Breaking the Chains of Gravity Read online

  Arriving at the small cocktail party, von Braun sought out McElroy and Medaris, and news of the Soviet satellite spread through the crowd. The launch of Sputnik, everyone recognized, was a turning point in history. A stunned silence seeped through the room until von Braun broke it. Medaris watched as the frustration of Project Orbiter languishing in storage suddenly spilled out of von Braun in a vitriolic rant. He knew the Soviets had orbital technology, the German engineer said, and also knew that Vanguard would certainly fail. Von Braun turned his attention squarely to McElroy. The navy’s program was too beset by problems to leave the ground. “Give me sixty days,” he implored, sixty days and the army would get a satellite into orbit using hardware just sitting on shelves waiting to be put to good use. Medaris stepped in to temper von Braun’s enthusiasm; the ABMA would need ninety days to launch a satellite, he said, but otherwise he didn’t disagree with his rocket engineer colleague.

  At the dinner table that night, McElroy sat between Medaris and von Braun, his meal marked by a constant stream of arguments in favor of the army’s satellite program, punctuated with updates about the Russian satellite from a radio broadcasting throughout the base. Unwelcome as the news was to the engineers at Redstone that night, there was a silver lining. Having been beaten into space by the Soviet Union would doubtlessly break the chains keeping their orbit-capable Redstones on the ground. The next day, anticipating formal approval before long, Medaris told von Braun to take Redstone RS-29 out of storage and quietly start getting it ready for launch.

  While von Braun and Medaris were dining with McElroy, President Dwight Eisenhower was at his farm in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, when he heard that the Soviets had launched Sputnik (a diminutive term meaning “fellow traveler”). The 22.8-inch sphere weighed 184 pounds and was soaring overhead tracing one orbit around the planet every ninety minutes, broadcasting a short-wave radio signal.

  The news of Sputnik spread rapidly through the country; radio and television reporters were as aghast as the public over the Soviet feat. It looked as though von Braun’s predictions of the psychological impact of a satellite were spot-on. The nation was already in turmoil over the showdown between the Arkansas National Guard blocking nine African American students from desegregating a Little Rock high school followed by President Eisenhower’s deployment of the Army’s 101st Airborne Division to ensure the black students’ safe entry into the school. Now the nation was rocked with a new fear of being at the mercy of the Soviet Union. Americans were forced to concede that the Russians could no longer be thought of as a technologically backward nation, an enemy against whom the wide Atlantic and Pacific Oceans provided a buffer.

  Sputnik made the Soviets’ technological prowess painfully evident. The upper orbital insertion stage trailing behind the satellite in orbit was visible to the naked eye, while two onboard radio beacons broadcast a steady beeping. An RCA receiving station picked up the signal that was then broadcast over NBC radio, recorded, and replayed for the nation to hear. The next morning’s New York Times front page brought the news to anyone who might have missed it. SOVIET FIRES EARTH SATELLITE INTO SPACE; IT IS CIRCLING THE GLOBE AT 18,000 M.P.H.; SPHERE TRACKED IN 4 CROSSINGS OVER U.S. Throughout the nation other newspapers carried similar headlines saying that the Soviets had won the race. International newspapers went as far as calling Sputnik the Pearl Harbor of American Science.

  The basketball-sized satellite was enough to tarnish the president’s image. Detractors seized the event as proof of Eisenhower’s failure to heed warnings of Soviet missile strength. Of course, it had been Eisenhower’s knowledge of both Soviet and American missile capabilities that had led him to make the original decision to favor missile development over space programs and raise the navy’s effort above other satellite launching systems.

  The scientific community had a decidedly different, nonpolitical reaction to the Soviet satellite. Most were elated, not just by the technological feat but also that Sputnik had effectively opened space as a new ocean for discovery. But at the same time, none could ignore the worrisome implication of Sputnik’s weight. Small as it was, it dwarfed Vanguard’s three-and-a-half-pound grapefruit-sized payload as well as the army’s thirty-one-pound satellite, which meant the rocket that launched Sputnik was far more powerful than any American equivalent. A rocket that could loft something so heavy into orbit could carry a similarly sized or even larger payload like a warhead across the globe. It was this missile threat, not the satellite threat, that worried scientists. The difference between nations lay not in the technology itself but in the totality of the effort that brought that technology to life. It was clear the Soviets were putting their energies and resources into developing a new weapons system that could double as a satellite system, an approach that allowed for far faster development than the American decision to develop two independent and largely redundant systems.

