by Chris Impey
Even if science, not politics, motivated von Braun, he was part of the machinery of war. He joined the Nazi Party and the SS, and photos exist of him donning those uniforms and posing in the company of senior Nazi Party members. After seeing film footage of the successful launch of a V-2 prototype, Hitler personally made von Braun a professor—an exceptional honor for a thirty-one-year-old engineer.
The V-2 was inaccurate but effective as a “terror” weapon, a projectile screaming out of the sky at four times the speed of sound, impossible to defend against. The rockets killed an estimated 9,000 civilians and military personnel in London and Antwerp during Nazi airstrikes. Each rocket was made in an underground factory at Mittelwerk, where prisoners from the nearby Dora-Mittelbau concentration camp toiled in deplorable conditions. About 12,000 forced laborers and prisoners died producing the weapons.
Figure 7. Schematic diagram of the German A4 rocket, later renamed the V-2, or Retaliation/Vengeance Weapon 2. It was the world’s first long-range ballistic missile and more than 2,000 of them were launched toward England and Belgium in the latter part of World War II.
But von Braun’s insider status didn’t place him above the Nazi Party’s suspicion. At an event in early 1944, after drinking too much, he said he thought the war would end badly for the Germans and that all he’d ever wanted to do with his rockets was send them into space. Such talk was tantamount to treason. He was a pilot, so the Gestapo arrested him to keep him from defecting to the West. A month later, Albert Speer convinced Hitler to release von Braun because he was critical to the V-2 program.
In early 1945, as Allied forces moved deep into Germany, the SS moved von Braun and his team to the Bavarian Alps, with orders to execute them rather than let them fall into enemy hands. But von Braun argued for the team to be dispersed so as not to be an easy target for American bombers. He had heard stories of the harsh treatment meted out by the Soviets to their captured enemies, so he deliberately surrendered to the Americans rather than the approaching Soviet forces. On May 2, he was able to slip away and surrender to a private from the 44th Infantry Division. He was at the top of the blacklist of German scientists and engineers targeted for interrogation by US military experts.23
When the fog of war lifted, von Braun had been rehabilitated. The American intelligence agencies created a false employment history for him, expunged his Nazi Party membership from the public record, and gave him a security clearance. Although he should have been relieved to get through the war unscathed, von Braun chafed at the restrictions of his new life. Working at Fort Bliss near El Paso, Texas, he couldn’t leave the base without a military escort. Whereas in Germany he had had thousands of engineers reporting to him when he was only twenty-six, in the United States he had a small team and was starved of resources. At least his loyal German engineers continued to address him as Herr Professor.
Although the postwar years were frustrating for von Braun, he gained a new start and had been “cleansed” of his Nazism. He was free to pursue his dreams of space.
The Big Chill
Germany lost the war due to a “marriage of convenience” between the Soviet Union and the Western allies. But those countries’ ideological differences bubbled up in the aftermath of the war, setting the stage for the Cold War, a term coined by writer George Orwell in October 1945.
As the war ended, Wernher von Braun and a hundred senior German scientists were working under US Army command with orders to continue development of the V-2 rocket.
Meanwhile, the Soviets took over jurisdiction of the Mittelwerk factory but found that most of the best engineers had already defected to the Americans. Whereas in the United States the Germans were at the core of rocket development, the Germans who worked in the Soviet Union were used only as consultants and were repatriated in the early 1950s. The Soviet counterpart to von Braun was the equally brilliant Sergei Korolev. He started by reverse engineering the V-2 but quickly developed his own designs, leading to a 100-ton engine of unprecedented power. As a result of one of Stalin’s purges, Korolev spent six years in prison, where mistreatment led to serious health problems throughout his life. The Soviets referred to him only as the “Chief Designer” during the Cold War and his identity wasn’t revealed in the West until after his death in 1966.
