Epic Rivalry Read online

  Unlike Sputnik 1, the second satellite was fitted with a number of scientific instruments, a concerted move to make the second launch more than an aerial stunt—and to link it to the goals of the IGY. Sputnik 2 entered an orbital path with an apogee of 1,038 miles. Western scientists were amazed at the extent and sophistication of the instrumentation on this second artificial satellite. The Soviets made a number of precise and detailed measurements of solar radiation, among other experiments, on Sputnik 2. The final payload for the satellite was slightly over 1,100 pounds, which was a quantum leap from the weight of Sputnik 1. The implication for Western military planners was obvious and threatening: The Soviets with the R-7 rocket possessed the means to design a genuine intercontinental ballistic missile.16

  The rapid sequence of two Sputnik launches during October-November 1957 heralded the advent of a new space age. In this new arena for human exploration, the Soviet Union cast itself as the pathfinder. Moscow took pains in its official media to portray the stunning successes of their space program as evidence of the superiority of Russia’s socialist system. Marxism-Leninism had opened a new and bright future for humankind with its commitment to science and human progress. Little reference, if any, was made to the underlying importance of rocketry to its national security—the urgent need to build an effective intercontinental ballistic missile.

  Furthermore, Moscow was planning additional space spectaculars in the near term and beyond: Sputnik 3 would be launched on May 15, 1958, to be followed by Sputnik 4 and Sputnik 5 two years later. The Sputnik series would culminate in 1961 with Yuri Gagarin becoming the first human to orbit Earth. As it turned out, this was the golden age for the Soviet space program, a sequence of successful launches made possible by the powerful R-7, a military rocket that was cleverly deployed by Khrushchev for use in the emerging Soviet space program.

  FACING THE RUSSIAN CHALLENGE

  As long as the world of Soviet rocketry remained concealed behind a thick curtain of secrecy, Americans were denied any balanced understanding of the Soviet Union’s actual potential in what was now emerging as a space race. Most Americans came to the grim realization that these Sputnik launches represented a milestone: No longer could the Americans dismiss their Cold War rivals as technological inferiors. The Soviet Union had emerged as a superpower with a coherent program for space exploration. Some Americans understood that these space triumphs also portended ominous military implications for U.S. national security, despite the fact that they had been pursued under the cloak of scientific research.

  The popular response to Sputnik 1 and Sputnik 2 is best described as an awkward mix of incredulity, a curiosity about Soviet intentions, and a growing anxiety over the unprecedented national humiliation. Before the twin launches, Americans had little doubt that the IGY Earth satellite honors indeed would belong to the United States. One stunning example of this prevailing attitude was a book published earlier that year. It was written by Martin Caidin, considered one of the country’s leading and highly respected writers on aviation and aeronautics. Caidin also wrote fiction, most notably the novel that became the basis for The Six Million Dollar Man television series. Unfortunately, as events turned out, Vanguard! The Story of the First Man-Made Satellite was published as nonfiction. Following the story line of his title, Caidin began: “One day during the International Geophysical Year of 1957-1958, the entire world will focus its attention on a desolate stretch of sand lying along the…coast of Florida. On a date which is yet to be announced, a small scientific and military army will concentrate at Cape Canaveral…the heavily-guarded and secret launch site…. They will come to this lonely part of Florida to report to the Earth’s people one of the greatest moments in their history: the launching of Vanguard, the first artificial space satellite.”17

  The mood of national concern quickly took on a political aspect. President Eisenhower, through his scientific adviser James R. Killian, Jr., appointed in the immediate aftermath of the Sputnik launch, assured an alarmed electorate that the Soviet satellite was not consequential.18 Lyndon B. Johnson, then the Democratic Senate Majority Leader, took exception to the reassuring words uttered by the Eisenhower administration, arguing that Sputnik amounted to a latter-day Pearl Harbor. Once evoked, this sense of falling behind the Soviets in rocket technology would eventually evolve into the argument in the 1960 presidential election that America faced a “missile gap.”

