A few weeks later, the transfer of von Braun and a hundred and twenty-six of his top rocketeers to the United States was officially approved as part of Operation Paperclip, a quickly planned and executed evacuation of thousands of German scientists, engineers, and technicians. They were soon granted security clearances and began arriving in September as “wards of the Army,” requiring no entry permits—but first they were provided with false employment histories, and their Nazi Party affiliations were expunged from their records. The U.S. military claimed they had not imported any “ardent Nazis,” but there seemed to be plenty of ways to avoid being classified as “ardent.”
The original idea was to bring the Germans over to America for six months to help defeat Japan—a costly invasion of the Japanese home islands had seemed unavoidable, since the Japanese had ignored Allied demands for unconditional surrender. The V-2, some thought, might be of use in the Pacific. But a U.S. Army Air Forces B-29 dropped a nuclear bomb on Hiroshima on August 6 and another on Nagasaki on August 9, resulting in at least a hundred and thirty thousand deaths and the complete obliteration of each city; Japan raised the white flag on August 15. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union was shaping up to be a formidable postwar enemy, and the Germans began signing five-year contracts with the U.S. Army.
In September of 1945, von Braun and company arrived in Fort Bliss, just north of El Paso, Texas, and were subjected to a loose form of house arrest in surplus barracks—“prisoners of peace,” as they referred to themselves, half jokingly. They were not allowed to leave the base without a military escort. With their families set to arrive a year later, the scientists had time to explore the exotic landscapes around them. The Texas desert was unappealing to most, though von Braun found it beautiful in an Old West kind of way—he and many Germans had an obsession with cowboys and Indians, chiefly due to Karl May, a late-nineteenth-century German novelist who had written dozens of hugely popular Westerns without ever visiting America.
Over the next five years, von Braun and his colleagues spent most of their time assembling V-2s, launching them at the White Sands Proving Ground in New Mexico, seventy-eight miles north, and training personnel in the use of rockets and guided missiles, all the while avoiding the subject of Nazi war crimes and adjusting to their new lives. In 1947, the thirty-four-year-old von Braun was granted permission to return to Germany to marry his beautiful blond first cousin Maria von Quistorp, who was eighteen; first-cousin marriages were not uncommon among the old European aristocracy. (He was accompanied by American agents to prevent the Russians from abducting him, and U.S. Army MPs went along on the honeymoon.) A few weeks later he returned to America with his bride and his parents, the Baron and Baroness von Braun, who had lost almost everything in the war, including their ancestral estate, which had been confiscated by the Russians.
During the next few years, with rare exceptions, any new rocketry ideas of von Braun’s were dismissed, and his dreams of space exploration remained just that. He and his team could take only meager satisfaction in the fact that their sixty-odd V-2 launches (most of which were successful) were furthering high-altitude research, as their increasingly accurate rockets penetrated the upper atmosphere carrying various scientific experiments. But in the spring of 1950, the U.S. Army—alarmed at the deteriorating world situation, particularly the escalating tensions between South Korea and the Communist countries of China and North Korea—moved them to the superior facilities of two adjacent, shuttered arsenals at Huntsville, in northern Alabama. The former chemical weapons factory and depot were combined to make the Redstone Arsenal. There, with larger budgets, they would develop a rocket and missile center. The Tennessee River ran along the arsenal’s southern edge, and the foothills of the Appalachians lay to the west. The Germans appreciated the lush green hills of Huntsville more than they had arid West Texas, and they settled into a project worthy of their talents: developing the Redstone, a large missile with a two-hundred-mile range—a kind of “super V-2.” When Chinese intervention in North Korea that winter spiked fears of an imminent Soviet invasion of Western Europe, American rocket development became a high priority.
