Sputnik sparked the dawn of the Space Age. That is, unless you consider the  
hushed-up Roswell Incident in 1947; the alleged Mogul weather balloon. But  
Roswell did capture the interest of the Air Force, and in 1957 they funded  
Convair to develop a radio telescope to search the heavens for radio signals. As  
I noted earlier today, Convair assigned Thomas M. Hemphill to head the design  
team and then Convair build the first United States radio telescope at Clark 
Dry  Lake in 1959. Both Sputnik and the radio antennae are processual steps in 
the  Early Space Age that continues to this day. All of this spun off the 
Cold War,  which effectively began in 1945, and the paranoia of the implications 
of  a Soviet satellite drove Congress to fund billions of dollars into NASA  
that continues through the present.
 
Now, here is the irony that should not be lost on the youth who did not  live 
in those days. The scientists in the Soviet Union and United  States who 
worked on the emerging Space Age did so with German military  technology, 
including some SS and Nazi Party scientists. Here in America  our government captured 
SS officer and former Nazi Party member Werner Von  Braun and brought him to 
the US through 'Cointelpro," exonerated him of his  crimes against humanity, 
and made him a citizen in order to develop rocketry.  Other examples are 
endless, but the first rocket fired in the Dawn of the Space  Age in America was none 
other than a German V-2 rocket and, also interesting, it  was fired at a 
range south of Roswell, New Mexico at about the same time as the  so-called 
Roswell Incident in 1947. The Soviets also turned former German  scientists into 
valued citizens and it was they who enabled the launch of  Sputnik on October 4, 
1957. For Anita's sake, I might add that those  experimental launch sites, the 
V-2 launch site, and the radio telescope at Clark  Dry Lake all are 
archaeological sites that should be of interest to the good  folks reading HISTARCH. 
What, we might inquire, were those scientists eating at  those remote 
experimental sites?
 
Ron May
Legacy 106, Inc.
 
 



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