by Amy Cherrix
The two men agreed to continue developing their satellite in secret. The army was technically forbidden to work on its satellite because the navy had won the right to launch first, but no one said anything about members of von Braun’s team continuing the satellite work on their own time. Peenemünde veteran Ernst Stuhlinger carried out calculations for the project in his home garage. Once, when Randy Clinton heard an inspection team was on its way from Washington, he stashed the satellite in the trunk of his car to hide it from them.
On September 20, 1956, at Cape Canaveral, Florida, the Huntsville engineers conducted a scheduled test of the Jupiter-C rocket, the same rocket included in their satellite proposal. The test had been approved, but the Pentagon had concerns about the rocket’s fourth stage—its satellite compartment. Military brass in Washington feared von Braun would secretly launch the satellite before the navy team had completed their work, stealing Vanguard’s thunder. Just before the launch, von Braun received a phone call from his superior, Major General Bruce Medaris. “Wernher, I must put you under direct orders personally to inspect that fourth stage to make sure it is not live,” he said. By “live,” Medaris meant carrying a satellite. Von Braun had no intention of launching a satellite that day, but he managed to make it into the history books anyway. The Jupiter-C set a record for an American rocket, soaring to an altitude of six hundred miles and traveling a distance of more than thirty-three hundred miles. Von Braun was overjoyed by the record-setting flight, dancing when he heard the news. If the rocket had been carrying a satellite instead of a nose cone stuffed with sand, America could have achieved another record that day: launching the world’s first satellite.
News of the Jupiter-C’s successful flight was not formally announced, but the information leaked days later. Wildly exaggerated details of the event reached the Soviet Union, and an alarmed Korolev mistakenly believed von Braun had attempted a satellite launch. Were the Americans that close to succeeding? The misinformation heightened tensions for Korolev as he raced to save his struggling satellite project, known as Object D, which was mired in technical problems—big ones.
Chapter 16
Object D
Object D tipped the scales at a hefty 1.3 tons. The R-7 could not lift it off the ground. In mid-November 1956, Mikhail Tikhonravov, who helped Korolev design it, had an idea. “What if we make the satellite a little lighter, a little simpler,” he proposed. Why did the satellite need to contain so many scientific instruments if their main goal was to achieve orbit? Korolev agreed. The simplified satellite would house only one or two radio transmitters and a power source. Tikhonravov’s solution also slashed production time and costs. The new, streamlined satellite could be fully redesigned and tested in a couple of months. If it was destroyed during launch, assembling a replacement would be fast and affordable.
As the weeks passed, pressure increased for members of Korolev’s team working on the new, smaller satellite. Viacheslav Lappo, among the youngest of the engineers, was tasked with the development of a transmitter to broadcast audio signals back to Earth from Object D. But Lappo faced a difficult truth. He had no method by which to guarantee the signal’s clarity in space. Temperature fluctuations, cosmic radiation, even meteorites could disrupt the transmission. It was impossible to predict and control the variables that determined success or failure.
Lappo was at his desk late one night when the work-obsessed chief designer dropped in to check on his progress. Korolev didn’t sleep much, despite his grueling schedule. He asked Lappo to play the signal for him. The steady bleep-bleep-bleep sound delighted Korolev, who asked, “Couldn’t you make it squeak a word of some kind?”
While Korolev finalized his satellite and prepared to launch it with his R-7, in the US, von Braun grew increasingly concerned that the Soviets would succeed first. Convinced that the navy could not build and perfect Vanguard’s top stage in time, he devised another secret backup plan. A Jupiter-C rocket was moved into what he called a “long-term storage test.” To military leaders at the Pentagon, it looked as if the team was conducting a routine experiment. In reality, von Braun was safely storing a rocket that could launch a satellite on short notice.
As more time passed, intelligence reports confirmed von Braun’s worst fear, that the Soviets could soon launch their satellite. The Vanguard still wasn’t ready. In his desperation to beat the Soviets, von Braun made one final offer, suggesting that the navy’s satellite be launched into orbit with the army’s Jupiter-C rocket, instead of Vanguard.
