by Amy Cherrix
The fortieth anniversary of the Russian Revolution was one month away. Perhaps the Soviet Union could quickly capitalize on Sputnik’s success with a second satellite launch timed to coincide with the occasion? Korolev hesitated. There were consequences to consider. If the next launch failed, the achievement of Sputnik could be diminished. And further developments on the R-7 would have to be halted to complete the new project on time. It was a risk, but Korolev had a lot to gain by keeping Krushchev happy and knew that his team could have a second satellite ready to launch in time for the anniversary. Korolev not only agreed to the launch, he offered to sweeten the deal: What if Sputnik II carried a live passenger?
PROPAGANDA
The use of propaganda persists. Political advertisements are one of the most common places to encounter this type of rhetoric, as opponents seek to rally support and convince people that their beliefs are superior to their rival’s. In the age of the internet, lies and half-truths created by political leaders can spread in less time than it takes to update a social media post.
When enough of these lies and deliberate mistruths go unchecked, they solidify into an erroneous record of history, aided by the immediacy of the internet. During the 2016 presidential election, the Russians carried out a massive social media attack against the US designed to compromise the integrity of the election.
Chapter 20
Laika and the Cosmo-Mutt Cover-Up
On the afternoon of October 31, 1957, a small, three-year-old female stray dog named Laika was placed inside the Sputnik II satellite with food and water. Outfitted with a special space suit, she was sealed in a cabin of the thirteen-foot, cone-shaped capsule. A separate cabin contained the life-support system, power sources, and other scientific instruments. The weather was cold, and the temperature inside Laika’s capsule was controlled to keep the dog comfortable until launch. Later that night, Laika’s capsule was placed atop the rocket sitting on the launchpad at the Baikonur Cosmodrome. Korolev and his team were confident they could boost the dog into orbit—but they also knew that they couldn’t bring her back. The technology to return a living creature safely to Earth did not yet exist. Laika’s voyage would be a one-way trip.
Laika, the Russian street dog turned unwitting space traveler.
Before risking a human life, the Soviets would first use a dog to test their ability to successfully launch living beings into space and learn how their bodies reacted to weightlessness. Homeless dogs were abundant in Moscow. Flight doctors believed these strays would be the most resilient live test subjects, because they had learned to survive on their own.
The affectionate Laika was smart and loved to run and play. She easily adapted to training. Her small size was another asset, because the capsule could not accommodate more than fifteen pounds of cargo. Laika underwent surgery to implant transmitters that would monitor her vital signs and relay her physical condition during the flight. “Everyone was very concerned,” recalled Viktor Yazdovsky, the son of the flight doctor who had cared for Laika throughout her training. “They knew she would not return from her journey.” His father brought Laika home to spend time with their family because he “wanted to do something nice for her.” Perhaps the elder Yazdovsky also wanted to ease his conscience.
On November 3, after sitting inside the capsule for three days while the launch procedures were completed, Laika finally lifted off, becoming the first living creature to orbit the Earth. It was another victory for the Soviets. Korolev had once again managed an extraordinary feat. How long Laika could survive, however, was unknown.
At liftoff, Laika’s implanted sensors communicated her vital signs to ground control. Her suffering as a result of the noise and speed at launch was evident in her heart rate, which leaped to three times its normal speed. Once in orbit, the temperature inside her cabin began to rise. Adequate insulation for space capsules had not yet been developed. Soon the dog was suffering temperatures approaching one hundred degrees Fahrenheit.
The initial Soviet news reports proclaimed that Laika had lived nine days. It was a lie designed to minimize negative perceptions of the experiment while emphasizing the accomplishment of launching a living being into space. In truth, the doomed little dog probably survived just a few hours and succumbed to the extreme heat in the capsule after completing three full orbits. These details about how long Laika actually survived were not publicized until 2011, when a letter originating in Soviet-era Russia was declassified. The truth had been hidden for fifty-four years.
What did it mean that the Soviets were willing to sacrifice this animal in an effort to make human spaceflight possible? Was it justified, or was it senseless cruelty? It depended who you asked. It still does. At the time, some Russians believed it was a necessary step in advancing their technology. “The Russians love dogs,” a Soviet official protested. “This has been done not for the sake of cruelty but for the benefit of humanity.” Oleg Gazenko, the principal investigator responsible for sending Laika into space, later admitted that he regretted her death. Undoubtedly, others were also saddened and believed that the dog’s sacrifice was unnecessary. In the United States, the editorial board of the New York Times lamented Laika’s fate, calling her “the shaggiest, lonesomest, saddest dog in all history.” Yet Laika undeniably lives on in books, songs, and untold quantities of Soviet-era memorabilia. The little stray dog that blasted into spaceflight history aboard Korolev’s rocket became a Russian cultural icon and symbol of the Soviet space program—not that she ever had a choice in the matter.
Chapter 21
The Invisible Woman
The launching of a live dog in a space satellite lit a fire in Washington, DC. President Eisenhower could no longer deny the need for an appropriate American response to the Soviets’ space challenge. Von Braun and Van Allen received approval to begin prepping the Jupiter-C rocket and its Explorer 1 satellite for launch. The navy’s Vanguard rocket would attempt to launch first, but after that, the army’s Redstone Arsenal team would get their chance. Hopefully, between the two rocket teams, one of them would succeed.
