Rude Astronauts

by Allen Steele

  To build the security cover for Blue Horizon, the FBI coerced Clark University’s directors into reinstating Goddard’s status as an active faculty member. It was arranged that Goddard’s only real academic workload was to teach a freshman class in introductory physics. In the university’s academic calendar for the semesters from 1942 through 1943, though, there was a listing for an advanced-level class, “Physics 390,” whose instructor was “to be announced.” But even senior physics students at Clark found it impossible to enroll in the class; it was always filled at registration time.

  Goddard’s “graduate students” in Physics 390 were a group of nine young men enlisted from the American Rocket Society, unrepentant rocket buffs and far-sighted engineers with whom Goddard had corresponded over the years. Goddard had quickly hand-picked his group from memory; the War Department and the FBI had contacted each person individually, requesting their volunteer help. None refused, though the Selective Service Administration had to issue draft deferrals for four members. The FBI moved them all to Worcester and managed to get them quietly isolated in a triple-decker on Birch Street near the campus.

  Team 390 (as they were codenamed by the FBI) were strangers even among themselves. Almost all were from different parts of the country. Only two members, Lloyd Kapman and Harry Bell, both from St. Louis, had met before, and although Taylor Brickell and Henry Morse were known to each other from the letters page of Astounding Science Fiction, of which they were both devoted readers, they had never met face to face. The youngest, Roy Cahill, had just passed his eighteenth birthday; the oldest, Hamilton “Ham” Ballou, was in his mid-thirties, and was forced to shave off his mustache to make him appear younger.

  And there were other problems. J. Jackson Jackson was the only black member of the team, which tended to make him stand out on the mostly white Clark University campus (his odd name earned him the nickname “Jack Cube”). Michael Ferris had briefly been a member of the American Communist Party during his undergraduate days, which meant that he had undergone intensive scrutiny by the FBI and nearly been refused on the grounds of his past political activity before he had agreed to sign a binding pledge of loyalty to the United States. And Gerard “Gerry” Mander had to be sprung from a county workhouse in Roanoke, Virginia: a rocket he had been developing had misfired, spun out across two miles of tobacco field and crashed into a Baptist preacher’s house.

  Once they were together, though, Blue Horizon’s R&D task force immediately hit it off. “We spoke the same language,” recalls Gerry Mander, who now lives in Boston and who was then the team’s “wildcat” engineer. “Rockets were our specialty, and putting something above the atmosphere was a dream we all shared. I mean, I was a young snot from backwoods Virginia, so sharing a room with a colored man like Jack Cube, at least at the time, seemed more unlikely than putting a guy in orbit. But Jack talked engineering, so we had that much in common, and in a couple of days I didn’t even care.”

  “We were all a bunch of rocket-buffs,” says Mike Ferris, the team’s chemistry expert, “and the War Department had given us carte blanche to put a man in space.” He laughs. “Man, we were like little kids thrown the key to the toy store!”

  Team 390 had little doubt about what was needed. The only device capable of intercepting the Sanger bomber was another spacecraft, and the only reliable navigation system was a human pilot. Since the ’20s, Robert Goddard had drawn, in his “gunpowder experiments” notebooks, rough designs for a rocket-plane, along with notes for gyroscopic guidance systems and other plans which turned out to be useful for the team. Studies at the California Institute of Technology had also suggested that a single-stage rocket-plane could be sent into space on a suborbital trajectory, with the ship gliding back through the atmosphere like a sailplane.

  The team postulated that a spaceplane, launched by a liquid-fuel engine and ascending at a forty-five-degree angle, could function as a one-man space fighter capable of intercepting the Amerika Bomber. Upon studying the Sanger Report, Team 390 further realized that the bomber would be most vulnerable during the ascent phases of its flight. At these points, the ship was slowest and least maneuverable, a sitting duck for another spacecraft’s ordnance. So if the US ship were launched from New Mexico just as the German ship flew over the Pacific coast, it could intercept the Amerika Bomber before it reached New York City and shoot it down with ordinary solid-fuel rockets.

