The crash effort for a second try

I left Cape Canaveral on 7 March for a one day stop in Iowa City, where our small cosmic ray group met to discuss the data arriving from Explorer I. That discus­sion is described in the next chapter. On Sunday, I boarded a plane again, bound for Pasadena to help prepare for a second attempt to launch our full cosmic ray instrument.

The first order of business upon arriving in Pasadena was to check on Rosalie, whose time for delivery of our third child was fast approaching. I had been away from 20 February until 9 March—a long two and a half weeks considering that son George made his appearance into the world only nine days after my return.

On Monday, it was back to the laboratory. All parties understood that a second Deal II launch attempt would be made as quickly as possible. We set about with great urgency to prepare for that attempt.

If one includes the original Environmental Test article, four Deal II satellite pay­loads were built. The Environmental Test model would not normally have been con­sidered for flight, after being intentionally overstressed during its testing regime. But we wanted to have three units in the best possible working condition at the Cape, in case we should have unexpected problems and need the additional hardware. There­fore, our launch preparations included that payload, as well as the two primary flight units.

The next two days, 11 and 12 March, Van Allen visited the JPL for a special meeting. Although discussion of preliminary results from the Explorer I data was billed as the purpose of the meeting, its actual primary purpose was a thinly veiled discussion of a highly classified topic of immense importance. The attendees, in addition to Van Allen and me, included Bill Pickering, Jack Froehlich, and Henry Richter of JPL, Major General John Mederas from Huntsville, and several others, most interestingly, Stanford University’s Wolfgang K. H. Panofsky, who was heavily involved in the U. S. atomic bomb testing program. That story is resumed later in this chapter and in Chapter 13.

The information discussed at that meeting lent additional urgency to the early analysis of the Explorer data and marked the beginning of planning for a new satellite, which was launched a few months later as Explorer IV.

From the time of the decision to launch a backup Deal II satellite, the failed mission was referred to within JPL and ABMA as Deal IIa, and the new attempt was dubbed Deal IIb. For some reason that I never understood, the JPL payload manager changed the payload identifications for that second attempt, leading to considerable confusion.

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TABLE 10.1 Disposition of the Deal II Instruments Deal IIa Designation Deal IIb Designation GM Counter Number Ultimate Location Engineering model Payload IV 84 Iowa Historical Society? Flight payload I Payload III 64 Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum Flight payload II Payload I 71 Launched on Missile 26 as Explorer II on 5 March 1958 Flight spare Payload II 57 Launched on Missile 24 as Explorer III on 26 March 1958

OPENING SPACE RESEARCH

then retesting the entire payload. During that retesting, the transmitter power output dropped for a while on one occasion. But it returned to its normal level before the engineers could determine what was wrong, and it never recurred. Thus, Payload IV had a possible not-understood incipient failure, a long history of various difficulties, and thus could not be depended upon for use as a full spare payload. It was taken to the Cape, nevertheless, as an emergency source for parts, if they should be needed.

A substantial change was made in one of the two satellite antennas on all three units. Explorer I had employed a so-called “turnstile” antenna for the high-power transmitter. One of its four stainless steel cable elements appeared to have broken off immediately after final injection, as described in Chapter 11. The significance of the change in the radio frequency radiation pattern following the Explorer I launch had not been fully understood by the time Deal IIa was launched, so that payload had retained the original whip antenna.

The situation was better understood by mid-March, however, and the JPL engineers undertook a crash program to change the antenna for the high-power transmitter and command receiver to eliminate the whips. It was converted to a simple linearly polarized dipole antenna, in which the shell of the instrument payload and the rocket casing served as the two driven elements. That change was designed, fabricated, tested, and installed by the JPL engineers on all three Deal IIb payloads during the short time available.

As in the case of the Deal I calibration data, JPL assembled a set of complete calibration data for the Deal IIb/Explorer III flight counter.13

Our baby was due any time after Friday, 14 March. As Barbara and Sharon had been born very quickly after the beginning of Rosalie’s labor, and since we lived a considerable distance from the hospital, she and I were very concerned about getting her there in time for her third delivery. We worked out what we considered the best route from our home in north Pasadena to Behrens Memorial Hospital in Glendale. That was in a time before interstate highways. The routes via the Pasadena and Los Angeles freeways took a long path around the San Rafael Hills, and they were frequently and unpredictably greatly congested. So we chose a route across the hills via Linda Vista and Chevy Chase drives. Our test drive on that Sunday afternoon revealed that those roads were very curvy but unlikely to be congested.

Our third child arrived two days later, on Tuesday, 18 March 1958. The day turned out to be rather complicated! At 1:00 in the early morning, Rosalie informed me that her labor pains were five minutes apart, so I loaded her and the two girls into the Mercury and we made our tortuous trip to the hospital. It soon became evident that her pains were false labor, so I took Barbara and Sharon home so they could get more rest in their own beds. After we arose that morning, we returned to the hospital, where we learned that Rosalie’s labor was not progressing.

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Noticing how uneasy I was, being preoccupied by the pressing work awaiting me at the laboratory, she suggested that I take the girls back home and go to my office. We had struck up a close personal friendship with Bill Pilkington and his family. The young couple had offered to take care of the two girls while Rosalie was in the hospital, so I dropped them off there and returned to the laboratory.

Rosalie and I maintained contact with the Pilkingtons after our return to Iowa, but to our great horror and dismay, the entire Pilkington family, parents and children, were killed some time later when their private airplane crashed in Mexico.

In the late afternoon, the staff at the hospital induced true labor, and our son was born at 7:24 PM. Once again, circumstances conspired to keep me from Rosalie’s side during our child’s actual birth (as turned out to be the case for all four of our children). My final notes for that day state, “He is a fine looking boy weighing seven and one-half pounds, 20 inches long, and with very little hair.”

We were delighted to have our first son and named him George Vickers Ludwig. The given name George continued a long-standing family tradition, honoring his father, grandfather, great-grandfather, and great-great-great-grandfather—all Georges. The middle name honored Rosalie’s family name.

Rosalie returned home from the hospital with our new son on Friday, 21 March. It seems unbelievable and somewhat embarrassing to me even today that I spent so little time with them during that period. I spent the next Saturday and Sunday mornings by beginning the design of a faster version of the binary scaling circuit for a future satellite. Thankfully, Rosalie’s mother arrived at our Pasadena home at that time to help during my continuing absences.