Fighting for Space

by Amy Shira Teitel

  “Come and see us again. I’ll mail your Green Stamps in the morning,” the tanker pilot joked as John, the refueling finished, disengaged from the drogue. He put a safe distance between himself and the tanker before returning to the Crusader’s cruising altitude of 51,000 feet and its cruising speed of Mach 1.48, well over the speed of sound. Nestled inside the cockpit, everything seemed eerily still. There was no sound save the static over his radio, and he was so high above the ground the countryside below looked almost stationary. Everything felt so smooth and calm, almost like driving down an empty country road at a leisurely thirty miles an hour.

  As he crossed the country, John’s flight path took him within ten miles of his hometown of New Concord, Ohio. His parents were outside in the yard with friends, trying to find a glimpse of the plane overhead. As the sonic booms that reached the ground in John’s wake shook all the windows in his parents’ neighborhood, a boy ran out into the street yelling, “Mrs. Glenn, Johnnie dropped a bomb!”

  Finally, New York’s Floyd Bennett Field came into view. John passed the towers that marked the finish line where timers stood to log the end of the flight. John had covered the country in 3 hours, 23 minutes, 8.4 seconds with an average speed of 723 miles per hour, sixty-three miles faster than the speed of sound at that altitude. He idled the plane’s throttle, pulled up into a sharp turn, and glided back around to make a smooth landing on the runway. He had just enough fuel to taxi to where a welcome party waited. He quickly spotted his wife, Annie, in the crowd wearing an off-the-shoulder dress topped with a choker necklace and a white hat, the woman he’d known and loved since they’d met as toddlers. Standing next to her was ten-year-old Lyn in a striped dress and white gloves and twelve-year-old Dave in a white shirt and pleated pants. As the band played “Anchors Aweigh” followed by the “Marine Hymn,” John pulled Lyn’s cat brooch and Dave’s Boy Scout knife out of his pocket and handed these supersonic souvenirs to his children. The family posed for photographers, and the following day their picture appeared in the New York Times. The accompanying article pointed out that at the age of thirty-six, “Major Glenn is reaching the practical age limit for piloting complicated pieces of machinery through the air.”

  The Glenns stayed in New York for a flurry of press conferences and public appearances, but it wasn’t all work. They spent time shopping, wandering through the big-city department stores where the award-winning Jacqueline Cochran Cosmetic displays encouraged women to consult with a beautician to learn her skin type and how to treat it. During a jaunt into Macy’s, John noticed a woman staring at him and David. He’d quickly grown used to the public attention so thought nothing of it, but the woman eventually approached them.

  She didn’t want an autograph. Rather, she wanted to know if he’d ever heard of the game show Name That Tune.

  John Glenn made his television debut on the game show weeks later, partnered with child actor Eddie Hodges. Every time they correctly identified a song from a few notes, they won $5,000 and moved on to the next round. They made it all the way to the final round, the Golden Medley. If they named every tune in the Medley, they would split the grand prize of $25,000.

  Viewers nationwide tuned in to watch the final round on October 4. Before the Medley began, host George DeWitt asked John what he would do with the money if they won.

  “Well, it would help pay for Dave and Lyn’s education, and if there was any left over, it would go towards Lyn’s wedding,” John told the studio audience, which included his now-blushing daughter. George turned his attention to Eddie, who admitted to having some trouble with a girl at school. Seeking advice, George asked John if he’d had any trouble with girls when he was Eddie’s age.

  “I did,” John admitted. “There was a girl in school who wouldn’t talk to me because all the other boys liked her, too.”

  “Did you ever get to talk to her?” George asked.

  “I did. I got to marry her,” John replied, smiling at Annie as the audience around her clapped. America couldn’t ask for a better hero in that moment. The handsome young marine with his beautiful wife and two children were the very picture of American family values.

