which Secretary Hughes had denied the validity of Capt. Roald Amundsen's explorations as a basis for Norwegian sovereignty in Antarctica.

In a public Statement of December 27, 1946, the Department of State again publicly reasserted its position of nonrecognition of any claims of any other countries in the Antarctic and expressly reserved all of its rights in Antarctica.

Most recently, the United States has clearly reserved all of its rights in Antarctica in the diplomatic notes, made public by the White House on May 3, 1958, addressed to countries participating in the Antarctic IGY program.

These are only a few examples of the numerous instances in which the United States, either in formal or informal communications or representations to specific countries or in general statements of policy, has reserved the rights of the United States and its citizens in Antarctica. (For detailed discussion of some of the examples listed above and for other examples see Hackworth's Digest of International Law, vol. I, pp. 449 to 465.)

It is believed that the United States has clearly and consistently asserted its position, both to particular countries and to the world at large, reserving the rights of the United States and its citizens throughout all of Antarctica.

Hon. LYNDON B. JOHNSON,

DEPARTMENT OF STATE,
Washington, May 27, 1958.

Chairman, Special Committee on Space and Astronautics,

United States Senate.

DEAR MR. CHAIRMAN: This letter is supplementary to my letter to you dated May 19, 1958, forwarding certain additional material requested by the special committee.

When I appeared before the Special Committee on Space and Astronautics on May 14, 1958, you asked whether the Department of State was consulted in the original drafting of the bill (transcript 646). In reply I stated that we received a copy of the bill from the Bureau of the Budget asking our views on the bill and according to my recollection at the time, the date of receipt by the Department was the 27th of April, although I asked permission to correct my statement if my recollection was erroneous.

Upon checking the record, I found that my recollection was erroneous and that the fact is that the views of the Department of State on the administration's space bill were requested in a letter from the Bureau of the Budget, dated March 27, 1958, which was received in the Department on March 28, 1958. In this letter from the Bureau of the Budget, this Department was requested to give its views with respect to the draft bill by March 31, 1958, and this was done. Certain changes were made in the draft as a result of the comments thus furnished by the Department of State.

Accordingly, the answer to your question is that the Department of State was consulted in the drafting of the bill before it was sent to the Congress.

Sincerely yours,

LOFTUS BECKER,

The Legal Adviser.

NATIONAL AERONAUTICS AND SPACE ACT OF 1958

THURSDAY, MAY 15, 1958

UNITED STATES SENATE,

SPECIAL COMMITTEE ON SPACE AND ASTRONAUTICS,

Washington, D. C. The special committee reconvened, pursuant to recess, at 10:05 a. m., in the caucus room, Senate Office Building, Senator Lyndon B. Johnson (chairman) presiding.

Present: Senators Johnson (chairman), Symington, Saltonstall, Bricker, Hickenlooper, and McClellan.

Also present: Cyrus Vance, consulting counsel; Eilene Galloway, special consultant; Dr. Glen P. Wilson, technical coordinator; Gerald W. Siegel, Stuart French, and Solis Horwitz, professional staff members.

NEW SOVIET SATELLITE LAUNCHED

Senator JOHNSON. The committee will come to order.

The events this morning give a new sense of urgency to the hearings that we are holding. The Soviet Union has launched successfully a new satellite. It is heavier by 100 times than anything we have put into space. The importance of this feat cannot be underestimated. It brings mankind closer and closer to an actual escape into space. It also should bring closer to us the realization that we must organize our potentialities as rapidly as possible to play our proper role in entering the new dimension that is opening up before us.

It is a pleasure to welcome Dr. William H. Pickering, director, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology.

Dr. Pickering was born in New Zealand in 1910. He studied at the California Institute of Technology, receiving a B. S. degree in 1932, a M. S. degree in 1933, and a Ph. D. degree in physics in 1935.

