Breaking the Chains of Gravity

by Amy Shira Teitel

  Von Kármán presented the SAG’s completed work totaling thirty-three volumes to General Arnold on December 15, 1945. Their findings and advice were distributed throughout the Army Air Force, but von Kármán didn’t want his group’s work to end there. It was clear, von Kármán said, that if this technological trend continued, the next major conflict would see supersonic airplanes and long-range unmanned bombing systems capable of destroying targets thousands of miles away replacing soldiers fighting in trenches. It would be unacceptable for some advanced technology to take America by surprise in some future war.

  A peacetime version of the Science Advisory Group, a civilian group of experts advising the Army Air Force, would ensure both the American academic and industry communities would maintain a national technological cutting edge. Nearing retirement, General Arnold left the decision to his successor, General Carl A. Spaatz, who agreed with von Kármán. One week after the Science Advisory Group’s final meeting on February 6, 1946, the groundwork was laid for the peacetime Army Air Force’s Scientific Advisory Board (SAB). The thirty-man board met for the first time on June 17 under von Kármán as chairman. Like the SAG before it, this board was subdivided into five panels, with Hugh Dryden again leading the group on guided missiles and pilotless aircraft. It was von Kármán’s intention that the SAB be an institution where civilian experts could exchange ideas and guide the AAF without being a hindrance, ultimately leveraging technological developments to prevent future wars, not win them.

  While the Army Air Force Science Advisory Group was busily finishing its work for General Arnold, the army was beginning to resurrect the V-2s in the New Mexico desert. Wernher von Braun traveled across the country by train escorted by Jim Hamill, one of the majors Colonel Holger Tofty had charged with recovering the rocket documents from the mine in the Harz Mountains, because the government-sponsored former enemy alien couldn’t be left alone. When he arrived at Fort Bliss, the closest army base to White Sands, on October 8, von Braun didn’t find the America he’d dreamed of. The hot Texas desert site didn’t have the accommodations the engineer had grown used to at Peenemünde, and his reception was far from warm. The base’s commanding general was a veteran wounded in both world wars and not pleased to be hosting one German scientist, let alone the dozens that would soon arrive. And though von Braun could move freely about the base, he was forbidden to leave the grounds and had to share a room with the major for security reasons. Making matters worse, he had contracted hepatitis at some point during his exodus and was forced to spend eight weeks in the hospital alongside American soldiers. Von Braun’s situation improved when the first in a series of trains bearing his fellow Peenemünde engineers arrived at White Sands two months later, on December 8. Another group reached the desert on January 15, 1946, and the last followed on February 20. Once settled, the Germans were assigned to various rocket-related projects, though only thirty-nine were tasked with getting V-2s flying under Project Hermes.

  By contrast, no Germans were working on the Army Air Force’s rocket program. At the end of October, the Air Technical Service Command invited industry proposals for a concept study and preliminary design for a surface-to-surface missile with a five-thousand-mile range, a significant advance over the V-2’s two-hundred-mile range. One company, Convair, presented the Army Air Force with two missiles, one a subsonic winged jet-powered missile and the other a supersonic ballistic rocket-powered missile. The AAF accepted Convair’s proposal and quietly awarded the company a contract, marking the beginning of Project MX-774, a test bed on the path toward an American intercontinental ballistic missile. And while it didn’t include German personnel, Project MX-774 did use the V-2 as the jumping-off point with some significant changes. The Convair missile’s airframe was notably different. In place of a supporting thick body structure like the V-2 used, the MX-774 employed a radical design that used the missile’s thin-skinned, lightweight fuel and oxidizer tanks as structural elements. To keep the missile from collapsing under its own weight, the fuel tank structure was pressurized with nitrogen, making it as solid as the thicker-skinned V-2. Another big difference was Convair’s use of a detachable warhead. Separating the warhead after its rocket burned out meant that only this small payload would have to withstand the heat of atmospheric reentry as it approached its target. The MX-774’s engine was also advanced compared to the V-2’s, which was steered by rudders protruding into the rocket exhaust. The new engine, built by Reaction Motors Inc., could swivel to steer the rocket in flight. These changes coupled with a simple gyrostabilized autopilot system promised to give the Army Air Force a far more sophisticated missile.

