5 HISTORY OF THE COMMITTEE ON SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY 



stated that we must "put our scientists and engineers to work." At a 

 December White House bricling of congressional leaders, the press 

 reported that "almost to a man, the leaders came from the meeting in 

 a critical mood. The lack of a sense of urgency' in the administration 

 was the main complaint." 



On the eve of the meeting of the new session of Congress in January 

 1958, Robert Albright wrote in the Washington Post: 



Sputnik and the battle tor survival implicit in the Soviet satellite-missile ad- 

 vances will in all likelihood dominate the second session of the 85th Congress con- 

 vening Thursday 



EXPLORIR I 



At the Army Ballistic Missile Agency in Huntsville, Ala., a team 

 of scientists and engineers led by Dr. Wernher von Braun scored a 

 dramatic triumph with the launch of Explorer I on January 31, 1958, 

 from Cape Canaveral, Fla. The Army was jubilant. Despite the fact that 

 the satellite weighed only a little over 30 pounds, von Braun im- 

 mediately became a hero and a prophet. If anything, the great event 

 underlined the drama of the space race and furnished still another spur 

 toward action by the Congress. 



At the same time, the Army's victory helped fan the fires of intense 

 and bitter competition among the three services attempting to get, hold 

 and expand their pieces of the space and missile action. The strong 

 interservice rivalry was not stilled by President Eisenhower's appoint- 

 ment, early in 1958, of Roy Johnson, a General Electric Co. vice 

 president, as head of the newly created Advanced Research Project? 

 Agency in the Department of Defense. 



ESTABLISHMENT OF THE SELECT COMMITTEE 



Although the Senate voted on February 6 to establish a Special 

 Committee on Space and Astronautics, with Senator Johnson as chair- 

 man, the Senate committee was not very active during its early days. 

 Representative William H. Natcher (Democrat of Kentucky) noted m 

 his journal on March 4, 1958, that almost all of the Senate Space 

 Committee members were committee chairmen or their ranking Re- 

 publican counterparts. "When the announcement was made of the 

 Senate members of the committee, I in turn tried to figure out in my 

 own mind just who the Speaker would appoint on the House com- 

 mittee," he wrote. "It never occurred to me that I would be named 

 as one of the 13 members of the House committee, since my seniority 

 was not comparable." 



Speaker Rayburh explained to Natcher, who had only been elected 

 in 1953, that he wanted active members who would represent all 

 sections of the country as well as the different committees with re- 

 lated jurisdictions. 



