The Apollo Chronicles

by Brandon R. Brown

  After the Soviet Union tested its first atomic weapon and communists took control of China in 1949, America hastily returned to missiles. They moved von Braun and his countrymen to an army base in Alabama, where he worked in the Redstone Arsenal’s ballistic missile program. The Germans felt a sort of double salvation. Not only could they resume rocketry work in earnest, but in Huntsville they also returned to a life with greenery and forests, reminding them more of their homeland (see Figure 2.1).

  figure 2.1 Walt Disney visits Wernher von Braun in Huntsville in 1954. (NASA photograph.)

  Meanwhile, von Braun pushed himself further into the public. He encountered some early speed bumps in Alabama. After a presentation to the Huntsville Kiwanis Club, a farmer said he would fly to Washington, D.C., on a bale of cotton before a man landed on the Moon. Soon after, von Braun received a letter from a woman advising him to stop his heretical talk of outer space—he should “stay home and watch television like the Lord intended!” But his confidence and charm made von Braun a natural scientific communicator, and he was relentless in his campaign. He made leading appearances in programs like Walt Disney’s television special, “Trip around the Moon.” Perfectly coifed and delivering impeccable, accented English, von Braun calmly described what a trip to our nearest neighbor would require. And he began writing for the general public as well, such as “Crossing the Last Frontier” for Collier’s, “Cosmic Wonders” in New York Times Magazine, and “First Men to the Moon” in This Week Magazine. All he needed was national will with a generous allowance, and he would harvest the wonders of space for America. Wernher von Braun’s Disney TV programs, in particular, mesmerized a number of eventual NASA engineers. “This show, probably more than anything else, influenced me to study aerospace engineering,” said one. “And this wasn’t the ordinary thing to do for a boy raised in a small Iowa farming community in the fifties.”i

  For some time, von Braun had wanted to use one of his rockets to put a satellite in orbit. In 1956, his team’s latest creation, the Jupiter rocket, set records by reaching an altitude of 682 miles above Earth and covering a total distance of 3,400 miles. But the military kept holding him back. By restricting the heights and durations of his launches, they made sure he didn’t “accidentally” put something in orbit around Earth. Through some clever labeling, he kept one of his best rockets intact and ready for future use, officially calling this a “long term storage test” of rocket hardware.2

  He was not afraid to use fear and conflict to further his ambitions—whatever would nudge America spaceward. In fact, he had been warning the U.S. government that the Soviets would beat them to a satellite. Earlier in the 1950s, even while pushing a benign vision of space to the public, he privately advised army brass to consider a militarized space station and satellites armed with atomic weapons. And just a year before Sputnik, von Braun had promoted the great prospects for spying from orbit. His words also showcased his incredible ability to convey technical principles in lucid language. “The atmosphere is much more transparent from without than from underneath,” he explained. “Pick up a piece of wax paper. Hold it close in front of your face and you see only a blur [like looking spaceward from Earth]. Hold it on a piece of newsprint, and it is perfectly transparent [like looking at Earth from orbit].”3

  We can glimpse part of von Braun’s operation through the early career of Henry Pohl, who started there as an enlisted GI in the fall of 1956. Henry was a newly minted engineer from Texas A&M University. His father had tried to talk his eldest son out of engineering, telling him he’d never be his own boss that way, and that he’d never have time for cattle. The elder Pohl pushed for law or medicine. Henry tried farming after high school, but a bad drought and lack of funds closed him down. He reasoned that, since he liked numbers and machines anyway, he could work a few years after college as an engineer, sock away some money, and then start a proper cattle farm. Then the army drafted him just as he completed his college degree.

  The clarity and precision of Pohl’s memories shine here. He knew his dog tag number for life after reading it twice, while some GIs never could perfectly remember theirs. He can recall driving to Huntsville (only his second time leaving Texas) in his 1953 Ford, and he writes of arriving there at 9:00 p.m., in a “light rain.” When he met with his new commanding officer, he remembers it being “the first office on the right.”

