Rude Astronauts

by Allen Steele

  He turns to the radio man in the narrow compartment behind the cockpit. “Sergeant, alert White Sands now!” he yells over the throb of the B-24’s engines. “It’s on its way!”

  Many miles away, warning klaxons howl at a top-secret US Army facility in the New Mexico desert. Around a spotlighted launch pad, technicians and engineers scurry away from the single-stage, 75-foot winged silver rocket poised on the pad. Cold white oxygen fumes venting from the base of the rocket billow around the steel launch tower. The gantry is towed back along railroad tracks by a locomotive, and fuel trucks race away to a safe distance where the ground crew and several soldiers wait, their eyes fixed on the pad.

  In a concrete blockhouse four hundred yards away, more than a dozen men are monitoring the launch. Among them, nine civilian scientists are hunched over control panels, anxiously watching hundreds of dials and meters as they murmur instructions to each other. In the middle of the blockhouse a frail, scholarly man peers through a periscope at the launch pad as the countdown reaches the final sixty seconds.

  For more than two years, these ten men have worked toward this moment; now, in the last minute, most of them are scared half to death. If the launch is unsuccessful, there will be no second chance. If the rocket blows up, as so many other rockets have before it, the Navy pilot inside the machine will die. But far worse than that, New York City, thousands of miles to the east, will suffer a devastating attack. An 80-ton incendiary bomb will drop into the middle of Manhattan, and there will be nothing in heaven or on earth to stop it. If the launch is successful, it will be the crowning achievement of American technology; if it fails, it may be the beginning of the end for free society. The stakes are that high.

  “Ten … nine … eight …” an Army officer recites tonelessly. Staring through the periscope, Robert Hutchings Goddard absently wipes his sweaty palms against the rubber grips and silently begins to pray …

  Forty-seven years ago, in the early morning hours of a summer day in World War II, a huge rocket called the A-9—the Amerika Bomber—hurtled down a horizontal track in Germany and climbed to the highest altitude ever achieved, 156 miles above the earth. Horst Reinhart, a young Luftwaffe lieutenant, became the first man in space. One hour and thirty-six minutes later, the rocket christened the Lucky Linda blasted off from New Mexico, and US Navy pilot Rudy “Skid” Sloman’s triumphant howl was picked up by ham radio operators across the continent as the United States became the world’s second spacefaring nation.

  This much is well-known; what has been largely lost to history, though, is the leading role played by a mild, stoop-shouldered physics professor from Worcester. Not because of neglect—Robert H. Goddard’s place in the annals of space-flight as the father of American rocketry has been assured—but because of enduring cold war suspicions. In the years since his death in 1945, facts about his private life, particularly during the Second World War, have remained hidden, mainly because of national security interests. Goddard was known to have had a vague “consultant” role in Project Blue Horizon, but little more has been discovered by Goddard’s biographers. The official record shows that Goddard spent the war teaching at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts; not much else is in the public record.

  Yet if that part of Robert Goddard’s biography is opaque, even less known is about the top-secret research group which was once codenamed Team 390. Each year, on the anniversary of the Lucky Linda’s flight, the seven survivors of the American rocket team gather at a sportsmen’s lodge in New Hampshire, on the shore of Lake Monomonac. Once again, in the lodge’s den, the secret tale is told. As the seven old men speak, more than a few times their eyes wander to the framed photo of Goddard which hangs above the mantel.

  They are all that remains of Team 390, but they rarely call themselves by that name. Now, as then, they are known among themselves simply as Goddard’s People.

  The affair began on the morning of January 19, 1942, when OSS agent William J. Casey (later to become the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency during the Reagan administration) arrived in Washington, DC, from London on a US Army DC-3. An attache case handcuffed to his wrist contained a top secret Nazi document which British MI-6 agents had discovered at Peenemünde. By noon, the document—codenamed Black Umbrella, unofficially known as the “Sanger Report”—was on the desk of President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

  The United States had been directly involved in World War II for only six weeks when the Sanger Report was unearthed. Isolationism had crumbled after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and fear was running high in the country that North America itself was the next target of the Axis powers; in Washington, anti-aircraft guns and air raid sirens were already being erected on city rooftops. Black Umbrella could not have arrived at a better time to have been taken seriously.

