Cocktails and the Blues

“I think there is very little doubt that the Russians intend to start firing [satellites] sometime on or before the first of the year [1958].”

—Richard Porter, chairman of the U. S.Technical Panel on Earth Satellites,

October 3, 1957

“As it happened, the public outcry after Sputnik was earsplit­ting. No event since Pearl Harbor set off such repercussions in public life.”

—William McDougall,.. .The Heavens and the Earth, a Political History

of the Space Age

L

ieutenant General Anatoly Blagonravov sipped vodka. In Tyuratam it was the early hours of Saturday, October 5, 1957. But in Washington, D. C., it was still the evening of Friday, October 4, and Blagonravov was hosting a reception at the Soviet embassy for delegates to the IGY’s con­ference on rockets and satellites. Sputnik I was in orbit, had, in fact, already passed undetected over America. It would not again go unnoticed.

The people at the Soviet embassy did not yet know that the space age had begun. As the guests circled the buffet of Russian delicacies spread beneath sparkling chandeliers, the Americans probed Blagonravov for hints of when his country planned to launch a satellite.

Although Blagonravov headed the Soviet delegation, the Americans could not have known quite how ideally placed he was to answer them. He was an academician and chair of the Soviet Academy’s Interdepart­mental Commission of Interplanetary Communication; as such he knew what the Soviet scientists wanted to do with satellites. He was a former head of the rocketry and radar division of the Soviet Academy of Artillery Sciences, to which Sergei Korolev had been elected in 1954. Finally, Blagonravov was a member of the State Commission and one of the VIPs who had listened to Prosteyshiy Satellite’s test signal in the assembly build­ing at Tyuratam little more than a week earlier.

What no one who saw Blagonravov that night can say is whether he knew at the beginning of the reception that Sputnik was already aloft. The white-haired, scholarly figure mingled genially with his guests, his demeanor much the same as it had been all week. His blue eyes masked an inner intensity. His Russian cigarette was tilted between his lips.

What is indisputable is that Blagonravov knew that a launch was imminent. So did the American scientists—at least intellectually—includ­ing William Pickering, a native New Zealander of great charm and under­lying sharpness. In 1957, Pickering was a veteran rocket scientist and had been the director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, for three years. He worked closely with the German rocket pioneer Wern – her von Braun. These two knew that with comparative ease they could convert one of the intermediate range ballistic missiles (range 2,000 miles) they were developing into a satellite launcher.

Pickering had first become involved with rocketry in 1942, at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). The lab had analyzed intelligence reports about a V2 rocket that had landed in Sweden. In 1943, Army Ordnance asked JPL to investigate the possibility of developing an American long – range rocket, which in those days meant rockets that could fly at least one hundred miles.

When the war ended, von Braun surrendered to American troops and was moved eventually to the Army Ballistic Missile Agency in Huntsville, Alabama. The U. S. Army also shipped home about one hun­dred V2s, which von Braun had designed. These rockets were distributed to groups around the U. S. that were interested in upper-atmosphere research and rocketry. A group of scientists known as the Upper Atmo­sphere Research Panel selected and analyzed the experiments that the rockets would carry Members of this group, including James Van Allen, went on to head the IGY s satellite efforts.

Pickering, in cooperation with the Army Ballistic Missile Agency and von Braun, was soon testing the V2s while JPL—known as the “army smarts”—simultaneously continued its own rocket development. At times, as rocket after rocket exploded, it seemed to Pickering that rocketry was an unpredictable art, not a science. But JPL and the Army persevered.

By the early 1950s, the V2s were proving the truth of what Sergei Korolev had said in 1934 in his book Rocket Flight in the Stratosphere: “ … a rocket is defense and science.”

Von Braun, too, had always known this. Like Korolev, he dreamed of space and worked on missiles. In his new country, von Braun was a highly visible advocate of space exploration. In the early 1950s, he drew headlines by promoting grandiose ideas of space stations and Martian colonies at a time when the general public and most scientists thought that even a sim­ple satellite was science fiction.

While the idea of a space station was indeed science fiction at that time, the technical pieces that would make the launch of a satellite a prac­tical project were in place in 1954. That September, von Braun and a small group of scientists drew up a plan for a satellite that would become famous in the annals of space history. His idea was that a Redstone rocket would lift a five-pound satellite from Earth and that an upper stage, comprising a cluster of Loki rockets atop the Redstone, would give the satellite its final kick into orbit. If the small satellite was successful, a second, larger, “bird” carrying scientific instruments would follow. This proposal was called Project Orbiter.

The result of the first shot would be five pounds of metal circling hundreds of miles above the earth at a speed of roughly 17,000 miles per hour, more than four miles per second. Impressive, but how could they prove that such a small, swift, and distant object was really in orbit?

