It was a rare strike against the Massachusetts golden boy and his carefully honed image of playing aboveboard. What the public didn’t see was how the Kennedy family fought the accusation relentlessly, with lawsuits, affidavits, bare-knuckled threats, and intense pressure that resulted in a retraction. With help from the Kennedy team, the charge was mitigated enough that Jack could leave discussions of it to his surrogates as he continued to travel throughout the country on speaking engagements.
While Kennedy’s primary focus was on politics, Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson began 1958 with a seminal February 5 speech on the subject of missiles, rockets, and space, attempting to get America’s scattershot space program on track. In Profiles in Courage, Kennedy had honored the legislative genius of past senators such as George Norris of Nebraska and Robert Taft of Ohio, but Johnson was a living example. The Texas senator’s bold address, written by aide Horace Busby, coldly described the apparent Soviet superiority in missiles and satellites; however, his sentiment was anything but defeatist. Instead, Johnson challenged his colleagues with his belief that “we must work as though no other Congress would ever have an opportunity to meet this challenge, for, in fact, none will have an opportunity comparable.”
To Johnson, it was sickening that the Kremlin was using Sputnik in its global propaganda, rubbing its technological superiority into Eisenhower’s amiable face. At the same time, LBJ faulted the president for his baby-steps approach to organizing the U.S. space effort. By contrast, Johnson advocated America’s taking giant steps, and in the process became the Senate’s leading voice on space issues. Some have questioned whether he studied the subject himself or simply delegated it to aides. Others thought Johnson was trying to ride the coattails of popular sentiment. But as space came into keen geopolitical focus, LBJ was intent on leading the parade, intuiting the political, scientific, and even humanitarian opportunities America could reap.
One day after Johnson’s speech, he set up a new Special Committee on Space and Astronautics in the U.S. Senate, dedicated to aeronautical and space science. He would serve as chairman—in part because no other senator knew a damn thing about aeronautics and astronautics, while he at least was conversant in the lingo and acronyms. Regardless, LBJ felt it was high time for greater federal organization to be applied to the rocket engineers in Huntsville, Hampton, and Pasadena who did understand the subject. Johnson’s committee immediately began to help plan for the new agency to pull expertise from the various military services into one civilian-run outfit. That spring and summer, Johnson worked tirelessly to create a sleek rocket of an agency from the spare parts of America’s disparate space programs. Reedy, a longtime Johnson aide, later called it a rare instance “where the initiative for a very major law and a very major change was the initiative of Congress.”
Kennedy campaigned continually in early 1958, making three speeches per week on average, in all corners of the country. He didn’t focus on space, except inasmuch as the Sputnik satellites reflected “the flaunting of the Soviets of their ability to rain death on any hostile neighbor.” He coined the term “Sputnik diplomacy” for the dark side of space exploration, as he saw it. And he intimated that Sputnik meant that the Soviet Union had the capacity to deliver an atomic weapon or an ICBM capable of blowing up Boston, New York City, or Washington, DC. For Kennedy, the United States was now in a take-no-prisoners fight to survive as the premier superpower.
While Johnson tried to streamline America’s space policy in a bipartisan fashion, von Braun’s Jupiter-C/Redstone team was focused on launching an Explorer 1 satellite on a missile. At the same time, the navy’s Vanguard program designed a space rocket aptly named TV-3BU (“backup), but the vehicle was having glitches. If this second Vanguard failed, the army might have a chance with Jupiter. Von Braun assured his boss at ABMA that the Jupiter-C/Redstone would work—a promise taken literally by ranking officers, who were themselves under pressure from Washington to deliver results.
ON YET ANOTHER space venture, a navy–air force partnership was developing a space-worthy vehicle that had nothing in common with the multistage rockets designed to lift satellites into orbit. The X-15 was a totally experimental research aircraft program meant to provide data in high-speed aircraft and spacecraft design. It was a winged, rocket-powered airplane that counted among its masterminds Walter Dornberger, von Braun’s former boss at Peenemünde, who had come to the United States courtesy of Operation Paperclip and developed guided missiles for the air force before becoming Bell Aircraft Corporation’s in-house genius.
