by Neil Sheehan
The LOX tank of Thor 103 had ruptured, incinerating the missile on the pad, the intensely hot fire causing enough damage so that Mathison and the contractors again had to refurbish the pad. And crew fatigue and the loss of focus that accompanies it had been the cause. One of the earlier countdowns had reached the point where they had fueled the missile. Over the subsequent hours, as the countdown was repeatedly aborted and then resumed, enough of the volatile LOX vaporized so that the supply in the missile’s oxidizer tank had to be topped off with more. A technician was assigned to make certain they did not overpressurize the tank in the process. The faces of the instruments of the time were the old-fashioned variety known as analog, not the brightly lit and colored numbers of the digital gauges that lay in the future. There were two pressure gauges for the oxidizer tank. One was a dial with a needle. The second was a drum on which was placed a round paper graph printed with lines to delineate levels of pressure. As the drum slowly rotated, an inking arm traced the amount of pressure in the tank. An investigation disclosed that while the technician might have kept looking at the gauge, he had lost so much alertness from exhaustion that he was no longer seeing it. Otherwise, he would have noticed that the needle had swung over into the red. The inked line on the paper delineated enough overpressure to burst the seal on the oxidizer tank and send Thor 103 to its fiery oblivion. Mettler was so embarrassed by what happened that he avoided seeing Schriever or talking to him on the phone for several days. He was not fired. Instead, Schriever removed Hall.
Bennie was in serious trouble. While he had nothing to show for Thor but three fiascoes, the Jupiter of his Army rival, Major General John Medaris, and of Medaris’s prized team of Wernher von Braun and his German rocketeers, had been flying well. The first Jupiter, launched on March 1, 1957, approximately five weeks after Thor 101 exploded eighteen inches above the pad, had flown for seventy-two seconds before breaking up. The second, sent aloft on April 12, flew for ninety-two seconds before disintegrating. Telemetry disclosed that when the missile turned, fuel sloshed back and forth in the tanks with enough momentum to overcome the Jupiter’s steering controls. A solution was rapidly worked out and adjustments made to the missile. On May 31, 1957, just ten days after the overpressurized LOX tank burst and Thor 103 perished in pyrotechnic wonder, a third Jupiter lifted off from Cape Canaveral. It sailed 1,610 miles down the Caribbean range, approaching the entire distance of 1,725 miles required for a full-fledged IRBM. Superior knowledge and skill acquired over years of hands-on experience were telling in the contest. For all their brainpower and engineering diplomas, with the exception of Thiel, Bennie’s team was a pack of amateurs up against professionals. The difference was evident in a matter as simple as countdown times. Von Braun and his Germans did not engage in any attention-draining, twenty-four-hour countdown sessions. The countdown time for the first Jupiter ran an hour and fifty-five minutes, for the second two hours and fourteen minutes. The von Braun équipe got the third Jupiter, the one that flew nearly as far as needed, into the air in eight minutes. Von Braun had been able to find out quickly what had gone wrong on his first two launches because he instrumented Jupiter extensively. His missile carried sensors to transmit 150 points of telemetry. Thor was instrumented for less than a third of these. He also flight-tested components for Jupiter by launching them in Redstone missiles. In all, he was to stage twenty-nine Redstone firings at Canaveral for this purpose. It was no wonder that while Schriever was months behind schedule in Thor firings, Medaris was a bit ahead of schedule with Jupiter.
The previous year, Medaris had lost two important battles in the rivalry with the Air Force over ballistic missiles. On November 20, 1956, Secretary Wilson had issued a new “roles and missions” directive specifying that although the Army was building Jupiter, the Air Force would be responsible for its “operational employment.” In other words, once Medaris and von Braun finished perfecting Jupiter, they would have to turn the missile over to the Air Force to deploy against the Soviets. Wilson had also decreed that in the future Army missiles would be restricted to a 200-mile range. The decisions, certainly approved by Eisenhower if not perhaps instigated by him, probably had as much to do with saving money by avoiding more duplication as they did with ruling that the Air Force was the logical service to control long-range missiles. But losing two battles did not amount to losing the war. If Thor was sufficiently discredited, Medaris could argue that it ought to be canceled on the grounds that the Air Force was incapable of building a satisfactory intermediate-range ballistic missile, at least within an acceptable period of time.
If he accomplished this, he could move on to the argument that since the Air Force had failed at the IRBM, how could anyone logically expect it to succeed at the far more difficult task of an ICBM? This need, so vital to the nation’s security, should therefore be entrusted to his U.S. Army Ballistic Missile Agency and his superb German rocket builders, whose track record would assure success. Medaris had always had ambitions that went far beyond the intermediate-range Jupiter. He and von Braun had already discussed the possibility of a rocket big enough to carry men to the moon and in August 1958 would obtain approval from the Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency to start designing it. Von Braun would also welcome the chance to move on from Jupiter to an ICBM because it would entail the creation of large rocket boosters, a sine qua non for space travel. Both men began denigrating Thor to anyone who would listen and also criticizing Atlas. The ingenious weight-saving concept Karel Bossart had first devised in the 1940s, a fuselage of thinly rolled steel that was inflated by the rocket’s fuel, was “a balloon” that was unlikely to withstand the traumatic stresses of launching. While this scenario of the Army taking over the ICBM program because Schriever made a hash of Thor might seem far-fetched decades later, it was not far-fetched in 1957. Medaris had a trump he could play if Bennie gave him an opening. He had von Braun and von Braun’s credibility in the making of rockets.