  After a moment of silence in the studio, the Golden Medley began. John and Eddie guessed the first four songs correctly, then had nine seconds on the clock as the fifth and final song started. John listened for a moment, pressed the buzzer, then leaned down to whisper the answer in Eddie’s ear.

  “‘Amaryllis’?” the boy guessed.

  “‘Amaryllis’…is right!” George exclaimed, proclaiming the duo grand prize winners as they hugged in celebration.

  The final strains of the Golden Medley had barely faded from the airwaves when, at 8:07 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, a very different sound was picked up on an RCA receiving station at Riverhead, New York, then relayed to the NBC radio studio in Manhattan. The sound was recorded then broadcast for anyone with a radio or television to hear. It was a slightly distorted, intermittent elongated beeping tone the special reports announced was coming from an artificial satellite called Sputnik.

  Lyndon Johnson stepped outside after dinner, accompanied by the guests he and Lady Bird had hosted that evening at their ranch. It was his custom to walk at night since suffering a heart attack two years earlier. But tonight, as he looked up at the familiar Texas sky, it felt different, almost alien. Spaceships and rockets to the Moon were no longer the stuff of stories told by the fire on a rainy evening. That future was just over the horizon, and so were the powerful Soviet missiles that had launched the small satellite. He’d never imagined the Soviets would succeed in launching the first satellite, and he knew America had no equivalent technology. Lyndon realized this nascent era in man’s conquest of the natural world marked a grim development in the Cold War, but it also brought a unique opportunity.

  Since becoming Senate majority leader in 1954, Lyndon Johnson’s political mastery had made his a career to watch. He skillfully united the liberal northern and conservative southern Democrats on crucial issues, but the Democratic Party as a whole was struggling to find something that it could leverage to regain the White House. That night at his ranch, Lyndon thought that if he could take charge of space policy and mold the nation’s reaction to Sputnik, he might be able to launch himself to the presidency.

  After Sputnik, October 1957:

  A Space Interlude

  Sputnik dominated the news cycle in the days that followed. It made headlines in the New York Times that landed on Jackie’s breakfast tray and in Jerrie’s local Daily Oklahoman. The nearly unanimous reaction among Americans was fear. No one was sure whether Sputnik was, as the Los Angeles Times called it, a “dove of peace or the sword of Damocles hanging by a thread over the free world.” The panic that gripped the nation was more extreme than anyone in Eisenhower’s administration had anticipated. The president’s science and political advisors knew Sputnik wasn’t a threat; the 184-pound sphere couldn’t do anything more than beep from orbit. The R-7 missile that launched it, on the other hand, was concerning. If it could put a small satellite into orbit, it could easily launch something heavier, like a nuclear warhead, from Russia to the United States. The president was thus armed with everything his staff had been able to dig up on missile development when, at ten-thirty in the morning on October 9, he prepared to address the nation for the first time in the space age.

  Sitting behind the large wooden desk in his executive office, he seemed calm, almost apathetic at the prospect of losing face to the Soviet Union on an international scale. In front of him were journalists eagerly awaiting his words as well as television cameras that would bring the press conference to Americans who needed their president to allay their fears.

  “We congratulate Soviet scientists upon putting a satellite into orbit,” the president read from his prepared statement. He went on to remind Americans that both the United States and the Soviet Union knew the other was developing a satellite capability as part of the International Geophysical Year. America’s I
GY satellite program, he said, was the Navy’s Vanguard, a civilian program deliberately separated from all other military activity to underscore the scientific nature of the program and prevent it from interfering with high-priority military programs. “Our satellite program has never been conducted as a race with other nations,” he said. “I consider our country’s satellite program well designed and properly scheduled to achieve the scientific purposes for which it was initiated.”

