No. 7,000 24 August, 1962
The plaudits which greeted the two Soviet astronauts on their return from their simultaneous voyage in space are well deserved. Russia's technological and scientific achievement is a considerable one, and it would be ungenerous and ungracious for Western commentators not to acknowledge it. However, when admiration for such a feat produces wild statements about matters which it hardly effects at all or is used as a factor to influence world affairs, then it is time to call a halt. The harmfulness of such statements as that made by Sir Bernard Lovell to the effect that the Russians are now 'masters of space' in a military sense does not only lie in their exaggeration. Exaggerated they are, since the whole lesson of the history of technology appears to that no such thing as a permanent advance in one field is possible, and American research over a wide front may well compensate for the advantage in rocket motors possessed by the Soviet Union.
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