The navy declined the deal. Exasperated, von Braun had a few choice words for John Hagen, director of the Vanguard program. “Tell him if he wants to, he can paint ‘Vanguard’ right up the side of my rocket. He can do anything he wants to, but he is to use my rocket, not his, because my rocket will work and his won’t.”
It was a last-ditch play and it had failed. Like it or not, the navy would attempt to launch the first American satellite, and von Braun would be forced to watch from the sidelines along with the rest of the country. He believed that his chance would come eventually. He just hoped that moment arrived before a Soviet satellite.
Chapter 17
Sputnik
OCTOBER 4, 1957
BAIKONUR COSMODROME, KAZAKHSTAN
The weather was unseasonably warm for autumn in the desert of Kazakhstan. It was launch day at the Baikonur Cosmodrome. The new rocket complex had been completed in just two years.
Korolev’s newly redesigned satellite was packed into the nose cone of the nine-story R-7 rocket. Object D had shrunk. Now the satellite was about the size of a basketball, weighing just under 184 pounds. It gleamed like polished silver, per Korolev’s instructions that it be light-reflective to increase its chances of visibility to the naked eye. He wanted anyone, whether they owned a telescope or not, to be able to see what the Soviets had achieved. Four antennae attached to the sphere would be triggered after it was ejected into orbit. The satellite had been renamed Sputnik, Russian for “fellow traveler.”
Fifteen minutes before launch, the area surrounding the pad was cleared of all personnel. At the ten-minute mark, Korolev arrived in the command crew’s bunker to observe liftoff. He was visibly on edge. He reacted to the slightest sound or comment, “instantly on the alert to see what was going on,” one witness recalled.
“Ten minutes to readiness,” a voice boomed through the loudspeaker. Twenty-four-year-old lieutenant Boris Chekunov was responsible for activating the launch. He placed his hand on the launch key and waited.
“Kliuch na start!” announced an operator.
Chekunov turned the key on his panel from left to right.
“Pusk!” Chekunov pushed the launch button. All five of Valentin Glushko’s powerful engines exploded to life. Vibrations shook the bunker as the 273-ton rocket thundered on the launchpad.
“Est’ kontakt pod’ema!” At this final “Contact liftoff” command, the support arms of the launch complex attached to the rocket fell open. In a moment of world-defining firsts, the R-7 was on its own. From the world’s first spaceport, the first intercontinental ballistic missile soared from the sand of the Kazakhstan desert toward a sea of black sky. If Korolev succeeded, it would punch the world’s first satellite into orbit.
Inside the bunker it was too soon to celebrate. The stoic chief designer was unmoved. Once the rocket was out of visual range, time seemed to stop. “There was absolute silence,” one Soviet official recalled. “All that could be heard was the breathing of the people and the quiet static in the loudspeaker. . . . And then, from very far off, there appeared, at first very quietly, and then louder and louder, those ‘bleep-bleeps’ that confirmed it was in orbit.” Everything was functioning perfectly—for the moment.
Outside, Viacheslav Lappo and his colleague Konstantin Gringauz sat inside a van, headphones over their ears, straining to hear Sputnik’s signal. When the first bleeps sounded, they immediately called Korolev to report.
Korolev continued to hold his emotions in chec
k. He would relax when the signal returned after Sputnik’s first orbit was completed and not a moment before. The chief designer and a number of his crew left the bunker and made their way to Lappo and Gringauz’s van to wait for Sputnik’s next transmission.
An hour and a half later, Lappo heard Sputnik’s steady beat return and shouted, “It’s there! It’s there! Turn on the tape recorders!” As the sun rose, Korolev finally rejoiced with his team, who laughed and kissed one another on each cheek. When their “fellow traveler” once again broadcast its reliable signal, the teary-eyed men looked to the sky and listened as Sputnik called back to them from the stars.
