Von Braun and his Huntsville rocket team truly believed that they should have received the mandate to build and launch the first American satellite. Having lost to the Vanguard program, however, they pushed for their appointment as a backup plan in case Vanguard was unsuccessful. As the Vanguard program ran into technical difficulties, furthermore, von Braun pressed for permission to launch ahead of the rival effort, claiming he could place a satellite in orbit as early as January 1957. The Department of Defense turned down that request, making the announcement in a memorandum of July 5, 1956:
While it is true that the VANGUARD group does not expect to make its first satellite attempt before August 1957, whereas a satellite attempt could be made by the Army Ballistic Missile Agency as early as January 1957, little would be gained by making such an early satellite attempt as an isolated action with no follow-up program. In the case of VANGUARD, the first flight will be followed up by five additional satellite attempts in the ensuing year. It would be impossible for the ABMA group to make any satellite attempt that has a reasonable chance of success without diversion of the efforts of their top-flight scientific personnel from the main course of the JUPITER program, and to some extent, diversion of missiles from the early phase of the re-entry test program. There would also be a problem of additional funding not now provided.
The final reason for disapproving this action: “The obvious interference with the progress of the JUPITER program would certainly present a strong argument against such diversion of scientific effort.”
Similar problems plagued the Soviet scientific satellite effort. Inspired by the Cold War of the 1950s, the eventual Soviet success had been laboriously built by Sergei Korolev and Valentin Glushko through years of systematic, command-economy efforts to achieve a perceived technological edge in military capability. The rocket received a formal go-ahead in the middle of 1954. The missile was meant primarily to carry nuclear warheads, but Korolev designed it so that it could instead orbit a satellite of 1.5 tons. The launching of a satellite, though unmentioned in planning discussions, was never far from the thinking of those involved in developing the technology.
The Soviet Union officially entered the satellite sweepstakes on August 2, 1955, when it responded to the Eisenhower administration’s announcement to launch a satellite during the IGY. At a press conference at the Soviet embassy in Copenhagen before about fifty journalists, Leonid Ivanovich Sedov stated: “In my opinion, it will be possible to launch an artificial Earth satellite within the next two years.” He added, “The realization of the Soviet project can be expected in the near future. I won’t take it upon myself to name the date more precisely.”
On August 30, 1955, Korolev discussed an IGY satellite in the highest levels of the Soviet defense establishment. He received approval to pursue the effort in no small measure because it would be a powerful demonstration of Soviet science and technology during the IGY. From there he went to another meeting in Moscow with the scientific community, including Glushko, where he told them: “As for the booster rocket, we hope to begin the first launches in April–July 1957 . . . before the start of the International Geophysical Year.” The IGY schedule gave Korolev a timetable not otherwise possible for any orbital satellite efforts. Within days they had a program fleshed out to undertake study of the ionosphere, cosmic rays, Earth’s magnetic fields, luminescence in the upper atmosphere, the Sun and its relationship to Earth, and other natural phenomena. The Soviet Academy of Sciences embraced this program; it would well satisfy the scientific objectives of the IGY and project Soviet capability on the world stage.
The Soviet effort gained official reality on January 30, 1956, when the USSR Council of Ministers issued decree number 149-88ss. The document approved a launch in 1957 of an artificial satellite, designated “Object D,” as part of the IGY. Responsibility for the project rested with Korolev’s Design Bureau, OKB-1, with support from Glushko and others. Korolev met with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev in February 1956 at OKB-1 to solidify support. While showing Khrushchev the massive R-7 rocket, Korolev turned the conversation to all the many objectives that could be met with the rocket, among them the IGY satellite launching. When it came time for Glushko to speak, he bored Khrushchev with extraneous technical details, “like he was talking to first course students at the neighboring forestry institute . . . rather than the higher leadership.” Accordingly, Korolev invoked the name of sainted Russian space theorist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and told Khrushchev that the Soviet people were on the verge of realizing his dreams of space exploration with the R-7 rocket.
