Nov 5 1963

From The Space Library

MSC announced a reorganization designed to strengthen Apollo and Gemini management structure and to assimilate Proj­ect Mercury personnel into these programs. Under Dr. Robert R. Gilruth as Director and James C. Elms as Deputy Director would be four assistant directors, managers of major programs, and manager of MSC Florida Operations. The four assistant directors : Assistant Director for Engineering and Development (Maxime A. Faget), Assistant Director for Flight Operations (Christopher C. Kraft, Jr.), Assistant Director for Flight Crew Operations (Donald K. Slayton), and Assistant Director for Administration (Wesley L. Hjornevik). Major program mana­gers : Apollo Spacecraft Program Office (Dr. Joseph F. Shea) and Gemini Program Manager (Charles W. Mathews). (MSC Release)

Various Russian sources had listed a variety of possible uses for the Polet type of maneuverable satellite, according to Space Business Daily. Space expert Vladimir Dobronravov had said that the spacecraft would be used for rendezvous and docking experiments. Tass mentioned the potential for reconnaissance, weather, or communications satellite. M. Litvin-Sedoi said it was a test of a system for construction of an orbiting space plat- form. (Space Bus. Daily, 11/5/63, 201)

Dr. Wernher von Braun, Director, Marshall Space Flight Center, addressing Chamber of Commerce, Charleston, West Virginia, said : "In support of Project Apollo major manufacturing, testing, and launching facilities are now under construction. Years of construction, personnel buildup, and training for activation will be necessary before they can be put to use. If Project Apollo should be short-changed these unfinished buildings would stand as monuments to America's folly. You simply cannot turn a complex project like Apollo off and on like a faucet." (Text)

Dr. Jerome B. Wiesner, the President's Scientific Advisor, would resign from government this winter and return to MIT, the White House announced. '(Wash. Post, 11/5/63)

Sen. William Proxmire (D.-Wis.) said on the Senate floor that "we can and should dedicate America's great resources to the magnificent challenge of space" but charged NASA with waste and inefficiency. He inserted in the Congressional Record an article of his in which he recommended (1) NASA build into its organization more effective safeguards against waste, duplication, and other "leakage" of funds; (2) Congress acquire skilled investigators to analyze the space program in depth; and (3) "Private individuals and groups should apply their concern about excessive and unnecessary Government spending to the space program." (CR, 11/5/63, 19990-91)

Rep. Melvin Price (D.-Ill.), speaking before AIAA-AFSC meeting in Dayton, Ohio, warned that "the honeymoon in research and development is over" on Capitol Hill. "The day of ill-defined objectives for research and development programs, of gross over­runs in costs, of blurred and overlapping management responsibility is rapidly coming to an end." As proof of the hardening attitude in Congress, he cited the cuts in the NASA budget, in the National Science Foundation budget, and the appointment of the Select Committee to examine the Government's research pro­grams. Improvements must be made, he said, "before the Congress and the people lose faith in those who are responsible for carrying out our vital research and development programs and implementing their results." Otherwise, he warned, corrective action would fall into "hands which are less considerate and less understanding." Rep. Price has for 10 years been chairman of the Subcommittee on Research and Development of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy. He was recently named chairman of the new Research Subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee and a member of the Select Committee on Government Research. (Finney, NY T , 11/6/63, 15)

1963 Nobel Prize in Physics was announced in Stockholm to have been won jointly by American Prof. Maria Goeppert Mayer, of the Univ. of Calif. at La Jolla, and American Prof. Eugene Paul Wigner, of Princeton Univ., the former sharing her half of the prize with German Prof. J. Hans D. Jensen, of the Univ. of Heidelberg. Mrs. Mayer and Prof. Jensen, working independently, devised nuclear models portraying the particles as arranged in levels or shelves which increase abruptly in number of parti­cles at each level further out from the nucleus. Prof. Wigner was cited for devising symmetry principles explaining the inter­action of the proton and neutron in accordance with the direction of their spinning motion. The prize in Chemistry was also an­nounced, being awarded jointly to Italian Prof. Guilo Natta, of the Institute of Technology at Milan, and German Prof. Carl Ziegler, of the Max Planck Institute for Carbon Research in Mul­heim. They were cited for devising a system of controlling the polymerizing of simple hydrocarbons into large molecule sub­stances. Their discovery had important commercial results, mak­ing possible the development of many kinds of plastics, synthetic detergents, antiknock mixtures for high-octane fuels, etc. (NYT, 11/6/63, 1)

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