  The Redstone Arsenal gave the enlisted men some choice as to where they worked. Pohl’s commanding officer said that whatever Henry decided, he should avoid the “Test Lab,” because the GIs working there got behind on their soldier training. Test Lab people were known to skip lunch, and they even worked weekends sometimes—it was awful, the officer told him. But none of that concerned Henry; far from home, he had little else to occupy him.

  He went to see the Test Lab people and they said there was plenty of work for him if he was interested, but he had to be dedicated. After his interview, they told him to hold tight, skip lunch, and watch a noontime rocket test. “That dadgum thing looked pretty simple,” he later said of the rocket on the test stand. The engine in the bottom didn’t look much bigger than the one on his tractor back home, and it was just a long tube on top of that. They took him to the safety of a fortified blockhouse. Pohl watched them prepare and chatter back and forth over a loudspeaker. This was to be a “static” test—the rocket engine would be held in place and monitored for performance. “All at once that thing lit off,” he recalls. “I had never seen power like that. . . . That beautiful white flame came out of the engine that looked like a gigantic cutting torch.” What amazed Henry was that something the size of his tractor engine—which was impressive already—could weigh less but generate hundreds of times more power. He was hooked.

  At first Henry followed the director of the static test stand around with a clipboard and simply did what he was told. After two weeks of that, he showed up for a day’s test, but the director did not. The engineers grew nervous because the super-cold liquefied oxygen would start freezing parts of the engine if they didn’t run it soon. Henry telephoned around the base asking about the test director and finally got the news. “Didn’t they tell you?” a voice barked at him. “The test stand is yours. Run the goddamn test.” Henry put the phone down, barely out of college and now in charge of one of the most powerful and dangerous engines on the planet. “That was the hardest 150 seconds of my life,” he says now. After acting the part of a leader that day, he went home with a bad migraine. But each day became more comfortable than the last, and he craved the work itself. The same spirit that would solve any problem on the Pohl family farm would solve those that bedeviled rocket engines.

  By the fall of 1957, Pohl answered to a German boss, a colorful and demanding figure named Guenther Haukohl. He had worn many hats in Germany, from flying experimental jet aircraft for the Luftwaffe to helping design underground rocket production lines serving von Braun’s team.

  One night in September of that year, Haukohl came into Pohl’s office looking beaten and almost physically ill. Henry asked him what was wrong, and his boss said that the best American intelligence had confirmed it: The Russians were going to launch a major rocket and put something in orbit around Earth. Pohl had never seen the man look so depressed. “Henry,” Haukohl said, “it’s going to be very bad for the United States.”4

  Following World War II, the Soviets had conscripted a number of German rocket scientists who’d not fled with von Braun, and together they had assembled the remnant pieces of V-2 rockets. Stalin’s oppressive regime had even allowed one Sergei Pavlovich Korolev, a brilliant Soviet rocket scientist, to briefly exit his life of Gulag confinement and take notes from the Germans at von Braun’s old research center on the Baltic coast.

  Nikita Khrushchev, shortly after taking the reins of the Soviet Union in 1953, discovered the rocket program that Stalin had hidden from even the most senior members of the party. And he discovered Korolev. When Khrushchev and his colleagues first saw one of Korolev’s roc
kets, “we gawked at what he showed us as if we were sheep seeing a new gate for the first time. . . . We walked around the rocket, touching it, tapping it . . . we did everything but lick it to see how it tasted.”5 While Khrushchev granted the rocket scientist new freedom and relative comfort, he maintained a leash as well. Korolev would still toil in anonymity, hailed as the “Chief Designer” but with his name and face hidden from public. Khrushchev pivoted from the ways of his predecessors and branded the new Soviet path forward as technological. What need would the Motherland have for antiquated, standing armies (where he happened to have many political enemies) when they could instead paint a clear nightmare for the West with a web of missile trails encircling the globe?

