The Navy's outstanding research organization, following the principle “what's good for science is good for defense," has had a long and happy relationship with the scientific community; its operations have been widely copied by other services and other federal agencies; and its interests are everywhere.
The October, 1957, launching of Sputnik clothed defense research overnight in a mantle of such glamour and urgency that every public figure who could reach a podium started lambasting the military for not having done enough in the past and exhorting it to do far more in the future, to the point that every schoolchild today is demanding all kinds of research on satellites, on ballistic missiles, and possibly on a few other aerial wonders that he can’t just name at the moment. But neither the schoolchild nor his father could have advised us, a few years ago, that satellites and missiles were the items to push. In 1945 even such an eminent authority as Vannevar Bush was telling the Senate, relative to the feasibility of intercontinental missiles, “If you were talking about 400 or 500 miles, I would say by all means . . . but 3,000 miles? ... I think we can leave that out of our thinking.” And who among us, back during the Korean war, was far-sightedly urging his congressman to pour money into satellites? It takes exceptional vision to look ahead and say that satellites, or missiles, or “anti-gravity machines” should be developed all-out, until research in the basic fields that make such hardware possible comes up with the requisite scientific truths—and then these truths may be so unexpected that they dictate the development of totally different end products.
In this kind of broad gauge research, under taken in the spirit of true scientific inquiry the Navy has been a pioneer throughout its history and operates in the same tradition today.
The Navy historically has been the service associated with science. In 1825 President John Quincy Adams requested Congress to establish a Naval Academy “for the formation of scientific and accomplished officers.” Five years later the Naval Observatory and Hydro- graphic Office were founded jointly as the Depot of Charts and Instruments, which, under Commander Matthew Fontaine Maury, initiated the fundamental studies of wind, currents, and the paths of storms and helped found the science of oceanography. In 1838 a University of Pennsylvania professor of chemistry and physics became the Navy Department’s first scientist. In mid-century the Navy pioneered in bringing on the age of steam, and in the latter part of the century began research that was to convert the world’s warships to liquid fuel. In 1915 the world’s first transatlantic radiotelephone system was set up between the U. S. Naval Radio Station at Arlington and the Eiffel Tower in Paris. In 1923 the Naval Research Laboratory was founded to conduct research in the physical sciences; most famous of its initial projects was investigation of the phenomenon later known as radar. This laboratory in 1939 instituted the nation’s first organized research program in nuclear energy.
Then came the war, and mobilization of the nation’s scientific potential for victory. And promptly at war’s end the Office of Scientific Research and Development withdrew all research support and went out of business. During the latter stages of the conflict, thoughtful naval leaders were realizing more and more that without all the new military hardware born of our pre-war store of basic scientific knowledge (largely European in origin) we could well have been defeated, and were planning how to nourish a home-grown research effort. In May, 1945, the Secretary of the Navy created an organization which had its genesis in OSRD and was destined to become of unprecedented importance to this nation’s basic research program. Born as the Office of Research and Inventions, and established by Congress the next year as the Office of Naval Research, it was the first agency of government with the express purpose of supporting and co-ordinating basic research.
Its success was overwhelming. Suspicion of military domination of science was dispelled, and ONR became the model of future governmental organizations for support of research. —NSF, OSR, OOR, and in part even the mighty AEC. The Universities of Chicago and California, asked if they would enter into research contracts with the new Navy organization, accepted with the comment that this was the wisest proposal for research ever voiced by the government. An early issue of Fortune said, “Smartest and most carefully organized of the new military agencies is ONR —which is spending about $20 million a year chiefly among universities for pure research, with no strings attached and a maximum of freedom for the working scientists. Without this support, basic research in the U. S. would be at its lowest ebb in history.” MIT’s Vice President Killian, now the presidential advisor, said, “The Navy has shown not only how to write research contracts but how to manage research. The ONR represents an extraordinary achievement in successful and enlightened government research.”
At the dedication of Johns Hopkins’ Applied Physics Laboratory, Dr. DuBridge said, “We will forever owe a debt particularly to the Office of Naval Research for what was done.” Last year Professor I. I. Rabi, distinguished Columbia University physicist, stated that the current general health of research in universities and elsewhere was largely due to ONR’s efforts. And a recent Fortune article on defense research said, “The Office of Naval Research is outstanding—indeed, most scientists would rather deal with ONR than with any other government agency, or even a generous private foundation.”