Promising manned flight from the very start, the X-15 was built to detach from a B-52 mother ship at an altitude of about seven miles, a process that would substitute for the first stage of a Viking-type rocket. Once released, the X-15 would use its own rocket propulsion to attain speeds in excess of 3,600 miles per hour and altitudes of up to 62 miles (100 kilometers), which is regarded as the borderline of space. Pilots, who would be weightless at that elevation, could release the entire cockpit as an ejection capsule in an emergency situation.
Captain Iven C. Kincheloe, an air force test pilot, was scheduled to fly the X-15 across the space barrier sometime in 1959, which would make him America’s first astronaut. A graduate of Purdue University, Kincheloe had joined the air force with an obsession for flight. After completing 131 missions during the Korean War, he campaigned for a career as a test pilot. “Boy, did he lap up publicity and attention,” the technical director of the X-15 program, Paul Bikle, recalled. Scheduled for the second trip was Joseph A. Walker, another test pilot with air force experience. A no-nonsense Pennsylvanian, Walker was always eager to be the top pilot whenever he flew. According to the X-15 master plan, the third flight would be piloted by a navy pilot, John McKay of Virginia, while the fourth would be piloted by an Ohioan who was more reserved and seemingly less ambitious than the rest. An apocryphal quote circulated, attributed to Armstrong, that perfectly captured his low-key demeanor. “God gave man a fixed number of heartbeats,” Neil Armstrong liked to say, before adding that he wasn’t going to gobble up his quota by overexerting himself.
Armstrong had become one of the most respected jet pilots of the Korean War generation, part of an “ace club” that also included John Glenn and Wally Schirra. Born on August 5, 1930, near Wapakoneta, Ohio, he developed a single-minded passion for aviation while still a child, fantasizing that if he held his breath long enough, he could float up and hover above the ground like a figure in a Marc Chagall painting. His mother described making many excursions to the Cleveland Municipal Airport so her son could watch the planes take off and land. “He was so fascinated,” Viola Armstrong recalled. “He was never ready to leave.”
Once Neil took his first airplane ride, in a Ford Trimotor at age six, he was hooked for good. He enthusiastically built models to the point that he even constructed a seven-foot-long wind tunnel in his parents’ basement to test his creations. The subjects of aeronautics and astronomy could never be exhausted.
After Armstrong received his degree from Purdue in 1955, the former naval aviator returned to aeronautics as a test pilot, settling at Edwards Air Force Base, in Lancaster, California. Admired for his composure and detached powers of observation, he was designated as one of the twelve pilots on hand during the X-15’s development. Bill Dana, another pilot at Edwards, said that Armstrong “had a mind that absorbed things like a sponge and a memory that remembered them like a photograph.” Milt Thompson, who worked on the rocket-powered X-15 project in a variety of capacities, concurred, saying that “Neil was probably the most intelligent of all the X-15 pilots, in a technical sense. He was extremely well qualified to fly the X-15.” Armstrong’s reserve, however, meant that it was hard to say much more than that he was a smart man and a fine pilot. “I worked and flew with Neil for over six years,” Thompson concluded. “I knew Neil, but I did not know him.”
While at Purdue completing an education that had been interrupted by the Korean War, Armstrong had been a vis
ible figure on campus, joining a fraternity and the band. An excellent pianist, he was just extroverted enough to write and perform in a musical comedy for his fraternity. As he became more serious about his career in aeronautics, however, he grew even more noticeably private. “All in all,” he said later about his thinking in high school, “for someone who was immersed in, fascinated by, and dedicated to flight, I was disappointed by the wrinkle in history that brought me along one generation late. I had missed all the great times and adventures in flight.”
By 1955, however, Armstrong knew well what great opportunities were newly available for a pilot and aeronautical engineer.
TIME MAGAZINE’S JUDGES had it right when they picked Khrushchev as Man of the Year for 1957. The Sputnik launches had changed the world. Overnight, mankind knew that it had a future in space, and soon media stories would be credibly discussing the feasibility of going to the moon.