  Lyndon didn’t think much of Ike Eisenhower’s promise of a superior US satellite. Neither did his aide George Reedy, who stayed up late into the night reading everything he could about space until he too became fixated on the idea of leveraging the issue into a Johnson presidency. George suggested LBJ take the stance of a nonpartisan senator and advise Congress to conduct an inquiry into Sputnik’s importance as well as the leadership decisions that had kept American satellites grounded. The US Army’s missile program was sufficiently advanced that it might have beaten Sputnik into orbit, but orders from Washington stopped it. Decisions like these were the key issues for an inquiry, in George’s mind. Lyndon agreed, not only because he knew space would be critical for the foreseeable future but also because taking control of new space policy was an appealing way to raise his public profile.

  The senator started laying the foundation for his inquiry the following Friday at the twentieth annual Texas Rose Festival in Tyler. “The real meaning of the satellite is that we can no longer consider the Soviet Union to be a nation years behind us in scientific research and industrial ability,” Lyndon orated before the gathered crowd. “The mere fact that the Soviets can put a satellite into the sky—even one that goes beep—does not alter the world balance of power. But it does mean that they are in a position to alter the balance of power.” To stave off that power shift, he called for the establishment of a Senate Armed Services Committee that he promised would get to the bottom of America’s flagging performance. This warning that America needed to act became his public refrain while he privately planned how to tackle Congress.

  Before LBJ had a chance to address Congress, the Soviets struck again on November 3. Sputnik 2 was more than five times heavier than the first and carried a dog named Laika on board, which meant the Soviets had a working, if rudimentary, life support system. It was clear they were planning to put a man in space. Appalled by America’s continued inaction, Lyndon issued a press release the following day calling for “bold, new thinking in defense and foreign policy” to regain American technological preeminence.

  * * *

  “We meet today in the atmosphere of another Pearl Harbor,” LBJ addressed the new Senate Preparedness Subcommittee on satellite and missile programs in the caucus room of the Senate office building on November 25, 1957. “There were no Republicans or Democrats in this country the day after Pearl Harbor. There were no isolationists or internationalists. And, above all, there were no defeatists of any stripe. There were just Americans anxious to roll up their sleeves and wade into the enemy.” He didn’t care if he was being overly dramatic. He knew the press would lap up every over-the-top statement and his speech would make headlines.

  After this ostentatious start, Lyndon led the Preparedness Subcommittee in cross-examining a rotating cast of witnesses from the military, aviation industry, and science arenas. Going into the Christmas season, Americans learned that the country had no planned timetable to catch up with Sputnik. The hearings quickly became a platform for every voice that opposed the president’s approach to space, among them Wernher von Braun.

  The tall, broad-shouldered, soft-spoken former Nazi engineer had found notoriety during the Second World War as the lead designer behind the V-2 rocket. His simple liquid-fueled guided rocket had been the first system able to deliver bombs to relatively precise locations from a considerable distance. The technology was so appealing that, when he orchestrated his team’s surrender to the United States in the closing months of the war, he was welcomed with slightly wary open arms. However frightening his weapons, America preferred to have him on its side than working for the Soviets.

  Now, more than a decade later, Wernher was an American citizen leading the Army Ballistic Missile Agency in developing the Redstone intermediate-range ballistic missiles that, with the slight modification of a fourth stage, could launch a satellite into space. This team could have beaten Sputnik, but the president had forbidden it; he didn’t want America’s first satellite to come from former Nazis. The result, Wernher testified before LBJ’s subcommittee, was a failing American program that could only recover with the creation of a dedicated and well-funded space agency.

  The Preparedness Subcommittee hearings were still going on when the navy attempted to launch America’s first satellite, Vanguard, from Cape Canaveral on December 6. People throughout the country gathered around their televisions for the live broadcast, their hopes pinned on its success. The whole world watched as the rocket lifted off the ground, paused as it struggled to gain height, then settled back on the launch pad where it collapsed under its own weight. The rocket erupted into a fireball that engulfed the launch pad and sent thick, black smoke curling high into the clear Florida day. The three-pound satellite, meanwhile, had sensed a moment of weightlessness and punted itself free. Thinking it was in orbit, Vanguard proudly emitted its beep from a nearby puddle for the world to hear.