The scope of the Navy’s total research and development effort, traditionally not publicized, includes employing one third of all the R&D people in the entire government plus directing 80% of ONR’s funds to the contract support of basic research in the universities. (Outside the AEC’s special province of nuclear physics, the armed forces as a whole sponsor half the basic research in American universities and technical institutes—and even in nuclear physics the ONR carried nearly the entire load of research support until the AEG was established in 1948.) In the years since the war, ONR has supported half the students who have obtained doctorates in the physical sciences in this country—perhaps 2,000 for last year alone. It is not surprising that the billet of Chief of Naval Research has been authoritatively labelled the most important scientific post in the armed services.
What is the secret of the Navy’s success in a field so fraught with pitfalls and pratfalls?
The answer is two-fold, with the first part arising from the second. First, the Navy has realized that research is a long-term peacetime activity, and that it must be stimulated but cannot be directed. In other words, it must be continuous and must lie wherever the competent scientist looks. But how can the Navy finance research in such random directions? That leads to the second half of the answer, which is that the Navy’s far-flung operations on and under the sea, in the air and on the land bordering the sea bring it into contact with every environment from ocean depths to farthest space. Geography, acoustics, engineering psychology, statistics, geology, power, physiology, astro-physics, marine biology—there is little in the physical world which doesn’t concern the Navy. So when the war spot-lighted this need for large-scale peacetime support of basic research, something never before undertaken by our government, the Navy was uniquely prepared, both by its scientific tradition and by its involvement in virtually every major scientific field, to play a pioneering role.
How does ONR stimulate research? Any scientist with an idea that needs looking into and a reputation in his field just sits down and writes ONR a letter, saying in plain English what he has in mind. If it sounds interesting, they work up a contract along the lines he has proposed. But it’s never cut and dried; if the investigator reaches midstream only to find out a shift of direction is in order, ONR is usually glad to modify the contract to suit. Then when it’s time for the report—the product ONR is buying—nobody’s fussy about that either. If the results have been published in the scientific literature (an action ONR encourages), a reprint of that will be fine. Small wonder, with this free and easy arrangement, that scientists find ONR an agreeable partner.
Does it all sound too pat—a good way to waste Government money in halfbaked studies? There’s really not much danger. The universities are proud of their reputations as centers of basic science and refuse to certify proposals of dubious worth when asked by ONR to countersign the contract. Second, scientists of the caliber backed by ONR want neither to waste their time on, nor to publish the results of, trivial investigations. Finally, and this is perhaps most important of all, the research subjects are selected by the right men —the scientists who know the field. As G. E. K. Mees of Eastman Kodak puts it: “The best person to decide what research work shall be done is the man who is doing the research. The next best is the head of the department. After that you leave the field of best persons and meet increasingly worse groups. The first of these is the research director, who is probably wrong more than half the time. Then comes a committee, which is wrong most of the time. Finally there is a board of company vice presidents, which is wrong all the time.”
All this is fine. But isn’t the Navy really, under the guise of scientific freedom and its broad interests, just funding every “good research” project under the sun that someone with a reputation wants to investigate?
Not at all. The Navy is fortunate to have a corps of scientists of first rank, who work with advisory groups and consultants in every field to determine research areas of probable naval interest. The decision on whether to support or not to support is based ultimately on whether a potential project fits into one of three broad categories:
First, scientific areas extremely important to future naval readiness, but of little present interest to industry. The Navy usually is the only agency who will fund these areas, and sometimes also has to stimulate interest among the scientific community to get some research started. Certain important astronomical and high-altitude coronograph work has fallen into this category.
Second, areas of importance both to naval technology and operations and to industry. Solid state physics research, whose present high level of activity is due greedy to consistent ONR support, falls into this category.
Third, areas where potential naval interest looks unlikely today, but where modest support assures that we stay aware of developments and can exploit them rapidly if possible applications show up. And show up they do, as witness ONR support of low temperature physics or cryogenics, considered by many outstanding physicists to be the finest example of government-sponsored academic research. The union of cryogenics research with subsequent solid state research led to revolutionary consequences that laid the foundation for much of the work on the hydrogen bomb. And just three years ago ONR began probing the apparently most unpractical field of radio astrophysics, the study of solar emissions; already this pure research has contributed substantially to naval navigation and communications, including development of a “radio- metric” sextant as accurate through clouds as the optical sextant is on a clear day.
The wisdom of ONR top scientists in nurturing these and other ideas was gained in consultation with the Naval Research Advisory Committee, a group of fifteen leading scientists—presidents and vice presidents of research of U. S. universities and industries.
