Even in Huntsville, the Germans found themselves stymied by the military, starved for funds, and frozen out of the space work they desperately wanted. They were stuck working, yet again, on suborbital missiles. The problem was not scientific know-how but classic bureaucratic rivalry. By the fall of 1957, von Braun’s army group had developed the Jupiter-C missile, a four-stage rocket that could have been shot into orbit, if only the army was allowed to launch it. It was not, and so the fourth stage of von Braun’s Jupiter-C was filled with sand, rather than propellant, to ensure it would not leave the atmosphere.
Medaris had reason to be skeptical of the incoming defense secretary and his visit. McElroy was replacing Charles “Engine Charlie” Wilson, another captain of industry appointed by Eisenhower. As defense secretary, Wilson threw himself into budget cutting with a passion, carrying out Eisenhower’s New Look defense policy, which emphasized advanced technology, such as nuclear weapons and airpower, over conventional forces. Yet satellites, in Wilson’s view, were “scientific boondoggles.” He did not understand what purpose they would serve for the military. When Wilson had visited Huntsville, army officials tried to impress him with their work, only to have the money-conscious defense secretary interrogate them on the cost of painting wood in his guest quarters.
With McElroy’s visit in the fall of 1957, just days away from becoming secretary of defense, it did not seem apparent to Medaris that the new Pentagon chief would chart a different course. As Medaris, McElroy, and von Braun exchanged pleasantries over drinks, an excited public relations officer interrupted the party with news. The Russians had launched a satellite, and The New York Times was seeking comment from von Braun. “There was an instant of stunned silence,” Medaris recalled.
News of Sputnik was a surprise, but it should not have been. In 1955, the Eisenhower administration announced plans to launch a small scientific satellite as part of the upcoming International Geophysical Year, which would run from July 1957 to December 1958. Not to be outdone, the Soviets countered with their own satellite launch plans. It was always a race, but one in which the United States assumed it had a natural advantage. The Soviet Union could not produce a decent automobile; how could it possibly hope to best the United States in rocket science? In the meantime, American plans for a satellite launch had fallen behind schedule.
However flawed the Soviet Union’s consumer goods industry, the regime had an advantage when it came to military and space research. An authoritarian state could focus resources on a specific goal, like a satellite launch, without the bureaucratic wrangling or public pressures that afflicted a democracy like the United States. The Eisenhower administration, prompted by its civilian scientists, wanted to keep its scientific satellite launches separate from its missile programs, even though the underlying technology was nearly identical. That was why the White House opted instead for the navy’s Vanguard, much to von Braun’s disappointment.
Now, with the soon-to-be defense secretary in front of him, and Sputnik circling overhead, the words began to tumble out of von Braun. “Vanguard will never make it,” the German scientist said. “We have the hardware on the shelf. For God’s sake turn us loose and let us do something. We can put up a satellite in sixty days, Mr. McElroy! Just give us a green light and sixty days!”
“No, Wernher, ninety days,” Medaris interjected.
McElroy had been the guest of honor, but now everyone circled von Braun, peppering the German rocket scientist with questions. Was it really true that the Soviets had launched a satellite? Probably, von Braun replied. Was it a spy satellite? Probably not, though its size and weight, if accurately reported, meant that it could be used for reconnaissance. And what did it all mean? It meant that the Soviets had a rocket with a sizable thrust, von Braun said.
The general and the rocket scientist spent the rest of the evening trying to persuade McElroy to let them launch a satellite. It is likely that the details were well beyond the grasp of McElroy, who had no background in technical issues. The conversation did impart to McElroy at least the importance of the satellite launch, which he might have otherwise missed. At first glance, the satellite did not seem like an immediate threat to the incoming defense secretary. Sputnik weighed 184 pounds and its sole function was to circle the earth, emitting a beep that could be tracked from the ground.
For McElroy, the man most closely tied to the response to Sputnik, the launch was something of a fascinating footnote to a pleasant cocktail party. His aide, Gale, devoted more space to describing a recent evening meal of exotic seafood on the coast of California than he did to the world’s first satellite launch. Yet Sputnik was about to trigger a chain reaction that, by the New Year, would engulf all of Washington.
—
Years later, a myth emerged that the Soviet “artificial moon” immediately prompted people around the country to stare up at the sky in fear and apprehension. “Two generations after the event, words do not easily convey the American reaction to the Soviet satellite,” a NASA history covering the time period states. “The only appropriate characterization that begins to capture the mood on 5 October involves the use of the word hysteria.”
In fact, there was no collective panic in the first few days following the launch. It was not immediately clear—except to a small group of scientists and policy makers—why the satellite was so important. For those involved in science and satellites, like von Braun and Medaris, the Soviet satellite circling the earth was proof that politics had hampered the American space effort. Yet for most Americans, the beeping beach ball initially produced a collective shrug. That Sputnik failed to shake the heartland to its core was best demonstrated in Milwaukee, where the Sentinel’s bold large-type headline on October 5 announced, “Today, We Make History.” In fact, the headline had nothing to do with Sputnik but referred to the first World Series game to be played in Milwaukee. News of Sputnik was buried deep in the paper’s third section, where the reporter noted merely that news of the unexpected launch had “electrified” an international meeting in Washington to discuss satellites.