Mistrust between the United States and the Soviet Union deepened after the war. The United States lost its monopoly on the atomic bomb and watched helplessly as the Soviets annexed European countries to form an “iron curtain” that stretched from the Baltic to the Adriatic. The Soviets had suffered 27 million casualties in the war and they feared invasion, especially as the United States had a far superior air force with bases near Soviet territory. The role of ideology in the so-called Space Race has been summarized by journalist and historian William Burrows: “The cold war would become the great engine—the supreme catalyst—that sent rockets and their cargoes far above Earth and worlds away. If Tsiolkovsky, Oberth, Goddard, and others were the fathers of rocketry, then the competition between capitalism and communism was its midwife.”24
The visionaries never gave up their ambitions for humans to leave the Earth. But for the next ten years, dreams of space travel were overshadowed by nightmares of nuclear holocaust.
The United States didn’t clash with the Soviet Union directly. The rivalry played out as a toxic brew of military jockeying, proxy wars, support of strategic allies, espionage, propaganda, and technological and economic competition. The cutting edge of the Cold War was a nuclear arms race. As the war ended, America was confident of its advantage in developing nuclear weapons, so American experts were shocked when the Soviets exploded their first atomic bomb in 1949.
The Manhattan Project was the US research and development project to build an atomic bomb. It had been so secret that Vice President Harry Truman was unaware of its existence, but it was riddled with spies. Both countries began massive investment in their arsenals. America was the first to detonate a hydrogen bomb in 1952, but the Soviets followed suit less than a year later.
The Space Race began when the United States and the Soviet Union developed ballistic missiles that could launch objects into space. It was kicked off in 1955 by announcements only four days apart that both nations were planning to launch artificial Earth satellites.25 Stockpiles of nuclear weapons grew rapidly; the underlying goal was the capability to target and destroy any city in the opposing country within hours.
In the United States, development of intercontinental ballistic missiles was hampered by the three branches of the military each wanting their own capabilities. The Air Force developed the Atlas rocket, the Navy had the Vanguard rocket, and von Braun’s US Army team was perfecting the Redstone rocket, a direct descendant of the V-2. As the Space Race intensified, President Dwight Eisenhower gave the nod to the Navy, since its Vanguard rocket was being developed by the Naval Research lab, which was seen as a scientific rather than a military organization. The Atlas and Redstone programs were iced. Eisenhower wanted to avoid the overt militarization of space, and he didn’t want to hand the Soviets a propaganda victory.
Meanwhile, the Soviets pursued intercontinental ballistic missiles with a relentless focus and ample funding. Sergei Korolev developed the R-7, which was more powerful than any American rocket; it could deliver a three-ton warhead 5,000 miles. Derivatives of the R-7 have been used in the Soviet and the Russian space programs for more than fifty years. On October 4, 1957, the Soviets shocked the world when they launched into orbit a beeping metal sphere the size of a beach ball and the weight of an adult man: the satellite Sputnik 1 (Figure 8).
Stakes in the Space Race suddenly became very high. The Americans and the Soviets each developed satellites as part of the International Geophysical Year of 1957–1958, which, ironically, was a project conceived after Stalin’s death to thaw the Cold War. While small satellites could be used for scientific research, the deeper concern was that large satellites could put nuclear weapons into orbit. Whoever controlled the frontier of
space would control the world.
Figure 8. Sputnik 1 was the first artificial Earth satellite. Launched by the Soviet Union into a ninety-minute, low Earth orbit in October 1957, it transmitted signals for twenty-two days before burning up in the atmosphere. Sputnik triggered the Space Race.
The United States rushed to match the feat of Sputnik, but the country experienced humiliation when a live national TV audience watched a Vanguard rocket explode seconds after launch. Newspapers called it “Flopnik” and “Kaputnik,” and the Soviet UN delegate offered the United States aid under a “Soviet program of assistance to backward nations.” Called into action, von Braun and his team rose to the challenge, and Explorer 1 was launched into orbit on January 31, 1958. It was a face-saving success, but the Soviets still held an edge: Sputnik weighed 84 kilograms, as much as a grown man, while Explorer weighed in at just 5 kilograms, not much heavier than a brick.