  In January 1946, before the first V-2 rockets were assembled at White Sands, the Army Ordnance Department held a conference to discuss possible uses of the rocket beyond learning how it worked. The V-2 was designed to carry a one-ton warhead to its target, and while the Project Hermes V-2s wouldn’t be armed they would need something equally heavy in the nose for ballast. It made sense to replace the warhead with scientific instruments, turning the V-2 into an upper atmospheric research vehicle as well as an exploratory weapons system. One result of this conference was the V-2 Upper Atmospheric Research Panel, which would use the German rocket to explore atmospheric phenomena. Its structure, composition, temperature, and pressure were not well understood, nor was the atmosphere’s impact on cosmic ray and ultraviolet radiation absorption at high altitudes or the behavior of sound and shock waves. The V-2 would help answer these questions, but it had to get off the ground first.

  With the help of the German contingent, the first fully German-built V-2 engine came to life in a static fire test on March 3. A month later, the first V-2 actually flew through American skies, lifting off the launchpad cleanly before tipping over to fly erratically as controllers watched helplessly, unable to shut it down. One of the steering jet vanes protruding into the rocket’s exhaust was lost right after liftoff, transferring the steering load to the missile’s aerodynamic fins, which couldn’t compensate. They ripped from the tumbling rocket’s fuselage, sending the fully fueled vehicle careening to the ground where it exploded in a fireball that consumed its full load of fuel. The third V-2 launched two weeks later was far more successful. It flew thirty-one miles before crashing and creating an enormous crater in the desert.

  Project Hermes gained momentum as more V-2s launched from White Sands. Procedures changed and full systems testing brought increased reliability to the complex missile system. Individual components were tested and calibrated before a launch, and once the rocket was assembled and tested as a unit it was ready to fly; from that point on, nothing could be removed or replaced. As they became more familiar with the rockets, General Electric personnel put more energy into calibrating components to increase the missiles’ power. The program progressed and spawned additional variants. The Hermes A1 was originally planned as an antiaircraft missile. The A2 was planned as a surface-to-surface model. The Hermes A3 was a tactical missile designed to deliver a thousand-pound warhead to a point one hundred and fifty miles away, give or take just two hundred feet. But these concepts never got beyond the planning stage. The Hermes II version was designed to test a ramjet engine, one that uses the vehicle’s forward velocity to “ram” air into the combustion chamber, eliminating the complex and costly rotating compressor and turbine wheels used by conventional jet engines. Another American V-2 offshoot was the Hermes C1, a three-stage missile with clusters of solid fuel rockets to deliver even larger payloads to more distant targets.

  On May 29, 1947, the Americans working in the New Mexico desert got a firsthand look at the power of the recovered German rockets. As the Sun set just before seven-thirty on that cool, crisp Thursday evening, a Hermes II rocket lifted off into twilight skies. It was supposed to fly north toward the uninhabited desert, but the onboard guidance gyroscope failed and the rocket turned southward. Range safety technicians saw it was flying off course but still didn’t shut its engine down. Observers watched the rocket, traili
ng flame and vapor, arc to an altitude of forty miles and fly south over El Paso, Texas, then over the international border. Five minutes after leaving the launchpad, the rocket crashed into a rocky knoll just three and a half miles south of downtown Juárez, Mexico. Traveling at twelve miles per minute on impact, the force of the crash shook buildings in the small town and in nearby El Paso. The shock wave broke windows and stopped the clock in the sheriff’s office at seven thirty-two. Flames shot into the air, setting the hillside on fire and generating a thick smoke. Startled residents in both towns flooded their local newspaper offices with phone calls asking what had disturbed their quiet evening. Panic bred as rumors flew around Juárez that an oil plant, an underground gasoline storage dump, or a boxcar full of dynamite had exploded. Personnel from White Sands arrived at the crash site around eight o’clock and found the modified V-2 had left a crater fifty feet wide and twenty-four feet deep in the hillside. Mexican soldiers kept civilians and souvenir hunters at bay while American personnel inspected the site. It turned out the rocket had narrowly missed an ammunition dump where Mexican mining companies stored powder and dynamite. The test was a moderate disaster that could have been far worse.