In the days following the launch of Sputnik, the Washington bureaucracy moved in slow motion. Eisenhower’s attention in the weeks leading up to Sputnik was focused on much more earthbound matters. The standoff over the first attempt to integrate schools in Little Rock, Arkansas, under court order had ended with the president’s sending in federal troops. By comparison, the launch of a satellite armed with nothing more than a beacon did not initially seem like something that was going to capture public attention. At a National Security Council meeting held on October 10, Eisenhower listened as his advisers hashed out ideas for responding to Sputnik. Perhaps the administration should emphasize “spectacular achievements” in science, like cancer research? Or the successful launch of a missile that could travel thirty-five hundred miles? Few in the administration seemed to understand what the Soviets had instinctively grasped: the psychological power of a space launch. General Nathan Twining, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, warned that the United States should not become “hysterical” over Sputnik.
Eisenhower saw Sputnik as a political stunt. He also knew something that the public did not know: in addition to the military’s rocket programs, which were public, the United States had been secretly working on the development of spy satellites, which would prove much more important for the strategic balance than a silver ball beeping from the heavens. In the weeks following Sputnik, the administration’s policy was simply to downplay Sputnik’s importance. General Curtis LeMay called it “just a hunk of iron,” and Sherman Adams, Eisenhower’s chief of staff, derided concerns over a space race as “a celestial basketball game.” The more that the administration tried to dismiss the Soviet accomplishment, the more fodder it gave for political opponents to accuse Eisenhower of allowing the United States to fall behind the Soviet Union. For Lyndon Johnson, the Democratic Senate leader, Sputnik was an opportunity to be fully exploited. In his memoir, Johnson wrote that he got the news of Spu
tnik while hosting a barbecue at his ranch in Texas. That evening, he walked out with his wife, Lady Bird, to look for the orbiting Soviet satellite. “In the West, you learn to live with the Open Sky,” he later wrote. “It is part of your life. But now, somehow, in some new way, the sky seemed alien.”
When Johnson looked up in the night sky, what he saw was not Sputnik but a heavenly political gift that would allow him to hammer the Republicans in the months, and possibly years, ahead. “Soon, they will be dropping bombs on us from space like kids dropping rocks onto cars from freeway overpasses,” Johnson proclaimed.
Eisenhower, who had so deftly managed his image as a political leader, found himself stumbling. From a technical standpoint, he was more right than wrong. Though the Soviets were somewhat ahead of the United States in booster technology, the United States had a number of strategic advantages that were not known to the public. In addition to the spy satellite technology being developed, the CIA the year before had begun flying a reconnaissance aircraft in the earth’s stratosphere. By flying at seventy thousand feet, the Lockheed U-2 spy aircraft was designed to evade detection by ground radar while flying over the Soviet Union and capturing pictures of military bases. The aircraft—and the flights—were top secret. Also secret was that the U-2 flights had already proved that the “bomber gap”—a suspected Soviet advantage in bombers—did not exist. With news of Sputnik, Eisenhower worried about a perceived “missile gap.”
Eisenhower refused to be swept up in mass hysteria, however. “Now, so far as the satellite itself is concerned, that does not raise my apprehensions, not one iota,” he told a throng of reporters, just days after the Soviet launch. The administration only helped its critics by providing confusing and contradictory statements about the importance of Sputnik. In that initial press conference, Eisenhower claimed that the “Russians captured all of the German scientists in Peenemunde.” In truth, the United States through Operation Paperclip had taken the cream of the crop, but the Germans in the United States were stuck filling the fourth stage of their Jupiter-C with sand.
As the weeks passed, the staid articles about Sputnik gave way to sensational coverage. Drew Pearson, the American writer known for his influential Washington Merry-Go-Round column, claimed that “technical intelligence experts” were predicting that the Soviets might try a moon launch on November 7, to commemorate the anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution. “The same missile that launched the 184-pound Sputnik, our experts say, also could shoot a small rocket 239,000 miles to the moon,” Pearson wrote. “The Russians might fill the nose cone with red dye and literally splatter a Red Star on the face of the Moon.”
Pearson’s moon prediction was an outrageous conflation of conjecture and exaggeration, but on November 3, just a month after Sputnik, the Soviets indeed launched a second, larger satellite. Sputnik 2 carried a dog named Laika on a one-way mission to space. It was taken as purported proof that the Soviets would soon be able to launch a man in space (though unlike with Laika the dog, sending a human into space would require the ability to bring the person back safely to earth). The launch sparked panic in the United States and worldwide protests from animal lovers.
Sputnik tapped into a narrative that artfully wove Hollywood, science fiction, and good old-fashioned fearmongering. The public understood that satellites were somehow connected to the ability to launch ICBMs, but the subtleties of terms like “throw weight,” or the payload a ballistic missile could carry, were not readily apparent. It took some time, politics, and editorializing, but within a few weeks the American public’s initial curiosity and mild apprehension over Sputnik turned to full-blown panic. Eisenhower was right about the science, but he had misjudged the national mood. The administration’s response to Sputnik was a mess, but one thing was clear: the solution was going to be formulated by a soap maker from Cincinnati.
