Scot Laney
CEO Evergreen Aviation & Space Museum
If October 4, 1957 started like any other day it certainly didn’t end like one. Surprise, the Soviet’s put the world on notice that day that they could launch a not especially handsome little sphere into earth orbit. Not only that, but the little blob also emitted a somewhat annoying little beep 
or all to hear. Translated from Beep to English (as if that was possible) those beeps said, repeatedly:
“Just think, I could be an atomic weapon, and I could be parked right on the White House steps”.
At least that was the take away from a now very worried United States government. Not to mention most other governments in the free world.
So virtually overnight the entire U.S. space program was reconstructed into a tit for tat rocket (read ICBM) demonstration. We had to prove to the Soviets that our ICBM technology was up to the task of bouncing our own atomic weapon off the wall of the Kremlin, maintaining the horrific yet necessary balance of MAD. To not add a new level of stress to an already deeply concerned public why not cloak the whole thing in something grand? Why not shoot for the moon? That way we could develop increasingly more capable space rockets that, naked of the NASA markings, were just more capable ICBMs.
Genius!
But what if Sputnik never went up? What would the space program have looked like? Likely it would have been a continuation of the X-plane project. The X-15 was a capable space vehicle and the next X-planes that were being developed were
even more so. Would we even have gone to the moon? It’s doubtful since the moon really played a proxy role in the rocket program, the right goal to distract the public from the fact that we were really taking the opportunity to up our “destroy the entire world if necessary” game in the hope that, because we could, no one ever would. Such were the times.
Eventually we did build that next generation X-plane. We called it the Space Shuttle. Once we worked through the whole rocket thing.