  Peenemünde is a seldom-visited fishing village on Germany’s Baltic Coast. During the war the village had become the base for secret Nazi rocket research for the German Army. Germans had been vigorously developing liquid-fuel rockets even before Adolf Hitler had become Chancellor, and the Nazis had incorporated rocket research into their war plans, recruiting a team of civilian rocket scientists, with Wernher von Braun as their chief scientist. British Intelligence had known that Peenemünde was the site of secret rocket experiments; a large missile called the A-4 was alleged to be in the final phases of R&D. “Silver and Gold,” two MI-6 agents working undercover on Peenemünde as janitors, had been monitoring the continuing development of the A-4 rocket, later to be known by the Allies as the V-2.

  In recent months, however, more puzzling things had been happening in Peenemünde. Something new was being developed in a warehouse which was kept locked and guarded at all times; rumors around the base had it that an even more ambitious weapon than the A-4 was being built by von Braun’s rocket team. High Command officers such as Hermann Göring, Rudolf Hess, and Heinrich Himmler had been regularly visiting Peenemünde, spending long hours in the warehouse, yet Silver and Gold had no idea of what was going on.

  Finally, the two agents had a stroke of luck. In a few precious, unguarded moments, a 400-page document stamped “State Secret” had been carelessly left out on von Braun’s desk by his personal secretary. Without reading the report, Silver had used a miniature camera to photograph as many pages as possible. The team then managed to smuggle the microfilm out of Germany, not knowing what information it contained except that it was part of a report which should have been kept under lock and key. The microfilm made its way to Whitehall in London, where MI-6 intelligence analysts had translated the contents. Horrified by what was found in the report, they rushed the transcript to Washington.

  Black Umbrella was a detailed proposal by Dr. Eugen Sanger, an Austrian rocket scientist employed at the Hermann Göring Institute, the Luftwaffe’s research center. Sanger had proposed the construction of a one-man, winged rocket-plane, an “antipodal bomber” capable not only of orbital flight but also of flying around the world to attack the United States. The rocket-plane—nicknamed the Amerika Bomber by Sanger—was to be almost a hundred feet long, weigh one hundred tons, and be propelled by a liquid-fuel rocket engine. Carrying an 80-ton bomb load, it was to be launched on a rocket-propelled sled which would race down a two-mile track to a sharp incline. The rocket-plane would disengage from the sled at the end of the track and, now accelerating 1,640 feet per second, would climb under its own power to suborbital altitude.

  Using the Earth’s rotation for a “slingshot” effect, the Amerika Bomber would make a series of dives and climbs along the top of the atmosphere as it orbited the earth, skipping like a rock on the surface of a pond. The skips would not only help preserve fuel, but also keep the rocket-plane far above the range of conventional aircraft. In this way, the bomber could fly over Europe, Asia, and the Pacific Ocean to the United States. Two of its atmospheric skips could carry it across the continent and, after diving to an altitude of 40 miles above the East Coast, the ship could drop an 80-ton bomb on New York Ci
ty. The Amerika Bomber then could fly across the Atlantic back to Germany, landing like an airplane on a conventional airstrip.

  It would obviously be a tremendous effort by the Nazis to develop and successfully launch the Sanger bomber; New York was not a military target, either. But the sheer terror of the scheme—the vision of a Nazi rocket-plane diving from space to drop an 80-ton incendiary bomb on Times Square—would be worth its value in propaganda alone. And if a squadron of antipodal bombers were built, as Sanger suggested, Germany would be in control of the highest of high grounds: outer space.

