“Are We Headed in the Wrong Direction?” Dwight Eisenhower asks in the August 17 Saturday Evening Post. He concludes, if I have succeeded in penetrating the thickets of platitude, that where we are moving fast and up, in budgets or spaceships, the answer is Yes. “What we need in this country is. to put first things first.” “No reasonable person wants to endanger national security by cutting defense spending below safe limits.” “Money alone cannot solve the problem [of the Red threat], and to spend more than necessary can damage our overall position as surely as spends ing too little.” General Eisenhower deploys these invulnerable truisms as a screening force to cover the advance of a flanking paragraph on the space program.
“By all means,” he continues, “we must carry on our explorations in space, but I frankly do not see the need for continuing this effort as such a fantastically expensive crash program. Why the great hurry to get to the moon and the planets?.. From here on, I think we should proceed in an orderly, scientific way, building one accomplishment on another, rather then engaging in a mad effort to win a space race.
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