  Sergei Korolev’s history-shaping masterpiece was to rocketry what Eastern bloc athletes would be to Olympic weightlifting: short, compact, and incredibly powerful. The thick R-7 rocket, only three times taller than it was wide, bundled together twenty rocket engines to create an unprecedented lift. The first edition, in the spring of 1957, burst into a fireball during an attempted launch. But Korolev was a master problem solver, driven not only by an urge to reach the heavens but also by the schemes of his boss. Korolev built a small hut exactly halfway between his team’s rural launch pad and their nearby rocket assembly workshop. Coworkers said he slept little, trotting in alternate directions to check on one and then the other. After his partial liberation, progress was so steady that Khrushchev allowed Korolev to meet with some leading Soviet astronomers and to even start preliminary calculations for flights to the Moon and back. By early August of 1957, Korolev had worked out the kinks of the R-7 monster, and his team happily watched their squatty pride roar aloft and arc out of sight. On August 27, the Soviet Union announced to the world that it had built the world’s first true intercontinental ballistic missile, capable of delivering nuclear weapons across oceans. There was little international response. On September 17, a follow-up announcement proclaimed they would launch Earth’s first artificial satellite. The world collectively shrugged, assuming this fit a pattern of empty propaganda.6

  Korolev had heard that the Americans and von Braun were talking about such a feat, and he knew the R-7, designed to carry a heavy nuclear weapon, should have little problem taking something much lighter than a bomb high enough and fast enough to achieve an orbit around Earth. Once he had the green light from party leaders, his team had designed a very simple device. At just 184 pounds, it was little more than a carefully enclosed pair of radio transmitters. They sealed this modest metal sphere with air inside to protect its electronics from the full vacuum of space. The radio would transmit beeps back to Earth. By varying slightly in length and timing, these pings would report on the health of the sphere’s internal pressure. Soviet engineers were also worried about temperature—the first device to abandon the protection of our atmosphere might sizzle to death in the full rays of the sun. Korolev’s team maniacally polished the metal exterior, hoping to reflect as much of the sun’s heat as possible. And so, the first Sputnik was born. Awaiting another R-7 liftoff, the Soviet Union announced the device’s radio frequency and invited the world to tune in.7

  After working through many technical delays, Korolev watched his latest R-7 light up the night sky of October 4, and once it delicately placed its Sputnik in a large oblong orbit, Korolev gave a speech to his team. The Soviet Union had lifted the first human-made object to take laps about Earth—their own tiny moon. “Today the dreams of the best sons of mankind have come true,” he said. “The assault on space has begun.”8 Khrushchev, informed by phone, nodded at the news. He congratulated Korolev and the engineers on another successful launch. Witnesses report that he returned to an ongoing state dinner in Kiev, glowing with the good news. But when he shared it with the assembled guests, they only smiled politely, having no idea what a “satellite” meant. Why should he have expected anything but another global yawn for their new announcement?9

  The world’s reaction to Sputnik was, of course, overwhelming, surpassing even the most hysterical dreams Khrushchev may have enjoyed that night. Americans in particular seemed to tremble with a new collective phobia. U.S. Senate majority leader Lyndon Baines Johnson took his dinner companions for a walk along the Pedernales River in Texas, looking upward for Sputnik. He said the sky now “seemed almost alien.” And two weeks after the launch, Life magazine tidily summarized the nation’s response. “Let us not pretend that Sputnik is anything but a defeat for the United States.” The only path to redemption, according to most, including President Eisenhower, involved a new dedication to math and science.10

  It’s easy now to say what Eisenhower tried to relay, in vain, at the time: The public was overreacting. As he told an advisor, “One small ball in the air . . . does not raise my apprehensions—not one iota.” But the Soviets had aggressively claimed Eastern Europe after the war and then had laid siege to Berlin. In Asia, communism had already enveloped a huge swath of the world’s people. In this light and in the ominous glow of ever larger nuclear tests, the official Soviet Sputnik announcement promising “larger and heavier” satellites sounded grave. And Americans couldn’t help but hear a challenge in the Soviets’ concluding statement of October 5: “Artificial Earth satellites will pave the way to interplanetary travel.”11 They had just claimed Earth orbit, and tomorrow they would take the solar system!

