Rude Astronauts

by Allen Steele

  The next night, Big Bertha was taken back to the Jaffrey rail head, loaded onto another flatcar, and started on its long journey across America to New Mexico. The first big hurdle of Blue Horizon had been jumped. Yet, despite the place he had earned in history, farmer Hartnell never told anyone about the Thanksgiving rocket test which had been made on his farm. He died in 1957 still maintaining secrecy, leaving the new owners of his farm puzzled at the strange concrete cradle which rested inside his barn.

  The final months of Project Blue Horizon were a race against time. MI-6 and the OSS knew that the Nazis were in the final stages of building the Amerika Bomber, but the location of work was still unknown and the Nazis’ rate of progress was uncertain. Silver and Gold had long since been pulled out of Peenemünde, so the Allies were now blind as to what the Nazis were doing. Reconnaissance flights by the Allies over Germany had failed to locate the two-mile launch track which Sanger had specified in the Black Umbrella document. Unknown to MI-6, it had been built near Nordhausen by the Dora concentration camp prisoners and camouflaged with nets; the Luftwaffe’s scientists were coming steadily closer to fulfilling their primary objective: within the secret caverns of Nordhausen, the sleek antipodal rocket-plane was gradually taking shape and form.

  Nonetheless, there was talk within the White House and the Pentagon that the Black Umbrella report had been a red herring. There had already been one similar instance, earlier in the war, when the Nazis had been suspected of developing an atomic weapon. In response, the War Department had begun a crash program to develop its own atomic bomb. This program, based in rural Tennessee and codenamed the Manhattan Project, had been unsuccessfully struggling to develop an atomic bomb when a Danish physicist, Niels Bohr, managed to escape to the West with the reliable news that the Nazis were nowhere close to attaining controlled nuclear fission, let alone perfecting an atomic bomb.

  Although minimal atomic research was secretly continued at the Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, the Manhattan Project had been scrapped, mainly to fund Project Blue Horizon. Now, however, some people within the Pentagon were saying that Sanger’s antipodal bomber was another chimera and that vital American resources were being wasted. On their side in the White House was Vice President Harry S Truman, who had begun referring to the American rocket program as “Project Buck Rogers.” Yet Vannevar Bush persisted; unlike the atomic bomb scare, there was no proof that the Nazis were not developing the Amerika Bomber. Roosevelt pragmatically followed his advice, and Project Blue Horizon was not cancelled.

  “Not knowing what the Germans were doing was the scary part,” Roy Cahill recalls, “so all we could do was work like bastards. We stopped thinking about it in terms of the glory of putting the first American in space. Now we only wanted to get someone up there without killing him.”

  Through the early part of 1944, Team 390 rarely left its makeshift laboratory at the sportsmen’s club. The ten scientists were constantly in the lodge’s dining room, pulling twenty-hour days in their efforts to design the rest of the X-1. The FBI bodyguards had taken to cooking their meals for them, and the long table in the middle of the room was buried beneath books, slide rules, and teetering mounds of paper. Big Bertha had only been one component which had to be designed from scratch; life-support, avionics, telemetry and guidance systems, even the pilot’s vacuum suit still had to be developed. As the long New Hampshire winter set in, the days became shorter and the nights colder; tempers became frayed. More than once, members of the team went outside to settle their disputes with their fists. The only instance of relaxation any of the team’s survivors remember was the December morning after a nor’easter dropped seven inches of snow on them; they dropped work and had a spontaneous snowball fight on Lake Monomonac’s frozen surface.

  “Bob was the one who really suffered,” Henry Morse remembers. “His health had never been good, and the overwork, plus the hard winter we had that year, started to gang up on him. Esther used to come up from Worcester to make sure that he didn’t overexert himself, that he rested once a day, but he started ignoring her advice after awhile. None of us was sleeping or eating well. We were frightened to death that the very next day we would hear that the Amerika Bomber had firebombed New York. It was that much of a race.”