Korolev showed a model of Object D and suggested to the Soviet premier that the Americans were focused on the IGY satellite effort and that this represented an opportunity to best their efforts. The R-7 was nearly ready for launch, he insisted, and its capabilities were such that it could hoist Object D into orbit with energy to spare. In the end, Khrushchev hesitantly told Korolev: “If the main task”—ballistic missile development—“doesn’t suffer, do it.” With this meeting, the Soviet IGY satellite project was under way.
This decision, however, did not necessarily mean that Korolev would receive all the funding he requested. He constantly grumbled about the need for additional resources. His close friend Mstislav Vsevolodovich Keldysh made the case in a September 14, 1956, meeting with the Presidium of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Keldysh excited the members with the possibility of placing a dog in orbit, as well as hinting of future human missions. “We, of course, can’t stop at the task of creating an Earth satellite. We, naturally, are thinking of further tasks—of space flight. The first project along these lines, I believe, will be to fly around the Moon and photograph it from the side which is always hidden to us.” To do this, he insisted, “it would be good if the Presidium were to turn the serious attention of all its institutions to the necessity of doing this work on time. . . . We all want our satellite to fly earlier than the Americans’.”
On August 21, 1957, the Soviet Union launched a successful R-7 rocket, its sixth attempt, carrying a dummy warhead more than four thousand miles to Kamchatka. Korolev was convinced by this success that the launcher was ready for use. Object D, however, lagged in development. He then substituted a less complex satellite, a spherical object weighing only 183 pounds, with a radio transmitter, batteries, and unsophisticated measuring instruments. This became known to the world as Sputnik 1, “fellow traveler” in Russian.
In a 1993 interview, Oleg Ivanovsky, who had worked on the program, recalled some of the problems with the satellite:
We had to find new techniques of manufacturing the surfaces in order to achieve the necessary optical and thermal qualities. We had no experience in this work. . . . Korolev, with his iron character, was able to influence the attitude of people. The Party directed that new paint be put on the factory walls. Korolev put the satellite on a special stand, draped in velvet, in order that the workers would show reverence towards it. He supervised the carrying out of the production schedule every day personally.
Korolev became a man obsessed. He “insisted that both halves of the sputnik’s metallic sphere be polished until they shone, that they be spotlessly clean,” recalled Konstantin Petrovich Feoktistov, who would be the first engineer-cosmonaut to go into orbit in the three-man Voskhod seven years later. “The people who developed the radio equipment were actually the ones demanding this,” he added. “They were afraid of the system overheating, and they wanted the orbiting sphere to reflect as many rays of the Sun as possible.”
Sputnik 1 launched atop an R-7 rocket on October 4, 1957. Red Army Colonel Mikhail Fyodorovich Rebrov recalled the experience:
No one will ever know what was going through Sergey Korolev’s mind at the time. Later on, when the sputnik was installed in orbit, and its call sign was heard over the globe, he said: “I’ve been waiting all my life for this day!” The moment of the blast-off has been described many times. Then the rocket got out of the radio zone. The communication with the sputnik end
ed. The small room where the radio receivers were was overcrowded. Time dragged on slowly. Waiting built up the stress. Everyone stopped talking. There was absolute silence. All that could be heard was the breathing of the people and the quiet static in the loudspeaker. . . . And then from very far-off there appeared, at first very quietly and then louder and louder, those “bleep-bleeps” which confirmed that it was in orbit and in operation. Once again everyone rejoiced. There were kisses, hugs and cries of “Hurrah!” The austere men, who were greeted out of space by the messenger they had made, had tears in their eyes.
American Responses to Sputnik
Some have called the Soviet launch of Sputnik 1 “the shock of the century.” But that shock only slowly reverberated through the American public in the days that followed. Most Americans seemed to recognize that the satellite did not pose a threat to the United States, so a spirit of congratulations prevailed, and many people seemed excited by the Soviet success. At the same time, Eisenhower acknowledged the need to “take all feasible measures to accelerate missile and satellite programs.” He also moved to assure the American public that all was well, largely succeeding in doing so during the month of October 1957.