  As the American military pursued its various missile programs, a change in national security brought a change to the service branches. The National Security Act of 1947 created the National Security Council, a group that included the president, vice president, secretary of state, and secretary of defense, among others, who met at the White House to discuss both short- and long-term aims in national security. The act created the Central Intelligence Agency, the peacetime civilian agency modeled on the Office of Strategic Services. The act also merged the War Department and Navy Department into a single organization, the Department of Defense. The new DOD, headed by the secretary of defense, directed the creation of a new Department of the Air Force. After a decades-long connection with the U.S. Army, the air force became its own independent military service with its own stations spread across the country. It retained the Science Advisory Board, which now had a much firmer position thanks to the air force’s independence.

  The same year it became an independent military branch, David Simons, a young physician with a year-old medical degree in hand, joined the air force. He was assigned to the service’s Aeromedical Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, but the bulk of his work, he learned, would be done in New Mexico with a scientific version of the V-2 called Blossom. Sixty-five inches longer than the standard V-2, it was designed to break apart in the air and parachute a small nose-mounted capsule back to Earth. The air force’s Cambridge Laboratory, which had been the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s test site at Hanscom Field during the Second World War, offered the space in the Blossom rockets’ noses to the Aeromedical Laboratory for biomedical experiments, an offer the laboratory readily accepted. Simons was named project officer for Animal Studies in high altitude V-2 flights. Working closely with the project’s director, James P. Henry, from the Acceleration Unit of the Biophysics Branch, the pair set out to answer questions of whether a man could survive being launched into the upper atmosphere aboard a rocket.

  Among the earliest biomedical payloads launched suborbitally on a V-2 were strains of corn seeds that were later planted and cultivated to look for possible genetic effects from cosmic radiation. But seeds were a poor analogue for a human. What Simons really wanted was to launch a monkey, as close a genetic relative to humans that he could use. He figured that with a pressurized cabin and rudimentary life support system he could send a rhesus monkey into the near-space environment. The flight would be a short one. Following a ballistic trajectory, the capsule would only be exposed to the high altitude region no living creature had ever visited for a few minutes, but it would gather useful data.

  On January 13, 1948, the Alamogordo Army Air Field was renamed Holloman Air Force Base in honor of guided missile research pioneer Colonel George V. Holloman. By then the newly named air base was deep in preparations for the first monkey flight. The passenger was a nine-pound rhesus monkey named Albert who arrived at Holloman from Wright Field with Simons. Carefully fitted with biomedical sensors so technicians could monitor his heart and breathing rates, Albert was restrained by straps and inserted into an instrumented capsule mated atop a Blossom rocket. The first primate to ride a rocket lifted off on June 11, but the flight was plagued by difficulties. The biomedical instrumentation failed in flight, and a failed propulsion system stunted the rocket’s ascent so it reached a peak altitude of thirty-nine miles, barely getting beyond the stratosphere. The rocket didn’t explode, but the parachute failed, and Albert’s capsule smashed into the desert. But Albert was dead before he hit the ground. The minimal biomedical data the team gathered before launch suggested Albert succumbed to breathing problems in his cramped cabin before the rocket even left the ground. Nevertheless, the experience gained in preparing Albert for his mission was invaluable and directly applied to the preparation of Albert’s successor, a second rhesus monkey appropriately named Albert II.

