Breaking the Chains of Gravity Read online

  Of all the V-2s launched in the United States, eight were designated Bumper rockets. These were ambitious variants of the German rocket similar to the unrealized two-stage A-9 and A-10 vehicles. Bumper was a V-2 with a Jet Propulsion Laboratory–built WAC Corporal rocket mounted on top as its second stage. The WAC Corporal’s engine fired when the V-2 reached its maximum speed after the engine burned out. On one 1949 test, the combined momentum of the two rocket stages sent the WAC Corporal to an altitude of almost 250 miles. Considering the extra altitude gained from this second stage, it was clear to von Braun that multistage rockets were the best way to reach space. It was on this principle that von Braun based his first satellite proposal.

  Von Braun’s proposed program was simple. One of his Redstone rockets, too small to put a satellite into orbit on its own, would serve as the launch vehicle’s first stage. The second, third, and fourth stages would be made of clustered Loki II-A rockets. These small rockets, measuring just a few inches in diameter, were also developed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory for Army Ordnance based on the World War II-era German Taifun antiaircraft missiles. And the key to the design was in the staging. Like the V-2 Bumper, each rocket stage was designed to ignite when the one below it reached its top speed. The final stage was the orbit insertion stage, the one that would give a modest, five-pound satellite the final burst of speed it would need to achieve orbit around the Earth’s equator at an altitude of about 186 miles. There were a few variants, one of which used nineteen Lokis in the second stage, seven in the third stage, and three for the final stage, but in any incarnation it would be a relatively inexpensive undertaking. Both rockets were available, so getting the satellite into orbit was simply a matter of putting the pieces together.

  Von Braun took his proposal to the Office of Naval Research. The navy’s pursuit of upper atmospheric research with the Stratolab had never come to fruition, and so von Braun suspected the service would be receptive to a joint program. Von Braun’s courtship did spawn a joint undertaking by the U.S. Army and the U.S. Navy called Project Orbiter. The air force declined to join the program in part because of interservice rivalries and in part because it preferred to undertake its own satellite program rather than piggyback on one designed by its former host service. Though no satellite program was formally sanctioned for the IGY, Project Orbiter was formally proposed to the assistant secretary of Defense in January 1955. And while it was a perfectly viable satellite project, it was far from von Braun’s dream program. What he wanted was a long-term project that would create something new, something purpose-built with longevity that would also give his rocket team in Huntsville job security in the longer term. By this point, von Braun had far loftier missions not just in his mind, ideas he had already shared with the American public.

  Years earlier in October 1951, editors from the widely circulated Collier’s magazine were among the attendees of the First Annual Symposium on Space Travel held at the American Museum of Natural History’s Hayden Planetarium in New York City. One of the Collier’s contingent was managing editor Gordon Manning whose interest in the talks of spaceflight outweighed the skepticism of his reporters. Pursuing this interest in space, Manning sent associate editor and reporter Cornelius Ryan along with space artist Chesley Bonestell to a space medicine conference in San Antonio, Texas, months later. There, Ryan attended a talk by von Braun during which the German engineer covered a blackboard with lengthy calculations and indecipherable schematics. The room at large had gasped at these symbols and figures, recognizing that von Braun had just demonstrated spaceflight’s feasibility, but Ryan had no idea what the fuss was about. He wasn’t sufficiently well versed in mathematics to understand the lecture without a translation.

  Later, Ryan saw von Braun again as he was leaving another session. Highball in hand, the editor grumbled that he had been sent to find out what real rocket scientists thought about spaceflight and all he was learning was that inexplicable symbols on a blackboard sent conference rooms tittering in excitement. Von Braun recognized the challenge facing Ryan, that spaceflight needed to be broken down to the layman. He also saw an opportunity to excite the American public about the realistic prospect of spaceflight. And so von Braun offered to bridge the gap between scientists and the public. A partnership between the engineer and the magazine was born.