  Younger Americans were, in many cases, less shaken than their parents. Their minds had ample room for fascination. A number of eventual NASA engineers changed their college majors within days of hearing the Sputnik news, in part for patriotic duty but also for the exciting lure of space. And some even younger Americans took to rocket building.

  We get a detailed glimpse of this through the stories of eventual NASA engineer Bob Austin, the son of a Tennessee dairy farmer. He attended high school in a small town north of Nashville, “just before you crash into Kentucky.” His father wanted him to eventually take over the family farm, but Bob, after watching a family friend build a radio from scratch, had his mind set on a career in the magical new world of electronics.

  After Sputnik launched, American newspapers published the satellite’s regular North American transits and its transmission frequency. The boy and his friends got to work. “We set up our receiver and a tape recorder and recorded the beep beep beep of Sputnik when it came over.” After one of their teachers learned what they had done, the high school called for an assembly. An excited but unusually quiet auditorium full of students and teachers waited until the boys on stage hit “play” and Sputnik’s monotonous electronic pings marked the time. With nearly two beeps per second, it thumped like a sprinter’s heartbeat, predating techno music by a half-century. They let it run. “We might as well have been Einstein,” he says of their classmates’ awe.

  Meanwhile, as with so many boys around the country—it was nearly unthinkable that their sisters would join them in this era—Bob and his friends had started building their own rockets. Model kits weren’t yet available, but enthusiasts could easily buy the fixings for primitive rocket fuel. “Back then,” Austin says, “you could go to the drug store, buy your carbon, buy your potassium, buy your sulfur.” They also needed gunpowder, ground fine, to keep everything burning quickly enough. A friend’s father worked for the FBI and helped the boys get a batch of shotgun shells, which they carefully emptied and sifted. They fashioned a rocket from an aluminum tube, filled it with their powder mix, and learned firsthand a fundamental truth of any rocket program. As Austin puts it, “There’s a narrow line between exploding and a launch.” In many ways, a successful launch is a controlled explosion happening at just the right speed.

  After a number of loud failures with these powder-packed engines, they set out to make a hopefully more reliable solid fuel. They would carefully mix an explosive brew and let it harden. The young team started their recipe in Austin’s grandmother’s kitchen. “Bless her heart,” he recalls, “she thought we were trying to shoot down Sputnik.” Their first batch didn�
�t go well; they’d talked with their physics teacher about the right recipe but apparently had missed a crucial line of directions. As Austin toiled at the stovetop, stirring the ingredients, he let the temperature drift too high and the rocket brew went off. One minute he was stirring, and the next minute there was smoke everywhere. The fuel had burned his hand and one side of his face. Despite the high ceilings of the kitchen, the boys fell to all fours to avoid the thick smoke and crawled outside.

  This scene, not unlike those in Homer Hickam’s Rocket Boys, played out in hundreds of towns. “So many people got hurt trying to make their own fuel that you could no longer go buy the components,” Austin says. But they had a more local problem: his father. Unhappy with the accident and near maiming, Mr. Austin told the boys they could try just one and only one more launch, this time with adult supervision. With his help, the would-be rocketeers finally had a solid-fueled rocket ready to launch. They moved off to a safe distance and counted down. “That sucker blew up like a cannon,” Austin says. And for all he knew, his days with rockets were done.12

  Wernher von Braun’s chief reaction to Sputnik was one of fury. He’d wanted his own rocket and his new country to be first. He had been thinking of a satellite for years already. A colleague recalled von Braun discussing the detailed steps of a satellite launch as early as 1952 and even fearing that the Russians would have the nerve and ability to do it first.13