Breaking the Chains of Gravity Read online

  BREAKING THE CHAINS OF GRAVITY

  Also available in the Bloomsbury Sigma series:

  Sex on Earth by Jules Howard

  p53: The Gene that Cracked the Cancer Code by Sue Armstrong

  Atoms Under the Floorboards by Chris Woodford

  Spirals in Time by Helen Scales

  Chilled by Tom Jackson

  A is for Arsenic by Kathryn Harkup

  For spaceflight’s pioneers who continue to inspire,

  and for Mark who believed in me at the start

  BREAKING THE CHAINS OF GRAVITY

  THE STORY OF SPACEFLIGHT BEFORE NASA

  Amy Shira Teitel

  Contents

  Preface

  Chapter 1: Hobby Rocketeers

  Chapter 2: The Rocket Loophole

  Chapter 3: The Turning Tide of War

  Chapter 4: Escape and Surrender

  Chapter 5: Nazi Rockets in New Mexico

  Chapter 6: Rockets Meet Airplanes

  Chapter 7: A New War, a New Missile, and a New Leader

  Chapter 8: Higher and Faster

  Chapter 9: Edging into Hypersonics

  Chapter 10: The Floating Astronaut

  Chapter 11: Space Becomes an Option

  Chapter 12: The First Satellite Race

  Chapter 13: One Little Ball’s Big Impact

  Chapter 14: The Fight to Control Space

  Epilogue: America Finds Its Footing in Space

  Glossary of People

  Glossary of Places and Organizations

  Glossary of Rockets

  Selected Notes

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  Preface

  Popular retellings of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s history typically follow the same narrative: In 1961, President John F. Kennedy pledged the nation would land a man on the Moon by the end of the decade and return him safely to the Earth. In July of 1969, Neil Armstrong took one small step on the Sea of Tranquillity, fulfilling the fallen president’s dream and completing a technologically daunting task in the name of restoring America’s national prestige. It was, by all accounts, a remarkable achievement given spaceflight’s embryonic state in the 1960s and the short time frame. The story becomes even more incredible in light of the fact that NASA was just three years old and hadn’t yet put a man in orbit when Kennedy promised America the Moon. Though common, this version of the story creates the illusion that NASA invented a lunar landing program in response to a presidential decree.

  NASA wasn’t created in a vacuum and suddenly tasked with the Moon landing. The agency might have been incepted in 1958, but it was assembled from preexisting parts, drawing off decades of research in rocketry, human tolerances, hypersonic flight, and the bureaucracy needed to oversee a major undertaking like a lunar landing program. NASA has technological and bureaucratic roots stretching back decades before it formally opened for business that made the Apollo program possible, and these roots are what this book is about.

  The incredible rockets that launched America’s first astronauts reached the nation by way of German engineers imported after the Second World War and employed by the U.S. military. The knowledge of human survival in space came from early air force programs, some done with primates and some with humans. Knowledge of how a vehicle could return safely from orbit was largely the product of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, the agency that was also versed in bridging the gap between military and civilian partners in cutting-edge aeronautics programs.

  But it must be said that this book only tells part of the story. Almost every rocket, aircraft, person, organization, and research laboratory in this book merits a work dedicated to its history. In fact, most of them do have dedicated volumes. In simplifying the story to bring it to a broader audience, I decided to focus on certain people and follow certain narratives to the exclusion of some notable figures like American engineer Robert Goddard and Russian scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, two fathers of rocketry whose contributions to the field were invaluable. The complete, unedited story would be a tome that only die-hard space fans would have the patience to sift through. Spaceflight is part of our shared human history and shouldn’t be an opus accessible only to initiates. It should be available to everyone interested in exploring this rich history.

  Among other decisions I made in writing this book was the decision to use male pronouns. With a handful of exceptions, everyone working in aviation and aeronautics between 1930 and 1958 was male, and most forward thinkers assumed that the first person in space would be a man. It is a thought process indicative of the era. I also chose to keep center names and dollar amounts consistent with the time frame of the book. Names are not reflective of current monikers, and values have not been adjusted for inflation.