The Navy has sponsored some top-notch people—and their results show it. Three physicists under ONR contract have received Nobel prizes for their work. The American Mathematical Society’s Bacher prize, awarded only once every five years, has twice gone to ONR contractors. An investigator on a long-range ONR radioastronomy program has received the gold medal of the British Royal Society. Three past presidents of the highly regarded American Psychological Association have been principal investigators on ONR contracts.
Radio communications is an excellent example of the Navy’s research at work. At first blush the subject sounds old-hat—everything worth discovering was dug out long ago, and all that remains is to refine the art here and there. It’s lucky they didn’t leave it at that, or a fistful of exciting new discoveries would still be in limbo.
For example, lots of Navy attention is going to the improbable art of transmission by means of radio signals reflected from the trails of meteors entering our atmosphere. Known as “meteor burst” or scatter, this seemingly ridiculous process is expected ultimately to become a vastly improved medium range communications system. Then there’s “whistler mode” transmission, wherein signals go from Naval Radio Station NSS at Annapolis to the point in southern Chile where the magnetic lines shooting out from Annapolis come back again to earth. The phase and amplitude of these signals when they hit Chile indicate that they have ridden the magnetic lines out for a distance of several earth radii and back again. “Whistler mode” is important in showing that the ionosphere is not opaque to very low frequencies, and also in demonstrating—most significant for long range electronic navigation systems—that the earth’s north- south and east-west characteristics are very different for this purpose. And there are those ubiquitous radar signals that NRL has been bouncing off the moon for the past six years. These continuing experiments, which have included round-trip voice transmissions, show that Luna is an effective radio relay station for many types of communications. If the New York overseas circuits are busy, just route your call via the moon!
Radio must include radioastronomy—the new way to look at the universe. The Navy has been a leader in this field since 1946, when NRL astronomers started turning their big radio-telescope on the sun, the planets, and “radio stars” so distant they show no trace on optical telescopes. Based on the discovery that heavenly bodies send out radio signals just as they do light waves, this new science has in a scant six years “shown” us by radio waves nearly the entire spiral of our own galaxy, hidden from optical view by interstellar dust since the dawn of man. The visible spectrum has been a small and dirty window into space—our own atmosphere and the debris floating in the void make a murky medium through which astronomers have peered hazily for 300 years. Now radioastronomy has opened the much larger and cleaner radio window, and tremendous finds are floating into view.
The mighty sun emits light waves too blinding to look upon, heat waves that blister flesh in a few hours, and radio waves of presumably equivalent magnitude. These great forces come from the awe-inspiring thermonuclear furnace in the fiery center, mightiest reaction within our ken. By contrast, at night the most powerful telescope can show you ever so faintly two little wisps of luminescence that astronomers identify as the Cygnus A Galaxy, 270 million light years distant. And this impossibly remote speck in the telescope pours just as much radio energy on the earth as does the thermonuclear sun, eight light minutes away. What titanic power source can so dwarf our solar H-bomb? It may be that Cygnus A is really two immense galaxies, one composed of conventional matter and the other of “anti-matter” (protons and “antiprotons,” as physicists have shown recently, will annihilate each other on contact with the production of great amounts of energy; and there is a theory that in widely separated parts of the universe all the separate particles and their anti-particles may be in continuous creation); and that their collision is releasing energy beyond our comprehension. This theory is reinforced by the spectroscopic finding that even the widely dispersed interstellar hydrogen within Cygnus A, rather than being at a temperature far below 0° as in ordinary galaxies, is excited up to 10,000° C.
Naval Research Laboratory investigators were the first to measure the velocities at which distant galaxies are receding from earth, when they peered at Cygnus A through their radio-telescope. They figured these radio waves would be partially absorbed by the characteristic frequency of interstellar hydrogen in the galaxy, leaving a little dip in the spectrum at this point—or at a slightly lower frequency from doppler effect if the galaxy were receding. This gave them a receding velocity of 10,000 miles per second, very close to the velocity previously estimated from the observed “red shift” in the visible light—and reinforced the imaginative theory of the expanding universe. These are strange and wonderful uses indeed of the humdrum old science of radio.
Something else cooking in radio is ONR- supported solid state research which recently came up with the “maser.” The random electron motion in radio circuitry causes internal noise often 5,000 times as loud as the tiny radio signals from the stars. With the maser, a micro-wave amplifier depending on molecules rather than electrons for its action, internal noise is very low and detection ranges for radioastronomers may be 100 times as great as at present. It is now being used in NRL’s telescope, with remarkable results. In addition to multiplying the extent of our new boundaries in the universe by 100 at one stroke—no small achievement—this Navy discovery promises similar radical improvement in radar ranges; and that brings it close to home in a hurry!