  On Sputnik’s fourth day in orbit, Eisenhower met with his principle scientific and military advisers to discuss America’s next steps. He was irked that reports of two U.S. Army officers griping about the Vanguard program had been leaked to the public, adding to the perception that he had knowingly put the country in a disadvantaged position. Because he knew the state of America’s missile programs, the president was somewhat dismayed by the public’s reaction of fear and panic over a small satellite that couldn’t do anything but broadcast its beep—it certainly wasn’t about to start dropping bombs from orbit.

  The implications behind the rocket didn’t inspire Eisenhower to change national policy regarding satellites, neither did the opinions of his gathered advisers. Among the assembled men was Deputy Secretary of Defense Don Quarles. Yes, the army could have launched a satellite the previous September had the fourth stage on the RS-27 missile been live, Quarles told the president, but he assuaged frustrations by rehashing the Stewart Committee’s rationale behind favoring Vanguard over Orbiter, particularly the need to keep missile programs far more secretive than the International Geophysical Year programs, a secrecy that extended to include the launch vehicle. Quarles went on to point out a silver lining. Sputnik had just established the concept of freedom in space, and the small satellite might have cleared the way for Eisenhower’s Open Skies policy.

  James Killian, president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was also in attendance that day, and like von Braun he was primarily concerned with how this simple satellite might warp the minds of Americans by instilling irrational fear in the public. He worried more than anything that Sputnik would heat up the Cold War, accelerate an arms race, or lead to the development of advanced military technology to effectively bring the world closer to the brink of another international conflict.

  Having taken into account his advisers’ opinions, Eisenhower ended the meeting with the order for McElroy to undertake a full review of the nation’s missile program. The president also ordered outgoing Secretary Wilson to direct the army to ready a satellite launch system as a backup for Vanguard, just in case.

  The next morning, representatives from the Vanguard program arrived at the White House to give Eisenhower a progress report. The program’s director was there, John P. Hagen, along with William M. Holaday, the recently appointed director of guided missiles for the Department of Defense. The two men gave Eisenhower a fifteen-minute update on Vanguard. They stressed that test vehicle TV-2, which was being readied for a launch at Cape Canaveral, was an experimental rocket and not one that was equipped to place a satellite into orbit. Atop its active first stage were two dummy stages. The next test vehicle, TV-3, was also an experimental test vehicle, still in the factory being assembled. And though TV-3 was the first complete Vanguard rocket and would carry a small instrumented payload, it wasn’t a satellite launch attempt. It was a mission intended to test the launch vehicle. If a satellite ended up in orbit it would be a great bonus.

  This latest information in mind, Eisenhower held a press conference in the Executive Office Building before 245 gathered journalists. Greeti
ng the room at ten twenty-nine, the president immediately opened the floor to the questions about Sputnik everyone had on the tips of their tongues. Calmly and deliberately the president addressed the media’s queries, demonstrating extreme composure before a frightened nation. Yes, he admitted, the United States could have orbited a satellite over a year ago, but the cost of merging the satellite program with a missile program would have been a detriment to both scientific and military progress. No, he said, the air force’s Strategic Air Command had not become a relic overnight. Yes, the nation’s scientific satellite program remained a priority within the confines of the International Geophysical Year, still completely separate from national security. No, the Soviets couldn’t use Sputnik as a launch platform to drop bombs on America. No, Eisenhower assured the nation, Sputnik did not raise his apprehensions about national security, not one iota. The American satellite program, he said, had moved forward since its formal approval in 1955 with additional funding going toward assuring a launch within the International Geophysical Year. It had never been the subject of a race with the Soviet Union. The navy had been working in the face of problems on the Vanguard program, and whether the other services knew of the navy’s hardships or could have launched a satellite earlier he was unwilling to say.

