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- 9 - Despite these considerations, educational institutions would probably not employ sounding rockets extensively as a teaching tool were it not for their great value in giving the student practical experience in the techniques, engineering, logistics, and discipline that are so essential to a successful experiment. In taking on responsibility in the planning, testing, and flying the experiment and analyzing the results, the student also learns that his ideas must be rigorously thought out and that they must be constantly checked: although some allowance for mistakes is possible since a re-flight can some- times be supported, the pressure to do it properly the first time is very great. Rocket work provides excellent training for complex technological pur- suits, including satellite research. Finally, rocket experiments lend them- selves well to M.S. and Ph.D. programs since they provide excellent thesis material and data that can in many cases be examined and digested by one individual. As one experimenter has said, "The launch pad has become a part of the scientific research laboratory and, therefore, graduate students must become involved. Rocket research provides the best opportunity to accomplish this important facet of the space program." The greater likelihood of experimental failure, owing to student inexper- ience, causes some university experimenters to have reservations about the suitability of rocket programs for the majority of students. This appears to be particularly true of astronomy payloads, probably because they tend to be the most complex, costly, and time consuming, and the risks of mission failure - through no fault of the student - are greater. It is a very significant dis- advantage for student experimenters that in rocket research all the operational parameters of an instrument must be correctly determined on the first try. Additional flights for refining the measurements introduce both the difficulty involved in additional funding and stretch out the program longer than may be desirable. The student who must build his own flight instrument is likely to be very tempted to place more emphasis in his thesis on describing the instru- ment and the experimental difficulties he encountered than on analyzing and interpreting his findings. These negative aspects are not so important at institutions where adequate technical and financial support are available and where experienced advisors can guide the student into an experimental project that is likely to succeed on the first or second try. Even then it is helpful if the program has enough depth to provide data for theses regardless of occasional failures, and if less expensive types of rockets are used. The most successful experiments by grad- uate students seem to have in common the features of simplicity of instrumenta- tion and the small size of rockets. In cases where direct student involvement in rocket flight programs is not feasible or is undesirable, participation in related laboratory studies or in analysis and interpretation of existing rocket data has proved very successful. Funding for Rocket Research According to information supplied to this Committee by government agencies, the total support for United States rocket research in fiscal year l968 was