  “We came up with it in one night over beer and pretzels in the Bancroft Hotel bar,” says Henry Morse, the team’s electrical engineer who now lives in Winchester, New Hampshire, “Bob wasn’t with us that night, but we had gone through his notebooks and read all that stuff he had thought up, so it was mainly a matter of putting it together. We knew we didn’t need a very sophisticated ship, nothing like a space shuttle today. Of course, we didn’t have time to make anything like a space shuttle. Just something quick and dirty.”

  “Quick and dirty” soon became buzzwords for Goddard’s People. The team took the plan to Goddard the following morning, during their “class” in Goddard’s lab at the university. By the end of the day, following many hours of arguing, scribbling notes on the chalkboard, and flooding the trashcan with wadded-up notes, Team 390 and Goddard settled on the plan. The professor was amused that his “grad students” had come up with the scheme in a barroom. “If Mrs. Goddard will let me out of the house, I’d like to be in on the next session,” he told Morse.

  The FBI, though, was not amused when it discovered that Team 390 had been discussing rockets in a downtown Worcester bar. There was always the chance of Nazi spies. The FBI was especially sensitive given the proximity to the MIT Rad Lab only forty miles away. Team 390 was ordered to stay out of the Bancroft, and J. Edgar Hoover assigned special escorts for Goddard and his team. The team thought the FBI was over-reacting.

  “It was a pain, of course,” Roy Cahill recalls. “We couldn’t visit the men’s room without having a G-man escorting us. They were also parked all night outside Bob’s house and our place on Birch Street. Esther couldn’t stand it at first, but she changed her mind after the City Hall thing.”

  By early 1943, the V-2 missiles were perfected and the first rockets launched against targets in Great Britain. The Allies had been flying air raids upon V-2 launch sites in occupied northern France, and finally against Peenemünde itself. During one of the early reconnaissance missions over France, Ham Ballou—temporarily brought over to England for the purpose of gathering much-needed intelligence on the V-2 rockets—flew over the Normandy coastline in the back seat of a P-38J Lightning, snapping pictures as the pilot dodged anti-aircraft flack. Ballou returned to Worcester with little which was immediately useful to Team 390, but for a while he was able to claim that he was the only person among Goddard’s people who had come under enemy fire—until Goddard himself almost caught a bullet.

  Following a devastating Allied air raid on Peenemünde, the German High Command covertly transferred the principal R & D of the Amerika Bomber 250 miles inland to Nordhausen, where the base of a mountain had been hollowed out into vast caverns by prisoners from the nearby Dora concentration camp. This was the secret Nazi rocket facility which MI-6 had been unable to locate. Many of the same European Jews who built the Nordhausen site were later sacrificed in grotesque experiments, over the objections of von Braun and Oberth, which tested human endurance at high-altitude conditions.

  Little of this mattered to Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler, whose Luftwaffe had now taken over the A-9 project from the German Army. He was more concerned with the fact, surmised through briefings with von Braun, that the German rocket team’s work had been largely inspired by Goddard’s research; he suspected that the United States might be embarked on a secret rocket program of its own. Although Gestapo agents in America had not found any evidence of a US space initiative, Himmler decided not to take chances. In March, 1943, he ordered the assassination of the only known American rocketry expert: Robert Hutchings Goddard.

  For all of his bri
lliance, Goddard was also absentminded about the mundane tasks of life; he could forget to fold his umbrella when he walked in from the rain. On March 30, 1943, the Worcester City Clerk’s office sent the professor a letter informing him that he had not filed his city taxes. Goddard received the letter while working in his lab. Both irritated and alarmed, he put on his coat and immediately bustled out to catch the Main South trolley downtown. He left so quickly that his FBI escort, who was relieving himself in the men’s room, missed the professor’s departure.

  But the Nazi Gestapo agent who had been watching Goddard for a week, waiting for such a break, didn’t miss the opportunity. Following Goddard from his post on the Clark campus, the assassin also took the downtown trolley, getting off at the same stop in front of City Hall. As Goddard marched into the building, the Nazi slipped his silenced Luger Parabellum from his trenchcoat pocket and followed the scientist inside.

