Countdown For Decision

The inside story of men, missiles and our race for space by the man who launched America's first satellite.

John Bruce Medaris (May 12, 1902 - July 11, 1990) retired a Major General in the United States Army. During World War II he became a highly decorated colonel in the ordnance corps, serving in every campaign from North Africa to Sicily, Normandy, the Battle of the Bulge, and invasion of Germany. In 1955 he assumed command of the Army Ballistic Missile Agency. Under his supervision Wernher von Braun and the Rocket Team developed the Jupiter missile which launched the first U.S. earth satellite into orbit in 1958. Medaris went on to play a role in the post-Sputnik debates over how the U.S. government ought to respond to the Soviet challenge. When the Eisenhower administration decided to create a civilian space agency, assigned long-range ballistic missiles to the Air Force and Navy, then transferred the Huntsville Rocket Team to the NASA. Derived from a Kirkus review: The Army's recently retired top missile-and-ballistics man, Major General Medaris, tells the story of the missiles race of the last five years, and makes some predictions about the future. Beginning with a brief personal history, coinciding with the development of rocketry through Dr. Robert Goddard and Werner von Braun, he then goes into specific detail of the years 1956-59, during which time he ran the rockets from the Redstone Arsenal and Cape Canaveral. Some of the heroes are men like Colonel Nickerson; Secretary McElroy; and von Braun. Other heroes are the missiles themselves—Nike, Bomarc, Jupiter, Titan, and a dozen more—whose history and sometimes frustrating failure Medaris recounts. The General sounds the alarm against complacency, and against bureaucracy. Unless, he says, men of decision and intelligence are allowed to carry out a balanced, imaginative rocket program, the power will soon shift decidedly to Russia. Well worth reading.-Print ed.