For his part, von Braun set out to educate the American public—and the world—about space exploration and legitimize a subject widely perceived as Buck Rogers silliness. In 1951, a paper he authored on organizing a manned mission to Mars was read at an astronautics symposium. The next year, he wrote eight articles for Collier’s magazine discussing manned rockets, space stations, space shuttles, and moon expeditions—“Man Will Conquer Space Soon!” blared the series’ title. Vivid, detailed color illustrations by respected artists such as Chesley Bonestell accompanied the stories. Despite the U.S. government’s lack of interest in von Braun’s true passion, he continued to write and speak about his extravagant ideas. He also began working with Walt Disney on three TV specials. The first, which aired on March 9, 1955, was seen by forty-two million viewers, an impressive 25 percent of the U.S. population. His zeal was infectious. With von Braun as their professor, Americans were acing Space Exploration 101—and they understood, or thought they understood, the implications of those Sputniks in 1957.
One American not so excited about space exploration was President Eisenhower, who refused to encourage the army’s increasingly ambitious plans for military rocket applications. As a result, the program was modest and underfunded. But von Braun was permitted to develop a multistage version of the Redstone, an advance that allowed rocket stages to be jettisoned after use, resulting in a lighter craft that accelerated more easily. Dubbed the Jupiter-C, it could deliver warheads to distant targets. By September 1954, von Braun’s Huntsville team had expanded to a thousand employees. The navy also began developing its own rocket, the science-oriented Vanguard, and the air force produced a much larger military booster, the Atlas.
In July 1955, the Pentagon chose the Vanguard, a superior rocket but one that at the time existed only on paper, to be first in space. Von Braun was incensed, declaring that the Vanguard—which some suggested should be renamed Rearguard for its slipping schedule—would fail. The Redstone had been deemed operational, and his Jupiter-C, which was capable of boosting a satellite into orbit, was close to completion. Von Braun had been pushing to launch a satellite for years, but he was allowed to prepare the Jupiter-C as a backup to the Vanguard. On September 20, 1956, von Braun and his team fired a successful Jupiter-C that reached a world-record altitude of 682 miles and a speed of 12,800 miles per hour. When he asked for permission to use it to put a satellite into orbit, he was refused. Neither Eisenhower nor the Pentagon believed that it was important to beat the Soviets into space. The backup Jupiter-Cs went into storage. Sputnik’s success infuriated and depressed him.
On December 6, 1957, at Cape Canaveral, the navy prepared to send a small four-pound satellite into orbit using their Vanguard rocket, an event that would be broadcast live. The Cape, as it was known—officially, the Florida Missile Test Range, on Patrick Air Force Base—was the military’s new missile-launch facility, built several years earlier on an abandoned naval station over a desolate stretch of gator- and mosquito-infested sand and palmetto scrub arcing out from the eastern coast of Florida. In truth, the launch was only a test, the missile’s first, and the navy was not happy with the pressure of having it broadcast live on national TV. But millions watched, eager to see America’s answer to Sputnik, and they were appalled when the seventy-foot rocket lifted about four feet off the ground and then exploded in a huge orange-and-yellow fireball. The grapefruit-size satellite fell from the nose section and rolled away into some bushes, where it began transmitting signals. “Kaputnik” and “Flopnik” were just two of the derisive names the press came up with for the disaster. American humiliation was complete when Russia’s UN delegate suggested that the United States take advantage of a Soviet program that offered technical assistance to underdeveloped nations.
Another Vanguard misfire—this one in secret—would occur two months later. But von Braun had already been
given the green light. He and about forty of his German colleagues and their families had officially been sworn in as American citizens in 1955, and they had long since become civil service employees. They had spent years refining their V-2 into the much superior Redstone, a short-range missile originally built to carry an atomic warhead and then converted into a three-stage rocket capable of escaping Earth’s gravity. On the night of January 31, 1958, von Braun journeyed to the Cape by train—the base was remote, and air travel there was infrequent—to witness the culmination of almost thirty years of work, but upon arrival, he was disappointed to find that he would not be allowed to watch. Instead, he was flown to Washington, DC, for what the army hoped would be a triumphant announcement. It was. The white-bodied, black-tipped Jupiter-C, with a fourth stage added and renamed Juno, lifted off and launched an eight-foot-long, thirty-one-pound tube called Explorer into the sky, though it took tracking stations an hour and a half to confirm that the satellite had been successfully boosted into orbit. A large crowd of reporters and radio and TV broadcasters showed up for a 1:30 a.m. press conference at the Great Hall of the National Academy of Sciences to hear the former Nazi who had saved America’s honor speak. They didn’t leave for two hours.