  The autumn of 1957 became a season for renewed debate over national character and priorities. The postwar era of prosperity and consumer culture was viewed by many as hedonistic, a social context where Americans had lost their way. In contrast to this perceived decline in values, the Russians emerged in the minds of many Americans as formidable—highly disciplined, dedicated to science, intent on dominating the world. Edward R. Murrow, the legendary CBS news reporter, argued that Sputnik had “shattered a myth,” the notion that scientific advances were not possible in a Communist dictatorship. “We failed,” Murrow argued, “to recognize that a totalitarian state can establish its priorities, define its objectives, allocate its money, deny its people automobiles, television sets, and all kinds of comforting gadgets in order to achieve a national goal. The Russians have done this with the intercontinental missile, and now with the Earth satellite.” Edward Teller, a nuclear physicist attuned to the Cold War tensions and a fervent anti-communist, echoed Lyndon Johnson’s position that the United States had just been defeated in a battle more important than Pearl Harbor. Other voices added to the national despair. Bernard M. Baruch, a venerated public intellectual, called Americans to a new regimen of hard work, to abandon the passion for Detroit’s automobiles, “the gaudy, grinning, chrome-plated, tail-finned, wrap-around, Dynaflowing embodiment of…moral and spiritual flatulence.” Just hours after Sputnik 1 reached orbit, Margaret Mead, the famed American anthropologist, created her own “emergency Sputnik survey,” designed to collect raw data on the popular reactions to the Soviet space triumph. Joined by Rhoda Metraux, Mead would seek out the reactions to Sputnik from more than 5,000 individuals throughout the United States, Canada, and Hawaii.19

  Homer H. Hickam, author of the best-selling book Rocket Boys, mirrored as a 14-year-old the powerful passions ignited by Sputnik as a talisman of the space age. Hickam, who later pursued a career as a NASA engineer, observed Sputnik from the vantage point of his home in West Virginia. From his backyard, he became enthralled with the “bright little ball, moving majestically across the narrow star field between the ridgelines.” Awestruck by the satellite, a human creation catapulted into the heavens, Hickam noted that he stared at the orbiting ball “with no less rapt attention than if it had been God Himself in a golden chariot riding overhead. It soared with what seemed to me inexorable and dangerous purpose, as if there was no power in the universe that could stop it.”20 The young Hickam participated with countless millions who gathered on rooftops, in parks, and in backyards to catch a glimpse of the technical marvel of the age.

  Another American moved by the Sputnik event was Neil Armstrong, the future spacecraft commander of Apollo 11 and the first human to step on the surface of the moon. On that fateful day of October 4, Armstrong was in Los Angeles, California, attending a meeting of the Society of Experimental Test Pilots. As a member of this small fraternity, he had long lamented the general indifference of the media toward test pilots, even those involved with upper atmospheric flying with the X-15 rocket plane. For Armstrong, “what was happening in the test-flight world was a very hard sell to the press, and it became completely impossible once Sputnik came across the sky.” Later, he reflected on the larger meaning of October 4: “Sputnik did change our world. It absolutely changed our country’s view of what was happening, the potential of space. I am not sure how many people realized at that point just where this would lead. President Eisenhower was saying something like, ‘What’s the worry? It’s just one small ball.’ But I’m sure that was a facade behind which he had substantial concerns, because if they could put someth
ing into orbit, they could put a nuclear weapon on a target in the United States.” By 1962, Armstrong had abandoned the test-flight community for training as an astronaut: “I decided that if I wanted to get out of the atmospheric fringes and into deep space work, that was the way to go.” Sputnik had redefined the future—rockets, not winged craft, were now at the cutting edge of experimental flight.21

