Red Moon Rising

by Matthew Brzezinski

  At 325.44 seconds into the flight, Nosov issued his last command. “Open the reflectors.” A plate on the central booster jettisoned, exposing prismlike mirrors on the rocket’s casing. Korolev had installed the reflective material, knowing that the ninety-foot central stage would follow PS-l’s celestial path like the blazing trail of a meteor, and he wanted to ensure that it too would be visible from earth as it circled the planet just behind the satellite.

  But was PS-1 really in orbit? Had the little orb survived the violent shaking and vibrations of takeoff? Had it overheated during its ascent, succumbing to the friction of slamming through the dense lower atmosphere at nearly 25,000 feet per second? Had the thin cover shields held? Everyone rushed to the communications van parked outside to find out. The van sprouted an array of antennae tuned to the two frequencies of PS-l’s twin transmitters. Inside the van, both operators hunched over their dials, cupping their headphones. “Quiet,” one of them yelled. “Be quiet.” So many people were pressing against the vehicle, clamoring for information, that the two operators couldn’t hear anything. Then, one of them raised an exultant arm. “We have the signal,” he shouted. “We have it.”

  Celebration erupted: dancing, laughing, hugging. Grown men cried and kissed one another. Glushko and Korolev embraced, their clashes momentarily forgotten. “This is music no one has ever heard before,” the Chief Designer cheered. Even the rigid military engineers inside the control bunker rose out of their seats in a rare display of emotion, though Chekunov, the young lieutenant who had pressed the launch button, would later recall that none of them would truly understand what had just happened until much later.

  Reports now started trickling in from the Far Eastern tracking stations. One after another, they were acquiring PS-l’s signal. It was on course, and its orbit seemed to be holding steady. Only a relatively minor altitude loss of fifty miles was reported. Once more cheering and shouting erupted, because that meant that the early engine cutoff had not had disastrous consequences after all. Already some of the State Commission members were reaching for the phones, ready to call Moscow with the good news. Korolev, though, was surprisingly subdued and silent. “Hold off on the celebrations,” he finally counseled. “It could still be a mistake. Let’s wait to hear if we can pick up the signal after a complete orbit.”

  For an hour and a half they waited, smoking, pacing, and fidgeting. When the appointed time for PS-1 to reappear over Soviet territory came and went in silence, a deathly stillness descended on the anxious crowd assembled in the huge hangar. A sense of foreboding suddenly gripped the scientists. Maybe PS-1 had continued to lose altitude and had burned up in the atmosphere. Maybe they had failed after all.

  At a few minutes after midnight, one of the westernmost tracking stations in the Crimea picked up something. At first faintly and with static, and then louder and clearer: BEEP, BEEP, BEEP.

  Amid the pandemonium, Korolev turned to his fellow State Commission members. Now, he said triumphantly, we can call Khrushchev.

  8

  BY THE LIGHT OF A RED MOON

  General Bruce Medaris greeted October 4, 1957, with the giddy anticipation of someone expecting a new lease on life. The day, he felt sure, would mark a turning point for his besieged Army Ballistic Missile Agency—perhaps even offer a reprieve for his own troubled military career.

  The source of this uncharacteristic optimism was the scheduled arrival that Friday morning of yet another high-ranking delegation from Washington. This time, though, Defense Secretary Charles Wilson would not be among the visiting brass, quibbling about the guest cottages. Wilson’s reign of terror was over.

  Engine Charlie—the man who had sidelined ABMA and tried to put it out of the missile and satellite business, a man so hated in Huntsville that some rocket scientists had once burned his effigy in Courthouse Square—was quitting. Whether Colonel Nickerson’s whistle-blowing scandal and allegations of corporate cronyism had influenced his decision to return to Detroit to devote himself to automotive and charity work, Medaris did not know. Nor did he care. All that mattered was that his nemesis would be out of office by October 8. “We could not shed a single tear over Mr. Wilson’s departure,” Medaris later reminisced. “It was our strong feeling that his tenure had been characterized, to put it charitably, by a complete lack of imagination.”

