Science and Public Policy: National Security 103 



ing a systems contract period. Otherwise, it is now economically 

 as well as administratively increasingly difficult for industrial 

 contractors to respond to the changes from new scientific find- 

 ings, as was done with greater or lesser degrees of responsibil- 

 ity during the earlier period of cost plus fixed fee or similar 

 arrangements. 



To illustrate the central thesis, let us look 

 Scientific now at a few detailed instances with which 



Discovery and one happens to be particularly familiar. 



Satellite Recovery This thesis shows how a capability of rapid 



generation and assimilation of extra-mis- 

 sionary, new science has become indispensable for national 

 military strength, through systems planning and management. 

 Consider another feature of our missile and space capabilities, 

 namely the composition of the various weapons systems which 

 enables them to endure the gradients of environment from 

 launching, transit of the whole earth's atmosphere into outer 

 space, and worst of all, controlled re-entry at 18,000 miles per 

 hour or more through the chemically-active composite which 

 surrounds this planet. The kind of rocket delivery we were 

 able to produce in the 1955 to 1960 time would not have func- 

 tioned with the nose cones and other structural heat shield and 

 protective features known at the time of the initiation of the 

 ICBM program. Now under the urgent compulsions of the 

 mid-fifties, even before the launching of the first SPUTNIK, 

 orderly engineering plans had progressed to yield the best re- 

 fractory metallic nose cone and heat shield that could be 

 conceived. However, for six or seven years before this there 

 had been carried forward (in the best pattern of ONR research, 

 although it did not happen to be directly associated with those 

 programs) a basic scientific study of the mechanism of high 

 temperature conversion of polymeric bodies into highly con- 

 jugated dehydrogenated structures, and eventually into diverse 

 forms of refractory carbon itself. Surprising energy absorptions 

 and the critical retention of relatively rigid geometrical form 

 had been among the unanticipated and, of course, nonmission- 