In Huntsville, physicist Joyce Neighbors, PhD, was rolling up her sleeves to help von Braun’s team do whatever was necessary to make the Explorer 1 launch a success. Neighbors was a team player and one of the few women in the male-dominated technology field of the 1950s. Explorer 1 was the opportunity she had been working toward her entire life. Neighbors played a key role in early American spaceflight, but due to sexism within NASA at the time, her early contribution was deliberately obscured.
Dr. Alice K. (Joyce) Neighbors, photographed in 1976.
When Neighbors was first hired as a mathematician at the Redstone Arsenal, working with von Braun’s rocket team, she was elated. Born and raised on a small farm in rural Georgia, Neighbors grew up in a house without running water. But she was smart, she believed in herself, and she was determined to go to college, eventually earning a PhD in physics. Now her dreams of making a difference in the world were coming true.
Future rockets would rely on electronic computers to manage every aspect of the launch sequence and flight. But in the late 1950s, the Jupiter-C’s rocket stages fired under manual commands from people. The timing of those commands was calculated by hand. The “computers” were human beings, and Neighbors was one of them. The figures she contributed were indicated on a hand-drawn chart that would be used to plan when to fire the rocket’s engines at each stage of the flight.
The lead German engineer, Ernst Stuhlinger, asked everyone involved in the creation of the chart to sign it. In acknowledgment of her contribution, Neighbors was asked to sign her name—but not her full name. Stuhlinger did not want anyone to know that one of the signatures belonged to a woman. He feared it would negatively reflect on the document’s credibility. Neighbors didn’t hesitate. She picked up her pen and signed her initials as Stuhlinger requested. “I had to wear a veneer in those days,” she recalled years later. “That is not something that comes naturally to me, but it was an honor
to be asked. It was a privilege to be a part of something larger than myself. I also knew I was making a place for all the women who would come after me. Signing that chart was one of the great honors of my life.” Today, Dr. Joyce Neighbors’s historic contribution to spaceflight is acknowledged in an exhibit at the US Space & Rocket Center (USSRC) museum in Huntsville, Alabama, where her portrait hangs next to the chart bearing her signature.
Dr. Neighbors’s incomplete signature did not include her full name, to cover up the fact that she was a woman.
Hidden Figures
Another group of female NASA employees overcame both gender and racial discrimination. Their roles were obscured in early histories of the space program because they were Black. During the Jim Crow era, African Americans working for the agency were restricted to segregated work spaces, bathroom facilities, and cafeterias. Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson worked as “computers,” calculating the complex mathematics for the engineers working in the space program and other projects at NASA. While these pioneering women did not work directly with von Braun’s group, some of their contributions were crucial to the future of crewed spaceflight with Projects Mercury and Gemini, as well as the Apollo-era missions. In December 2019, all three women were awarded congressional gold medals.
Johnson, in particular, would help narrow the distance between the Soviet Union and the US during the space race. Two days shy of his Earth-orbiting launch aboard Friendship 7, John Glenn hesitated. Before he would agree to be blasted into space, he insisted that Johnson double-check the accuracy of his flight’s trajectory data. The astronaut didn’t trust the numbers generated by NASA’s IBM electronic computer. He trusted Johnson. “If she says they’re good, then I’m ready to go,” he said. In 2015, at the age of ninety-seven, Johnson accepted the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama, who cited her as a pioneering example of African American women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM).
At the age of ten, future NASA mathematician Katherine Johnson entered high school, and by age eighteen, she had earned dual degrees in math and French from West Virginia State College. She retired from the agency in 1986, after thirty-three years of groundbreaking work in spaceflight.
Chapter 22
The American Satellite
In early December 1957, the US Navy’s seventy-two-foot, three-stage Vanguard rocket sat on a launchpad at Cape Canaveral, Florida, with a satellite nestled in its nose cone. With their two successful Sputnik launches, the Soviets were ahead in the Cold War battle for scientific supremacy. It was time to strike back. Millions of people around the world tuned in to watch the historic flight on television.
Liftoff was “a thing of beauty,” reported California’s Humboldt Standard newspaper. The rocket rose, and for the first few moments, the launch appeared to be going as planned. Then four short feet from the pad, it collapsed and exploded into “a tremendous orange ball of flame . . . followed by an awesome black cloud of smoke.” The rocket was a complete failure, but the satellite was safely ejected from the inferno. It landed nearby and began broadcasting its audio signal as if it were in orbit, like a baby bird that had tumbled from the nest too soon. The headlines describing the failed attempt reflected America’s disappointment and indignation. “Sputter, Sputter, Fizzle, Fizzle, Plop!!” wailed the Humboldt Standard’s headline. “US Fires Dudnik.”
The Navy’s Vanguard rocket explodes on the launchpad.