  All of Huntsville, apparently, was of the same mind. The town had more than doubled in size since von Braun and his German engineers had moved into their brick ramblers in new suburbs with nicknames like “Sour Kraut Hill,” and Huntsville’s fate was now inextricably linked to ABMA and its high-tech marvels. The jobs of five thousand skilled workers and much of the local economy had hung in limbo since Wilson’s November 1956 edict had effectively robbed the army of the big missile brief, and the uncertainty had devastated morale and depressed the once-booming real estate market. Huntsville, which had dubbed itself “Rocket City, USA,” was learning the harsh reality of the military-industrial complex: with the stroke of a pen in Washington, entire communities could be wiped out as quickly as they were created.

  To keep his company town afloat and his rocket team intact, Medaris had waged increasingly inventive bureaucratic guerrilla campaigns that were beginning to take their toll on his standing with the power brokers at the Pentagon. The embarrassing disclosures of alleged favoritism at the Nickerson court-martial had won the Jupiter intermediate-range ballistic missile program a temporary stay of execution; ABMA could continue doing limited research on the missile while the Pentagon decided whether to cancel the project entirely. Unfortunately, ABMA had few friends at the defense secretary’s office, and the army IRBM was still on Charlie Wilson’s chopping block.

  Medaris’s tireless lobbying to land a role for the army in satellites was also becoming an irritant. He had loudly and repeatedly questioned the selection of an inexperienced civilian team to launch the navy’s Vanguard satellite, the official U.S. entry in the IGY competition, and hinted darkly at conspiracies in high places. He had also pushed his boss, James Gavin, a hard-nosed former paratrooper in charge of Army Research and Development, to lodge formal but futile appeals with Quarles and Wilson on ABMA’s behalf.

  Like Korolev, Medaris had simply refused to take no for an answer, and like the Chief Designer, he had not been above using a little subterfuge. The similarities were not that surprising, given that the two men had been raised in almost identical circumstances by strong-willed, single women who had challenged the chauvinism of their times. Medaris’s mother had also divorced young and left her son with her parents while she pursued a career, eventually becoming the comptroller of a midsize manufacturing company and one of the most senior female executives in Ohio. It was in his grandmother’s home that Medaris first displayed his resistance to authority, “timing his comings and goings so that Grandmother LeSourd didn’t ask hard questions.” From his industrious mother, Jessie, he learned the value of entrepreneurship, taking a part-time job at the age of eleven sorting mail at the local railway station. By twelve, he was driving a cab on weekends (driver’s licenses were not yet required in Ohio), and at fourteen he was working full-time as a uniformed conductor on the Springfield Street Railway System on the 3:30-to-midnight shift. By the time the stock market collapsed in 1929, Medaris had accumulated over one hundred thousand dollars in his trading account. Left with sixty-nine dollars after the crash, he bought himself a new suit and started all over again.

  Medaris was no stranger to adversity, and he was not a quitter. Regardless of what the Pentagon said, he would not abandon his satellite quest. And so, with Gavin’s tacit compliance, he had “bootlegged” the Jupiter C. Ostensibly an experimental vehicle to develop a new form of ablative nose cone whose heat shield peeled off in layers, the C in reality was a souped-up Redstone whose added upper stages were suspiciously similar to the army’s rejected satellite booster design. “We must make it perfectly clear,” Medaris instructed von Braun and his staff, “that we did not carry forward a program w
hich we had been denied, that the work was carried on because that was the best way to make a reentry missile and the two happened to fit together.” Justified by the need to simulate the speed, friction, and trajectory of big nuclear-tipped missiles on atmospheric reentry, the Jupiter C’s ulterior purpose was to keep ABMA unofficially in the satellite sweepstakes, since the navy was stumbling badly. Vanguard was so behind schedule and over budget that Eisenhower had considered canceling it, while the Jupiter C had set U.S. altitude and distance records, soaring 662 miles high over a 3,335-mile arc. Even so, Medaris had been unable to gain any traction with Wilson in repeated pleas to at least consider designating the army as a backup for the navy satellite effort. “In various languages our fingers were slapped and we were told to mind our own business,” he recalled. “Rightly or wrongly, we were convinced that during Wilson’s regime the Army had consistently been pushed aside.”