  For the editors of The Saturday Review, the annoying beeps of the Sputnik satellite indeed had mocked America’s “delusions of superiority.”22 However, this setback did not necessarily mean that there was some inadequacy in American science and technology. According to this analysis, America should undertake no crash program in arms development or redesign the existing educational curriculum of schools and colleges. One such voice was the poet Archibald MacLeish, former head of the Library of Congress. Appearing on the campus of the University of Kansas in the immediate aftermath of Sputnik, he dismissed the whole idea of ballistic missiles as an “idiotic dream.” Moreover, MacLeish reacted negatively to any “crash program to keep up with Russia,” arguing that “we are going to end up with a lot of plumbers and electrical helpers.” He expressed profound fears about the growing clamor for more technological training, a false remedy for what he viewed as an illusory problem—a notion that would exalt mastery of technique over all else, creating a new generation of “drones in the beehive…[who] will get stung in the end.”23

  Two weeks after the launch of Sputnik 1, poet and historian Carl Sandburg appeared on NBC’s Meet the Press, where the questions turned from pressing domestic issues to the matter of the Soviets launching the first Earth satellite. White-haired, then 79 years old, and widely revered as the eminent biographer of Abraham Lincoln, Sandburg took the occasion to renew his criticism of the Eisenhower administration. The Sputnik crisis, he pointed out, revealed certain tendencies in modern American life that had allowed the Russians to forge ahead in the sphere of space, such as “McCarthyism, philistinism, and neglect or lack of respect for sciences.”24

  Some prominent political figures, however, saw the crisis in more conventional terms, arguing that science and technology had faltered in the United States. Former President Harry Truman took the occasion of a Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner to join the chorus of strident critics of the Eisenhower administration. Speaking before an enthusiastic audience in Los Angeles on November 1, 1957, Truman noted that the Russians had “scored their greatest propaganda victory in many years.” The Sputnik achievement had taken place “while our Secretary of State [John Foster Dulles] dances on the brink of war, and the President cuts down the Army, the Navy, and Air Force.” In Truman’s assessment, President Eisenhower had been “slow to sense the new Russian danger, and when made aware of it, he was slow to do what he ought to do.” After these general partisan utterances, Truman identified the true culprit: “While the Russians were demonstrating their scientific advances, the administration was actually issuing secret orders cutting down the basic research in the defense establishment…serious blunders, shocking in their lack of judgment, imperiling the country’s safety.”25

  Amid the intense debate on the Sputnik launches, a clamor rose for the United States to launch its own Earth satellite. This demand became loud and demanding, forcing the government to announce that the first Vanguard launch would take place on December 6, 1957, as part of America’s contribution to the IGY celebration. This decision reflected the pressures of the moment, since only the first of the four stages of the Vanguard rocket had been tested successfully.

  Given the fact that two Soviet satellites were in orbit, the Vanguard launch attracted a global audience. At the moment of ignition, Vanguard’s engines roared to life, thrusting fire and smoke downward, giving a momentary feeling that the black-tipped rocket would lift majestically toward the heavens. Those hopes were soon crushed as the Vanguard—after rising a mere four feet—collapsed onto the launch pad in a cloud of fire and smoke. Millions watched the unfolding debacle in amazement. In the debris field of burning fuel and wreckage, the Vanguard satellite capsule somehow managed to survive intact, sending its signals from the charred ground zero. This embarrassing moment prompted the writer Dorothy Kilgallen to say, “Why doesn’t someone go out there and kill it?” Tom Wolfe, the author of The Right Stuff, described the scene at Cape Canaveral in devastating detail: “The first stage, bloated with fuel, explodes, and the rest of the rocket sinks into the sand beside the launch platform…very slowly, like a fat man collapsing into a Barcalounger…. This picture—the big buildup, the dramatic countdown, followed by the exploding cigar—was unforgettable.”26

  The foreign press, to the chagrin of the Eisenhower administration, was equally dismissive of Vanguard, regarding the calamity as a testament to the moribund state of America’s rocket program. No less troublesome was the shorthand widely used to describe the ill-fated Vanguard—words such as “Kaputnik” or “Stayputnik.” The rocket project itself was dubbed derisively as “Rearguard.” The United States greeted the arrival of 1958 in a mood of national depression. It was tempered, however, by a growing desire to catch up with the Russians.