  Piece by piece, the X-1 was assembled in New Mexico from the specifications laid down by Team 390. Unlike Big Bertha, some vital components such as the inertial guidance system were installed virtually without testing. There was simply not enough time to run everything through the wringer. The White Sands engineers knew that they were working from sheer faith. If Goddard’s People were crucially wrong in any one of thousands of areas, the spacecraft they were building would become a deathtrap for its pilot.

  “How in the hell did we get a man into space?” After many years, Morse shakes his head. “Because we were scared of what would happen if we failed.”

  In the end, it was a photo finish. Both the Amerika Bomber and the X-1 were finished and brought to their respective launch pads in the same week. Goddard and his team left New Hampshire for White Sands on May 15 to oversee the final launch, whenever it occurred. It was now a matter of waiting for the Germans to launch the Amerika Bomber.

  The denouement is well recorded in the history books. The vigil at White Sands ended early on the morning of May 26, 1944, when high-altitude recon planes and ground-based radar spotted the Amerika Bomber over the Pacific Ocean. Within twenty minutes the X-1—christened the Lucky Linda by its pilot after his wife—was successfully launched. Skid Sloman piloted the X-1 through a harrowing ascent and intercepted the A-9 in space above the Gulf of Mexico—during its final ascent skip before the dive which would have taken it over New York. High above the American heartland, Sloman destroyed the Amerika Bomber with a solid-fuel missile launched from the X-1’s port wing. Sloman then successfully guided his ship through atmospheric re-entry to touchdown in Lakehurst, New Jersey.

  With the landing of the Lucky Linda, Project Blue Horizon was no longer top secret. Once the X-1’s mission was announced to the American public by Edward R. Murrow on CBS radio, it became one of the most celebrated events of World War II. The destruction of the Amerika Bomber was also one of the final nails in the Nazi coffin. So many resources had been poured into the project that the rest of the German war machine suffered. Sanger’s squadron of antipodal bombers was never built, and within a year, Germany surrendered to the Allies. The Lucky Linda flew again in August, 1945, modified to drop a massive incendiary bomb on Hiroshima, Japan. Japan surrendered a few days later, and World War II ended with the dawn of the Space Age.

  Yet the story doesn’t end there.

  Because the technology which had produced the Lucky Linda was considered vital to national security, the OSS clamped the lid on the history of the spaceplane’s development. The story which was fed to the press was that the ship had been entirely designed and built in New Mexico. The OSS felt that it was necessary to hide the role that Robert Goddard and Team 390 had played.

  In the long run, the OSS was correct. When the Third Reich fell, the Russian White Army rolled into Germany and took Nordhausen, capturing many of the German rocket scientists. Josef Stalin was interested in the Amerika Bomber and sought the expertise which had produced the spaceplane. Unknown to either the Americans or the Germans, the Soviet Union’s Gas Dynamics Laboratory had been secretly working on its own rockets under the leadership of Fridrikh Tsander and Sergei Korolov. The Soviet rocket program had stalled during Russia’s Great Patriotic War, however, and Stalin wanted to regain the lead in astronautics. But von Braun, Oberth and other German rocket scientists escaped the Russians and surrendered to American forces; eventually they came to the United States under “Operation Paperclip” and became the core of the American space program.

  The lead was short-lived; in March, 1949, the USSR put its own manned spacecraft into orbit. Shortly thereafter, Brookhaven physicists announced the sustenance of nuclear fission, demonstrated by the explos
ion of an atomic bomb in the Nevada desert. This was followed, in less than a year, by the detonation of a Soviet atomic bomb in Siberia. The new cold war between the two superpowers moved into the heavens; for the next twenty-six years, until the passage of the United Nations Space Treaty in 1974 which outlawed nukesats, no person on Earth could ever feel safe again.

  Richard Feynman, the Nobel laureate, accurately assayed the situation in his memoirs, Get Serious, Mr. Feynman: “It was bad enough that the US and USSR shared the capability to launch satellites into orbit; now they both had atomic bombs to put in the satellites. In a more sane world, it would have been bombs without rockets, or rockets without bombs—but, God help us, not both at once!”

