Breaking the Chains of Gravity

by Amy Shira Teitel

  As daylight seeped into the field, a gentle wind picked up, knocking the balloon around as it was filled with helium. Straining against the rollers holding it in place, the balloon was finally released at six twenty-three, carrying Kittinger off the launch platform. He wasn’t alone in the sky; circling the area were photographic and tracking aircraft. But inside the capsule Kittinger was isolated. Exacerbating his solitude was a communications glitch with the very high-frequency radio. He could hear his ground crew but they couldn’t hear him, forcing him to use the backup continuous wave transmission system. Tapping out messages in Morse code, an employee at the Winzen plant would receive the messages then call the ground crews in South Saint Paul to verbally relay the message. This roundabout method meant a delay in transferring critical information, but it wasn’t a showstopper for Kittinger. He tapped out a simple message in Morse code: NO SWEAT. It was a trademark phrase of his that told ground crews he was fine.

  The higher he rose the more the helium gas expanded and began to fill the balloon’s two million cubic feet in earnest, drawing Kittinger inexorably further from the Earth. Less than an hour into the flight, Kittinger glanced down at his oxygen supply gauge and saw that he had used up almost half of his breathable gas in less than an hour, far more than was expected at that stage in the mission. Logic said to abort the mission then and there, but Kittinger’s test pilot instincts took over. Not only did he want to complete the test for his own sake, he also wanted to justify the hard work of the entire team. Besides, he rather than Simons was in that capsule that morning to test the system, and test the system he would. Reasoning that he could probably make it to his peak altitude and back if he carefully rationed his oxygen usage, Kittinger began bleeding oxygen from his suit into the capsule’s environment. Taking away his own personal backup survival system put his life even more firmly in the hands of the Winzen and air force personnel who had built the capsule.

  Manhigh 1 rose steadily through the atmosphere, past the tropopause toward the stratosphere. At forty-five thousand feet, Kittinger experienced the full force of a jet stream. The capsule was knocked nearly over on its side, and looking out the portholes he saw the balloon was completely distorted into a concave bulging mass of plastic. Putting the sight out of his mind and his faith in Vera Winzen’s army of women, he waited for the balloon to carry him above the fierce winds. As quickly as it had come, the force of the jet stream abated and the balloon resumed its rounded form; Mrs. Winzen did indeed make excellent balloons. Kittinger continued to ascend, and as he passed seventy thousand feet, the world outside his portholes began to change. Looking down he could still see the familiar pale blue of the Earthly sky as a thick band on the horizon, but as he moved his eyes upward the blue quickly gave way to inky black. The Sun shone bright and strong in the morning sky, but the sky around it remained completely devoid of color. Kittinger was filled with a sense of awe and privilege looking out his small windows.

  On the ground, Simons became increasingly anxious as the mission wore on. He was still convinced that Kittinger’s fondness for parachute jumping would win and that the pilot would find some excuse to bail out, choosing a thrill over science and sacrificing the capsule in the process. Impatient to get Kittinger and the Manhigh capsule down safely, Simons radioed the order to begin his descent just before nine o’clock in the morning.

  When he got the call, Kittinger knew he had enough oxygen to stay up a little longer, and he wasn’t keen to end the mission just yet. Now at ninety-six thousand feet, he had a view of the Earth that few people had ever seen, its curvature clear against a dark sky. And unlike the rocket plane pilots flying high in the skies over Edwards Air Force Base, he had the luxury of sitting and letting the view wash over him in the silence afforded by his balloon’s lack of propulsion system. The sky took on a hue he had never seen from the Earth. It occurred to him in that moment that he was the first man to spend any length of time in the near-space environment, that he was, in a way, the first man in space.

  Kittinger didn’t have much time to savor the moment. He was already venting the gas from his balloon to begin his slow decent to Earth. But first he toyed with Simons just a little, playing off the doctor’s obsession with Kittinger’s fondness for parachute jumping. He thought a moment before tapping out his reply to the order to descend: COME UP AND GET ME. Simons was livid, convinced that Kittinger had succumbed to the “breakaway phenomenon,” the theorized psychological condition wherein a pilot at altitude would risk his life trying to reach further into space. The thought was laughable to Kittinger, who knew pilots didn’t actually suffer from this breakaway phenomenon, and Stapp, too, found Kittinger’s reply humorous. Nevertheless, Stapp did follow Simons’s lead in ordering Kittinger to begin his descent, to which the pilot tapped out the reply: VALVING GAS.

  The sky outside the porthole windows gradually lightened and returned to an Earthly light blue as Manhigh 1 brought Kittinger slowly back down through the atmosphere. He carefully valved gas to shrink the balloon and decrease its lift and dropped batteries to lighten his weight and slow his fall. Opening portholes as he went to let atmospheric oxygen into the capsule, Kittinger landed neatly at twelve fifty-seven in the afternoon with his oxygen supply completely depleted, having traveled just eighty lateral miles from his launch point. Simons was the first to arrive at the Manhigh capsule and help a grinning Kittinger out onto the grass.