Dr. Pickering, I ask unanimous consent to insert a brief biographical sketch in the record, and if you will just proceed with your statement in your own way, the committee will be pleased to hear you. We know that you have a broad background in a field directly related to space technology and we are anxious to have the benefit of your experience and your advice.

(The biography referred to is as follows:)

BIOGRAPHY OF DR. WILLIAM H. PICKERING

Dr. William H. Pickering is the director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology. He was born in Wellington, New Zealand, in 1910. He studied at the California Institute of Technology, receiving a B. S. degree in 1932, an M. S. degree in 1933 and a Ph. D. degree in physics in 1936.

Dr. Pickering performed graduate and postgraduate work in cosmic ray physics at Cal Tech. He has been associated with JPL since 1944 and has been director of the laboratory since September 1954. He has been a member of the Scientific

Advisory Board of the Air Force and Chairman of the Research and Development Board Panel on guided missile test ranges and instrumentation.

He is a member of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, a fellow of the Institute of Radio Engineers and the American Rocket Society, a member of the United States National Committee Technical Panel on the Earth Satellite Program, and chairman of its work group on tracking and computation.

STATEMENT OF W. H. PICKERING, DIRECTOR, JET PROPULSION LABORATORY, CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY

Dr. PICKERING. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. Chairman, I am honored to be invited to testify before this committee. I am sorry I do not have prepared notes, but I should like to make the following remarks.

In view of the Russian launching this morning, as you said, Mr. Chairman, there is no question but that the United States must embark on a space program. However, it seems to me that in so doing, we must realize that there is a very broad spectrum of interests in space experiments, these interests covering the scientific, the military, the commercial areas and also, of course, the area of national prestige.

When I think about a space program, I am thinking in terms of vehicles which are not used for transportation from one point on the earth's surface to another. Vehicles which are either weapons or for the carriage of goods and passengers, and vehicles such as ICBM missiles, and so forth, these I treat as a separate category. I am thinking rather of a space program in which we are in fact sending vehicles out into space beyond the earth to travel for long periods of time in the gravity-free condition.

Now, in evaluating the necessity for a space program, it seems to me that it is of some interest to consider the fact that at the present time in the IGY program, the United States is supporting a rather large effort in the Antarctic. One might ask why are we supporting this Antarctic effort, and here again we see a case where an interest which is primarily a scientific interest is accounting for an expenditure of a large amount of effort, a large amount of manpower in order to support what is fundamentally a scientific experiment. We likewise should regard the support of a space program as a national necessity in the same way that the support of an Antarctic program during this IGY period is a national necessity.

It is obviously a matter of national prestige that we should have a station at the South Pole during this IGY period.

In asking what is a reasonable program for the country to develop, again I make the analogy with the Antarctic program and say that what is needed is scientific exploration. There are specific scientific experiments which I am sure have been discussed in this committee and elsewhere at great length, and I don't want to discuss these in any detail. But I will point out that the scientific experiments are a necessary forerunner to the commercial exploitation of space or the military exploitation of space. I think that a very good example is the present cosmic ray experiment which has been performed on EXPLORERS I and III. This experiment of Dr. Van Allen's has given us some completely new information about the radiations present in outer space. The information was completely unexpected. Radiation levels, a thousand times or more greater than the cosmic

ray background, have been measured. Radiation levels in fact so high as to be potentially dangerous to space travel, to human space travel.

This is a rather dramatic example of the results of a quite simple scientific experiment which was the first step out into space. Here, after we have had a vehicle in orbit for a matter of a few weeks, we are finding startling new results.

Now, I don't mean to say that every new satellite experiment is going to have equally dramatic results, but it does mean that the scientific steps must be the first steps toward the exploitation of space.

A second thing, it seems to me, which we must remember in trying to establish a space program is the fact that we are not yet in the position of being able to, as it were, take a vehicle off the shelf and say, "Here is a truck which can carry your scientific experiments where you want them." We are still in the evolutionary stage of these large rockets, this large rocket technology, and it becomes necessary, then, to plan in great detail the specific experimental vehicle as well as the experimental program. These have to be integrated together into a system.