  ABMA had gotten a raw deal under Engine Charlie. But now his replacement, Neil H. McElroy, was coming to Huntsville. Medaris hoped to get a fairer hearing from the new secretary-designate, who was by all accounts a fair and forward-thinking man. At fifty-three, he was almost exactly Medaris’s age, and a fellow Ohioan to boot. Like Medaris, he had a reputation for speaking his mind, and he had a mid-westerner’s impatience with Washington’s insular ways. McElroy, in fact, had accepted Eisenhower’s invitation to join his cabinet only on the condition that he serve no more than two years. Any longer, he argued, and he would risk succumbing to the temptations of political power.

  Medaris felt certain he could reason with such a man, a son of small-town schoolteachers, a full-scholarship Harvard graduate. “Our whole organization was thoroughly fired up,” he recalled. “We hoped that with a fresh and uncommitted mind, [McElroy] would grasp the significance of our story. We were determined to give him our frank feelings, backed by facts and figures, as to our record for delivering what we promised, when we promised, and for the money originally stated.”

  If Medaris had one reservation about McElroy, it was that he was yet another moneyed representative of big business, the president of the household goods giant Procter & Gamble. But at least he wasn’t from the incestuous defense establishment, intent on feathering his company’s nest with government contracts. In any event, Medaris would have the incoming secretary in Huntsville for a full twenty-four hours to bend his ear and make his case before the Washington hyenas got to him.

  By the time McElroy’s plane touched down at the Redstone Arsenal airstrip at noon on October 4, General Gavin had already been working on the secretary-designate during the flight, priming him for Medaris’s pitch. The hard sell, though, was to take place that evening at the Officers’ Club, over dinner and drinks and an outpouring of southern hospitality at a reception in McElroy’s honor.

  Wilbur Brucker, the secretary of the army, and General Lyman L. Lemnitzer, the army chief of staff, were in attendance, as were Huntsville’s eager-to-please town fathers. Will Halsey, one of the community leaders, remembered the room being “so heavy with top brass that it seemed like two-star generals were serving drinks to three-star generals.”

  As the cocktails were being poured and the secretary’s favor curried, ABMA’s public relations officer, Gordon Harris, abruptly burst into the bar. Clearly agitated, the young officer rudely interrupted McElroy and grabbed Medaris. “General,” he stammered, too loudly for discretion, “it has been announced over the radio that the Russians have put up a successful satellite!”

  For a moment, the room was deathly quiet, so that only the soft sound of background music could be heard. “It’s broadcasting signals on a common frequency,” Harris went on, as hushed murmurs began rippling through the gathering. “At least one of our local ‘hams’ [amateur radio operators] has been listening to it.”

  Then dozens of voices erupted in a spontaneous outburst of anger and pent-up frustration. “General Gavin was visibly shaken, and understandably so,” an aide to Secretary Brucker later recalled. Gavin, only days earlier, had tried to persuade Wilson one last time to take the Jupiter C as a backup for the problem-plagued Vanguard. Now he cursed Engine Charlie’s lack of foresight.

  “Damn bastards” was all Medaris said, and it was unclear whether he was referring to the Soviets or his own government overseers. Whichever the case, he was stunned. How could the Russians have done it? It was impossible. Only the week before, he had laughed when Ernst Stuhlinger, one of von Braun’s top engineers, had pleaded for him to approach Quarles because he was “convinced” that the Soviets were planning a launch. “Now look,” Medaris had replied, “don’t get tense. You know how complicated it is to build and launch a satellite. Those people will never be able to do it. Go back to your laboratory and relax.”

  Medaris had always presumed that he was in a race with the air force and the navy, not with the USSR. Like most Americans, he thought the Russians were boors: primitive, simple, crude. How could they pull off something like this? Medaris, for once, was speechless. Yet in underestimating the Soviet Union’s technical potential, he had made the same mistake as Senator Ellender and all the others who had laughed at Moscow’s crummy cars and shoes. What Medaris, like most Americans, failed to understand was that conditions that made communism wholly unsuited as a producer of quality consumer goods made it an ideal system for promoting major scientific breakthroughs. The state could never compete with private businesses making sneakers, tennis racquets, or transistor radios. But no corporation could muster the vast resources, strict discipline, and unlimited patience that were required of huge scientific undertakings like the Manhattan Project, or the creation of a satellite-bearing ICBM. Stuhlinger and von Braun, as veterans of the state-run V-2 program, understood this and knew that science thrived under totalitarian regimes, even if free speech and commerce did not.