Although it was the height of the Cold War, and space could easily have become the exclusive preserve of the military, the cool head of the commander-in-chief prevailed. Eisenhower was playing catch-up with a well-funded and better-organized adversary. As a former general, Eisenhower knew enough about military bureaucracy to prefer a civilian organization. He also knew that the best innovation would come from a national space agency rather than small groups often working in competition and in isolation. When Congress held hearings on the subject, one of the key players forcing the pace was a young senator from Texas, Lyndon Johnson.26
The events leading to the formation of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) laid bare the tension among the competing motivations to go into space. As Sputnik orbited the Earth, Eisenhower appointed James Killian as his special assistant for science and technology. Killian was the president of MIT, so his selection provided a strong signal that Eisenhower wanted to keep a civilian emphasis on space. Late in 1957, Killian wrote a memo to Eisenhower saying that many scientists strongly opposed Defense Department control of the space program because it would limit space research to military objectives and tar all US space activity as military in nature. Meanwhile, the Senate Armed Services Preparedness Subcommittee heard from dozens of experts who said the United States would never have been beaten to the punch by Sputnik if the military had held sway. Then in May 1958, the Soviets launched the one-ton Sputnik 3, and the sheer size of the satellite triggered recriminations and new calls to action. The voices of the hawks grew louder.27
Eisenhower held firm. On October 1, 1958, he established NASA as a civilian organization for the peaceful exploration of space. The new agency began with 8,200 employees and a budget of $340 million. Its charter in the Space Act had eight objectives, which included expanding knowledge of space, improving space vehicles, preserving the leadership of the United States in space science and technology, and collaborating with our international partners and allies.28 The Space Act was signed a little less than a year after the beeping Soviet satellite had rocked the world.
3
Send In the Robots
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Fly Me to the Moon
Sputnik was a technological “Pearl Harbor moment” for America, but the feeling of scrambling to keep up with the Soviets continued.
In the first five years of their space program, the Soviets reeled off an impressive series of achievements: first satellite in orbit, first object to leave Earth’s gravity, first data link to space, first probe to crash-land on the Moon, first probe sent to Venus, first probe sent to Mars, first man in space, first woman in space, first dual manned spaceflights, and, last but not least, the first dogs to be put into orbit and safely returned to Earth.1
Yuri Gagarin became the first human to orbit the Earth on April 12, 1961, rising from the barren steppes of Kazakhstan aboard the Vostok 1 spacecraft. His modest stature—Gagarin was just 5 feet 2 inches—helped him fit into the tiny capsule. His flight lasted only one orbit and Gagarin didn’t control the spacecraft; it was flown in automatic mode as a precaution, since medical science didn’t know what would happen to a human subjected to the stresses of launch and subsequent weightlessness. Gagarin had the ability to take over control of the spacecraft in an emergency by opening an envelope and typing a special code into the computer.2 Nevertheless, Vostok 1 was hailed as a historic event (Figure 9).3 The United States experienced an echo of the shock and embarrassment felt with the launch of Sputnik.
Figure 9. Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space on April 12, 1961. He retired with the air force rank of colonel and received the award of Hero of the Soviet Union, the nation’s highest honor. Gagarin was a worldwide celebrity; he died in a routine training flight in 1968.
A new young president responded quickly. Less than two months after Gagarin’s flight, and less than three weeks after Alan Shepard became America’s first astronaut in a fifteen-minute suborbital flight, John F. Kennedy addressed a special joint session of Congress: “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely.”4
The first phase of the manned space program took place against a backdrop of Cold War escalation. Even though the first astronauts in the Mercury program didn’t fly their spacecraft, putting humans in orbit was concomitant with the larger goal of mastery of space. Mastery of space in turn was seen as a vital tool in the power struggle between the two superpowers. After the failure of Kennedy’s covert plan to topple Fidel Castro, the Soviets increased their military support for Cuba. In Europe, American and Soviet tanks were facing off across the newly constructed Berlin Wall. When the Soviets prepared to install nuclear missiles in Cuba in October 1962, it felt as if the world had come to the brink. The United States had more than 30,000 nuclear weapons and the Soviet Union was rapidly catching up. The deterrence logic of “mutually assured destruction” was scant solace.
