies, with foreign governments allowed to buy up to 10 per cent of the public shares. And it proposed that communication companies should be allowed to own some of the potentially profitable ground stations. The House passed a revised bill modeled on the committee’s approach by 354 to 9 and sent it on to the Senate, which presumably will OK it too.

No more national privacy

Probably the quickest space payoff will come from satellites like NASA’s upcoming “orbiting observatories,” which will carry telescopes and other astronomical and geophysical instruments. Such satellites could map the world as it has never been mapped before. “When it comes to mapping, the satellite is to the airplane as the airplane is to the ground surveyor,” says Richard S. Leghorn, president of Itek Corp. and chairman of the National Planning Associations’ Committee on Security through Arms Control. “The present proposal to map Antarctica with planes could be done with satellites for half the money and in a fifth of the time.” All that needs to be decided, says Leghorn, is whether the government or private industry is to run them.

Once the decision is made, observational satellites could begin to earn money immediately, on jobs now scheduled. Itek itself stands to gain by an early decision, for as a specialist in information storage and retrieval it has developed a machine that can read diagrams and pictures and otherwise relay information graphically without programing—i.e., without reducing information to a machine code. “There’s no such thing as backyard privacy if we orbit the world constantly,” Leghorn likes to point out. “We’re ahead on information satellites; we should take advantage of them to open up the Soviet Union to view. Great areas there are barred off, but what would be the use of barring them off if we know what’s there?”

Probably the most broadly remunerative of the space vehicles will be the government-operated weather satellites, designed not only to predict short-term weather movements but to gather enough data to enable men to understand just how these movements are generated. Four R.C.A.-made and NASA-supervised Tiros (television and infrared observation satellites) were launched between April, 1960, and early 1962. Orbiting the world every hundred minutes or so, and equipped with two TV cameras apiece, they recorded significant new cloud formations over enormous ocean areas. All except Tiros I gauged solar energy reflected and scattered by the earth’s surface and atmosphere as well as infrared radiation leaving the earth and its atmosphere. Relevant findings were analyzed promptly and passed on to weather forecasters here and abroad. Although Tiros IV missed the epochal east-coast “Ash Wednesday storm” last March—it was orbiting the Northern Hemisphere by night at the time—Tiros III tracked seventeen tropical storms, and gave advanced warning of Hurricane Esther.

Within a year NASA plans to launch at least three more Tiros and an advanced Nimbus satellite, which will orbit the earth from pole to pole. It is possible that the Russians will cooperate in such a venture, perhaps by lofting a second Nimbus-type satellite. At all events, such satellites will enable the U.S. Weather Bureau to trace the progress of any disturbance anywhere. To view a large part of the world from a steady vantage point, moreover, NASA and the Weather Bureau are planning an Aeros high-altitude orb.

How much all this will save the world it is hard to say. A dozen or so years ago, when the Weather Bureau tried to determine the value of storm warnings and correct forecasts, “business and agricultural interests” suggested that such forecasts could save $3 billion a year in water resources and up to $2.5 billion a year in farm products, to say nothing of a hundred million in transportation (exclusive of air transport). But F. W. Reichelderfer, bureau chief, now feels such figures are meaningless. “Everybody benefits from better weather forecasting,” he says, “so we’re trying to value something we really can’t measure. We know, however, the benefits are there. Just think how much could have been saved if Tiros IV had been around to forecast that east-coast storm last March.” Accurate weather forecasting could make farm supports an even greater absurdity than they are. Underlying the whole support program is the assumption that farming, owing to the weather, is egregiously risky. With the risk eliminated, there would be less reason for subsidizing farmers than for subsidizing small manufacturers or storekeepers.

Despite the predictions of the space enthusiasts, it will be a long time before man can even attempt to begin to control the weather. First he must thoroughly understand it, and he still has a long way to go. But he will find out more about it in the next few years than he has in all history.