Nowadays, of course, radio links satellites to observers on the ground. Then radio was not an obvious choice. Von Braun turned to astronomy. The satellite would, after all, be a new heavenly body.

No one was better qualified for the job of finding a body speeding through space than the man he turned to, Fred Whipple. Whipple was the director of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts. A tall, slender man with a widow’s peak and steel-rimmed glasses that gave him an air of erudition, he was expert at tracking meteors and comets. Whipple concluded that optical tracking could follow a bur­nished satellite at an altitude of two hundred miles, even though the satel­lite would be visible only for the twenty minutes at dawn and dusk that the sun would illuminate it against a dark sky. So the proposal for Project Orbiter included no plans for radio tracking, a decision that—seemingly— was to tell against von Braun less than a year later.

Von Braun sent the proposal to the Department of Defense, JPL, and branches of the armed services. Whipple approached the National Science Foundation and the National Academy of Sciences.

The proposal came at a time when others with influence were strongly advocating that the U. S. should begin a satellite program. Among these were the scientists who had gained the support of the international scientific community for the inclusion of a satellite in the IGY, and, secretly, those in the Air Force who wanted satellites for reconnaissance. In addition, the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL), in Washington D. C., made its own pitch for a satellite program and launcher.

The NRL had been one of the groups to receive V2s, and under the technical leadership of Milton Rosen, it had developed its own rocket—the Viking—for upper-atmosphere research. Rosen persuaded a few forward­looking thinkers to write about the job that satellites could do when rock­ets were developed that could reach orbit. Among these was John Pierce, from AT&T’s Bell Laboratories, who, along with Harold Rosen from the Hughes Aircraft Company, would later be christened “the father of com­munication satellites” by the science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke.

It was the IGY’s scientists who won Eisenhower’s public support, and on July 29, 1955, the president announced that the U. S. would launch a satel­lite as part of the IGY. He deferred a decision as to which of the armed services would provide the launch vehicle.

The day before the formal announcement, the White House press office summoned journalists, telling them that the briefing was embargoed for the next day. The day’s grace was to allow American scientists time to notify their colleagues overseas. One scientist flew to New York to give a letter for Sydney Chapman, president of the IGY, to a friend who was fly­ing to London.

In a two-hour background briefing at the White House, James Hagerty, Eisenhower’s press secretary, announced that America planned to launch ten basketball-sized satellites sometime during the International Geophysical Year. The journalists rushed to the phones, only to be brought up short by the locked doors. Hagerty was determined that the journalists should understand that the story was not to be broken until after the official announcement the next day. One journalist asked what he, a crime reporter, was supposed to do with the story.

Jet Propulsion, the sedate journal of the American Rocket Society, stopped the presses. The editor wrote, “We cannot imagine anything more exciting than to look up and see through our binoculars the brilliant point of light in the sky that will represent a new astronomical body created by man. We expect to be deeply moved.”

Until the announcement, only about a hundred people knew of the satellite plans. Now the secret was out. But the launch vehicle decision was still pending.

The unenviable task of recommending a launch vehicle fell to a panel of scientists headed by Homer Joe Stewart. Stewart, widely referred to as Homer Joe, was well respected for his technical expertise. He was an aerodynamicist from the California Institute of Technology and a prime mover on the Upper Atmosphere Research Panel. Homer Joe s panel was guided in its deliberations by two precepts: satellites must not interfere with missile development, and the project should have a strong civilian flavor and scientific component. Both charges to the Stewart committee must surely have stemmed from the more secret deliberations within the White House that the Killian report stimulated.

The first requirement was largely taken care of when the Air Force, which had earlier been assigned responsibility for military space projects, dropped out of the competition, saying that it could not develop a rocket in time to launch a satellite during the International Geophysical Year without compromising its missile development. Not a surprising decision, given that the development of intercontinental ballistic missiles had top priority with the Department of Defense and that parts of the Air Force were lobbying for funding to develop reconnaissance satellites.

The second requirement was more difficult to fulfill. Only the mili­tary were then sponsoring launcher development.

But the Army and the Navy squared off: the ring, the committee rooms ofWashington D. C. and private offices in the Pentagon.

In one corner was Wernher von Braun with an updated version of Project Orbiter. At his back, the formidable figure of General John Medaris and the technical expertise of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The laboratory had suggested important changes to the upper stages of the launcher, but the size of the proposed satellite—five pounds—stayed the same.

Nevertheless, the Army’s proposal had an immediate strike against it, because the Army was developing intermediate-range ballistic missiles. While not as high a priority as those that the Air Force was developing, they were undoubtedly missiles and compromised perception of Orbiter as a civilian project.

In the opposing corner was the Naval Research Laboratory with its proposal, called Project Vanguard. That proposal contained a much stronger scientific component than the Army’s, a component that the Naval Research Laboratory, with its strong background in upper atmo­sphere research, was well qualified to implement.

