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Don't draft the young engineer! Local boards and national officials should hearken to that cry. . . .
Our defense should not only be a temporary measure, but a long time program with its greatest strength in the future. Technical students, even recent graduates, are not immediately vital to industry, but these same men are the ones that compose the potential intelligent guiding power of our industrial system. Cut down their number by draft lottery and one of the most important defense pillars of our country will be chipped at the base. To say that an aeronautical engineer, or a chemical, or a civil, will be of more value to his country as a soldier of one year's training that as a specialized engineer with four years' tested schooling behind him is preposterous.
Space exploration, by chance, has been greatly accelerated due to the military's desire to have a stockpile of long range ballistic missiles. This fact is a result of varied uses of the boosters required for such missiles.
The only change necessary to transform war vehicles to space probes is the replacement of the warhead by an assortment of scientific instruments of about the same weight, and to shoot the rocket straight up instead of sending it along a slanting trajectory towards an enemy target. In 1958 and 1959, the U.S. was forced to perform such modifications in various ballistic missiles. However, the outlook for the future is in sharp contrast to this.
At present, there are at least three boosters in either the initial or advanced development stage and each will be versatile enough to accomplish many goals. The three boosters are Centaur, Saturn and Nova. But, in all honesty, one can say the ballistic missile was the spark that promises to vault the human race to the threshold of space and true three-D existence.
Industry is snapping up quantities of Army tools of war and putting them to peacetime application. It might be wise for educational institutions to recognize this obvious Eldorado in classroom applications of weapons of war. It is evident that the obsolete spit-ball will soon be replaced by the more efficient 30 caliber machine gun. In this case, the merits are twofold. Primarily, through combat experience, the veteran will have an edge on the instructor and the nonveterans as far as survival is concerned. Secondly, this natural selection of the fittest will help keep the enrollment of large schools under control.