  My hope is that this book opens up NASA’s prehistory to those who might not realize that America’s national space agency has such a fascinating backstory, and that it inspires a few to dig into this history a little further. Humanity’s exploration of space is wonderful. Having a deeper understanding of how it all started is not only interesting, having a sense of the context makes everything we have achieved in the last half century of space exploration that much more incredible.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Hobby Rocketeers

  On May 17, 1930, dusk fell just before nine o’clock at the end of a warm, clear Saturday in Britz, Berlin, but Max Valier showed no signs of leaving his workbench for an evening of leisure. He remained in his seat, focused on a simple combustion chamber bolted to the table in front of him. It was a simple setup. At the center was a combustion chamber, a simple steel tube with an upward-facing exhaust nozzle. On the other end were a series of small bore holes through which the fuel and oxidizer were introduced. The whole apparatus was set up on a grocery scale. His assistants Arthur Rudolph and Walter Riedel sat some distance away at two tanks, one of kerosene mixed with water and the other of liquid oxygen. The two men manually opened the valves as Valier dictated, sending the fuel and oxidizer into the combustion chamber where they mixed. Once the combustion chamber was adequately pressurized, Valier lit the mixture with a blowtorch. As the jet of flaming gases roared upward from the combustion chamber, directed by the nozzle, the resulting reaction was a downward force onto the scale. While the engine burned, Valier added weights to the other side of the scale until it was properly balanced, giving him a crude measure of the engine’s efficiency.

  That day, Valier had made two successful tests with the same setup. Two good burns in the combustion chamber had yielded good data. A third test had failed, the accompanying jolting motions deforming the test hardware at the same time. At that point Riedel had pushed for the skeleton crew to end their day and start fresh the next day, but Valier’s enthusiasm had been indomitable. He was so encouraged by the afternoon’s successes that he pushed for one final test to end the day on a high note. The combustion chamber was reassembled, the fuel and liquid oxygen tanks were hooked up.

  As he had done dozens of times before, Valier moved the flame toward the pressurized combustion chamber, but instead of the slow, steady burn he was expecting, the space was rocked by an earsplitting explosion. Unbeknownst to Valier, part of the emulsified mix of kerosene and water had combined with liquid oxygen to form a jellylike substance that stuck to the sides of the chamber where it burned with explosive, deadly force. Riedel instinctively closed the valves on the tanks and rushed to Valier’s side, barely catching the man before he collapsed to the floor. Passing a stricken Valier off to Rudolph and their machinist, Riedel ran outside in search of a passing car to send for help, but it was too late. There had been no protective shie
ld between Valier and the combustion chamber. When it exploded, a piece of shrapnel had pierced Valier’s pulmonary artery. That day, one of Germany’s most notable popularizers of rocketry and space travel bled to death on the floor of a Spartan laboratory.

  Valier had made a name for himself and for rocketry by undertaking similarly dangerous and almost foolhardy public experiments extolling the virtues of rocket propulsion. It was a boyhood fascination come to life, full-scale experiments by the man who, as a child, had attached firecrackers to model airplanes and sent them hurtling through the skies of Innsbruck in Austria during school holidays. As an adult, Valier found a kindred spirit in Romanian-born physicist Hermann Oberth.

  Oberth found rockets through French novelist Jules Verne. While recovering from a bout of scarlet fever in Italy when he was fourteen, Oberth read Verne’s 1865 novel De la Terre à la Lune (From the Earth to the Moon), which tells the story of a group of Americans from the Baltimore Gun Club who build a massive cannon and shoot themselves in a train-like vehicle to the Moon. More than the fantastic story, it was the realistic potential of rocket propulsion for spaceflight that had captivated Oberth, though he knew black powder like the characters in the story used couldn’t get a spacecraft to the Moon. Black-powder rockets simply didn’t have enough power. But Oberth suspected liquid-propelled rockets would. And so he set out designing a simple, proof-of-concept rocket called a recoil rocket that would propel itself through space by expelling exhaust gases from its rear end. It was a basic application of Newton’s third law that states that every action has an equal and opposite reaction. The expulsion of gas behind the rocket would propel it forward. But a paternal tradition intervened to derail Oberth’s pursuit of rocketry. In 1912, he moved to Germany to study medicine at the University of Munich. It was a short-lived career. After serving in the First World War with a medical unit on the battlefield, Oberth determined he was not destined for life as a physician.

