Documents / FOIA release
This Central Intelligence Agency memorandum, dated 16 September 1954, reports on a September meeting of the Upper Atmosphere Rocket Research Panel at the Naval Research Laboratory, Anacostia, chaired by James A. Van Allen. It summarizes briefings on the capabilities of research rockets such as the Viking and Aerobee and on a three-phase earth satellite program. It also covers Project Orbiter planning and funding for the International Geophysical Year. The author concludes that a satellite could likely be orbited by that year given high government priority.
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11. Mr. Callender of the National Defence Foundation gave a brief account of the commission of the Telecommunications rocket research. The million, three-million thousand collars is presently available and about 70% of this will be transferred immediately to Gill for procurement and accounting purposes. The volume of the rocket project units = 4,000,000 will become available next year. 12. Following adjournment of the panel meeting, I spent a couple of hours with Mr. Tan Allen, who had served under no for a time during World War II. Tan Allen was one of the key figures in the development of the VT fuse under central powers and was one of the officers involved in introducing the fuse to the Pacific Fleet. In our conversation, I mentioned the difficulty that apparently would be encountered in the VT program, of designing scientific devices which would stand the high cost encountered in most of the military rockets, particularly with solid propellant. I mentioned specifically the VT's carried in stores two of the field cluster vehicles. Tan Allen said that there should be no such difficulty. He pointed out that the VT fuse contained five miniature reactor, a battery and a transmitter, and that this instrument, with essentially no failures, understood 20,000 times and had been used in use for some time, the Ivanov retarder 20 pounds of instrumentation for cruise my research and telecommunications 60 times. In said that he saw no difficulty in designing instrumentation for his related projects which would cost him 1,000 pounds. In regard to them, Ivanov correctly, he arrived thereonly with Mr. Tan Allen, that the inventive fuse still was to launch a slug. So told that if the local government priority could be established, with airspace and control by an outside high level scientific group, it would almost certainly be possible to put a slug in orbit by the time of the VT and possibly even put up an instrumented vehicle. CIRCLE *Distribution* cric 1 - collection 2 = x. . . . . . . 1. ../i 1 ! $$ \angle 3 = \therefore \therefore $$
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FOIA release, from the cia-readingroom collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. The text was read from the page images by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word. 5 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.