America was finally in space, and in the race.
After the successful launch of Explorer, von Braun was feted like a war hero. Unlike Sputnik, Explorer had accomplished something beyond the simple fact of its orbit. The satellite had carried the same radiation sensors as the Vanguard, and they had detected the belts of radiation ringing the Earth that were later named after the scientist who directed the experiment, James Van Allen. Von Braun appeared on the cover of Time magazine and was invited to the White House to be congratulated by President Eisenhower, who didn’t much like him—von Braun had not only publicly disagreed with the president when he downplayed the importance of Sputnik but also campaigned constantly and loudly for space funding. It was vindication of the sweetest sort. Von Braun was the right man at the right time, and he knew it. His speaking fees went up dramatically, and a movie about his life was announced.
At a prestigious gathering in Chicago a few weeks later, von Braun waxed eloquent—by this time, his written English was as good as the best speechwriters’. He delineated the grave danger to “free men everywhere” from the “Red menace” and asked whether America could “meet the total competition of aggressive communism and still preserve its way of life.” In a speech that sounded like a presidential State of the Union address, he spoke of the importance of education in meeting the challenge and of the many years it would take to catch up to and pull ahead of the Russians. He finished with a call to arms: “We have stepped into a new, high road from which there can be no turning back.”
If the challenge had not been formally accepted before, it was now.
Chapter Two
Of Monkeys and Men
It doesn’t really require a pilot, and besides, you’d have to sweep the monkey shit off the seat before you could sit down.
Chuck Yeager
Unlike most other international contests, those involving space required massive expenditures of money, and a president determined to balance the budget was in no mood to grant them. From top secret intelligence based on reports from U-2 spy planes, which had been operating since 1956, Eisenhower knew that the United States was comfortably ahead of the USSR in guided missile development—the opposite of what most Americans assumed. He continued to deny or minimize the importance of the Sputniks, insisting there was no value in a space race with the Soviets. He even went so far as to make several TV appearances in an effort to convince the American people of this. He took great pains to point out the difference between satellites and rockets designed for scientific purposes and those intended for military use.
But neither the public nor the press seemed to care about the distinction, and the May 15, 1958, successful launch into orbit of Sputnik 3, a 2,926-pound research satellite with a large array of instruments, only increased the nation’s anxiety. The United States and the USSR had yet to engage in full-scale combat, but each side was heavily armed, and the doctrine of mutually assured destruction was of little comfort. Further fueled by an almost constant barrage of opinion pieces and articles on the imminent dangers of Soviets in space, not to mention speeches and statements by Senator Lyndon Johnson and other Democratic congressmen eager to exploit the purported missile gap for their own political gain, Americans quickly began demanding a full-fledged space program.
The president grudgingly conceded, though he dreaded adding another bureaucracy and the expenditures it would create. To Eisenhower, fed up with the endless territorial squabbling of the army, navy, and air force over space—he would later warn Americans of the “military-industrial complex”—it had become increasingly clear that the program needed to be nonmilitary. (In January 1958, he had even proposed to Russia that the two superpowers agree that “outer space should be used for peaceful purposes.” The Soviets rejected the offer.)