Schriever saw Medaris’s game right away. Suddenly the minor project he had not wanted had turned into a nightmare threatening the major project that had become his life’s ambition. He blamed Hall for what had occurred because the failures were not flaws in the missile itself. They were failures in the testing process and Bennie felt that Hall, as chief of propulsion for WDD and program director for Thor, should have been paying enough attention to avert them. The difficulty, as always, was Hall’s personality. Hall was convinced that Mettler and the entire Ramo-Wooldridge contingent were unnecessary. They were interlopers. There was already enough technical expertise within the Air Force itself, Hall believed, for the service to act as its own prime contractor and systems engineer and to guide industry in the creation of both the IRBM and the ICBM. Schriever, who had good reason to believe otherwise and who was in command, was not about to jettison the partnership with Ramo. There was thus nothing Hall could do to change the situation, but he could not bring himself to accept it. And, as was to be expected with him, he did not hesitate to voice his resentment. As a result, he did not get along with Mettler and the rest of the Ramo-Wooldridge team assigned to Thor. Thiel was an exception, perhaps because Hall respected his knowledge, but Thiel in turn had decidedly mixed feelings toward Hall because of his behavior. On one occasion, when Hall had come to Canaveral to witness the launching of a Jupiter, he began calling out “Blow! Blow! Blow!” as the rocket rose. Some of Thiel’s former German colleagues, with whom he swapped information and maintained cordial relations despite the rivalry, were sitting close by in the reviewing stands. He was embarrassed to the quick that they would see him associated with someone so lacking in politeness and protocol as to shout for their missile to blow itself up. “He was really a horrible guy … very arrogant,” Thiel said.
Hall did fulfill his role of program director by participating in all of the working sessions in California. He was not, however, perhaps because of his antagonism toward Mettler, attending the launches at Canaveral, where he would have had the authority an
d responsibility as the senior Air Force representative to exercise supervision and control. Instead, he was delegating the task to a subordinate on his staff but was not giving the officer a charter to wield the same supervisory power he could have brought to bear. Because Schriever’s management method consisted essentially of gathering around him men with outstanding aptitude for particular endeavors, or sharp-witted enough to grasp a new task swiftly, and then turning them loose to accomplish their roles while he surveyed all as a kind of high-tech ringmaster, Bennie had tolerated Hall. The lesson on how to get men to do what he wanted had been learned and practiced ever since, as a junior lieutenant, he had been given a Civilian Conservation Corps camp full of rambunctious boys to govern in Texas. “Talented people can be difficult,” he once remarked. “You have to let them do things their way.” But the tolerance was extended only as long as they produced for him and Hall was definitely not producing on Thor. Schriever had to find a replacement for him as soon as possible.
55.
THE RELUCTANT RESCUER
A day or so after Thor 103 burned on the launching pad and while he was still on the East Coast, Schriever telephoned the lieutenant colonel who had so briskly instructed Mettler to abort the launch, Richard Jacobson, his chief of test facilities and operations. “Jake,” he said, “I need you to take over the program.” Jacobson had been warned by one of Schriever’s deputies to expect the call and he had his answer ready. “General, I don’t want it,” he replied. “I really don’t want it.” He explained that he had striven hard to establish a reputation for performance in the Air Force and had too much to lose by getting involved with a sinking enterprise. “I can understand that,” Schriever said, “but you know we’re in a terrible competition with the Army, and if we can’t make an IRBM work, the Army’s going to say we can’t make an ICBM work, and we’re going to lose the whole guided missile program. You’ve got to make Thor work.” The pressure on Schriever had become excruciating. One of his officers recalled long afterward that during a staff briefing on a Saturday, when Bennie had left orders he was not to be disturbed, his secretary had appeared at the doorway and said there was a call he had to take in his office. “That was Eisenhower,” he said, as he walked back into the meeting, “and I’m not sure I’ll be here on Monday.”
Jacobson felt bad having to refuse Schriever anything because he had such respect for the man. The respect had been earned at the Pentagon one day back during the interregnum before the adoption of the Gillette Procedures. If they were to maintain schedule and proceed “to the maximum extent that technology would allow,” as General White, the vice chief of staff, had directed in May 1954, they needed approximately $130 million for the next fiscal year. The launch complexes to be built at Canaveral, the downrange monitoring stations through the Caribbean, and other essentials, all had to be paid for. Yet they had so far been allotted only $38 million. Schriever arranged an appeal before a board of the Air Staff. Jacobson was awed by the galaxy of stars in the room. The chairman of the committee was a three-star general and all of its members had at least two and a couple of them three.