  Because the United States was now competing with Russia for dominance in space, the American rocket team lived under oaths of secrecy for more than forty years, forbidden to discuss publicly what they had done in Worcester and Rindge. Robert Goddard himself died on August 10, 1945, the day after the firebombing of Hiroshima. Esther Goddard remained silent about her husband’s involvement with Blue Horizon until her death in 1982.

  Other members of Team 390 passed away over the years with their lips sealed, yet almost all remained involved in the American space program. J. Jackson Jackson became the presidential science advisor during Robert Kennedy’s administration, and Hamilton Ballou was the chief administrator of NASA during the time of the first lunar landing. Ham and Jack Cube are both dead now, but each May 26, the seven remaining members of Team 390 make their way to Rindge. Sometimes they are accompanied by children or grandchildren; in the last forty-seven years, seldom has any of the former teammates missed this anniversary. The Monomonac Gun & Rod Club belongs to them now, a gift from their grateful country.

  They spend the day getting the club in shape for the summer—or, rather, telling the kids what to do, now that the youngest founding member is in his mid-sixties. The old men sit together in rocking chairs on the front porch, drinking beer, kidding each other that FBI agents are watching them from the woods. When the chores are done, they and their families have dinner together, sitting alongside each other on benches at the long oak table in the lodge’s dining room where they once scrawled notes and bickered. This is always a festive occasion, punctuated by laughter and dirty jokes. Another tradition is seeing who can get raunchiest, within certain unspoken limits. Their wives roll their eyes in disgust and the kids make faces, and none of the seven men give a rotten damn what they think.

  After dinner, as the wives and young people tend to the clean-up, the old men retire to the lodge’s main room; Henry and Roy and Mike, Lloyd and Harry, Gerry and Taylor settle into chairs around the fieldstone fireplace, cigars and drinks in hand, their feet warmed by the fire. After a while, they begin to talk. As the wives and children and grandchildren gradually filter into the room, while the sun sets beyond the lake and the crickets and bullfrogs strike up the nocturnal orchestra, seven friends once again tell their secret tale.

  On occasion, they look at the framed photo of Robert Goddard which hangs above the mantel. At other times, though, their eyes wander to another, smaller picture which hangs beside it, a shot which is familiar to nearly every person in the civilized world: the spacesuited figure of Neil Armstrong, the first American to set foot on Mars during the joint US-USSR expedition in 1976, opening an urn and scattering Goddard’s cremated ashes across the landing site at Utopia Planitia.

  John Harper Wilson

  JOHN HARPER WILSON, THE first American to set foot on the Moon, lives today in peaceful obscurity in a log cabin in Rindge, New Hampshire. There’s no mailbox on the narrow dirt road leading to his house, and the clerks at the post office in town are among the small handful of townspeople who are aware of the famous resident. Wilson visits the post office two or three times a week to check his rented box, which is seldom full. Although John Harper Wilson’s name is in the history books, the man himself has almost been forgotten.

  Inside the cabin, surrounded by birch and pine trees near the shore of Lake Monomonac, there is little to show that its occupant was once an astronaut. Wilson’s wife, Leanne, who was photographed nearly twenty years ago tearfully watching her husband on TV as he descended the ladder of Eagle One, has decorated the log walls with Tibetan carpets. Wilson himself—his brown hair now turned grey, his once athletic build now slightly paunchy—has become an amateur expert on Buddhist culture and Tibetan history. It is only in Wilson’s small office, in a guest room adjacent to the living room, that one finds memorabilia from the Luna One expedition: a model of a moonship, a bit of grey rock suspended in an acrylic cube, a framed photo of the twenty members of Luna One, posed in their heavy space armor on the surface of the Moon, surrounding the American flag that was planted there.

  Wilson, the mission commander, is the astronaut in the center of the group. Next to him is his second-in command, Captain Neil Holliday. Their helmets almost entirely cover their faces, except for a narrow eye slit, so it is impossible to read their expressions. Wilson says that he was smiling when the picture was taken.

  “Bloody wonder, right?” he asks. “Neil wasn’t smiling. I couldn’t see his face, but I know that he wasn’t smiling. I think he wanted to murder me right then.”