The laboratory had additional advantages. It had successfully devel­oped the Viking sounding rocket as a replacement for the V2. The Viking was not part of a weapons system but was intended for scientific explo­ration of the upper atmosphere—albeit in support of military purposes.

Further, the Viking project had provided the lab with a record of developing a large project on time and to cost. The Glenn L. Martin Company had been the contractor for Viking, and the laboratory pro­posed to work with them again on Vanguard.

Finally, the NRL had what was for that time a sophisticated radio tracking plan, whereas the initial Project Orbiter included only optical tracking.

Much of Project Vanguard was technically innovative, relying on miniaturization to beef up the satellite’s capabilities. While miniaturization is today a technological cliche, in 1955 the concept was new. Vanguard would have tiny batteries and radio equipment and in principle would be able to carry ten pounds of scientific instruments, far more than Project Orbiter offered. The batteries were chemical because the designers decided that solar-battery technology, generating electricity from sunlight, was unlikely to be practical in the time available.

The Navy won the first round, but the Army bounced back with a plan that took account of technical criticisms, including an improved tracking proposal. Milton Rosen, who had headed the Viking develop­ment and would be the technical director of Project Vanguard, listened to them argue their case for most of an afternoon. He watched tensely, afraid that von Braun’s eloquence was swaying the panel.

In the event, Homer Joe’s committee confirmed its original decision, and on September 9, the secretaries for the Navy, Army, and Air Force were notified that the Navy would head the three services in the develop­ment of a satellite launcher. When the news reached the NRL’s site by the Potomac in Washington D. C., there was jubilation, some surprise, and a conviction that they could do the job.

The decision of Homer Joe’s panel was not unanimous. Homer Joe himself was one of two who thought that the Army should get the job. The nation could save time and money, he thought, by piggybacking the satellite program on the Army’s missile work. Many, then and now, believe that he was right, and that if the U. S. had picked Project Orbiter, America would have been the first into space.

Thus Project Orbiter became famous as the proposal that could have begun the space age but did not. In retrospect, and in the light of the emerging evidence concerning the Eisenhower administration’s desire to establish the freedom of space by launching a civilian scientific satellite, one suspects that the Army could not have won. Certainly, the guidance given to the Stewart committee seems to have been fashioned to favor the somewhat less militaristic Navy proposal.

The administration’s decision to back Project Vanguard has pulled down much vilification on President Eisenhower’s head. Though it seems now that Eisenhower’s decision was more subtle than it appeared at the time, he did underestimate the blow to America’s self-esteem and the con­comitant gain in the Soviet Union’s international prestige that would fol­low the Sputnik launch.

During 1955, as wheels of policy turned within wheels, the scientists who in the fall of 1954 had won backing from the international scientific com­munity for the inclusion of satellites in the IGY had also been busy. Early in 1955, the executive of the national committee had established a rocketry panel to evaluate the feasibility of producing a rocket that could launch a satellite. The task was delegated to William Pickering, Milton Rosen, and a young hawk, also from the Naval Research Laboratory, John Townsend.

They met in Pasadena in February of 1955. This trio concluded— unsurprisingly—that a satellite launch was feasible. Milton Rosen reported their findings to the rocketry panel in March 1955. He outlined three pos­sible rocket configurations, which, unbeknownst to many scientists of the IGY, had much in common with proposals which were then vying for attention at the Pentagon.

On March 9, Joseph Kaplan, chair of the U. S. IGY, sought approval from the U. S. executive committee for the IGY for the inclusion of satel­lites in their research plans.

He met opposition. The debate, recorded in scribbled, handwritten notes, is hard to decipher, but the language suggests that some of the scien­tists knew or had an inkling that national security issues were at stake. Merle Tuve, director of the Department for Terrestrial Magnetism at the Carnegie Institution (and founder of the Applied Physics Laboratory, which would develop the Transit navigation satellites), was very uncom­fortable with the idea of tying the satellite project to the IGY. Others, like Fred Whipple and Harry Wexler, who as chief sci’entist of the weather bureau would be a strong supporter of meteorology satellites, argued persuasively that satellites would expand the science that could be undertaken by the IGY.

His colleagues asked Tuve—wouldn’t it be better for satellites to be part of the IGY so that the data collected by the spacecraft would be unclassified and freely available? If the Department of Defense were to lead the way, there would be less opportunity for international collaboration. They could do an enormous amount of science with satellites, they argued. And if they were to exclude everything from the IGY that had a possible military application, there would be nothing left. Who were they, asked one scientist, to hold up progress?

Hugh Odishaw, the indefatigable secretary of the national commit­tee, finally summarized their options: say no, irrespective of whether the satellite project had scientific merit or not; embrace the satellite project as part of the American contribution to the IGY; decide whether it had merit and, if it was geophysically useless, say that the satellite program was more appropriate to the Department of Defense.