  The international press had a field day giving Vanguard creative nicknames like Flopnik and Stayputnik. In Washington, the very public failure forced Ike Eisenhower’s hand. He gave Wernher von Braun’s army team sixty days to get their satellite up while the Preparedness Subcommittee took advantage of the media attention to try its most outspoken witnesses. LBJ allowed witnesses to speak freely about their issues with the Eisenhower administration, and though the senator himself cast no stones, the president came out battered, and the majority leader emerged as a politician concerned with the nation’s welfare above all else. The Preparedness Subcommittee’s inquiry ended with the unanimous agreement that decisive action was vital to accelerate an American space program. To avoid a destructive war, America needed a space program, powerful rockets, fast-tracked “crash programs” for its intercontinental and intermediate-range ballistic missiles, and above all, some structure over the warring service branches trying to gain dominance in space.

  * * *

  At ten-thirty on the last night of January 1958, Wernher von Braun paced relentlessly in the communications room at the Pentagon. Being in Washington was hell when his rocket was 800 miles away at the Air Force’s Cape Canaveral launch site in Florida, but he couldn’t disobey an order. If the launch was successful, he would go straight to the Academy of Sciences building for a celebratory press conference. If it wasn’t, he’d put on the dark sunglasses hidden in the breast pocket of his dark suit jacket and escape to an even darker movie theater.

  At 10:48, telemetry from the rocket reached the Pentagon, and Wernher could see that the launch had been good, but he couldn’t celebrate until he got confirmation that the satellite was in orbit. An hour passed with more pacing, coffee drinking, and cigarette smoking. One hundred six minutes after launch, Wernher knew the satellite should be over the west coast, its signal audible to local tracking stations. Unable to wait, the men in Washington called the men who had built the satellite at Caltech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. Both ends of the phone call were tense until JPL got the signal confirming the satellite was indeed in orbit. At 12:51 in the morning, exactly seventeen weeks after Sputnik’s launch, America officially entered the space age.

  Less than a week later, Lyndon pushed a Senate resolution through to establish the Special Committee on Space and Astronautics that would oversee space policy as well as direct its use of resources, and against a lone dissenter, he was elected chairman. Funding was forthcoming and LBJ would be in control of it.

  It wasn’t long before word got around Washington that the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics was getting into the space game. America’s
preeminent aviation research organization, the NACA was a strictly civilian agency that worked closely with the military and had played a part in virtually every major development over the last four decades. Now it was spearheading the move into space. The NACA’s Research Center at Langley Air Force Base in Virginia was looking for a few test pilots to fly simulated missions and help figure out what a future manned spacecraft would look like. When John Glenn heard about it, he immediately volunteered.

  Langley introduced John to concepts he’d never heard of and sensations he’d never experienced. He learned how to adjust a spacecraft’s orbit in flight and what it took to make a manual reentry. Sitting in a cabin at the end of a fifty-foot arm, he tried to control the axes of pitch, yaw, and roll with a simple hand controller while the centrifuge spun him fast enough to feel crushing g-forces. On a visit to the McDonnell Aircraft plant in St. Louis, he saw the first mockup of the spacecraft. It was nothing like the sleek aircraft pilots flew through the sound barrier. This was a squat-looking truncated cone with a rounded bottom designed to disperse the heat it would generate falling through the atmosphere during reentry. Though it was mostly research and rumors, John knew he was seeing the very beginning of America’s manned spaceflight program. He also knew that the second they called for people to fly in space, he would be first in line.

  * * *

  Lyndon was frustrated as President Eisenhower remained at loggerheads with his science advisors. The president wanted America’s new space program to fall under the Department of Defense whereas his advisors were pushing for a civilian space agency that could foster creativity and international cooperation. The president finally relented and sent a note to Congress recommending that the new agency form with the NACA as its nucleus and the goal of managing everything but the nation’s military needs in space. LBJ sprung into action.