  There was little doubt in the White House that the Nazis could pull off Black Umbrella. According to British intelligence, German civilians had been actively engaged in sophisticated rocket research since the 1920s under the aegis of the Verein für Raumschiffahrt. Almost immediately after Adolf Hitler became Chancellor, the Gestapo had seized all journals and records of the German Rocket Society, and the German Army had scooped up almost all members of the VfR, including Hermann Oberth, von Braun’s mentor. It was also known that the German Army was diverting enormous amounts of men and materiel to Peenemünde, although it was also suspected that the Nazis had another, more secret missile base located somewhere else deep within the German borders.

  According to declassified White House minutes of the meeting, President Roosevelt turned to OSS Director William “Wild Bill” Donovan after hearing the report on the Sanger project. “So, Bill, who’s in charge of our rocket program?” he asked.

  “We don’t have a rocket program, Mr. President,” Donovan replied.

  “All right,” Roosevelt said calmly. “Then who is the leading rocket expert in America?”

  “I don’t know if there is one,” Donovan said.

  “Yes, there is,” answered the President. “Somewhere out there, there’s got to be someone who knows as much about these things as von Braun. Find him. He’s now the most important man in the country.”

  The man they found was Robert H. Goddard, and he didn’t feel like the most important man in the country. He was only a brilliant scientist who had long since become fed up with being called a crackpot.

  Goddard had been obsessed with rockets since reading H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds as a youngster. Born in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1882, Goddard had pursued his obsession throughout his life; he earned his bachelor’s degree in engineering from Worcester Polytechnic Institute and shortly thereafter became a professor of physics at Clark University. Goddard’s secret dream was to build a rocket capable of landing men on Mars. It was a wild idea which would drive the scientist throughout his life, and also earn him as much trouble as encountered by predecessors like Galileo Galilei and Percival Lowell.

  In January, 1920, the Smithsonian Institution, one of Goddard’s sources of funding for his early rocket research, published a 69-page monograph written by Goddard. The monograph, titled “A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes,” mainly described how liquid-fuel rockets (themselves still only a theoretical possibility) could replace sounding balloons for exploring the upper atmosphere. The paper was mostly composed of equations and tables, and thus would have escaped the notice of the general public had it not been for brief speculation at its end of how such rockets, perhaps someday in the future, could be used to reach the Moon. Goddard wrote that a rocket could crash-land on Earth’s satellite and explode a load of magnesium powder which would be visible to astronomers on Earth.

  Compared to Goddard’s real objectives of manned space exploration, this was a rather modest proposal, but the press didn’t see it that way. Newspapers reported Goddard’s speculation with little accuracy and less respect. He was either scoffed at from such pinnacles as The New York Times (which claimed that rocket propulsion was impossible in outer space because there was no air for rockets to push against) or treated as wild-eyed fantasy by papers such as the local Worcester Telegram (whose headlines speculated that passenger rockets carrying tourists into space would be possible within a decade). Few newspapers took Goddard seriously; for the most part, he was regarded as a crazy college egghead.

  Goddard, a shy and softspoken person, was appalled by the press attention and embarrassed by the ridicule. He henceforth took his research underground, particularly his experiments with rocket design and his efforts to launch a liquid-fuel rocket. Although he continued to devise means of sending rockets into space—including his own design for a rocket-plane—he carefully hid his notebooks in his laboratory file cabinet, in a folder ironically marked “Gunpowder Experiments.” There were no reporters present in the hilltop farm field in nearby Auburn, Massachusetts, on the cold morning of March 16, 1926, when Goddard successfully fired the world’s first liquid-fuel rocket.

  By 1942, though, Robert Goddard was no longer in Worcester. Following the explosion of one of his rockets, the Auburn town council outlawed all types of “fireworks” within city limits. Following a brief series of experiments at the US Army’s Camp Devens in nearby Ashby, Goddard went on sabbatical from Clark University in 1931 and moved his residence and rockets to Roswell, New Mexico. There were a couple of contributing reasons for the move besides the unacceptability of rocketry in Massachusetts. The professor had battled tuberculosis throughout his life, which the damp New England climate scarcely helped, and the arid Southwestern desert also was a better site for rocket tests. In this sense, rural New Mexico was a fair trade for urban Massachusetts. He broke the sound barrier with a rocket in 1936, and by 1942 Goddard rockets were reaching record altitudes and achieving greater sophistication. Although largely unpublicized, his rocket experiments were on a par with the A-series rockets being developed in Nazi Germany. Few people knew about the feats which Goddard rockets were performing over the New Mexico high desert.

