Scientists gather to review IGY progress

Official detailed planning for the IGY had been under way for several years, as related earlier. A series of four meetings of the Council of Scientific Unions’ full CSAGI had been held in Brussels (June-July 1953), Rome (September-October 1954), Brussels (September 1955), and Barcelona (September 1956) to provide overall planning for the endeavor. Specialized regional and discipline meetings were set up to plan specific details. One of those discipline meetings was the first CSAGI Conference on Rockets and Satellites, held in Washington, D. C., on 30 September through 5 October 1957. The conference agenda included general reports from all countries having IGY rocket and satellite activities, establishment and meetings of working groups, and the presentation of technical papers. Four working groups were established during the opening plenary session, and those groups worked throughout the conference to prepare specific resolutions for endorsement by the full conference.

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The official record of the conference is contained in volume 2B of the Annals of the International Geophysical Year.8

I combined participation in that conference with further testing and coordination of our instrument development at the Naval Research Laboratory, as described in the previous chapter. Van Allen and Larry Cahill were on the State University of Iowa (SUI) equatorial and Antarctic shipboard rockoon-launching expedition, so I was the sole conference attendee representing the university. I presented, on behalf of their authors, all four of the SUI papers, one a report of the status of our satellite instrument development by Van Allen and me, two others exclusively authored by Van Allen, and one by Cahill and Van Allen.9

Herbert Friedman, head of the U. S. delegation for the Working Group on Internal Experiments and Instrumentation Program, asked me to participate in the work of his group in Van Allen’s absence. I also participated, for the same reason, in the activities of the Working Group on Rocketry.

Much has been said about the participation and comments by the Soviets at that conference. The Soviet delegation was headed by Anatoly A. Blagonravov. By that time, he had risen to the rank of lieutenant general of artillery. In June 1946, the USSR had set up an Academy of Artillery Sciences, with Blagonravov as head of its Department for Rocketry and Radar. He soon became that academy’s president. In that position, he first seriously considered the development of an Earth satellite in 1948, based partly upon the stimulus of captured German documents that described Eugen Sanger’s antipodal bomber, a piloted, winged rocket that would reach an altitude of 160 miles and skip on the top of the atmosphere halfway around the world.

By the time of the 1957 conference, Blagonravov was a full-fledged member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences and of the Interdepartmental Commission on Interplan­etary Communications. He, along with Leonid Sedov, would act as “front men” for Soviet science at international gatherings for many years to come. A chain smoker, his demeanor was courteous and mild-mannered. In contrast to the two younger men with him in Washington, he appeared very distinguished and professorial, with his shock of white hair. Although his inner intensity showed from time to time, according to Walter Sullivan’s account, “much of the time he wore a thin smile and carried his Russian cigarette tipped upward at a rakish angle.”10

He made the formal USSR report at the opening session on Monday, 30 September. In that report, he spent most of his time outlining plans for 85 to 95 rocket launchings from three sites: (1) Franz-Josef Land, (2) in the Antarctic near Mirny, and (3) between 50 and 60 degrees east longitude. He did include a short statement that satellites would be launched, and, simply, that the onboard experiments would vary. He also attended the Tuesday session of the Working Group on Satellite Internal Experiments and Instrumentation Program and the Thursday afternoon session of the

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Working Group on Satellite Vehicles, Launching, Tracking, and Computation. Again, very little information about the Soviet satellite program was forthcoming.

A. M. Kasatkin, the second-ranking Soviet delegate and another highly placed Soviet scientist, attended the meetings of the Working Group on Rocketry. He also attended all four sessions of the Working Group on Satellite Vehicles, Launching, Tracking, and Computation. He provided substantial specific information about the sounding rocket launch sites. The firings from Franz-Josef Land would be conducted from Cheynea Island; those from Antarctica would be conducted from shipboard near the Soviet station Mirny; and the 50 degree to 60 degree east longitude firings would be fired from the Soviet Union from between 50 degrees and 60 degrees north latitude. One action of that working group was to agree on a form to notify all participating countries whenever rockets were to be launched. Kasatkin agreed that they would fully comply with the use of that form with regard to the launching of meteorological rockets, but only information on the instrumentation and containers would be pro­vided for other geophysical rockets. They made no commitment whatsoever about notifications related to satellite launches.

S. M. Poloskov was the third Soviet delegate. He served as vice chairman of both the Tuesday and Wednesday sessions of the Working Group on Satellite Internal Experiments and Instrumentation Program. During those presentations, Poloskov stated that the first USSR satellite would carry 20 and 40 MHz transmitters, and that the question of the frequency to be used in later satellites was open for further consideration. He also stated, in response to a query, that the USSR satellite orbit would probably be highly elliptical so that the height of passage over a given spot would vary markedly. Beyond those two points, he, too, said nothing of specific Soviet satellite plans.

Although there had been some advance work in preparing for the meetings of the working groups, the memberships of those groups were not established until the conference opening, and their agendas were not set until their first meetings. As a result, the focus and activities of the working groups evolved progressively during the conference. The working group resolutions were formed at their meetings, and those resolutions represented one of the primary products of the conference.

The technical sessions, on the other hand, were organized purely for the exchange of technical information about the various national programs. The list of sessions, their chairmen, and the listing of officially submitted technical papers had been announced ahead of time, and preprint copies of those papers were distributed at the opening of the conference.

There had been considerable disappointment before the conference that the Soviets had not offered many technical papers. Only three USSR papers, two on satellite

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tracking and one on determining the composition and pressure of air at high altitudes from sounding rockets, had been submitted prior to the conference and included on the official program.

However, when the USSR delegates arrived, they introduced 17 additional papers. Copies of all of those papers were hastily made and distributed, but most of the Western attendees were unable to read the Russian texts. Naturally, the attendees were anxious to hear of the Soviet plans, and changes were made in the technical sessions to accommodate the new material. Although those changes do not appear in the IGY Annals’ general coverage of the conference, some of the new information did show up in the individual reports of working group sessions. My sparse notes from the meeting show, for example, that Soviet papers dealing with substantial details of their rocket programs for measuring the structure of the atmosphere and for meteorology were presented and discussed.

As far as their satellite program was concerned, their new papers focused on Earth satellite orbital dynamics, potential experiments, and other generic topics, rather than on specific Soviet plans.

As mentioned, the decision by the Soviets to use the lower 20 and 40 MHz frequen­cies greatly disturbed the American attendees, as the entire internationally coordinated U. S. radio receiving and tracking system had been designed to operate at a frequency of 108 MHz, as agreed at the Barcelona CSAGI meeting a year earlier. That frequency had been chosen to permit more accurate tracking of satellite motion, since the higher frequency signal would have been subject to less distortion as it passed through the atmosphere.1112

In retrospect, one can see that one highly significant hint about the launch escaped us during that week. Most of the Soviet lectures were delivered in Russian, with simultaneous translation into English. Most of the written papers were also in Russian, and those were not translated until well after the conference. During the discussion following the oral presentation of one of the technical papers, a Soviet delegate made a passing comment about the timing for the first satellite launch. The Russian word was translated at the time as soon, which was taken by the listeners to mean soon on the time scale of the IGY. A more accurate translation of the Russian word would have tipped us off that the Soviet launch was imminent, literally, due at any moment. Having missed that subtlety, we did not anticipate that the first launch would occur only a few days later.