A Navy-sponsored research study at the University of Illinois on the properties of semi-conductors has supplied much of the basic information that has made possible the development of diffusion transistors, which not only can be mass-produced but can operate at much higher frequencies than older transistors. And Navy research, developing silicon and germanium as a substitute for rare selenium, actually ended up with devices better than those made from selenium.
There’s another Navy-produced stir in the radio business, one that promises to end up right in your house. In a recent attack on the growing maze of dials and gauges that faces the bewildered pilot while his speed goes up and reaction time shrinks to the vanishing point they are evolving a tremendous little computer that will paint a pictorial display summing up the information the dials want to tell him at a glance. And to make it possible in daylight and crowded cockpits, NRL is developing a flat picture tube with a special transparent phosphor that reflects little light and hence not only can be viewed in bright daylight but can be seen through as part of the windshield! A by-product of this remarkable device probably will revolutionize your home TV set. It can provide a simpler and more efficient color television tube and is expected to lead to the development of 3-D television as well.
Let’s shift to the field of biology, a science in j which you would think the Navy’s research interest would be slight—outside of the fact that it has close to a million men in uniform and is interested in their health.
The Navy is making notable progress in finding ways of preserving such tissues as blood vessels, skin, and bones, so they can be placed on the shelf and be available for transplanting in severe wounds. The sight of a Navy surgeon pulling an artery out of the deep freeze and installing it in place of a damaged section, just as a mechanic sticks another bearing in your car, is worth waiting for. Fascinating new discovery, too, is the fact that the skin of unborn calves is astonishingly effective for severe burns. Not grafted on, but wrapped on like a bandage, this embryonic bovine skin lets the human skin grow back underneath without the scarring and repeat grafting found necessary with the use of human skin. And the beautiful thing about this dressing is its availability.
Navy researchers are looking into such unlikely things as the habits of desert birds, to see how their innards can get along on so little water. Perhaps we can find clues to help stranded mariners adrift on a liferaft, or fliers down on the desert itself. And at the other end of the atlas, they are trying to learn the penguin’s secret in keeping her eggs toasty warm and hatching them in polar cold. Maybe the penguin, in addition to helping sell cigarettes, will give out with some tips on how to keep navymen operating in the frigid environment of the polar regions or the ramparts of space itself.
Then there are fish. We would do much to emulate the jet propulsion system of the lowly squid, and so he comes in for a hard look. And unfortunately for him, he has another handy feature—his nerve cord is just the size for lots of good experiments. As a result, a bewildered but happy group of Chilean fishermen spend the days profitably combing the reefs for squid, and off goes a big refrigerated crate of them to the U. S. Navy three times a week.
Other undersea dwellers can do what the Navy wishes it could do—specifically certain fish which swim a good deal faster than they have any theoretical right to do. Biologists cut them up, and from their muscle dimensions compute the power they have available; then they clock them over the measured mile (not the cut-up ones, but their cousins), and they’re going too fast. It’s not their shape— when the investigators freeze them solid and tow these piscatorial icebags in the model basin tanks, they need the full calculated power. Whatever their secret is, they have it only when they’re alive and swimming. Scientists are on the trail of a few possibilities: maybe the fish pokes out parts of his stomach here and there in a way that maintains laminar flow that means those extra knots. Maybe it’s something else. Whatever it is, the Navy’s submarines would like to have some— and some day, no doubt, they will.
For biological snooping into a region once as inaccessible as outer space, the Navy has been sponsoring Professor August Piccard’s fantastic underwater blimp, the bathyscaphe. Able to withstand pressures three miles down, this slightly self-propelled craft can take two men and their scientific gear down to 99 per cent of the world’s ocean floors. Last summer and fall the novel vehicle made a series of 26 dives down to about two miles off Naples, studying some effects of undersea life on acoustics as related to submarine warfare. Besides their numerous classified observations, the Navy scientists saw lots of life at all depths, including such oddities as fish whose bodies appeared covered with white down, and discovered many indications of burrowing animals on the ocean floor. The discoveries of the exotic bathyscaphe—-now at the Naval Electronics Lab in San Diego—are just beginning.
