"SOMETHING NEW UNDER THE SUN, Satellites and the Beginning of the Space Age"
Copyright:Copernicus/Springer Verlag (New York)
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Book description.
Notes and Sources
The relative importance of written and oral records varies from section to section and even within sections, as does the balance between primary and secondary sources. In chapter one, for example, secondary sources were the only ones I had access to.
Even when there are records, they can be scanty or one-sided. The IGY, for example, is well recorded by the National Academy of Sciences, but the individual scientists, such as Verner Suomi, do not have extensive records. Often, the scientists and technologists were too busy as pioneers to record in detail what they were doing, and posterity was the last thing on their minds.
The NAS archives, which were of importance to the prologue; chapters two, three, and eleven; and to parts of the other sections have been well mined, and others have written extensively of the IGY and its relationship to the subsequent development of space science in the U.S. My "angle" was to explore the same material for the seeds of space technology and of application satellites.
Both oral and written primary sources are of equal importance to the navigation section. The pre-Transit chapters were possible only because of long and repeated interviews, while the chapters on Transit were possible only because of the material in APL's archives.
The meteorology section is based on interviews, a few primary sources, and secondary sources. It provides the clearest example of the emergence of application satellites trom the IGY. But access to declassified primary sources will eventually make the history of meteorology satellites much more complete.
The communication section is the most heavily based on primary source written records, supplemented with a few interviews.
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