MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
LABORATORY For NUCLEAR SCIENCE
CAMBRIDGE 39, MASSACHUSETTS

Rm. 26-569

February 1, 1960

Professor Joshua Lederberg
Dept. of Genetics

Stanford University

Palo Alto, California

Dear Joshuas

Thank you for your letter of January 19th and for the manuscript of
your talk in Nice. I was very much interested in it and especially
in your idea about the possible presence of large carbonaceous mol-
ecules in space, Certainly, we should be looking for such molecules.
Of course, one of the difficulties is how to collect them from a
fast-moving satellite without destroying them. Do you have any idea
in this connection?

I, too, am very worried about project Mercury and for exactly the

Same reasons that you so clearly express in your letter, Let me state
my present position in this matter, I believe that eventually man

will want to go into space and that there will be sound scientific
reasons for so doing, I feel, however, that no sienificant scientific
mission can be accomplished until man can be landed on the moon or a
planet and returned to the earth, or at least until he can circle the
planet on a low orbit. This is, obviously, in the fairly distant
future. It seems to me that the most important step in the preparation
for such missions is the development of powerful and reliable vehicles.
I am told that Mercury is also a necessary preliminary step toward manned
space flights, I am not yet convinced that this is true and especially
that the time is ripe for such a first step, and I have said so at the
last meeting of the Space Panel of the President's Advisory Committee.
However, I have the feeling that the decision about project Mercury has
been made a very high level and cannot be changed,

with best wishes,

Sincerely yours,

rome

Bruno Rossi

BRen
P.S, Incidentally, I am not a member, but just a consultant of PSAC,
and a member of its panel on space science heade y E. Purcell,