  At the same moment, Worcester police officer Clay Reilly was walking downstairs from the second floor of City Hall when he spotted a trenchcoated man, carrying a gun, closing in on another man, who was walking toward the tax assessor’s office. The second man was unaware that he was being pursued, but Reilly immediately sized up the situation.

  “I didn’t think twice,” Reilly, now retired from the force, says in retrospect. “I pulled my pistol and shouted for the guy to freeze. He decided to mess with me instead.”

  Reilly was a crack shot on the WPD firing range; his skill didn’t fail him then. The Gestapo agent turned and aimed at Reilly, and the officer nailed the assassin with one shot to the heart before the Nazi could squeeze his trigger. Goddard himself fled from City Hall, where he was spirited away by his FBI escort, who had just arrived in his car.

  No identification was found on the body of the man Patrolman Reilly had shot. The Worcester Telegram reported the story the next day under the front page headline, “Mystery Killer Shot in City Hall.” No one knew that he had been trying to kill Goddard; Reilly didn’t recognize the scientist and Goddard had not remained at the scene. Clay Reilly was promoted to sergeant’s rank for his quick thinking, but it wasn’t until long after the war that the policeman was informed of the identity of the man he had shot or the person whose life he had saved, or the fact that J. Edgar Hoover himself had insisted upon his promotion.

  “Everything changed for us after that,” says Henry Morse. “I guess we were sort of looking at Blue Horizon like it was a kid’s adventure. Y’know, the Rocket Boys go to the Moon. But Bob’s close call sobered us up.”

  The incident also sobered up the White House. Upon the insistence of Vannevar Bush, the FBI hastily sought a new base of operations in New England for Team 390. Within a week of the attempted assassination, a new locale for Project Blue Horizon was found: the Monomonac Gun & Rod Club, which had been closed since the beginning of the war. The lodge was located in the tiny farm community of Rindge, due north of Worcester just across the New Hampshire state line, close enough to Worcester to allow the rocket team to quickly relocate there. Because the club was accessible only by a single, unmarked dirt road, it had the isolation which the FBI believed was necessary to keep Team 390 hidden from the world.

  The FBI purchased the property, and in the dead of night on April 6, 1943, all the rocket team’s files and models were loaded into a truck. As far as Clark University’s collegiate community was concerned, Dr. Goddard had taken an abrupt leave of absence due to health reasons, and nobody on campus seemed to notice the sudden departure of the small, insular group of grad students from Physics 390.

  The Monomonac Gun & Rod Club was set in seven acres of New Hampshire forest on the northwestern side of Lake Monomonac. The club consisted mainly of a two-story whitewashed lodge which dated back to the turn of the century; it had a handsome front porch which overlooked the serene main channel of the lake, a couple of spartan rooms on the upper floor which contained a dozen old-style iron beds, and a single outhouse beyond the back door. Mail from relatives was still sent to Worcester and forwarded once a week to New Hampshire; except for Esther Goddard, none of the families of the rocket team were made aware of the fact that their sons and husbands were now in New Hampshire.

  The former sportsmen’s club was a far cry from the comforts of Clark University; most of the rocket team were unused to roughing it in the woods. Mice had taken up occupancy in the kitchen next to the long dining room, and the only sources of heat were a fireplace in the den and a pot-bellied stove on the second floor. One of the first orders of business was to knock down the hornet nests in the upper bedrooms and under the porch eaves. “The first week we were there, we almost went on strike,” laughs Gerry Mander. “If it hadn’t been for the fact that we were in a race against time, we might have told Bush and Hoover and all the rest to stick it until they found us some decent accommodations. As it was, though, we knew we had little choice.”

  Yet there was another major problem in the relocation. In New Mexico, the engineering team at White Sands was building unmanned prototype rockets based on the plans sent by Goddard’s team, firing the rockets as soon as they could be made. The major hurdle was in producing a reliable engine for the spaceplane, now dubbed the “X-1.” It had to be capable of lifting 65,500 pounds to orbit, yet most of the prototypes exploded, sometimes on the launch pad. For each small success, there were dozens of setbacks. There had been several pad explosions already, and in the latest failure a couple of technicians had been killed when the liquid-hydrogen tank ruptured during pressurization.