  The second primate’s accommodations atop a Blossom rocket were slightly less cramped owing to improved instrumentation and a revised parachute system. It was with high hopes for success that Albert II launched on June 14, 1949. The parachute system failed again, ending the flight in a crash landing, but this mission wasn’t a complete failure. The sensors on Albert II’s body gathered enough data to tell technicians that he survived launch and the rocket’s ascent to its peak altitude of eighty-three miles, confirming the life support system worked. Two more rhesus monkeys died on Blossom flights in that year. Albert III was killed almost instantly after launch on September 16 when the Blossom rocket exploded less than eleven seconds after liftoff. On December 8, Albert IV suffered a similar fate to Albert II, surviving liftoff and returning valuable data before being killed when his parachute failed to open.

  The engineering behind sending biological payloads into space was improving, and the understanding of how spaceflight might affect living passengers was becoming clearer, but there was still a long way to go in recovering living payloads from space, and Simons was frustrated by the short duration of ballistic Blossom flights. He needed larger rockets to keep payload aloft higher, but such a rocket was not forthcoming. The air force’s more powerful Convair-built missile was no longer a candidate for atmospheric research. After test launches at White Sands ended with mixed results, a common occurrence given the nascent state of rocketry in America, the MX-774 program was canceled in 1949. In its place, development began on a U.S. Navy high altitude sounding rocket akin to the V-2 called Viking that had been contracted to the Martin Company.

  None of these new rocket programs were taking advantage of the imported German talent. While the makers of the V-2 provided indispensable assistance in the early stage of Project Hermes, by the spring of 1947 they had been entirely phased out of the program and replaced by American General Electric personnel. The development in part suited von Braun who had never wanted to keep working on the V-2 in the United States. But he also wasn’t able to work on the bigger and more powerful rockets he was anxious to build. Instead, he sat idly by while Americans launched an increasingly stale technology. His long-term thoughts, meanwhile, remained firmly off the planet. During his lengthy downtime at Fort Bliss, von Braun penned a technically comprehensive work outlining a manned mission to Mars. His vision wasn’t for a small-scale scouting trip to investigate the planet before visiting; Das Marsprojekt detailed a seventy-man mission akin to the turn-of-the-century scientific expeditions mounted to the North and South Poles.

  The slow development of America’s rocket technology frustrated more than the V-2 engineer. General Dwight Eisenhower, now the army’s chief of staff, felt the fledgling rocket program wasn’t getting the support and priority status it desperately needed. The guided missile field and all related fields like electronics, missile guidance, and supersonic aircraft were still poorly understood, he explained in a hearin
g before the House Military Appropriations Subcommittee. It was in the nation’s best interests to focus research energies into these areas that needed more attention. If the United States didn’t devote significant resources to developing this technology into a viable missile now, he believed, the nation risked ruin or defeat to an enemy that was pursuing these technologies, potentially the Soviet Union. But the U.S. Congress was focused on reducing military forces and expenditures in the postwar climate, not sinking more money into any kind of new armaments. Eisenhower had the foresight that had eluded Hitler, that developing missiles as weapons was a worthwhile investment, but he could only do so much to raise the program’s priority status. Without an immediate threat to the country, congressional support for the program was lacking, and national resources were urgently needed to rebuild the country more than to develop the weapons to counter a theoretical future threat.

  It didn’t help the army’s missile program that its imported German experts were effectively being ignored. The American War Department didn’t acknowledge that it was hosting a number of former Nazi engineers until December 1946, largely because it had taken the better part of a year for all of the men to secure their military contracts. Even then, their freedoms remained severely limited. Having entered the country under Operation Overcast and later Project Paperclip, they could work under the umbrella of the U.S. Army, but they were still not formally recognized by the government as being in the country. And for every government official and industry leader who wanted to tap into the German knowledge base there were just as many who refused to work with such a recent enemy. The American public did not know that German scientists were living and working in the country. Being phased out of the Hermes program only increased the Peenemünde group’s sense of isolation. The standing order from Washington was for them to just tinker with their old V-2s and wait until they were needed. The subtext was that they might not be needed until a new war developed that would require the same fast-paced development that had spawned the V-2 or the American Manhattan Project.