Despite Ike’s insistence that there was no cause for alarm, the Democrat-controlled Congress chartered the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in July 1958, and on October 1, NASA became operational. The new civilian organization would incorporate the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), an agency devoted to aeronautical R and D, and its far-flung research and test centers (most significantly Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory, on the banks of the Chesapeake Bay in Virginia, to be renamed Langley Research Center). It would also include other important facilities, such as the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. Transferred to the fledgling agency were ongoing projects from the three branches of the military, each of which had been developing its own missiles and edging closer to space; the army had its Explorer, the navy had the Vanguard, and the air force had its massive F-1 rocket engine.
The NACA had been founded by Congress during the early years of World War I when the government realized that the United States’ meager air military force was at a severe disadvantage to other nations’. Just prior to the war, the U.S. had about thirty planes; Russia, England, and Germany together had more than a thousand. By 1915, the Germans were using fighter aircraft—a plane with a machine gun timed to fire through the propeller. Two years later, the U.S. responded by establishing its first civilian aeronautical research facility at present-day Langley Field. With a mandate to study the problems of flight “with a view to their practical solution, and to direct and conduct experiments in aerodynamics,” the agency had improved aviation techniques dramatically by the mid-1930s and played a huge part in developing the superior aircraft that helped win World War II.
But the NACA produced research, not products; any ideas with potential were turned over to others—sometimes the military, other times a private aircraft company—to develop and produce. The agency was run by committee and operated by consensus—and did it all slowly and carefully. Employees were encouraged to work only from eight to five; Security locked the doors at five p.m. every day. A regular lunchtime activity was a paper-airplane contest. After Sputnik, that environment—and particularly those hours—would change completely. In the years following World War II, the agency had been withering away, its budget slashed repeatedly. Now it would help to win another war. Some far-seeing NACA engineers had even begun to research the task of putting a man into space—and they were eager to take on the challenge.
But that would require powerful rockets, and NASA had no rocket program. The NACA’s specialty had been applied research; it didn’t build aircraft, only told military and industrial entities how to make them better and safer. NASA would need von Braun and his ballistic-missile team in Huntsville. That presented a problem; the army, still basking in the glow of launching the first American satellite, refused to part with von Braun and the other Germans and the massive booster they were developing, the Saturn. Von Braun had an eye toward using it to transport components of a military space station, one of his pet projects.
A three-way tug-of-war for his services would emerge between the army, the air force, and NASA.
Meanwhile, since the successful Jupiter-C launch of Explorer, von Braun had become even more of a national hero, and he had capitalized on his fame. In its cover story about him, Time magazine dubbed von Braun “the Seer of Space,” and he was well paid for his articles and speeches. The Disney movie about his life was produced and titled I Aim at the Stars. The film was neither dramatically effective nor factually accurate—the former SS major was depicted as being persecuted by the Nazis, and his Peenemünde secretary became an Allied spy, two of many perversions of the truth. The film’s most lasting legacy came from comedian Mort Sahl, who suggested that it should have been subtitled But Sometimes I Hit London. The public’s tepid response to the film, however, didn’t damage von Braun’s reputation a whit. In a July 1957 article he had written for Missiles and Rockets—he was on the magazine’s advisory board—he waxed messiah-like on the promise of space travel. “Space flight,” he wrote, “will free man from his remaining chains, the chains of gravity which still tie him to this planet. It will open to him the gates of heaven.”
For several months after the launch of Explorer, the American and Soviet programs launched—or attempted to launch—rockets into orbit almost every week. More Sputniks went up, most of them successfully, though at least one, launched three days after Explorer, failed to reach orbit and crashed back to Earth. (Because the Soviets didn’t announce planned launches, no one in the West would know about it for decades.) The navy’s Vanguards continued to malfunction, and von Braun’s next Jupiter-C, launched on March 5, failed as well. Two weeks later, a Vanguard finally reached orbit with a three-pound test satellite. Nine days after that, on March 26, another Jupiter-C lifted Explorer 3 into orbit. Then three consecutive Vanguards failed. Each nation also attempted to land rockets on the moon; the Soviets tried three times, the Americans four. All seven were unsuccessful.
Shoot for the Moon Page 3