  “Part of the problem was that the team wasn’t in New Mexico to oversee the final stages of each test,” Morse says. “We were expected to build rockets without getting our hands dirty, and you simply can’t compartmentalize a project like that. What it came down to, finally, was that we had to have a test-bed in New Hampshire, whether Van Bush liked it or not.”

  It took Robert Goddard several weeks of lobbying to convince Vannevar Bush that some of the hands-on research had to be done by his people. Once Bush finally caved in, though, the next task was to locate an appropriate location for the construction of the new prototype. A giant rocket engine is difficult to conceal; it simply could not be constructed on a workbench in a sportsmen’s club.

  One of the prime military contractors in Massachusetts was the Wyman-Gordon Company, which was making aircraft forgings for the Army in its Worcester factory. Upon meeting with Wyman-Gordon’s president in Washington, DC, Vannevar Bush managed to finagle the company into renting out a vacant warehouse on the factory grounds. Final assembly of Team 390’s new prototype engine—referred to as “Big Bertha”—would be made in Warehouse Seven, from parts made across the country and secretly shipped to Wyman-Gordon. Big Bertha’s aluminum outer casting was cast there as well, although only a few select people at Wyman-Gordon knew exactly what it was.

  Secrecy was paramount. Only a handful of Wyman-Gordon workers were involved in the construction of Big Bertha; all had survived extensive background checks by the FBI, and what they were told was on a strict “need-to-know” basis. The FBI put counterspies to work in the factory to guard against Nazi infiltrators, and work on Big Bertha was done only after midnight, when the least number of people were at the plant. When necessary, the Team 390 members were brought down from New Hampshire to the plant to supervise the engine’s construction, making at least three transfers to different vehicles en route, with the final vehicle usually being a phony Coca-Cola delivery van owned by the FBI.

  It was a little more difficult to find a suitable site for test-firing Big Bertha; Wyman-Gordon’s plant was located in the middle of a residential neighborhood. This time, though, the rocket team didn’t leave it to the FBI; Henry Morse and Roy Cahill borrowed Esther Goddard’s car and spent several days driving around southern New Hampshire trying to find a place for the test-firing. After only a few days, they finally located a dairy farm in nearby Jaffrey, New Hampshire.

  Jaffrey had a freight line which ran straight up from Worcester, and the fa
rm was located only two miles from the siding. Its owner, Marion Hartnell, was a World War I veteran who had just lost his only son in the fighting in France. He had no love for the Nazis, and once he was approached by Goddard himself, he eagerly volunteered to let the team use his barn for the test-firing of Big Bertha. “We told Mr. Hartnell that there was a possibility that our rocket might blow up and take his barn with it,” Cahill recalls. “The old duffer didn’t bat an eyelash. ‘So long as you can promise me you’ll shoot that rocket of yours right up Hitler’s wazoo,’ that was his response. He even turned down our offer of rent.”

  In the night of November 26, 1943—Thanksgiving eve, exactly six months before the launch of the Lucky Linda—Big Bertha was loaded onto a flatcar at the Wyman-Gordon rail siding. A special freight train took it due north across the state line to Jaffrey, where after twelve a.m. on Thanksgiving Day the massive rocket engine was carefully off-loaded onto a flatbed truck, which in turn drove it to the Hartnell farm. An Army Corps of Engineers from Fort Devens in Ashby, Massachusetts, spent the rest of the morning anchoring the prototype engine onto the concrete horizontal test-bed which had been built in the barn. Shortly before noon, Goddard and his scientists began making their preparations for the test while the townspeople of Jaffrey unwittingly enjoyed their Thanksgiving meals. Team 390 waited until exactly 10 p.m., then Robert Goddard threw the ignition switch on the control board outside the barn.

  “I think everybody was standing a hundred feet away from the barn door when we lit the candle,” Mander recalls. “When it went, I almost wet my pants. I thought we were going to blow up the whole damn farm.”

  Big Bertha didn’t explode, though; the engine produced 60 tons of thrust for the requisite ninety seconds. “When it was over,” Morse says, “Bob turned to us, let out his breath, and said, ‘Gentlemen, we’ve got a success. Now let’s go have that Thanksgiving dinner.’ I swear, the old man was ready to cry.”