Instead of feeling threatened, a generation of Americans seemed to embrace the dawn of the space age as a symbol of progress and a better future both on Earth and beyond. A generation of Americans had been raised on visions of human colonies on the Moon and Mars, great starships plying galactic oceans, and prospects of a bright, limitless future beyond a confining, overcrowded, and resource-depleted Earth. Entertainment leaders like Walt Disney joined Wernher von Braun and other rocketeers in inspiring the embrace of a promising future in space. Taught in the early 1950s that spaceflight loomed just on the cusp of reality, the public now saw that perception coming true. As an example of how one American responded to Sputnik, fourteen-year-old Homer Hickam recalled watching “the bright little ball, moving majestically across the narrow star field between the ridgelines” over his home in Coalwood, West Virginia. Hickam said he was inspired to become an aerospace engineer and devote his life to the quest for space. He was just one of many, not only in the United States and the USSR but across the world.
In fact, the best evidence suggests that excitement about prospects for the future dominated the thinking of the American public immediately after the Sputnik launch. Three days later, social anthropologist Margaret Mead and her partner Rhoda Métraux began collecting data gauging American responses to Sputnik. They asked colleagues and friends around the country to conduct surveys asking three open-ended questions among divergent age, gender, race, economic, and social groups:
1. What do you think about the satellite?
2. How do you explain Russia’s getting their satellite up first?
3. What do you think we can do to make up for it?
Mead and Métraux collected 2,991 adult responses by October 18. Few respondents said that the Soviet launch was an unexpected event; an even smaller number registered no knowledge of the launch. As one investigator summarized in a report on this study, “It seems that most informants in the ‘Emergency Survey,’ whether or not they possessed prior knowledge about artificial satellites, had taken the news of Sputnik in stride and developed a logical, rather than emotional, approach to the topic by the time they were interviewed.”
This assessment squares with more scientific analysis of the Sputnik response. As a government study reported in October 1958:
Interpretations of the sputnik’s significance likewise show that public concern was not great. Gallup found that only 50 percent of a sample taken in Washington and Chicago regarded the sputnik as a blow to our prestige. Sixty percent said that we, not the Russians, would make the next great “scientific” (actually technological) advance. A poll by the Minneapolis Star and Tribune found that 65 percent of a sample in that State thought we could send up a satellite within 30 days following the Russian success, a statistic which included 56 percent of the college-educated persons asked. In the sample of the Opinion Research Corporation, 13 percent believed that we had fallen behind dangerously, 36 percent that we were behind but would catch up, and 46 percent said that we were still at least abreast of Russia.
There is good reason to believe that the response to Sputnik was a political construct. George Reedy, a Democratic strategist, wrote to Senator Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas on October 17, 1957, about how the Sputnik issue could be used to the party’s advantage: “The issue is one which, if properly handled, would blast the Republicans out of the water, unify the Democratic Party, and elect you President.” Reedy suggested, “You should plan to plunge heavily into this one. As long as you stick to the facts and do not get partisan, you will not be out on any limb.”
Using every tool at their disposal, Johnson and his associates worked to maximize the Sputnik launch for their political purposes. Speaking for many Americans, he remarked in two speeches in Texas in the fall of 1957 that the “Soviets have beaten us at our own game—daring, scientific advances in the atomic age.” Since those Cold War rivals had already established a foothold in space, Johnson proposed to “take a long careful look” at why the U.S. space program was trailing that of the Soviet Union. He led a broad review of American defense and space programs in the wake of what he presented as the Sputnik crisis. Eventually, the public may have grown to fear the ramifications of the satellite.