The beneficent promise

“In whatever direction our technology is moving,” an I.B.M. engineer puts it succintly, “the space program is advancing us faster.” Thus the “fallout” of other kinds of benefits from the nation’s investment in space research and development, though some will be long in coming, may be incalculable. To get space discoveries and inventions where they will help the civilian economy, NASA has set up an Office of Applications that will identify “inventive elements and apply them to industry while they are new.” One of its first moves has been to hire the Midwest Research Institute of Kansas City to pick up potential applications, document them, and circulate news of the possibilities among industry people.* It has also retained the Denver Research Institute for a different kind of investigation: to find out whether industry is already making products and using processes originating in the space effort. After careful screening, Denver Research found 145 such examples, and thinks it will find more. But the big advances lie at some point in the future when the new techniques have had time to blend with the old and join the economy. When they do, space will be largely responsible for many new looks here below. Among the promising areas of development:

Materials. Structural demands of rocket and spacecraft vehicles, the intense power requirements at takeoff, the sustained power required in flight, and the intense heat encountered on re-entry are making for a sharp advance in the strength and property of materials. In the area of metals and alloys this will lead to successful hypersonic planes, the development of simpler, more efficient aircraft and automobile engines, and, perhaps twenty years hence, to lighter and stronger building structures. The development of powerful new fuels is leading the chemical industry to use extreme-temperature, high-pressure techniques, one of which, indeed, is already being used to produce liquid hydrogen. A large array of entirely new metals and materials will be available for untold uses.

* Business, however, has been complaining that it has been discouraged from adapting new products and processes developed while working on NASA contracts, because patent rights on those products and processes automatically become government property unless the administrator waives the government’s rights. The Department of Justice has entered a strong plea to keep things that way. The issue, whose importance is obvious, seemed to be building up to major proportions when the patent subcommittee of the House Science and Astronautics Committee voted to revise NASA practices. If its recommendations are adopted, NASA could be brought more in line with the Defense Department practice of retaining license rights—but not title—to patents taken out on inventions and improvements made by companies while working on military contracts.

Reliability and miniaturization. Because space-vehicle machinery must be both small and absolutely reliable, industry’s trend toward miniaturization and reliability, already illustrated by the development of transistors, diodes, etc., will accelerate. Computers will be among the first to profit by the new techniques; computers that used to fill large rooms will soon be housed in packages the size of a small TV set. The Burroughs D210 computer, designed to guide missiles, occupies less than ¼ cubic foot, uses less power than a 60-watt bulb, operates 50,000 hours without failure, and costs only $25,000 to $50,000, against more than $1 million for the present Atlas computer. Various forms of microcircuitry, developed for space vehicles, some already used widely, will probably result in miniature consumer goods, like radios, at reasonable prices.

Automation. Advances in guidance systems for space vehicles will improve and speed up automation techniques. “Everything we have learned about guiding the Titan,” says one I.B.M. man, “will be useful in guiding machine tools.” By way of humble example, Allied Research Associates of Boston has used space innovations to develop a machine that automatically sorts cigars for uniformity of color.

Bonding techniques. Because high vacuums are essential for space environmental test chambers, and because many of the specialty metals for space vehicles are being made in vacuum, high-vacuum techniques are being accelerated. Scientists of the National Research Corp., for example, have recently shown that certain metals, if cleaned and put into an almost perfect vacuum, bond together tightly and permanently as if welded. This demonstration will help industry make bearings that will not congeal and clog in the vacuum of space; on the other hand, it will probably result in new nonwelding techniques for bonding many metals here on earth.

Aerial observation. Interpretation of aerial pictures, now being used by Itek Corp. to advise grape growers of California on the quantity and quality of the crop and so to forecast market price, will be extended to hundreds of uses. The problem of storing and retrieving vast amounts of technical information, brought into being by the space age, will be solved by digital graphic systems such as Itek’s EDM machine.

Klimps and Kudl-Pacs. Space components are easily damaged, and must be handled a lot, so new packaging techniques have been developed for them. North American Aviation’s subsidiary, NAVAN Products Inc., has invented an L-shaped wire fastener it calls a “Klimp,” which is replacing nails in packing boxes, and “Kudl-Pac,” a thermal-plastic, polyurethane-lined case that adapts itself to a variety of shapes and can be used over and over again. NAVAN has promoted this product by sending prospects a real live egg enclosed in a Kudl-Pac.