  The media inquiry continued. From the din of eager voices one asked about the Vanguard launch planned for December, whether it would be the initial proof of concept small sphere or whether it would be fitted with any instrumentation to gather scientific data. Calling back to his earlier conversation with Hagen and Holaday, the president answered vaguely that the original plan had been to launch a simple sphere; the instrumentation was expensive, so taking initial measurements of orbital velocity and direction was a cost-effective first step. There might be many of these test vehicles before any instrumentation launched into orbit.

  Eisenhower didn’t say that the next Vanguard launch would be an orbital attempt, but the press interpreted it that way, bolstered in this opinion by a press release accompanying the conference. As articles appeared bringing the latest from the president to the public, Americans learned that small test spheres would launch in December with fully instrumented satellites following early in 1958. There was no clear distinction between a test launch and a satellite launch attempt, a misinterpretation that effectively turned the Vanguard TV-3 launch into what Americans thought of as the first orbital attempt. This idea gained momentum with follow-up articles promising that America’s answer to Sputnik would be circling the globe by the end of the year. The Vanguard team steeled itself for a push to bring their project to fruition, but one that did little to offset the ever-present uncertainties of the program.

  The president’s assurances soothed the jittery nation. It was the first step toward solving what Eisenhower viewed as the most immediate problem created by Sputnik, which was to give a perspective regarding the Soviet feat to offset panic. The second problem facing the president was a much larger and more complicated one. He now needed an accelerated satellite program that could match the Soviet accomplishment, but one that wouldn’t appear to be a reactionary program. He was wary of reigniting the fear in the hearts of his nation anew.

  Addressing this second problem became the topic of a meeting with the Science Advisory Committee of the Office of Defense Mobilization on October 15. Though scheduled before Sputnik’s launch, the satellite served to refocus the day’s agenda to address looming space-age developments. Eisenhower asked the committee, which included Killian, for their collective opinion on Sputnik. Specifically, the president needed to know whether these experts truly thought American science had been outdistanced. The consensus was that American science had not been completely outstripped, though the balance had certainly shifted to the point where an American response was necessary. The Russians had started picking up steam and seemed poised to easily surpass the United States, warned physicist Dr. Isidor Rabi of Columbia University. The best move, offered the president of the Polaroid company, Dr. E. H. Land, was to emulate the Soviet Union’s apparent attitude toward science, which was to treat it as a source of knowledge and pleasure. Eisenhower was skeptical on this point, unconvinced that the Soviet system really valued the best minds and supported their rise to the intellectual upper echelons. But regardless of the situation in Russia, the president recognized the need to push science forward in his country, and to this point Dr. Rabi had a suggestion: anticipating an influx of policy matters centered around science, it might be wise to appoint a science adviser to the White House. The task facing the men gathered in that meeting was clear. There was no shortage of missile and satellite programs in the country from governmental and nongovernmental agencies alike. Now they had to figure out how to best support and even merge these existing projects in the name of progress. The next step would have to be vigorous and swift.

  Killian sat in his office on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s sweeping grounds a few days later when his phone rang. On the other end was Sherman Adams, Eisenhower’s chief of staff. The president was considering creating a position for a special assistant to advise him directly on all things science and technology, Adams said, then asked whether Killian would be willing to travel to Washington to lay out the role of this new position. Though he didn’t say it, the subtext behind Adams’s request was an invitation for Killian to fill this role himself. Days later, the president of MIT arrived in Washington armed with a memorandum outlining the benefits of moving the president’s Science Advisory Committee from the Office of Defense Mobilization into the White House. This would create a direct line to the president and create a full-time member to the group who could deal with all matters of scientific importance. This advisory committee would have to be nonpartisan, Killian specified, offering entirely confidential and anonymous advice, effectively preventing any one man from leveraging this role into personal gain. It was Killian’s opinion that associating science with his security and space divisions would protect Eisenhower from attack regarding his defense initiatives and policies. And the president’s willingness to take council from science advisors, Killian thought, boded well for the future relationship between science and government in America in the post-Sputnik era.