  After the war, Oberth returned to the university, resolved to change his path. He switched his field of study from medicine to mathematics and physics, and self-specialized in rocket propulsion. The work culminated in a doctoral dissertation on liquid rockets and their application for spaceflight, but the work was rejected by his advisers in 1922. Though astonishing, his committee said, the paper failed to meet the requirements for a degree in classical physics. Rocketry and spaceflight were fodder for science fiction, they believed. It was a blow strong enough to turn the young physicist away from academia but not from the pursuits of rocketry. Oberth circulated his rejected thesis among publishers and eventually found a small press willing to print the volume.

  Die Rakete zu den Planetenräumen (The Rocket into Planetary Space) reached bookshelves in 1923, but it wasn’t widely well received. Though less than a hundred pages long, it was sufficiently dense and loaded with complex diagrams and calculations to alienate the casual reader. But the book did strike a chord with amateur rocket enthusiasts who were similarly taken by the prospect of rocket propulsion as a means to space travel. Among Die Rakete’s avid readers was Max Valier, who was so taken with the work that he wrote to Oberth in 1924. The initial letter sparked a fruitful correspondence. Oberth acted as the teacher to the enthusiastic student Valier, the pair discussing the fundamentals of rocketry, best practices of testing, and even a plan to publish a book together. The joint work would play to both men’s strengths. Oberth would supply the technical details while Valier would finesse the writing such that it would be accessible to the layman. But it wasn’t long before the duo reached an impasse regarding methods. In discussing plans for future rocket research, Oberth wanted to undertake a step-by-step test program to gradually explore and understand the power of liquid-propelled rockets, while Valier wanted to use available powder rockets to gather basic data points. Valier also wanted to carry out these experiments in public, something Oberth found flashy and unscientific. But Valier knew this was the best way to secure patrons for an undertaking as lofty as rocket research.

  Valier had subsidized a career of research and public talks by strapping rockets to anything that moved, beginning with cars. Valier found a willing patron in German automotive industrialist Fritz von Opel, who was willing to strap rockets to one of his vehicles as a way of demonstrating their power. The first collaboration between the automobile manufacturer and the rocket enthusiast was the Opel-Sander Rak.1, a standard Opel race car whose engine had been removed. Its new power source was a cluster of solid rockets manufactured by Friedrich Wilhelm Sander and strapped to the rear. But it hardly looked like a rocket car. Boxy in the front with wheels sitting on either side of its main body, the Opel-Sander Rak.1 was not an aerodynamic streamlined design. It was, however, ready for a test drive.

  On March 12, 1928, the Opel-Sander Rak.1 was parked on the circular racetrack at the Opel factory. Behind the wheel sat race car driver Kurt C. Volkhart. No one knew exactly what to expect, but with his life on the line even a seasoned driver like Volkhart sat with his hands stretched out before him, bracing himself like he was about to be shot from a cannon. The rockets were lit before a small crowd of onlookers waiting anxiously to either see a rocket car race down a track or erupt in a fiery explosion. Two bright jets appeared amid a cloud of smoke, signaling that the fuses were burning. When the fire reached the rockets, there was a sudden loud hissing noise. The Rak.1 started moving, but almost before it could gather momentum the powder was exhausted and the rockets lost thrust. The world’s first rocket car had covered five hundred feet in thirty-five seconds with a top speed of just five miles per hour. On the sidelines, von Opel failed in his attempts not to laugh. Unwilling to stand by and be ridiculed, Valier decided to sacrifice one of his small, two-inch bore rockets. Without an aerodynamic cap or the right length guiding pole, he launched the rocket. The gathered spectators, including von Opel, watched as it shot to a height of more than thirteen hundred feet in about two seconds. This simple demonstration silenced von Opel’s laughter and brought the media around to the exciting potential of rockets applied to travel.