  Yet Goddard’s fortunes had also suffered, largely because of the bad press he had already endured. Although he continued to receive grants from the Guggenheim Foundation and from one of his admirers, Charles A. Lindbergh, the Smithsonian Institution had stopped funding his research. And though he had already developed solid-fuel ordnance such as the bazooka for the US Army, the War Department had expressed no interest in his liquid-fuel rocket research. Obscurity had become a double-edged sword for Goddard: he had found the solitude he craved, yet he was struggling to finance his experiments.

  All that changed on the morning of January 29, 1942, when two civilians from the OSS and an officer from the US Army General Staff, Col. Omar Bliss, found Robert Goddard in the assembly shed at Goddard’s ranch with an assistant, working on another high-altitude rocket. The rocket scientist greeted his unexpected visitors with courteous surprise; he dismissed his assistant and sat down on a bench outside the shed to hear what they had to say.

  Bliss, now living in retirement on Sanibel Island, Florida, remembers the meeting he had with Goddard. “He was completely shocked, horrified,” Bliss says. “He told us that he had kept up with German research during the ’30s and knew that they were making progress with their rockets, but he had no idea that their work had come this far. We asked if Sanger’s plan was possible and he thought about it a minute, then told us that if they had the resources and a little luck, yes, they could make it work. He knew that von Braun and Oberth were working for the Nazis, and he had no doubts that they and others had the knowledge to develop the Amerika Bomber.”

  The men from Washington asked Goddard if he had any ideas how to prevent New York from being blitzed from space; Goddard indicated that he had a few notions. “Then we asked him if he would help us,” Bliss recalls. “I was afraid that he would refuse. People had treated him so unfairly before, after all. But he at once nodded his head, yes, he would do whatever was necessary to stop the Nazis.”

  The space race had begun.

  Robert Goddard’s role in what would become known as Project Blue Horizon, however, was not played in New Mexico. For various reasons, the War Department returned the professor to his home town. Although the Lucky Linda would be launched from the White Sands Te
st Range less than 100 miles from Goddard’s ranch, Washington decided that the best place for Blue Horizon’s brain trust was in Massachusetts.

  The Department of War wanted to keep Goddard within arm’s reach, and Massachusetts is closer to Washington, DC, than New Mexico. Yet it was also decided not to take unnecessary risks. Goddard was reputed to personally tinker with his rockets while they were on the launch pad. This fact was known by Dr. Vannevar Bush, President Roosevelt’s science advisor, who gave orders for “the Professor” to be kept away from the rockets themselves. In hindsight, this was good logic. There were many spectacular explosions in White Sands over the next two years of the crash program, one of which claimed the lives of two technicians. It would have been disastrous if Goddard himself had been killed during one of these accidents.

  There was some resistance by the War Department to having Project Blue Horizon located in Worcester because another top-secret military R&D program was already underway in Massachusetts: the radar defense project being developed in Cambridge at MIT’s so-called “radiation laboratory.” It was felt by many in the Pentagon that having two secret projects working so near to each other would be risky. Goddard was not eager to return to Worcester, either. It had become difficult for him to endure the New England climate, and he especially chafed at not being able to witness each rocket test. Bush argued, however, that neither Clark University nor MIT were high-profile enough (at the time) to attract Nazi spies; having Blue Horizon camouflaged by a college campus, like MIT’s “Rad Lab,” made perfect sense.

  The White House won out over the Pentagon, and Goddard went along with his relocation orders. Esther Goddard, always protective of her husband’s health, naturally returned to Worcester with Robert. They moved back into their former residence, where Goddard had been born, and readjusted to life in New England’s second-largest city.