President Eisenhower and other leaders of his administration congratulated the Soviet Union and tried to downplay the importance of the Sputnik 1 accomplishment, but they misjudged the public reaction to the event. The Democrats accused the Eisenhower administration of letting the Soviet Union best the United States. The Sputnik crisis reinforced for many people the popular conception that President Eisenhower was a smiling incompetent; it was another instance of a “do-nothing,” golf-playing president mismanaging events. With the prodding of Democrats, the public began to perceive Sputnik as an illustration of a technological gap, and that perception provided the impetus for increased spending for aerospace endeavors, technical and scientific educational programs, and the chartering of new federal agencies to manage air and space research and development. Not only had the Soviets been first in orbit, but Sputnik 1 was much larger than the projected 3.5 pounds for the first satellite to be launched by the Americans with Project Vanguard. In the Cold War environment of the late 1950s, this disparity of capability portended menacing implications.
Concerns about Soviet success compounded on November 3, 1957, when the Soviets succeeded in launching a second satellite, and this time it was a monstrosity that carried a dog, Laika. While the first satellite had weighed less than 185 pounds, this spacecraft weighed 1,120 pounds and stayed in orbit for almost two hundred days. Eisenhower tried to quell public apprehensions, and he took action to address the perceived space gap. He accelerated missile programs, put more focus on science and technology in the government, approved a secondary satellite effort called Explorer, and appointed a presidential science adviser. He also created, at the suggestion of scientists in Washington, a President’s Science Advisory Committee (PSAC), which began operation on November 22.
As a first tangible effort to counter the apparent Soviet leadership in space technology, the White House announced that the United States would test launch a Project Vanguard booster on December 6, 1957. Media representatives were invited to witness the launch in the hope that they could help restore public confidence, but it was a disaster of the first order. During the ignition sequence, the rocket rose about three feet above the platform, shook briefly, and disintegrated in flames. John Hagen, who had been working feverishly to ready the rocket for flight, was demoralized. He felt even worse after the next test. On February 5, 1958, the Vanguard launch vehicle reached an altitude of four miles and then exploded. Hagen was tearful at the very public failures and some of his associates later thought that his career ended then and there, for he never again held an important post.
In this crisis t
he army, featuring the handsome and charismatic Wernher von Braun and his rocket team of German immigrants, dusted off an unapproved plan for the IGY satellite effort, Project Explorer, and flew it within an amazingly short period of time. After two launch aborts that made observers apprehensive that the United States might never duplicate the Soviet successes in spaceflight, the Juno 1 booster carrying Explorer 1 lifted off from the Cape Canaveral, Florida, launch site at 10:55 P.M. on January 31, 1958. The Juno booster was largely a variant of the ABMA’s Jupiter-C, whose technology, in parts, can be traced to the V-2 of World War II. The tracking sites marked the course of the rocket to the upper reaches of the atmosphere, but observers on the ground had to wait to learn whether orbit had been achieved.
Von Braun, who was at the Pentagon with other Department of Defense officials preparing for a press conference, received news from the Cape that the launch had taken place and calculated that telemetry from Explorer 1 should be received at the West Coast tracking stations at precisely 12:41 A.M. But that time came and went, and still von Braun waited for communication from the satellite. It finally came at 12:49 A.M., when the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) tracking station confirmed Explorer 1’s pass overhead. The delay had amounted to nothing more than a little higher orbit than anticipated and therefore a longer period required to travel the extra mileage.
The spacecraft carried a small instrument, essentially a Geiger counter, to measure radiation encircling Earth. The instrument had been built by James A. Van Allen, a physicist from the University of Iowa. Its data verified the existence of Earth’s magnetic field and discovered what came to be called the Van Allen radiation belts. These phenomena partially dictate the electrical charges in the atmosphere and the solar radiation that reaches Earth. Later that day, February 1, 1958, a press conference took place at the National Academy of Sciences, where von Braun, Van Allen, and JPL director William H. Pickering announced success. The signature image that appeared in newspapers around the nation the next morning depicts three smiling men holding a full-scale model of Explorer 1 above their heads in triumph of launching the first United States artificial satellite. Project Vanguard also received additional funding to accelerate activity during this period, and Vanguard 1 was finally orbited on March 17, 1958, confirming the existence of the Van Allen belts and measuring their severity.
Reaching for the Moon Page 3