Coming above water for animals who can teach us tricks, the Navy has admired the talented little bat—whose one gram “radar” (actually sonar) set can discriminate targets at 150 feet from background of far greater density. This set is both search and attack, varying its spread and frequency at will as the target’s aspect necessitates.
ONR researchers at Notre Dame have developed the germ-free animal as an effective new research tool. On an animal without other germs, diseases caused by specific organisms can be studied with no foreign influences. For the first time it has been possible to prove that bacteria cause tooth decay—a long-held hypothesis that no one knew for sure except the ad-writers—since tests on germ-free animals fed a sterilized diet show they have no dental caries (and probably no fun, either).
A host of other biological investigations have occupied Navy researchers. Their accomplishments include producing the first successful virus in the absence of host cells, successfully testing plastic corneas to replace damaged corneas in animals, developing better shark-chasers, analyzing which food shipwrecked mariners can eat (and how to catch it), developing blood plasma expanders, discovering a revised concept of burn shock with resultant new treatment, developing a family of new agents for the relief of fatigue and pain, the treatment of tension and anxiety, and the promotion of alertness and rejuvenescence, and learning more about the lowly barnacle and how to discourage him.
But all these things, however interesting and beneficial, are right here among us. How about the quest of the century—the race for the stars?
Until man can blast himself into outer space and return to tell about it, he will have to rely on observation posts placed ever higher and higher in the atmosphere. The Navy high altitude program started in 1946, ages ago by today’s swift space calendar, and it is owing to that farsighted beginning that we have as solid a store of basic information as we do. In that year the Office of Naval Research initiated its high altitude plastic balloon program, Project Skyhook; at the same time the Naval Research Laboratory began work with research rockets, first with the German V-2 and then with the Viking and Aerobee rockets. Both attacks were necessary, because balloons could remain up for several hours, while rockets could go much higher but could stay only a few minutes. Unmanned Skyhook balloons carried automatic instruments to the record height of 25 miles, and a single stage Viking rocket made a 1954 record flight to 158 miles with an 825-pound pay- load. This rocket was modified to become the first stage of Vanguard.
Last fall, in Project Stratolab, the Navy sent up a 12-inch telescope for an important first in science. This telescope automatically took hundreds of pictures of the sun at 81,000 feet, virtual “close-ups” with the atmosphere’s obscuring water vapor left below to permit registering a wealth of detail far surpassing anything ever taken before, and then parachuted safely to earth. Future unmanned telescope flights are in the wind with larger scopes, and it is probable that a television may be attached later, for direct transmission of these spectacular telephoto shots to the earth.
In the more dramatic manned Stratolab program, a two-man team of naval scientists, Lieutenant Commanders Malcolm Ross and M. L. Lewis, rode their instrument-packed gondola up to 86,000 feet, collecting a wide variety of scientific data plus the Harmon Trophy. Major David Simons of the Air Force, who made his outstanding world’s record ascent to 102,000 feet, used a high altitude balloon developed for the Navy program.
Scheduled for November as this goes to press is a Stratolab flight by Ross and Dr. John Strong of Johns Hopkins, in which they will take a 16-inch telescope up to the clear medium of 80,000 feet and get the first unobscured look at Mars. They hope to measure the water vapor and oxygen content in the red planet’s atmosphere, possibly solving the mystery of her famous canals, and getting clues to the possibility of life itself on our neighboring planet. This ascent, with its new technique of high altitude astronomical observation, is expected by many eminent astronomers to usher in startling advances in astronomy and astrophysics.
Everyone has seen the dramatic photographs of the curving earth, snapped from the rim of the world by a Viking research rocket 158 miles out. Later Aerobee-Hi Navy rockets have soared to 193 miles, record for a research rocket. In 1957, NRL rockets made the first quantitative intensity measurements of micrometeors, those particles so potentially hazardous both to earth satellites and to intercontinental missiles streaking through the upper atmosphere. NRL scientists attained early proficiency, not only in the rocketry which now catches the public fancy, but also in the delicate art of telemetering the information back to earth from a rocket high in the stratosphere. It was this early know-how that weighed heavily in the decision to assign the American earth satellite program to the Navy, and has proven so effective in the Minitrack and other radio-intelligence systems.
Using such research rockets as the Navy’s Aerobee, Aerobee-Hi, and Deacon, scientists have confirmed the theory that radio blackouts come from an extra layer of ionized particles in the upper atmosphere, ten to twelve miles below the lowest portions of the ionosphere. This layer occurs during solar flares, and it has been established that it is caused by X-ray emissions from the sun.