  Months later, the March 22, 1952, issue of Collier’s appeared on newsstands around the country bearing the fruits of this chance meeting. The cover featured one of Bonestell’s dramatic paintings depicting a winged glider atop a winged rocket at the moment of staging. Beneath the glider was the Earth’s curving horizon giving way to the blackness of space. Above it, the feature article’s tantalizing title read MAN WILL CONQUER SPACE SOON; TOP SCIENTISTS TELL HOW IN 15 STARTLING PAGES.

  The article, written by von Braun, detailed the construction of an orbiting space station that would serve as an off-world science laboratory and jumping-off point for missions to the Moon. The vision von Braun brought Collier’s readers became grander with each subsequent issue adding a new facet to space exploration. Over the course of two years, the magazine published eight issues unpacking his vision for the future of space exploration through a series of feature articles written by von Braun and other experts in the field, including Willy Ley, one of the founders of the Verein für Raumschiffahrt. In these pages, the average American learned about large multistage rockets, about satellites, and about the vehicles that would take men to other planets.

  The articles caught the attention of Walt Disney, the cartoon magnate whose name was already synonymous with Mickey Mouse. Disney was in the midst of building Disneyland, an amusement park whose concept was so new that willing investors were hard to come by. But one deal Disney had managed to secure was with the American Broadcasting Corporation. ABC had given Disney money to build his park in exchange for an exclusive TV series of hour-long episodes showcasing everything Disneyland would offer future visitors. The series would follow the park’s four theme areas of Fantasyland, Adventureland, Frontierland, and Tomorrowland. The futuristic Tomorrowland area featured, among other things, a ride along a simulated Moonscape, which meant the related TV episodes had to deal in science fact rather than science fiction. Disney’s production team reached out to Willy Ley, who in turn brought von Braun into the fold.

  On March 9, 1955, some forty million Americans watched as Tinkerbell appeared on their TV screens, flitting about and waving her cartoon wand amid changing images as a deepvoiced narrator introduced the night’s episode of Disneyland. A final, glittering wave of Tinkerbell’s wand replaced an image of a castle similar to Sleeping Beauty’s with a black screen. The episode title appeared in lowercase script, utilitarian in stark contrast to the glittering opening sequence: “man in space.” Walt Disney himself introduced the episode as the camera panned over an office littered with rocket models and draftsmen standing at tables poring over papers ostensibly filled with calculations. Thirty-three minutes into the episode, after an introduction to rocketry featuring footage of Valier’s rocket car runs and V-2 launches, America met Wernher von Braun. The engineer was introduced as one of the foremost proponents of spaceflight and head of the guided missile division at the army’s Redstone Arsenal. His higher-pitched voice was marked by a slight but distinct German accent. His responsibility for the V-2 was mentioned but only insofar as it related to the development of America’s rockets. The family friendly show made no mention of the V-2’s sordid past and von Braun’s reputation by association.

  Over the course of three episodes, American audiences learned about spaceflight from von Braun. He detailed plans to build a toroidal-shaped space station two hundred feet in diameter circling one thousand miles above the Earth. He envisioned that this station would rotate to provide a low-gravity environment for its fifty occupants. From this station, von Braun said, astronauts would leave on missions to the Moon, ten-day orbital flights to explore it in unprecedented detail that would precede landing missions. But even more
exciting was von Braun’s vision for a mission to Mars, the subject of the third episode in the Tomorrowland series, “Mars and Beyond.” And unlike his first envisioned flight to the Moon that would be a small scouting trip, this first mission to Mars followed the outline from his earlier Das Marsprojekt with a seventy-man scientific mission.

