Many happy returns?

摘要

When asked what he would like as a birthday present for the organisation he runs, Michael Griffin answers: "An understanding that not everything that is worthwhile can be justified in terms of immediate dollars and cents on the balance sheet." It is an artful reply. But nasa, America's space agency, did not survive to be 50 years old without being artful. The agency was born on July 29th 1958. It was thrown together in response to Sputnik, the first artificial satellite, which was launched by the Soviet Union in October 1957, and it was given extra impetus by the flight of the first cosmonaut, Yuri Gagarin, in April1961. That led to the space race, and NASA's finest hour. John Kennedy, America's president at the time, responded to Gagarin's flight by saying that an American should go to the moon by the end of the decade. In doing so, he turned on a tap of dollars and cents that, within five years, was running so fast it gave nasa access to three-quarters of 1% of America's gdp.