Korolev addressed the team around him. He spoke of the enormity of their accomplishment, congratulating all of them, taking care to acknowledge “the junior specialists, technicians, and designers,” thanking them for their “titanic labor.” As Lappo’s transmitter broadcast its repetitive bleeps from inside Sputnik, amateur radio operators around the world began to hear the first-ever man-made sound to be transmitted from outer space.
The world’s first satellite, Sputnik 1.
Chapter 18
Bleep-Bleep-Bleep
OCTOBER 4, 1957
As Sputnik zoomed around the Earth, von Braun was on his way to a cocktail party at the Redstone Arsenal officers’ club, unaware that the Soviets had successfully launched a satellite. He and his boss at ABMA, Major General Bruce Medaris, had spent the day escorting President Eisenhower’s nominee for defense secretary, Neil McElroy, around their facilities. Von Braun stopped by his office before the party, and the telephone rang.
“What do you think of it?” a British newspaper reporter asked.
“Think of what?” asked von Braun.
“The Russian satellite. The one they just orbited.”
Von Braun arrived at the party and immediately relayed the information to McElroy. “We knew they were going to do it!” 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. We can put that satellite up in sixty days, Mr. McElroy! Just give us the green light and sixty days.”
Medaris did a quick mental calculation of the time required to move their Jupiter-C rocket from its “long-term storage test” and make the satellite operational. He knew there was no way they could do it within the two months von Braun was promising. He had to rein in the headstrong engineer. “Ninety days,” Medaris said to von Braun, who immediately understood. He backed off and agreed to the additional month. Without a promise from McElroy, or permission from his superiors, Medaris secretly told von Braun to “get the stuff out on the floor and go to work on it just as if we had a directive to proceed.”
As a new day dawned on October 5, fourteen-year-old Homer Hickam Jr.—who later became a NASA engineer—was sound asleep in his cozy bed when his mother awakened him. She looked worried. “Come listen,” she said. Hickam dressed and made his way downstairs. While he ate buttered toast and sipped hot chocolate, his mother turned on the radio. He expected to hear rock and roll music. Instead, he heard a bleep-bleep-bleep sound coming from the radio and the announcer’s voice saying that “the tone was coming from something called Sputnik. It was Russian and it was in space.” Hickam’s mother knew that science-fiction novels and magazines fascinated her smart and curious son. In their small coal-mining town of Coalwood, West Virginia, he was like many American kids who were swept up in the science-fiction craze of the 1950s. Hickam’s mother hoped her son could explain the strange sound. “What is this thing, Sonny?” she asked.
Hickam knew exactly what it was and why it mattered. Someone had finally done it! While he slept, the Soviets had launched the world’s first Earth-orbiting satellite and delivered a punishing technological blow to America. The man-made moon orbited the planet every ninety-eight minutes, broadcasting its telltale bleep-bleep-bleep from space.
That evening, in the backyard of his family’s home, Hickam waited for Sputnik to appear in the night sky. He spotted it just as Korolev had intended, without the aid of a telescope. “The bright little ball [moved] majestically across the narrow star field between the ridgelines,” Hickam later wrote. “I stared at it 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 were no power in the universe that could stop it.” Inspired by Sputnik’s appearance over Coalwood, Hickam started his own rocket club with a group of his friends, the Big Creek Missile Agency.
There was no stopping what Sputnik had started. It was the dawn of the space age, and all around the world, Korolev’s satellite was sparking the imaginations of young people like Hickam, who had only read of such things in science-fiction novels. They watched Sputnik succeed and believed that they could also be a part of it. The dream of spaceflight had become reality.