  Considering it was a shakedown flight, Manhigh 1 was widely considered a successful mission. But for all the biomedical benefits of these controlled balloon flights, they were limited as well. Balloons could carry a man to a near-space environment but not all the way into orbit. For that, Kittinger would need to fly in a rocket plane or more likely on top of a rocket, and by the time he made this historic flight, the wheels were in motion for that latter route to space to take center stage. The time for slowly and methodically learning about space was fast coming to an end.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Space Becomes an Option

  For centuries, ancient and medieval Western scientists thought the Sun was a perfect, unchanging orb in the sky that moved around our planet with clocklike regularity. In 1543, Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus tracked the movements of the planet Mars and found that the enduring heliocentric model was wrong, that the Sun was actually at the center of the solar system and the Earth and all the other planets circled it. But still the Sun’s reputation as an unblemished body shining its light on the world remained intact. Then, around 1611, Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei used his telescopes to project images of the Sun onto a blank wall and observed dark spots on its face. These first blemishes on an ostensibly perfect celestial body forever changed our perception of the Sun’s immutable nature.

  Later generations of astronomers followed suit, aiming their telescopes sunward to find not only that sunspots are common, they also increase and decrease over the course of a regular solar cycle that peaks at a solar maximum every eleven years. By the mid-twentieth century, our once docile Sun was understood to be incredibly dynamic. In 1952, the impending solar maximum prompted the International Council of Scientific Unions to propose a coordinated research effort into various aspects of atmospheric science affected by the Sun’s activities called the International Geophysical Year.

  This wouldn’t be the first time international scientists collaborated on a large-scale research project to understand the physical properties and processes affecting the Earth. More than seventy years earlier, Austrian explorer Carl Weyprecht proposed that the answers to fundamental meteorological and geophysical questions could be answered through a series of coordinated scientific expeditions to the Earth’s poles. Weyprecht died in 1881, but not before inspiring the First International Polar Year. Between 1881 and 1884, some seven hundred scientists from eleven nations established fourteen research stations in the Earth’s polar regions and an additional thirteen auxiliary stations around the world. Their painstakingly gathered data were never truly utilized, but
the model of a coordinated research program proved so sufficiently viable that it was resurrected in 1927 by the International Meteorological Committee. Another coordinated research program pulling together observations from Arctic and Antarctic stations was expected to answer lingering questions about terrestrial magnetism as well as auroral and meteorological phenomena, the types of things that now had immediate applications to marine and aerial navigation, wireless telegraphy, and weather forecasting. From 1932 to 1933, the fiftieth anniversary of the First International Polar Year, a second international cohort of men braved arctic conditions to establish research stations at the poles for the sake of gathering internationally useful data for the Second International Polar Year.

  The outbreak of the Second World War disrupted this international scientific undertaking, and the results of the Second Polar Year lay untapped until a 1946 Liquidation Commission was formed to conclude all outstanding issues. And as international relations began the slow process of repairing after the war’s end, international scientists became increasingly keen to renew contacts and resume joint research programs. A handful of collaboration-minded scientists proposed such a program to the Joint Commission on the Ionosphere in Brussels in September 1950, a third Polar Year from 1957 to 1958 to coincide with a period of peak solar activity. The proposal garnered enough initial interest to be passed on to a number of international research bodies, including the International Astronomical Union, the International Council of Scientific Unions, and the World Meteorological Organization. Each of these organizations was receptive to the idea but changed its focus. Consensus was that a geophysical research program would be far more useful in the long term than another polar program. This revised focus meant new research stations established extending away from the poles toward the equator. With this new emphasis, the International Council of Scientific Unions created the Committée Speciale pour l’Année Geophysique Internationale (the Special Committee for the International Geophysical Year) in late 1952, an international committee to oversee all aspects of the first IGY.

  The CSAGI held its first comprehensive meeting in Brussels midway through 1953 by which time more than thirty nations had responded favorably to the idea of an IGY. From there, plans gradually, and somewhat painstakingly, started coming together. Basic guidelines included the overall directive that participating nations develop programs that would take advantage of the significant technological advances that had been made since the previous Polar Year. Each nation would also manage its own IGY program at a local level, though national planning committees had to take into consideration the various overarching scientific committees’ needs at every turn. But the nature of such a wide-scale program meant the details of the IGY were by necessity ironed out during days-long international conferences held in Brussels or Barcelona.