Clearly, satellites do have considerable potential for geophysics, and what seems to have persuaded Tuve to endorse the satellite project was that if the Pentagon took the initiative, cooperation with other countries would be difficult. Eventually, the executive committee approved the inclusion of satellites in the IGY.

The National Science Foundation then requested funds from Con­gress on behalf of the National Academy of Sciences, which was organizing the IGY (the National Academy of Sciences does not request funds directly from Congress). The National Science Foundation and the National Acad­emy of Sciences gave Donald Quarles, assistant secretary of defense for research and development, what he needed, two bodies with indisputable credentials in the world of civilian science. He now had a formal request for a civilian satellite as had been recommended by the Killian committee.

Kaplan sent a letter to the National Science Foundation explaining that the satellite project would need $10 million in addition to the nearly $20 million that congress had by now authorized for the IGY. At the same time, the IGY s satellite proposal was sent to the White House and the Pentagon. At the Pentagon, Quarles looked at Kaplan’s figures and doubled them. Even that turned out to be a serious underestimation of the ultimate cost (elevenfold what Kaplan requested, excluding the Pentagons expendi­ture), inevitably, perhaps, because no one had any idea of the technical dif­ficulties and costs of space exploration.

It was now May 1955, and the IGY’s organizers needed the money as soon as possible if they were going to launch a satellite before the comple­tion of the IGY at the end of 1958. But the project stalled. At least, that is how it appeared to the staff of the U. S. national committees secretariat, who were frustrated as phone calls went unanswered and unsatisfying memos arrived in response to requests for information about the satellite budget.

In fact the IGY was now a pawn in a bigger game. The chain of events was in progress that led ultimately to the National Security Coun­cil’s endorsement of the plan at the end of May, to the formation of Homer Joe Stewart’s committee, to President Eisenhower’s announcement of July 29, and to the September decision that Project Vanguard would launch America’s first satellite.

From the IGY’s perspective, things started to move again after Eisen­hower made his announcement. Despite not knowing which launch vehi­cle the administration would select, the national committee asked Richard Porter, a technical consultant to General Electric, to form a panel to over­see the IGY’s satellite work. Porter’s committee spawned two more. One, led by William Pickering, was responsible for radio and optical tracking and orbital computations. Fred Whipple was one of his committee mem­bers, and he took on the responsibility of organizing optical tracking for the IGY. James Van Allen chaired the second group, which was responsible for choosing the experiments that would fly.

As 1956 advanced, the cost of the satellite program escalated. Eventu­ally, one of the IGY scientists complained that the satellite program was costing as much as if each satellite had been built from solid gold. Berkner assured him that the value of the satellites to the international community and to the United States was worth far more than digging that much gold out of the earth.

Despite such enthusiasm, development of the Vanguard rocket was experiencing technical and financial difficulties. Milton Rosen, Van­guard’s technical director, was convinced that the Glenn L. Martin Com­pany was not giving the NRL its best efforts. He attributed this to the company’s also having the contract for the Air Force’s Titan ICBM. Whatever the reasons, the pitfalls and colossal nature of undertaking to develop and build a three-stage rocket from scratch in so short a time were now apparent.

These technical difficulties were compounded by the cutbacks in the program. By October 1957, Van Allen’s committee could count on only six launch vehicles, possibly far fewer.

Sputnik was about to change all that.

On Friday, October 4, 1957, Walter Sullivan, a science correspondent for the New York Times, filed a story for Saturday’s paper. After a week at the rockets and satellite conference he felt fairly certain that he had taken the right line. He’d written that the Soviets were close to a launch attempt.

Sullivan says that before going to the reception he called his office. He was told that the paper’s Moscow office had heard Radio Moscow announce that a satellite was in orbit. He was told to find out what he could.

Sullivan hurried to the embassy. He found the American scientists: Pickering, Richard Porter, Lloyd Berkner, and John Townsend. When Sul­livan told them the news, they looked at one another in consternation. To this day, Pickering believes that the Soviets at the reception did not know of their own successful launch.

The Americans went into a huddle and decided that they must con­gratulate their hosts. As the senior American scientist present, the task fell to Lloyd Berkner. Leaving his colleagues to assimilate the news as best they could, he took his glass and a spoon and climbed on a chair. He rapped the glass for attention. Slowly the conversation died down, and the guests turned to Berkner. His announcement was simple, and it caused a sensa­tion. He said, “I am informed by the New York Times that a satellite has been launched and is in orbit at an altitude of nine hundred kilometers. I wish to congratulate our Soviet colleagues on their achievement.” With that, he raised his glass. Blagonravov was beaming as he drank the toast.