Not everyone was inspired by Sputnik’s arrival. Some people hardly noticed or cared. Still others were frightened, as newspapers thudded onto doorsteps with ominous headlines: “Russians Win Race to Launch Earth Satellite,” “Space Age Is Here,” “Russia Wins Race into Outer Space,” “Russians Launch First Artificial Moon.” People across the country crowded around radios and televisions to listen for its signal. When night fell, they looked up, scanning the sky for the mysterious silver ball racing around the planet. Imaginations ran wild with doomsday scenarios. Was the satellite carrying a bomb? What did the bleeping sound mean? Was it a code of some sort? Did Sputnik have cameras aboard that could take pictures of classified American military bases? And the most frightening prospect of all: Was a missile powerful enough to launch a satellite into orbit also capable of launching a nuclear weapon against the United States?
At a press conference five days after the historic appearance of Sputnik, Eisenhower tried to ease the country’s fears by downplaying its significance, saying that Sputnik didn’t “raise [his] apprehensions, not one iota.” It wasn’t what some Americans wanted to hear. How could their president remain calm in the face of this disturbing turn of events? Didn’t he care about the loss of American prestige? They worried that he was underestimating the threat and was dangerously out of touch.
Eisenhower was not out of touch. Far from it. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had previously warned him that a Soviet satellite launch was possible. In fact, Eisenhower was relieved that the Soviets had been the first to launch a satellite, because they had unwittingly established the freedom of space principle. Now any nation launching a satellite that flew over a foreign country could expect to do so without provoking hostility. Sputnik had proven to be a windfall for American national security interests. Eisenhower would be able to deploy secret spy satellites to monitor the Soviet Union, which he believed was more important than any scientific gain. What Eisenhower failed to understand was the demoralizing impact Sputnik would have on his country.
The appearance of this strange new Soviet technology heightened tensions as the Cold War entered a new phase. The stage was set for a prestige fight between the United States and the Soviet Union. Rather than risk annihilating one another with nuclear weapons, the rivalry would unfold in the race to outer space. At stake would be recognition as the world’s dominant scientific power. The Soviet Union had taunted America like a playground bully who had thrown the first punch. But when America tried to hit back, it would be swinging at a ghost.
Chapter 19
The Invisible Man
Korolev’s Sputnik victory made him one of the most important men in the Soviet Union. Intelligence agents feared he could be kidnapped or assassinated. He had to disappear before anyone in the West could discover his true identity.
An invisible man could not be threatened, Soviet officials reasoned, but he couldn’t be acknowledged either. Korolev was forbidden to claim public credit for any of his achievements, including Sputnik. Around 1957, his name became a state secret and, along with Valentin Glushko’s and those of several other key missile program desi
gners, began disappearing from historical records. If Korolev was mentioned at all, it was only by his title, “chief designer,” to conceal his identity from the world.
During this time, the Nobel Prize Committee contacted the Soviet Union requesting the name of the person responsible for Sputnik. Khrushchev refused to disclose Korolev’s identity, declaring that the achievement belonged to the Soviet people, not to one person. If Korolev felt any bitterness about not being allowed to claim public credit for his satellite, it did not diminish his desire to innovate. Sputnik, the world would soon discover, was just the beginning.
In the United States, news of the world’s first orbiting satellite had been announced in the New York Times with a six-column-wide headline, historically used only for declarations of war: “Soviet Fires Earth Satellite into Space; It Is Circling the Globe at 18,000 M.P.H.; Sphere Tracked in 4 Crossings over U.S.” By contrast, in the Soviet Union, the press announcement was barely noticeable, buried in the morning edition of the Soviet newspaper, Pravda, beneath a larger headline that read: “Winter Is an Urgent Task.” Khrushchev had not anticipated the international outcry over Sputnik’s launch. Like Eisenhower in the US, his priority was defense, not scientific experiments. But the worldwide media craze in the wake of Sputnik signaled to Khrushchev that Korolev’s pet satellite projects could be a propaganda gold mine. By deliberately hiding the Soviets’ weaknesses while hyping Korolev’s victories in the media, Khrushchev would craft an exaggerated image of the Soviet Union’s scientific and military power. It got him thinking: What if Korolev could do it again?