  Valier knew the problem with the Rak.1 came down to friction; the car’s wheels moving against the asphalt was too much for the rockets to overcome. And so he tried taking advantage of momentum, lighting the rockets when the car was already moving. The results were better, though still not the explosive run he wanted. With the car traveling at eighteen miles an hour, the lit rockets increased its speed threefold. Building off this first successful run, Valier and von Opel developed a second version of the rocket car, the Opel Rak.2. It was a more streamlined design: Its forward end was tapered like a bullet, and wheels were housed in wells within the body. Valier even added small inverse wings on either side of the car to keep the wheels pressed to the ground, just in case the rockets accelerated the car enough for it to become airborne. The Rak.2 was also designed to allow the driver to ignite the rear-mounted rockets by a pedal in his footwell. With twenty-four rockets in the back and von Opel himself at the wheel, this second rocket car reached a top speed of about 145 miles per hour on the Avus Speedway in Berlin two months after the first Rak.1 failed to impress. It was a vast improvement over previous rocket runs, but it didn’t surpass the power of traditional combustion engines. Weeks before the Rak.2’s run, American driver Ray Keech set a landspeed record of nearly 208 miles per hour at Florida’s Daytona Beach Road Course in the triple-engined internal combustion White Triplex Spirit of Elkdom.

  Asphalt, Valier realized, was still a problem, creating too much friction with the tires for the rocket cars to reach their top potential speed. To solve the problem, Valier developed a vehicle designed to run on rails. The Eisfeld-Valier Rak 1, so named to reflect a new partnership with the J. F. Eisfeld Powder and Pyrotechnical Works firm from Silberhütte-Anhalt in central Germany, made its first test runs in the Harz Mountains at the end of the summer and early autumn. Valier’s instinct might have been right, but the execution revealed a host of problems with this design. The wheeled sled gained too muc
h speed, flew off the track, and crashed. The wheel struts mounted below the vehicle broke and destroyed tracks. One test in early October saw the wheels completely separate from the vehicle. It was an embarrassing failure for Valier, who had invited guests from the national railways to the October test in an attempt to secure a new investor for his idea. Instead, the incident prompted local authorities to step in. His rocket-powered vehicles were banned as safety hazards, though the ban was eventually lifted.

  The failed rail runs inspired Valier to try his hand at developing a rocket vehicle with no moving parts. What emerged from this goal was a long, slender sled sitting on skids with a rear seat for a pilot. Behind the seat was a bank of small rockets. The Rak Bob, as it was called, made a series of demonstration runs at a winter sports festival in early 1929 on Bavaria’s Eibsee Lake. It was one of Valier’s more promising designs; so great was his faith in the vehicle that he felt safe enough to let his wife, Hedwig, behind the wheel. The sled tore across the wintry landscape at impressive speeds, traveling so fast that when Valier studied the tracks of some test runs, he found they disappeared in places. The Rak Bob actually went fast enough to lift off the ground. But fast land vehicles had never been Valier’s goal. What he had always wanted to develop was a means of achieving rocket-powered flight, and for that his only means for testing was to attach rockets to lightweight airplanes.

  The Wasserkuppe is a high plateau in Germany’s Rhön Mountains. In the 1920s, it was a popular spot for sailplane pilots, who rode the strong updrafts high above and across the valleys stretching out below. In March 1928, Valier and Sander took a trip to the Wasserkuppe to meet with sailplane designer Alexander Lippisch. Valier didn’t tell Lippisch his name or his intentions in the meeting, maintaining a mysteriously low profile while peppering Lippisch with questions about a custom sailplane design. He wanted something lightweight and tailless for a very special purpose, he told the sailplane designer, divulging only that it would involve a high thrust rear-mounted engine. Lippisch and his designers were skeptical of the stranger’s odd request but consented to build the plane. Days later, Lippisch recognized Valier in a picture accompanying an article in a local newspaper about rocket cars. Realizing who the stranger was, Lippisch became more interested to see how the rocket popularizer’s mysterious sailplane test would turn out.