  Wilson pauses, gazing at the group photo. “Pretty remarkable that they let a traitor stand in the middle of the picture, isn’t it?” he wonders aloud.

  It has taken nineteen years for the true events concerning Luna One to become public. For almost two decades the US Air Force, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the White House had successfully prevented historians and the press, along with the greater public at large, from finding out what occurred on the Sea of Tranquility on July 20, 1969.

  For all those years, the four-and-a-half-minute communications blackout from Tranquility Base has officially been described as a “technical failure.” And since the mission’s return to Earth six weeks after the landing, John Harper Wilson has virtually disappeared from the public eye. When Congress awarded Medals of Honor to the members of Luna One, all but Major Wilson attended the ceremony on Capitol Hill. Wilson was said to be too sick to attend, and Neil Holliday accepted the medal for his friend. Wilson says he never received the medal from Holliday.

  After nineteen years, Wilson has finally broken his silence, at risk of persecution by the Department of Justice. Sitting on an overstuffed couch in his living room, absentmindedly juggling the acrylic cube with its bits of moonrock from hand to hand, the retired Air Force officer spoke about Luna One and the events leading up to those four minutes and thirty seconds of missing history.

  “I changed my mind on the way to the Moon,” he began.

  A manned expedition to the Moon had been an Air Force objective since the early 1950s, during the postwar Space Age that followed the Blue Horizon Project, the secret race to beat Nazi Germany into space which saw the first suborbital flight of Robert H. Goddard’s spaceplane in 1944. Spurred by the victory of the Lucky Linda over Germany’s Amerika Bomber, the Pentagon became convinced that the key to strategic military superiority was the control of outer space. General Omar Bliss, the Army’s chief of the Blue Horizon Project, summed it up during testimony to the House Committee on Science and Technology in 1949: “Gentlemen, military advantage has always rested on taking the high ground, and space is the new high ground. America must take this hill, or risk losing its freedom.”

  Congress and the Truman and Eisenhower administrations agreed, and the new US Air Force was given virtual carte blanche to establish a permanent American presence in space. With the aid of former German scientists from the Nazis’ Peenemünde rocket base, the Lucky Linda was superseded by the 265-foot, three-stage Atlas-class spaceships, the first of which was launched on April 10, 1956, from the Air Force Proving Grounds at Cape Canaveral, Florida. Subsequently, the Air Force space effort was retitled the US Space Force, and the base was redesignated the US Space Force Canaveral Launch Center, more commonly called “the Cape.”

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p; Propelled by almost limitless budgeting, the American space effort continued at a breakneck speed. By 1963, Space Station One, the 250-foot “Space Wheel,” had been completed in orbit five hundred miles above the equator, and the United States was firmly established as the world’s first spacefaring nation. The imagination of the American public was captured. Collier’s and Life breathlessly reported each new success to millions of readers; CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite became the first journalist to report from space during a three-part series filmed aboard the Wheel; and Star Trek, a somewhat melodramatic TV series produced by Irwin Allen, was the second-highest rated network program for years, surpassed in the Neilsens only by I Love Lucy.

  Yet the distinctly military flavor of the American space program disturbed many on Capitol Hill. In 1959, a move was made by members of the Senate to bring the program under civilian control. The “Space Act,” proposed by two Democratic leaders in the Senate, John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts and Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas, would have created a civilian space agency, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, or NASA.

  Naturally, the bill was vigorously opposed by the Pentagon, which claimed that a civilian agency could not possibly put a man on the Moon before 1970. But the Space Act didn’t need Pentagon hostility to kill it, only the loss of its primary sponsors. Kennedy, the Democratic presidential nominee in 1960, lost the election to Richard M. Nixon; Johnson also lost his seat in the Senate in the same election year.

  With Kennedy and Johnson both suddenly out of office, NASA died along with the Space Act; the bill was killed in the Ways and Means Committee. Under the conservative Nixon administration, the space program remained under military control. Since Nixon was an ardent supporter of the military space effort, the Space Force formally proposed, shortly after the election, a manned expedition to the Moon, Luna One.