Schriever, followed by Jacobson and others from the WDD staff, briefed the committee on why they absolutely had to have the additional funds. The generals listened patiently and then discussed the matter among themselves. The three-star chairman turned to Schriever. “General, we have other high priority things and we don’t have the funds,” he said. “You’re going to have to live with the $38 million and make your schedule.” Schriever, as was his wont, had been sitting behind a table with his feet propped up on another chair. It was a favorite position because it was relaxing and solved the problem of what to do with his long legs. He took his feet off the chair and stood up, a conspicuous figure with the single star on his shoulder tabs before this multistarred committee. “Gentlemen,” he said, “you can tell me what schedule you want me to make, in which case I’ll tell you how much money you will have to provide. Or you can tell me how much money you will provide and I will tell you what schedule you will get. But you can’t tell me both.” Jacobson was astonished. A junior general running a program, no matter what the priority, was expected to salute and march off once his betters had rendered judgment. The program would then fall far behind schedule, or perhaps not get finished at all, but the requirements of seniority and protocol and budget would be satisfied. The committee had expected Schriever to behave accordingly. “My God,” Jacobson thought, “these guys are going to eat him alive.” The chairman broke the silence. “General, let us discuss it,” he said. “We’ll get back to you. Just wait outside.” In about ten minutes they were summoned back into the room. “General,” the three-star said to Schriever, “you’re absolutely right. You’ve got your money.”
Back in a bind again, Schriever was not about to relent with Jacobson. He pointed out that as far as he could tell, there was nothing fundamentally wrong with the missile. “All three errors have been because of the way in which they tested,” he said. “And you, as director of tests, know more about how to get this thing done than anybody and I want you to do it.” Jacobson tried again to wiggle away. “Boss, I got to tell you, I don’t want my name on that goddamn program. You’re going to lose that program.” Jacobson was assuming that, with Jupiter flying so smoothly, should Thor run into much more trouble, Secretary Wilson, if for no reason other than to please a president who was always seeking ways to reduce the military budget, would reverse himself and declare Jupiter the nation’s IRBM. Schriever cut a deal with Jacobson. “I’ll tell you what, Jake, I’ll leave you as director of tests, but I’ll make you acting program director of Thor,” he said, underscoring the word “acting.” “If you’re concerned about it being on your record, it will never appear.” Jacobson relented, partway. “Well, you’ve got a program director named Ed Hall,” he said. “I’ll get him out of your way,” Schriever replied. And so he did, but not in a manner that would disgrace Hall and force his departure. Ed Hall was too gifted a man to lose. Schriever had in mind a new prospect appropriate to those gifts, one he knew Hall would take up with enthusiasm. He wanted to keep Hall around until matters matured enough for him to assign Hall to it. In effect, he suspended Hall while he shifted Jacobson into his job. He told Hall that although Jacobson would be taking over Thor, Hall would officially remain the program director. He was to wait in this holding pattern until Schriever could arrange an alternative worthy of him.
In Jacobson, Schriever had found a man who could rescue him from his predicament, for Richard “Jake” Jacobson was a man prepared to expend whatever energy and perseverance were required to achieve his ends. He was extremely intelligent, one of the smartest officers ever to serve Schriever. Enemies called him “Jake the Snake.” The epithet was undeserved, a parting shot from officers angry at having been bested by him in some professional scrape. While he would resort to guile when necessary, Jacobson was no intriguer. He was normally as candid as he had been on the telephone with Schriever, his forth-rightness reinforced by the cuss words that laced his language. The son of a prosperous family of Jewish ancestry in the ladies garment business in Birmingham, Alabama, he had grown up in a house with four African-American servants, including the chauffeur. His father steered him into business administration at the University of Alabama because it was assumed he would take up the family trade, but he found the subject boring and soon switched to his first intellectual love, mathematics, and developed an interest in flying.
By the fall of 1943 he was in England, a twenty-three-year-old captain in the U.S. Army Air Forces, piloting a C-47 transport in a troop carrier group. When a call went out for volunteers to fly a special (“special” being the military euphemism for “dangerous”) mission, Jacobson raised his hand and found himself in a squadron that dropped the first paratroops, the “pathfinders,” during an airborne landing. He was designated lead pilot of one of the three-plane flights, called “serials,” into which the squadron was organized. The pathfinders were equipped wit
h radio beacons to guide the subsequent waves of C-47s with the mass of airborne infantry to the correct landing zones. The trick was to drop the pathfinders on the right spot, always difficult in those years of relatively primitive navigation instruments and particularly so at night, as had to be done for the Normandy invasion. In the predawn hours of D-Day, Jacobson led his three-plane serial at fifty feet over the English Channel, then up to 700 feet as they crossed Normandy’s Cotentin Peninsula to gain enough altitude for the parachutes of the pathfinder troops crowding the planes to open. He suddenly realized that his navigator had failed to alert him to a turn and he was off course. He took his three C-47s back out to the Channel and up over the Cotentin and into the German antiaircraft fire once more, so that these parachutists would not fling themselves out the doors and into battle in vain. He was awarded the Silver Star for Gallantry and later, from Charles de Gaulle’s Free French government, a Croix de Guerre.