These rockets are playing an important part in the International Geophysical Year. A Navy Aerobee launching crew is stationed at Fort Churchill, Canada, a launching site picked because aurora, airglow, and other desired atmospheric disturbances show up best at the high latitudes. The Aerobee is a reliable and inexpensive vehicle that can reach well into the ionosphere, and the Aero- bee-Hi is an improved version for high altitude research. The Air Force also has a version of the latter.
Vanguard has come in for quite a shellacking from time to time. Forgotten when Explorer attained orbit after Vanguard’s unsuccessful tries was U. S. satellite history. Dr. Wernher von Braun himself points out that Project Orbiter, the genesis of what became the Army satellite project, was set in motion by ONR when it called a conference of military rocketeers in 1954. The quite feasible joint Army-Navy program decided on then, using existing military rockets, was terminated by the leaders of government in 1955 so that nothing should interfere with the missile program, and Vanguard was born as a brand new research rocket unconnected with military missiles and their secrecy.
Dr. von Braun’s generous quotes at the time of the Jupiter C-rocket’s success in orbiting a satellite bear repeating: “I tell you quite frankly the Vanguard is a missile superior to this one. ... It is so sophisticated that it is a little difficult to get it off. Ours is based on older and more proven components. . . . Ours is a little more obsolete.”
The search for exotic propellants is getting hotter. After World War II the hydrocarbons had about exploited their chemical limit of 19,000 BTU’s per pound, and a new chemical fuel was indicated. In 1946 the NACA tried burning boranes, and shortly afterward the ONR awarded contracts to several companies to find out more about the promising chemical. By May, 1952, the basic research had proceeded far enough for the Navy to start Project Zip, the search for a usable borane fuel. The search was so successful that in late 1955 the Air Force came in, and this year the two services will put their second fifty million dollars into borane fuel plants. A Russian plane designer of note states that the boranes fill the gap between hydrocarbons and nuclear power.
Actually the problem is not quite as simple as BTU’s per pound. If it were, the Navy’s Polaris missile wouldn’t be winning so many unexpected converts to its solid-propellant engine. A workable (not necessarily Polaris’) solid propellant might have particles of oxidizer in a plain old low-BTU hydrocarbon binder; the catch is that the solid propellant may easily have double the density of the liquid fuel, giving it a lower specific impulse but more overall range. There are of course other solid-fuel advantages, such as reliability, fire-safety, and very short countdown, having no relation to power.
Getting lots of attention are the ultimate propulsion systems, and this article has nothing to say about actual Navy research in this field. But the ballpark of theoretical feasibility includes “simple” atomic rockets, where a uranium pile could heat up hydrogen to many thousand degrees and shoot it out the exhaust for very high specific impulse. Potentially still more powerful would be the “stabilized free radicals,” unstable fractions of chemical compounds that normally exist only momentarily in very hot reactions such as flames before combining explosively, but have been captured occasionally in the laboratory by superfreezing; pure hydrogen atoms reacting to form hydrogen molecules could produce, if controllable, double the specific impulse of an atomic rocket. Free hydrogen radicals float about in the sparse upper atmosphere, and it wouldn’t be impossible that a high-flying satellite might cruise along with its front door open, collecting enough to keep putting along in orbit forever.
The current theoretical ultimate, the photonic rocket, once it reached virtually the speed of light, could go out to the end of the universe and back in four billion years which —wait—which might turn out (the scientists divide on the practical results of relativity time-compression inside a space ship) to be a mere forty years or so for the space cadets. They run the risk, of course, of getting back to find that, not only have the girls they left behind grown up and died, but so has the whole human race.
It is very hard to stop a discussion of the Navy research program. There is so much variety, and the siren song of interest keeps calling you around the next corner. Completely unmentioned in this article are some fifty developmental laboratories operated by the technical Bureaus, who take over from ONR as soon as basic research proves the feasibility of a development—and who do a good deal of basic research themselves in their own areas of interest. Unmentioned, too, are the big test centers who prove out the untried missiles or machines delivered to them, and in the process do a good deal of creative work on their own. Each of these is a story in itself.
This article has confined itself largely to the basic research program. Some people arc surprised that the Navy would do any basic research whatsoever. More are amazed at the breadth of Navy interest in pure investigations. But the overwhelming paradox is that a fighting service, whose heritage is the rugged and elemental sea, has been a foremost supporter and guardian of pure science in this country.
More prophetic than he knew was Maury’s comment of a previous century: “Navies are not all for war!”