Packaged power. Probably the broadest area of practical development will grow out of the new, compact, self-contained sources of power needed by satellites and spacecraft to operate their equipment and to maintain men and their environment independently in space. Already being developed by private and government research for eventual commercial use, they include: (1) Silicon solar cells, converting sunlight directly into electricity, which are being used to power such disparate things as portable radios, railway crossing lights, and community radio receivers in Indian towns. (2) Thermoelectric materials, which can convert low heat directly into electricity, or electricity into heat or cold by reversing the direction of the current. (3) Thermionic tubes, which convert high heat directly into electricity. (4) Fuel cells, converting chemical reactions directly into electricity. (5) Highly compact atomic-power packs, tapping electricity directly from the atom through a converter. (6) Magnetohydrodynamic generators, which convert the movement of a very hot and ionized gas stream (“plasma”) into electricity by passing it through a magnetic field. Such a device will make possible high-efficiency power stations: Avco Corp. and a group of eleven electric utilities led by American Electric Power Service Corp. is supporting a research program on MHD generators, which may turn out to be 40 per cent more efficient than the most modern power generator. As a result of its work in plasma, incidentally, Avco is marketing a “PlasmaGun” or high-heat gun using a tungsten electrode and water-cooled copper nozzle for applying such coatings as tungsten, molybdenum, titanium carbide, and tantalum carbide to metallic and ceramic surfaces. Achieving temperatures up to 30,000° F., the gun can also be used for flame cutting and materials studies.

Compact power packages will probably be developed to the point where they can generate electricity on the spot for home lighting, appliances, and industrial processes. The natural-gas industry is financing a research program on fuel cells, reacting natural gas with an oxidizer to make gas the sole source of domestic energy—heat as well as electricity. Thus walls for homes and buildings may be designed with their own built-in, self-contained heating, cooling, lighting, and electrical systems, feeding on fuel cells, or free energy from the sun. These and other devices, already being carried over from the space industry by such giants as General Electric and Westinghouse, may revolutionize the generation and distribution of power on earth.

Solution to overpopulation. Gazing far into the future, some scientists believe that the greatest benefit the space effort will confer on the human race is to enable man to migrate to other worlds. Theoretically, atmosphere can be created on planets where it is nonexistent or very thin, perhaps by seeding the planets with a catalytic substance to release oxygen now locked up there in compounds like carbon dioxide. “If you want to look ahead a hundred years or more,” says Murray Zelikoff of Geophysics Corp., “I think the real purpose of the space effort is to colonize the planets. How else can we solve the population problem? It’s not only politics that moves men, but social and biological factors. Subconsciously these are moving men to outer space.”

Feet on the ground

Such a prospect is still far out, but it no longer belongs in the comic strips. The space project is surely enlarging man’s notions of the potentialities of the universe, and is accustoming him to think in terms of longer periods of time. Engineers look ahead at least twenty years in planning a space program, and to the extent that business is involved, its scale of thinking is correspondingly enlarged. As General Electric’s Ralph Cordiner has remarked, when business deals with space it deals with a technology that needs a planetary scale to stage it, decades to develop it, and a much bigger investment to cross the threshold of return than is customary today.

Private enterprise is not disdaining the challenge. As we have seen, it is stepping into the communication-satellite business; and if other jobs, such as launching operations, can be put on a paying basis, it may gradually take them over. With its own money, industry is already constructing space-simulating facilities, such as G.E.’s laboratory at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, and R.C.A.’s space center at Princeton, New Jersey.

Nevertheless, the great space effort is primarily dependent on government planning, national and international. Consequently, it is boosting the ardor and ambition of those who believe the world is headed for more state planning, and that the scope of private decision is inevitably narrowing. They “observe” that planning for space will train men to plan ahead in other fields, that the idea of government and free enterprise as distinct entities is no longer adequate. For them the great implication of space is that it will somehow free man from his preoccupation with profits and losses and other sordid things that tyrannize him here on earth.

But alas for the idealists, it is precisely this tropism of worldlings for minding their business that has enabled the space program to be created. Only this mundane preoccupation can carry the great program along, world without end. Contemplating the starry heavens above, as Immanuel Kant once did, even a normally reflective person finds it easy to muse on the shortcomings of mankind. But it should also be obvious that the space program, no matter how abundantly it pays off, will be a big and growing investment, and that, like all investments, it cannot be made until people first produce something to invest. To rise in the sky, the U.S. will have to keep its feet on the ground.