  Medaris had never grasped the dichotomy, and now, as the shock settled in, he didn’t look the least bit relaxed. But it was the usually unflappable von Braun who appeared most emotional. “Von Braun started to talk as if he had suddenly been vaccinated by a Victrola needle,” Medaris later recalled. “In his driving urgency to unburden his feelings, the words tumbled over one another.”

  “We knew they would do it!” von Braun exclaimed, his Teutonic Texas twang rising to a fevered pitch. “We could have done it two years ago,” he cursed, launching into the story of how Wilson had been so suspicious that the army might “accidentally” launch a satellite ahead of the navy, igniting an interservice war, that he had ordered Medaris to personally inspect the Jupiter C booster to ensure that the top stage was a dud. (The precaution, as it turned out, had been unnecessary. “There was no chance of an unauthorized attempt,” Stuhlinger later recalled. “We had our orders, and von Braun was very strict about following orders.”)

  Office politics had denied von Braun his lifelong dream. Unlike Korolev, he had been obsessed with the conquest of space since early childhood. He had sold his soul—first to the Werhmacht, then to the Nazis, and finally to the U.S. Army—to pursue his quest. He had endured Hitler, Himmler, five long years of purgatory in the hot Texas sun. All so that he could pursue his dream. And now, because of some idiotic bureaucratic imperatives, someone else had beaten him to it. Von Braun very nearly exploded with anger and frustration. “For God’s sake cut us loose and let us do something,” he implored McElroy. “We have the hardware on the shelf.”

  Medaris must have swallowed hard. In his overexcited state, von Braun had let it slip that ABMA had quietly diverted two Jupiter C rockets from the nose cone testing program and put them in cold storage in anticipation of the navy not delivering Vanguard. A lot of people had been complicit in the scheme, but the unauthorized misplacement of millions of dollars of Pentagon property was not something one necessarily wanted to spring on the secretary of defense before he was even sworn in. (“It was imprudent to admit we had retained those rockets,” Medaris would later confess to congressional investigators.) Mc-Elroy, though, made no comment, perhaps beca
use von Braun did not pause for breath. “Vanguard will fail,” he went on, with a certainty that verged on arrogance. “We can put up a satellite in sixty days, Mr. Mc-Elroy. Just give us the green light and sixty days.”

  “Ninety days,” Medaris quickly interjected. Two months was pushing it. Von Braun, though, kept repeating his original figure. “Just sixty days.”

  “No, Wernher.” Medaris finally pulled rank. “Ninety days.”

  But McElroy was in no position to make any spot decisions. He still had to be confirmed by the Senate, which was controlled by the Democrats, who were likely to develop a sudden and intense interest in the subject of space.

  Reports on the Soviet satellite now began trickling out on the radio and television at the Officers’ Club. Harris, the harried PR officer, announced that ABMA’s communications team had also captured its signal. “It beeped derisively over our heads,” he said. Western news agencies in Moscow had by now hastily translated the official TASS press release, which included technical details of the orbiting craft. The Soviets were referring to it as Iskustvenniy Sputnik Zemli, or Artificial Satellite of the Earth. American broadcasts were simply calling it Sputnik, the generic Russian term for satellite. ABMA’s scientists now clustered around Harris, bombarding him with questions. What were Sputnik’s parameters? What was its orbit? How big was it? When word spread that it weighed 184 pounds, people shook their heads in disbelief. Must be a mistake, they said. Someone must have misplaced a decimal point. Vanguard’s satellite payload was only 3.5 pounds because the navy’s slim booster produced a mere 27,000 pounds of thrust. Even von Braun had never proposed anything larger than 17 pounds as the payload for his 78,000-pound-thrust Jupiter C. How could the Soviets put up a satellite ten times heavier? Plainly the media had got it wrong. But if the press reports were accurate, the military implications of a missile powerful enough to orbit such a weighty cargo were frightening. It would have to generate hundreds of thousands of pounds of thrust, possibly as much as half a million, some of the scientists ventured. (Not even their wildest guesses, however, approximated the R-7’s 1.1 million pounds of lift.)