Dec 8 1963
From The Space Library
Rep. Edward J. Gurney (R.-Fla.), forwarded to President Johnson an appeal to preserve the name of Cape Canaveral, asking the President to clarify his executive order and make it clear that it applied only to the launch operations center and missile range station. Residents of nearby Florida communities writing to their Congressional delegation largely favored naming the John F. Kennedy Space Center as a tribute to the late President but preferred retaining 400-year-old name of Cape Canaveral. (AP, Wash. Post, 12/9/63; Av. Wk., 12/9/63, 25)
Dr. Caryl P. Haskins, President of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, warned in his annual report that long-range planning and general allocation of resources for scientific research were becoming "an absolute necessity. "We cannot, in the nature of things, simultaneously do all things well. And there is the very real danger that, without a careful and continuing general review of our over-all scientific activities in relation to their probable bearing on human welfare, we could find ourselves irrevocably over concentrated in certain spectacular areas of science where past performance and present magnitude lend a luster that promise for the future does not match." . . . currents of such magnitude and import as those now sweeping science on its course, if allowed to flow undirected, can bring incalculable damage . . . [in producing] massive imbalances among delicately related elements of our research structure . . . ." He warned that "we are firmly wedded to massiveness, and our long and triumphant experience in developing vast technology leads us easily to equate success in research with sheer magnitude of effort . . . ." Actually, the major advances "must inevitably rest, in the future as they have in the past, in the hands of a comparatively few highly original and gifted men and women-a minuscule proportion of the entire scientific population . . . ." (Finney, NTT, 12/9/63, 1 and 43)
Soviet newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda (Red Star) reported that Soviet cosmonauts are undergoing intensive training for "more complicated tasks." Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, promoted to full colonel, is directing new program of training the other veteran space flyers. (UPI, Wash. Post, 12/9/63)
Tenth anniversary of the Atoms for Peace Program, which began when President Eisenhower before the United Nations had proposed making nuclear power "a great boon for the benefit of all mankind." (Finney, NTT, 12/8/63, A43)
In the Washington Post, Howard Simons reviewed reconnaissance satellites, referring to previously released information and statements regarding a so-called "Samos" project, and inferring that "Samos" satellites were now operational. (Wash,. Post, 12/8/63, E1-5)
December 8-18: FAA Administrator Najeeb E. Halaby visited Moscow, London, Paris, and Berlin, conferring with Aeroflot officials in Moscow, with civil aviation officials in London and Paris, and surveying U.S. air carrier operations in and out of Berlin. (FAA Release 63-104)
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