The result of this is that any scientific experiments, even the relatively simple scientific experiment in space, are the result of long planning on the part of the vehicle people as well as the scientists, so that a well thought out space program is one which is a continuing program, a long-term program, a program which has long lead time items and therefore it must be supported on a continuing basis so that there can be this long-term planning.

It seems to me that one other factor in connection with the immediate program is that the military interest in space at the present is rather tenuous. I say this because although it is true there are some definitive military applications which we can see now, such as the reconnaissance satellite, and so forth, it is difficult to see very much beyond this point. I am quite sure that as we explore space, as we send vehicles into space for scientific purposes, that there will be military byproducts as a result. But I do not feel that the military objectives out in space are clearly enough defined at this time to say that the military program should be the governing factor in space.

I think also one should distinguish in this example between military applications as, shall we say, weapons systems as distinct from military-supported research. For example, meteorology is a field of interest to the military. It is quite clear that satellites are going to be a very useful tool for meteorological research.

Now, does this mean that meteorological research satellites should be conducted by the military or conducted by a civilian group? In my estimation the intital meteorological research program should be laid out essentially with civilian thinking. As a byproduct of this program we could very well end up with a military satellite using the results of the meteorological research which had been carried out by a civilian agency.

It seems to me one other point in connection with the military interest in space is that at the moment the biggest contribution which the military can make to our space program is to develop the largescale, long-range rocketry which is, after all, the basis for any space exploration, and that the military objectives at this time should be concentrated on the military weapons systems using large rockets

And

which are now under development. These are of primary importance to the country. There is no question whatever about that. they must be developed as rapidly as possible.

With this as a background, the question of the space agency, then, appears to me in this light. One can first of all ask, Do we need a new space agency or can the space job be done with the existing scientific and military groups in the country? And my feeling here is that a new agency is needed because of the magnitude of this program.

The costs of this program are going to very large. There is no getting away from that; large in dollars. Looked at from the point of view of national effort, one might say perhaps a quarter of a percent of the national income might be diverted to the space programs.

and

With a large expenditure and with a necessity for long-term planning, it appears to me that there must be a well-integrated national program, and this means, then, that a single agency should integrate and control the program rather than to have it on a catch-as-catchcan basis as some of our research activities have been up to now, quite rightly so, because there is much research which obviously should be supported by different agencies. But when we are talking about a project of this magnitude, then I feel a single agency, a single space agency, a civilian space agency, is required. It is necessary that this agency have the imagination and the boldness to establish a program which is ambitious but not rash. It is necessary also that this agency have the continuing funds necessary to carry out such a

program.

The magnitude of the efforts becomes comparable to the AEC type effort, but I feel that this is a different sort of activity than the AEC in that rather than growing out of-rather than having a program which grows out of a military requirement, as the AEC program has grown and broadened from its initial military objectives, here we have a program which I feel should start on the other side. It has more similarity to the IGY Antarctic program where the effort is initially scientific and there may be military byproducts which will develop later on, but the organization which carries out the program, rather than being an AEC type operation with strong military overtones should start in the other direction as a scientific operation which will develop military byproducts.

The present bill which proposes a new national space agency would appear to me to meet the objectives as I see it. I do feel that there is one comment I would like to make, however, and that is the association of the National Space Agency with the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. I feel that the new Agency has to do a job which is quite different from the job which is now being carried out by the NACA, and in this light, then, I regard the new Agency as in fact a new Agency which incidentally absorbs the NACA rather than an agency which grows out of the NACA. I believe that the wording of the bill is such as to imply this, but I merely wanted to emphasize that from my point of view I feel that this is important, that the new Agency have the authority and have the tasks assigned to it which are in the bill and which are a different set of tasks than those assigned to the NACA.

Thank you, gentlemen.