  In the book, von Braun designed his Martian mission to start from Johnston Island, a tiny island 940 miles west and slightly south of Hawaii. This safely isolated spot would serve as a launch and landing point for orbital missions. With every launch, the first and second stages of these rockets would be left to fall into the Pacific Ocean where they would be recovered and towed back to Johnston Island by a tug. The third stage of the rocket would be a winged gilder, again reminiscent of the ultra plane. Only the winged stage would reach orbit, delivering its cargo and transferring any excess fuel into the Mars-bound vehicle before reentering the atmosphere and gliding to a runway landing on Johnston Island. The three stages would be refurbished and used for another launch, a conservation of hardware that meant just forty-six rockets and glider stacks could make the 950 missions necessary to complete assembly of the Mars spacecraft.

  In von Braun’s vision, ten ships would make the first foray to the red planet, seven carrying passengers and three only carrying extra supplies and fuel. Each manned vehicle would feature a sixty-five-foot habitation sphere providing quarters for ten men per ship and also carry 356.5 metric tons of extra propellant for the trip home. The three cargo ships, meanwhile, would each carry a two-hundred-metric-ton winged lander and an additional 195 metric tons of reserve supplies. From their starting point in Earth’s orbit, the whole platoon would burn their engines for a full sixty-six minutes to gain the necessary boost of speed to reach Mars. The empty fuel tanks would be jettisoned to lighten the overall mass of the mission as the ships and their seventy intrepid explorers settled in for the 260-day transit to Mars.

  Upon their arrival, the fleet would fire their spacecraft’s engines again, this time against their direction of travel to slow down enough to be captured by Mars’ gravity. Once in orbit, they would begin surveying the Martian terrain in search of an appropriate landing spot. Once a site was selected, a small advanced team of men would board one of the winged landing vehicles and separate from the rest of the group, deorbiting their spacecraft and gliding to a landing. Fitted with landing skids rather than wheels, it would likely have to land on one of the Martian poles to take advantage of the smooth surface layer of ice. Landing in a reliable region was vital; this first group’s mission was a one-way mission in a spacecraft with no means for the crew to return to orbit. It would then fall to this small crew to establish landing facilities for the rest of the team still waiting in orbit. They would establish a small base camp and set up the runway.

  The second landing party would bring the total population of Mars to fifty; the remaining twenty men would stay in orbit, monitoring the spacecraft and observing the planet. On Mars, living out of inflatable quarters and traveling around the area in the crawler vehicles, the landing expedition would spend four hundred days exploring the red planet, gathering samples, and running experiments. Once their sojourn was at an end, they would load their samples and anything else worth bringing back to Earth and board their return vehicles and launch from the surface of Mars into orbit. There they would reunite with their orbiting counterparts and board the main vehicles before abandoning the spent spacecraft at Mars. When they finally arrived back home, they would reenter the atmosphere in specialized gliders and land on a runway custom built for their arrival. From the first launch to the last landing, this expedition to Mars would last about 963 days.

  While this Mars mission was a fantasy, von Braun knew that with enough money to work out the engineering problems and build both the launch sites and the flight hardware, his mission was not impossible. And though many remained skeptical of such a grand mission particularly in light of the fact that neither satellites nor men had yet gone into space, attendees at the space medicine conference had seen von Braun’s rationale in action, as had readers of Collier’s magazine and Disneyland viewers.

  But von Braun’s message of an exciting, spacefaring future with space stations and expeditions to Mars came with a warning. It was clear that any nation that figured out the intricacies of spaceflight and developed the powerful technology to realize this spacefaring future would be an unquestioned technological leader. Whoever conquered space first would have dominion in the sky and technological dominance over its adversaries. Von Braun urged the United States to devote the time and resources to putting a payload into space sooner rather than later, even if the payload was the five-pound satellite he was proposing as the payload for Project Orbiter. Because however feasible his space station and Mars missions were, these missions hinged on significant technological advances. A Project Orbiter–style program was only a first step in space, but a vitally important one. Expecting to put a small satellite in orbit by the end of 1956, the real success of this project for von Braun wouldn’t be the technical feat but rather the psychological gain. The satellite would be a clear demonstration of the United States’ prowess, the satellite serving as a reminder of that fact as it orbited the planet once every ninety minutes. It would be a small but important psychological coup. Project Orbiter was, in short, a fast way for the United States to assert dominance over the Soviet Union.