In the Soviet Union, Pravda published a reproduction of the front page of London’s Daily Herald. The article included two images: one of Vanguard before liftoff, and next to it, an image of the resulting explosion. The headline read: “Oh, What a Flopnik!”5 Above this was a single line: Reklama i Deistvitelnost, which meant “Publicity and Reality.” The government was pointing out to Pravda readers that while America made promises about its technology, in reality, they could not compete with the mighty Soviet Union.
“Goldstone Has the Bird!”
The following month, at Cape Canaveral, Florida, US Army major general Bruce Medaris was determined to help Wernher von Braun prove that the Soviet Union wasn’t the only country capable of launching a satellite. With the Vanguard failure, all eyes turned to von Braun’s team.
The army had a three-day window in which to launch Explorer 1. After that, the navy would get a chance to make up for its humiliating failure with a second Vanguard launch.
Von Braun, Pickering, and Van Allen had been ordered to Washington, DC, to hold a press conference once the satellite was in orbit. Medaris and von Braun’s longtime crew chief, Kurt Debus, would oversee operations at the cape. Debus was one of von Braun’s most trusted engineers. The two had worked together since the Peenemünde days. Back then, the army investigators had classified Debus as an “ardent Nazi” who had denounced his colleagues to the Gestapo. Debus’s file was classified along with those of others who had been part of Operation Paperclip, and he was allowed to enter the United States anyway.6
On the morning of January 29, Medaris and Debus realized that the jet stream was going to be a problem. The wave of air that circulates constantly over the United States at varying altitudes was moving at an unusually high speed. It could tear the rocket apart. When conditions failed to improve, the launch was rescheduled for the next day. But the jet stream surged stronger and the launch was canceled for a second time.
Around seven a.m. on the third day, the team finally heard some hopeful news. The jet stream had relented. Things looked good.
They were go for launch.
By ten p.m., the countdown had begun. Engineers and other technicians crowded into a Quonset hut a few miles from the launchpad. The air inside, Medaris said, “seemed charged with electricity.” At 10:48 p.m., the launch commenced. “As the missile started its slow, majestic rise, almost every voice” joined in a chorus “that sounded like a prayer, saying, ‘Go, baby, go!’” It rose “up and up. Faster and faster.” Data from the rocket streamed to the ground control station. Engineers watched for any indication that something was wrong during the four hundred seconds that had elapsed since launch. In that time, Ernst Stuhlinger had been waiting in a nearby hangar. Aided by the chart signed by himself, Joyce Neighbors, and others, Stuhlinger jammed his finger onto the red button that fired the rocket’s second stage. Then came the hard part: waiting.
Early reports were good. One of the first tracking stations, in Antigua, locked onto the satellite’s signal, but it was still too soon to declare victory. Only a confirmation of the satellite’s signal at the Earthquake Valley tracking station in California meant that orbit had been achieved. Forty minutes later, Medaris received a wire message from the secretary of the army, Wilber Brucker, in Washington:
I’m out of coffee and we are running low on cigarettes. What do I do now?
Send out for more and sweat it out with the rest of us, Medaris replied.
Soon after, technicians were able to verify that all four stages had fired successfully. The team had done all they could. The flight appeared stable from the ground, but until the Explorer 1 signal pinged the Goldstone Tracking Station in California, no one knew for sure.
Around midnight, someone handed Medaris a piece of paper with the words Goldstone has the bird! It was confirmation of the satellite’s signal. Explorer 1 had achieved a wider orbit than anticipated, which explained the delay. “I repeated the words on the paper out loud,” Medaris later wrote. People cheered. From a nearby loudspeaker, the familiar voice of President Eisenhower announced that the United States had successfully launched an Earth satellite.
At one thirty a.m., von Braun, Pickering, and Van Allen held a press conference at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, DC. “We have firmly established our foothold in space,” von Braun told reporters. “We will never give it up again.” The three men held an Explorer 1 model overhead as cameras flashed.
Left to right: Dr. William Pickering, Dr. James Van Allen, and Wernher von Braun triumph
antly hoist a model of Explorer 1 overhead at the press conference on February 1, 1958.
Not only had America launched its first satellite, but it had also snatched an important victory from the Soviets. Explorer 1 carried equipment that allowed Van Allen to make the first scientific discovery in outer space. His cosmic ray detector proved his hypothesis that the radioactive band existed. Now known as the Van Allen belt, the “two donuts of seething radiation” held in place by the planet’s magnetic field help shield Earth from the sun’s deadly cosmic rays.
In the Soviet Union, Korolev felt the pressure of von Braun’s triumph. The designer’s desk was covered with English-language newspapers boasting about the victorious American response to Sputnik. At his side, a translator worked throughout the night, transcribing the details of the American victory, as the determined Korolev contemplated his next move.
Stage III
The Quest for the Moon
Chapter 23
NASA is Born
The United States had finally answered the Soviets’ satellite challenge, but for the time being, its rival was more advanced and better organized. Von Braun spoke candidly to reporters, both in print and over the airwaves, about how far America still needed to go to beat the USSR. He was constantly trying to drum up support for his work. Given how closely Korolev followed American media from inside the Soviet Union, he likely saw, heard, and read many of von Braun’s public statements about the status of the American program, as well as his thoughts on Soviet accomplishments.