  The same day that Eisenhower met with his Science Advisory Committee to discuss the next steps in space, a long-planned NACA meeting began at the Ames Research Laboratory in California. Called the Round Three Conference, it was intended to discuss the next phase of high-speed flight research; it was the third round after first breaking the sound barrier with the X-1 and then exploring the supersonic and low hypersonic flight with the X-15. This third step would undoubtedly be higher and faster flights pushing into space. The fundamental question now became what that vehicle would look like.

  Opinions were divided on the aerodynamics of this future hypersonic vehicle. Continuing in the vein of the X-15 with a flat-bottomed delta wing vehicle seemed like an obvious choice to some. This next step would be a piloted, hypersonic glider designed to launch on a rocket reaching speeds as high as Mach 17.5 at altitudes as high as seventy-five miles before gliding, unpowered, down to a runway landing at Edwards Air Force Base. Eventually, a faster launch would take this basic glider into orbit, giving it a dual purpose as a hypersonic research vehicle and the first manned spacecraft. This proposal was inspired in part by Dornberger’s antipodal bomber, one that would build on the lessons learned from the X-15 and develop a new knowledge base.

  One incarnation of this idea was Project HYWARDS, an acronym for hypersonic weapon and research and development system that surfaced in 1956. It was an air force project with supporting wind tunnel research from the NACA’s Langley Laboratory intended to explore the potential of a flat-bottomed delta wing boost-glide vehicle capable of reaching speeds as high as Mach 18. It marked an enormous leap from where the X-15 would leave off, taking it inexorably toward space. The basic features of a HYWARDS-type vehicle were brought up for discussion again owing to Sputnik’s launch at the R
ound Three Conference as one possible way forward in space. And because it had been proposed years earlier and gained preliminary traction among various study groups, many assumed the boost-glide vehicle would be the next step in spaceflight.

  But support for a flat-bottomed glider wasn’t universal. A number of engineers in attendance preferred a drastically different, blunt-bodied approach to the next phase of flight research. The idea arose as a by-product of missile research. Just as the X-15 returning from high altitudes needed some protection from the searing heat of reentry, so too did missile warheads. Typically sleek and reminiscent of rifle shells just like the rockets that launched them, these warheads had a habit of detonating harmlessly in the air above their targets. Aerodynamic heating from their fall through the atmosphere was enough to detonate the bomb. Seeing this problem, Harvey Allen, a high-speed research specialist from Ames, considered taking the complete opposite aerodynamic approach. A blunt body falling from the peak altitude after a launch, he predicted, would develop a bow-shaped shock wave beneath it, essentially creating a buffering cushion of air protecting it from the heat of reentry. Allen tested the novel concept with Alfred Eggers, a colleague at Ames, by placing miniature blunt missiles in a supersonic free flight tunnel, a sort of hybrid between a firing range and a wind tunnel. The idea proved sound, and while Allen and Eggers’s report was released as a research memorandum, it didn’t find a receptive audience in the early 1950s.

  Allen and Eggers weren’t alone in exploring the merits of a blunt-bodied vehicle. Former naval submariner Max Faget had arrived at the NACA’s Langley laboratory in 1946. That same year, the center created the Pilotless Aircraft Research Division in large part to satisfy the voracious research appetites of the rocket specialists, Faget among them. Over the course of his missile work at PARD, Faget developed the idea of a ballistic vehicle for spaceflight, one that would fall from orbit rather than glide to a controlled landing. He noted that any vehicle launched suborbitally, be it at hypersonic speeds or not, would follow a ballistic trajectory rising and falling at the same angle. This simplistic flight path negated the need for complicated avionics and control equipment because the payload was going to fall in an extremely predictive way. The same basic principle could be applied to a return from orbit, Faget said. Retrorockets could slow a simple capsule from orbit, making it fall following a ballistic trajectory, simplifying its overall return to Earth. The vehicle wouldn’t have to glide or be controlled to a runway landing. Returning from space could be as simple as designing a capsule with enough inherent stability and structural integrity to survive reentry, while making it fall on a ballistic path. The spacecraft he envisioned was conical with a flattened bottom, eleven feet long and seven feet across at the base, weighing just two thousand pounds. It was simple and light enough, Faget said, to be launched on the larger missiles then under development in the United States.