Milton Rosen

Both were actively guided, and fueled with the same propellants (alcohol and liquid oxygen [LOX]), which were fed to a single rocket engine by turbine-driven pumps.

In the early 1950s, the American Rocket Society set up an ad hoc Committee on Space Flight, of which Rosen became the chair.

Encouraged by conversations between Richard W. Porter of General Electric and Alan T. Waterman, Director of the National Science Foundation (NSF), Rosen on November 27, 1954, completed a report describing the potential value of launching an Earth satellite.

However, there was also a strong hidden motive higher in the US government: to establish a precedent for overflight rights to Eastern Bloc territory with a non-military civilian research rocket, in preparation for the highly secret national reconnaissance satellite program then underway.

Rosen went on after Vanguard to be involved in a number of important NASA studies and committees that helped to define the family of large launch vehicles, designed from the beginning not as missiles, but as space launchers, that were eventually to be key components of the Apollo program.

He was the principal author of a report to President Eisenhower, dated January 27, 1959,[7] which proposed three families of vehicles needed to support an ambitious National Space Program.

The second family discussed, called Juno V at the time, eventually evolved into the Saturn I rockets, using clusters of eight medium-sized, 188,000 lbf (840 kN) thrust H-1 engines to yield 1,500,000 lbf (6,700 kN) liftoff thrust, and nine clustered propellant tanks adapted from the Army's existing Jupiter and Redstone rockets.