  The United States’ contribution to the IGY was starting to take shape in the spring of 1954. The prospective program was by and large in line with the overall IGY goals with one notable exception. In addition to ground-based research stations, American scientists wanted to explore the upper atmosphere using rockets. Initially, the American IGY program called for the use of rockoons, a rocket-balloon hybrid that lifts a payload to altitude by a balloon before launching it higher with a small rocket, as well as small Aerobee sounding rockets. These high-altitude payloads would carry instruments to measure atmospheric pressure, temperature, density, and also return data about the strength of magnetic fields and the phenomena of night and day airglow. Specific instruments would also measure ultraviolet light and X-rays in space, investigate the particles that cause the glowing aurora, estimate the planet’s ozone distribution, the density of the ionosphere, and measure the effects of cosmic radiation. These rockets would launch on predetermined “World Days” of notable solar activity with the goal of gathering the most fruitful results. But scientists had been working with sounding rockets with mixed results for years. The larger scope of the IGY brought with it the possibility of using larger rockets.

  For the scientists already working with upper atmospheric research, launching an Earth-orbiting satellite was not only a natural next step, it was also the best way to overcome the shortcomings of available technology. Small sounding rockets like the American repurposed V-2s launching from the White Sands Proving Ground could only gather data during the payload’s few minutes at the top of its arcing trajectory. Sounding rockets could also only deliver their payloads to the upper atmosphere, not above the atmosphere, which meant that any data onboard instruments gathered about cosmic radiation or the space environment were not completely free from atmospheric disturbances. And because they are fairly small, no sounding rocket had the necessary power to launch any payload fast enough to send it into orbit around the planet. Balloon flights, just like the ones John Paul Stapp and David Simons were starting to work on at the Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico, were similarly limited. Though balloons could keep a payload of instruments at altitude far longer than a ballistic rocket, they were also unable to escape the Earth’s atmosphere.

  Putting a scientific satellite in orbit would overcome these problems and explore wholly new regions of space all at once. A satellite could gather data on outer atmospheric density because it would be above the atmosphere and measure the Earth’s equatorial radius and oblateness as it circled the globe. It was the only way to study the radiation environment outside the protection of the atmosphere. A satellite would travel around the planet at 17,500 miles per hour without ever falling back to Earth, extending its mission as long as its instruments had power to continue working.

  From a practical standpoint, designing a payload to work in the upper atmosphere wasn’t much more difficult than designing the same payload to work in orbit. In both instances the instruments would have to withstand the g-forces of launch, the cold of the upper atmosphere, and the vacuum of space. However, an orbital launch promised more demanding extremes for the payload and also required a power source that could keep the instruments working in these more extreme environments. The bigger challenge lay in developing the rocket that could propel the payload fast enough to get it into orbit around the planet, and that technology was no longer in the realm of futuristic fantasy. Military missiles under development could be modified to send modest payloads into orbit. As international plans solidified, more nations joined the effort leading to greater costs and loftier goals. Each participating nation was committed to using cutting-edge technology to investigate geophysical phenomena. And in many areas of investigation, such as aurora and other upper atmospheric and space phenomena, scientists unanimously agreed that an Earth-orbiting satellite would be the best way to gather the necessary data.

  Support for the International Geophysical Year by necessity went beyond scientific circles. The American program was managed by the National Science Foundation at the behest of the chairman of the National Research Council, making it a government program that the president had to sign off on. The first time President Dwight Eisenhower was presented with the plans, he called the IGY a unique and striking example of international partners taking advantage of scientific curiosity in a way that promised to benefit nations worldwide. And the prospect of a satellite was equally appealing. The president first learned that putting a small satellite into orbit was scientifically beneficial and technologically possible during a meeting of international scientists in Rome in the fall of 1954 where he also learned that launching satellites under the umbrella of the IGY would make it a purely scientific endeavor. That the exploration of space be a peaceful undertaking was paramount for Eisenhower, something he knew wouldn’t be seen as a competitive or hostile move to international partners. But he did realize that there would be an inescapable military connection to this program; the only vehicle then available that could get a payload into orbit was the army’s Redstone family of missiles. Eisenhower approved the IGY satellite program on the condition that it not interfere with any ongoing missile program and that it not use a military mis
sile—the launch vehicle would have to be some peaceful variant to firmly separate the military from space. The United States’ provisional inclusion of a satellite to its IGY program prompted the International Council of Scientific Unions to urge other participating nations to consider building and launching small satellites as part of their IGY activities as well.

  The Soviet Union answered the ICSU’s call. Though not officially a participating nation in the IGY in 1954, it wasn’t barred from taking part. The country had expressed interest in joining and was welcome to do so providing, like every other nation, that it freely exchange all gathered data with the other cooperating nations, something not forthcoming from a closed society. Regardless, Soviet representatives were present in Rome when the United States’ satellite was approved.

  Of all the scientists keen to pursue an orbital satellite for scientific research, perhaps none was more excited at the prospect than Wernher von Braun. After four years working at the army’s Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama, his Redstone rocket could be modified to place a small payload into orbit. Designed by von Braun and built by Chrysler, the nearly seventy-foot-long and six-foot-around missile was the U.S. Army’s first short-range surface-to-surface missile. And with an engine capable of delivering seventy-eight thousand pounds of force at sea level, it was the best candidate to get a payload into orbit, though it couldn’t do so alone.