be overly optimistic, they can scarcely be
dismissed as irresponsible in the light of what has already happened.

[Illustration: FIGURE 6.--Booster engines of tomorrow, such as
this mockup of the 1,500,000 pound thrust single engine, will place
broad requirements on men and materials.]

CREATION OF NEW INDUSTRIES

Whether or not we think of the missile-space business as being a
self-contained industry, the requirements and exigencies of space
exploration can be expected to result in the creation of new or greatly
strengthened industrial branches, for example:

_Research_

This phase of the American economy is having a phenomenal growth. Not
only have many established industries now placed research high on their
organizational charts, but hundreds, perhaps thousands, of new
businesses are springing up which are entirely devoted to research and
development. R. & D., as it is called, is their stock in trade, their
only product. And space exploration appears to have given them their
greatest boost.

One recent study on the subject regards research as the fourth major
industrial revolution to take place in American history, following the
advents of steam mechanization, steel, electricity-and-internal
combustion engines.

The fourth industrial revolution, ours, is unique in the number of
people working on it, its complexity, and its power to push the
economy at a rate previously impossible.

Today between 5,000 and 50,000 _technical entrepreneurs_ (top R. &
D. engineers, leading scientists, and highly effective technical
managers) are directly analogous to an estimated 50 to 500 men in
all of the first three periods. Thus about 100 times the effort in
terms of qualitative (effective, creative, patent-producing)
manpower is being spent on the fourth revolution as on the other
three combined.

Total manpower, of course, is much more than that: there are
probably 700,000 engineers and industrially oriented scientists in
the United States today, as against 2,000 even as late as Edison's
first high voltage light bulb. Whereas Edison worked with 20 to 100
scientists in his laboratory, and Fulton labored alone, there are
5,000 industrial laboratories today employing from 20 to 7,300
technical men each.[30]

_New power sources_

One of the greatest demands of spacecraft of the future will be for new
sources of power. While rocket