—
McElroy arrived in Washington just in time for peak Sputnik hysteria. The new defense secretary’s first few weeks at the Pentagon were marked by an endless parade of military chiefs and presidential advisers, all making suggestions about who should be in charge of space. The air force, not surprisingly, wanted to be in charge of a nascent aerospace force. The navy, which was stumbling with Vanguard, argued incomprehensibly that space was an extension of the oceans. And the army wanted to conquer the moon. Another proposal envisioned creating a tri-service organization. None of the suggestions made a particularly convincing case for ownership or offered a solution to the mismanagement that had led to the current crisis.
One meeting in particular appears to have resonated with McElroy shortly after he arrived at the Pentagon. Ernest Lawrence, the famed nuclear physicist, along with Charles Thomas, a former Manhattan Project scientist and the head of the agribusiness company Monsanto, visited the Pentagon chief and over the course of a meeting that lasted several hours proposed that the secretary establish a central research and development agency with responsibility for all space research. It was a concept that drew on the legacy of the Manhattan Project, the World War II–era government project to build the atomic bomb.
McElroy latched onto the idea, likely because it sounded a lot like the “upstream research” laboratory he had established at Procter & Gamble. Whether the visitors’ suggestion sparked the idea—or merely reinforced a thought he already had—is impossible to know. But on November 7, McElroy wrote to his chief counsel to find out if, as defense secretary, he had the authority to set up a research and development agency without seeking new legislative authorities. The answer from counsel was yes, although it was not clear Congress would agree. By the time McElroy showed up on November 20 on Capitol Hill, his idea had a name, and it was called the Defense Special Projects Agency, a space agency that would make sense of the various rocket programs and other space technology ideas. The new agency would consolidate the Pentagon’s missile defense technology and space programs while also pursuing, as the defense chief put it, the “vast weapon systems of the future.”
Many of the members of the President’s Science Advisory Committee were not enthusiastic about this proposal. Fearful of military pressure to hasten an arms race, Eisenhower had purposely selected the panel to represent the interests of the scientific community over military advisers. The scientists on the committee were not necessarily against the Pentagon’s consolidating its rocket programs, though they wondered whether it made sense to place ballistic missile defense and space programs all in one agency. As one committee member put it, missile defense was an urgent priority, while there was “no urgency on Mars.”
More fundamentally, the science advisers were concerned about placing the space agency under military control. They eventually acquiesced, likely because James Killian, the president’s newly appointed science adviser, supported it. The panel did convince the president that a civilian agency, not a Pentagon agency, should ultimately be responsible for nonmilitary space programs. Eisenhower, in his approval of the new organization, made clear that “when and if a civilian space agency is created, these [space] projects will be subject to review to determine which would be under the cognizance of the Department of Defense and which under the cognizance of the new agency.”
The reception within the corridors of the Pentagon to the Defense Special Projects Agency was ice cold. The military services viewed it as an attempt to usurp their authority and steal their money. The new agency was a threat to their turf, and their budgets, and they quickly went on a public offensive to undermine support for the proposal. The air force general Schriever told Congress the new agency would be a “very great mistake.” If the military wanted to prove that it did not need a centralized agency for rocket programs, its best bet was to prove that it could launch a satellite into space on its own. To that end, in December, all eyes were on Vanguard, the navy satellite that Wernher von Braun had warned McElroy was doomed to failure.
—
On December 5, 1957, in the midst of Washington battles over the creation of a new research
agency, hundreds of reporters and curious onlookers gathered at Cape Canaveral, Florida, to watch the launch of Vanguard. When Sputnik launched in October, John Hagen, the director of the Vanguard program, admitted the navy rocket was five months behind schedule but blamed the Soviet head start on “unethical conduct,” as if a surprise satellite launch were the equivalent of cheating at a tennis game. Now, after hurried preparations, Vanguard Test Vehicle No. 3 was ready for launch. Yet the day of the scheduled launch, technical problems kept pushing back the countdown, and America’s best hope for catching up with the Soviets became the butt of jokes. The Japanese newsmen called the rocket “Sputternik,” the Germans dubbed it “Spaetnik” (a play on the German word for “late”), and the jaded news crews from Washington, D.C., christened it “civil servant,” because it “won’t work and you can’t fire it.”
Finally, the next day, December 6, the countdown to launch began. As the count reached zero, Vanguard lifted off. From beaches just two or three miles from the launch site, hundreds of eager people gathered to watch and cheered as shooting flames marked the liftoff, though giant plumes of smoke obscured their view. The few dozen or so official viewers gathered at a hangar not far from the launchpad could see exactly what unfolded: they watched as the navy’s rocket lifted a few feet up and then exploded in a massive fireball, toppling over into the sand. In a sad testament to the failed launch, the satellite itself was thrown out of the third stage of the rocket during the explosion and was found not far away, still emitting the beeping signal that was supposed to mark the United States’ first foray into space.
The Imagineers of War Page 4