So began the Apollo program, the largest and most complex technical undertaking in human history.5 At its peak, it involved 500,000 people and 20,000 companies. Its cost in present-day dollars was more than $100 billion.
To get to the Moon so quickly, NASA needed a huge budget and a tight and single-minded focus on the goal. At the time of Kennedy’s speech, only two humans had ever traveled in space. As a precursor to Apollo, NASA began Project Gemini in 1962. Gemini spacecraft carried two astronauts and the missions tested docking technology, practiced working outside a spacecraft, and orbited long enough to mimic a trip to the Moon and back. All the early Apollo crews were veterans of the Mercury and Gemini programs.
America was hopeful that the two superpowers might collaborate rather than duplicate the vast effort required for a race to the Moon. After stepping back from the brink following the Cuban missile crisis, Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev had developed a mutual understanding. In 1963, in a speech to the United Nations General Assembly, Kennedy proposed a joint space effort. Khrushchev initially rejected the overture but was poised to accept it when Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963. Even Kennedy was hedging his bets, though, wavering between cooperation and competition. In the speech he never lived to give on November 22, he was to have said, “The United States of America has no intention of finishing second in space.”6 Within a year, Khrushchev had been ousted and Lyndon Johnson and Leonid Brezhnev had a frosty relationship, so joint ventures in space were taken off the table.
The relationship between the world’s two superpowers was plagued with misinformation and misperceptions. This has only become clear in hindsight and with the release of documents that were classified at the time.7 Each country was fearful of the other, and each overestimated the capabilities of the other. The Soviets refused to cooperate in space in part because they didn’t want to expose the technical shortcomings of their program. With his famous 1961 speech, Kennedy in effect dared them to show their stuff.
Space travel in the early days was risky. Most of the Soviet losses were kept secret at the time but have come
to light since.8 In 1960, more than a hundred top Soviet military and technical personnel were killed when the second stage engine of an R-16 rocket ignited the propellant tanks of the first stage, causing an explosion and fire. Chief Marshal of Artillery Mitrofan Nedelin was vaporized, and his only identifiable remains were his war medals. A year later, a Soviet cosmonaut was incinerated in a fire in a test chamber with high oxygen content. The Soviets erased all evidence that he had ever existed, which was particularly tragic, since the Apollo 1 flight crew died in similar circumstances in 1967; knowing about the Soviet incident might have led to a redesign of the capsule. As it happened, a spark ignited an oxygen fire in their capsule during a ground test, and Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee were severely burned and then asphyxiated after all the oxygen had burned away. The same year, Vladimir Komarov died after a trouble-plagued flight in Soyuz 1, when the parachute system failed to slow his descent.
The men who strapped themselves into a small metal container on top of half a million gallons of kerosene and liquid oxygen were extraordinarily brave. People who witnessed a Saturn V launch recounted that even at a distance of two miles, its engines produced coruscating heat and waves of pressure that passed through the ribcage. The five massive engines gulped 15 tons of fuel each second and produced eight million pounds of thrust. The giant rocket was 60 feet taller than the Statue of Liberty (Figure 10). In July 1969, there were plenty of white knuckles at Mission Control in Houston when Neil Armstrong assumed manual control of the Apollo 11 landing module, after a series of technical glitches, and guided it over a field of rugged boulders to a soft landing on the Moon with less than a minute of fuel left. Back in Houston, Charles Duke radioed him: “You got a bunch of guys about to turn blue. We’re breathing again.”9