  NARROWING THE GAP

  As unlikely as the coincidence might seem, on the night Sputnik 1 was launched, von Braun and General Medaris were entertaining Neil McElroy, the defense secretary-designate, and Army Secretary Wilbur Bruckner at the Redstone Arsenal. As the news of Sputnik 1 came in, von Braun wasted no time in making clear to these powerful visitors his disdain for Vanguard and its prospects for success and his frustration that “[w]e could have done this with our Redstone two years ago…. We knew they [the Soviet Union] were going to do it.” Well aware of Vanguard’s problems and delays, he said, “Vanguard will never make it. We have the hardware on the shelf. For God’s sake, turn us loose and let us do something.” Von Braun did not stop there: “We can put up a satellite in 60 days, Mr. McElroy.” He repeated “60 days” several times before being interrupted by Medaris: “No, Wernher, 90 days.” McElroy made no commitment before returning to Washington.27

  But Medaris and von Braun did not have long to wait. On November 8, 1957, just five days after the Soviet Union’s second space spectacular—the launch of Sputnik 2, carrying the first living creature into orbit—the U.S. Army finally received approval to launch a satellite. In making his decision, Defense Secretary McElroy, who had himself just taken office days earlier, recalled the confident can-do attitude voiced by Medaris and von Braun in Huntsville. He informed Medaris, who quickly gave von Braun the news: “Wernher, let’s go!”28

  Beyond readying one of its Jupiter-C missiles for launch, a major challenge for ABMA was the prompt development of the satellite it would carry. The Army team wanted a scientific payload that was considerably more sophisticated than that envisioned for Project Orbiter. Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) director William Pickering convinced General Medaris that his institution, which had been involved in Project Orbiter from the beginning, should retain its role going forward. JPL was awarded the contract for Explorer, as the new satellite was soon named. The satellite was an 80-inch-long, six-inch-wide cylinder, unlike Sputnik 1 and Vanguard, which were spheres. Explorer, weighing just over 30 pounds, was divided into two sections: one containing measuring instruments and radio transmitters totaling 18.5 pounds and the other section a solid-propellant rocket to kick it into orbit.29

  Of the three experiments onboard, by far the most significant was the one contributed by James Van Allen, in whose Maryland home the IGY had been conceived. Soon after that meeting, Van Allen had moved to the University of Iowa, where he headed the department of physics and astronomy. His Explorer experiment was a special Geiger counter that would bring him international fame by discovering two separate radiation belts of charged particles (cosmic rays) trapped by Earth’s magnetic field between 400 and 15,000 miles above the planet. The belts, named for Van Allen, constituted the first significant scientific discovery of the space age, and heralded the coming age of human exploration of the solar
system.30

  In 1958 the United States prepared to establish itself as a serious rival to the Soviet Union. With the launch of Explorer 1, it hoped to achieve its own milestone by firing an artificial satellite into orbit. For the American scientific community, Explorer 1 would become an important tool for scientific research.

  Von Braun and his team were more than ready for their hard-earned shot at orbiting the first American satellite. They had also learned some lessons from the Navy’s disaster. In the first place, Medaris ordered the Army launch plan to operate under tight security. For example, the launch rocket was referred to only as “Missile 29” in classified Army communications, to make it appear it if it were to be used for just another advanced Redstone missile test. The missile was flown to Cape Canaveral in late December 1957, its upper stages discreetly covered in canvas to hide their shape. The launch missile’s name was changed as well, but that wasn’t the result of Medaris’s security regime. Rather, in deference to Eisenhower’s concerns about the use of military missiles for IGY activities, the Jupiter-C’s used to launch satellites were known as the Juno 1.31

  All was ready on the nights of January 29-30, 1958, but the weather wouldn’t cooperate, with strong winds at higher altitudes ruling out a launch. Conditions were better the next night, and just before 11 p.m. the Juno 1 was headed for space. General Medaris was at the Cape to view the launch, but he was hardly alone. Despite the tight security he had ordered, word had gotten out, and thousands of cheering onlookers enjoyed the view from nearby beaches. Von Braun waited in the Pentagon’s communications center, with Pickering and Van Allen.32