  This early talk of satellite programs sparked some long-term thinking about satellites from the agencies in charge and begat a slew of committees who explored the potential behind these ideas. The Coordinating Committee on General Science reasoned that studies should continue with increased interservice cooperation before any one program was cleared to fly. The Ad Hoc Committee on the Scientific Satellite Program was tasked with preparing a paper for the National Security Council on a potential interservice satellite program and backup program with the CCGS as the organizing body.

  The prospect of launching a satellite as part of the United States’ International Geophysical Year activities formally moved from idea to policy on July 29, 1955, with an announcement from the White House. A press release issued the same day gave more details, clarifying that the project would be entirely scientific in nature, co-run by the National Science Foundation and the National Academy of Sciences. Supporting technical advice and help would come from the Department of Defense. Its experience with upper atmospheric research would be useful when establishing a launch facility, as would its access to military sites.

  Though presented as a purely scientific undertaking, there was another, less overt facet to the American IGY satellite decision. Eight days before the White House’s satellite announcement, Eisenhower had proposed the Open Skies Treaty at a summit conference in Geneva, Switzerland. Since the early 1950s, the United States had been trying to gain as much reconnaissance information as possible about the Soviet Union’s development of offensive weapons, a significant challenge in light of the closed nature of the Soviet state. What surveillance flights the Americans did manage typically flew through international airspace off the coasts of Russia. The handful of flights that did cross into Soviet airspace was in violation of international law.

  With satellites circling the globe in various orbits, it was inevitable that one would pass over some part of the Soviet Union at some point, and one misunderstood satellite could tip the fragile relations between the two nations and spark an all-out war. The Korean War had ended with a signed armistice in July 1953, and while it put an end to the fighting it failed to truly resolve the conflict, encouraging the continued American Cold War policies of Soviet containment and militarization. Keen to avoid a renewed international conflict, Open Skies was Eisenhower’s attempt to level the playing field. He proposed that the United States and the Soviet Union freely exchange information on military establishments and allow aircraft overflights for the sake of verification. Such an exchange would ease fears of a surprise attack for both sides and facilitate the develop
ment of space exploration as a truly peaceful endeavor.

  Open Skies, though highly regarded by European governments, was rejected outright by the Soviet Union. Soviet leaders feared it was an attempt by the United States to lull the nation into a false sense of security before launching a surprise attack. The rejection of Open Skies left the United States apprehensive of what long-range missiles and advanced nuclear weapons the Soviet Union might be hiding, a potential “Bomber Gap” that prompted Eisenhower to authorize continued reconnaissance flights through Soviet airspace, however risky. The IGY satellite program, however, presented a loophole. Primarily a scientific research program, satellites flying over the Soviet Union could either double as a reconnaissance system or mask a separate reconnaissance satellite program such as the air force’s Project 1115 already under development.

  By 1955, there were fifty-five nations slated to participate in the IGY, and interest in the American satellite program was rising internationally. During the Sixth Congress of the International Astronautical Federation in Copenhagen in August that year, the president of the IAF showed the Disneyland episode “Man in Space.” Delegates in attendance were enthusiastic about the show and excited by the promises it made for the future. The Soviet delegates in attendance were equally interested in the program and asked to borrow the film to show it in their home country. It would be excellent to have the movie on hand for private demonstrations about spaceflight, they said, though they likely wanted it as much as proof of the emerging American technology that, with the help of German engineers, was close to solving the basic problems associated with manned spaceflight. Not to be outdone by the Americans, the Soviet Union announced at the meeting in Copenhagen its intention to also launch a satellite as part of the IGY. Reports began circulating of an ambitious eighteen-month time frame accompanied by promises that any Soviet program would better any American attempts, but few people took these promises seriously.