For the Soviets, the launches were an unalloyed public relations win, a sigh of relief, and probably their greatest achievement of the Cold War. But they also proved a quieter but still significant win for the United States and the global aerospace community. With no protests from the other UN member states erupting in response, the Soviet satellites set a precedent in international law, one that opened space to unfettered exploration. For Eisenhower, that was Sputnik’s major upside: while the Kremlin had beaten the Americans to space, their satellites’ use of America’s high-altitude airspace tacitly gave the United States reciprocal rights to the Soviets’ own high-altitude airspace. This played into Ike’s “Open Skies” insistence that the best use for space was peaceful scientific research and satellite communications—and, much less publicly, CIA overhead reconnaissance: the president had already approved the top secret Corona program, the development of spy satellites that were capable of letting U.S. intelligence agencies know exactly where Soviet missiles were positioned and tanks were massed.
In the coming years, spy satellites trained on the USSR would improve America’s strategic position in the Cold War enormously. Between 1956 and 1960, high-altitude U-2 spy planes conducted numerous missions over Soviet territory, photographing everything from military bases and atomic power facilities to the ICBM launch compound in Kazakhstan, with the captured images sent to the CIA’s National Photographic Interpretation Center to be scrutinized by experts. The U-2 program displayed the kind of nuanced thinking that had made Eisenhower a success as D-day’s Supreme Allied Commander, but the program’s secrecy meant it didn’t generate the kind of public, tit-for-tat one-upmanship that made for positive newspaper headlines. In pure power-politics terms, Kennedy was a lucky beneficiary of Eisenhower’s decoys and discretion.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower deserves credit for establishing NASA in 1958. The new agency inherited the large organization that already existed with the NACA, and a workforce of more than eight thousand people.
Courtesy NASA
7
Missile Gaps and the Creation of NASA
Events since last October show all too clearly the public appeal and the Cold War importance of satellites. The importance to the Nation of a successful space program cannot be overestimated.
—W. H. PICKERING (DIRECTOR OF CALTECH’S JET PROPULSION LABORATORY) TO W. V. HOUSTON (PRESIDENT OF THE RICE INSTITUTE), APRIL 19, 1958
At the beginning of 1958, the U.S. Navy’s Vanguard program was still mired in the short-term effort to put a satellite into space. By then, Senator Kennedy had taken to calling the International Geophysical Year the “Geo Fizzle Year,” and his disillusionment with Eisenhower’s systematic approach to the space race was now a regular talking point. At a Harvard Club dinner in March, he even subtly mocked Vanguard’s first disastrous launch effort. “When the elevator at the Washington Monument caught fire in December and smoke poured out of the building,” he deadpanned, “one drunk staggered by and declared, ‘They will never get it off the ground.’”
That winter, both U.S. military rocket programs, the army’s Redstone project and the navy’s Vanguard, were so hungry for a satellite success that there was a race to launch first at Cape Canaveral. One launchpad was quickly repaired after sustaining damage in the December 6 Vanguard TV-3 explosion. The Vanguard team had a launch of their TV-3BU backup scheduled for February 3. The indefatigable von Braun, raring for the Army Ballistic Missile Agency (ABMA) in Huntsville to be first, had fulfilled his promise to Secretary of Defense Neil McElroy to deliver a modified Redstone rocket (the Jupiter-C) within ninety days. The pressure was on.
On January 31, 1958, von Braun was in the Communications Room at the Pentagon while his primary boss, Major General John Medaris, oversaw the launch from Cape Canaveral. He had gotten permission to launch the Jupiter-C as a counterstatement to Sputnik 2. According to Medaris’s journal, he “cautioned Dr. von Braun that there must be no public claims or discussion by employees of this agency which would falsely give the impression that we are in the satellite business.” This was the only day the army team had to test the white, cone-shaped Jupiter-C; after that, they’d have to cede the Cape Canaveral range to the navy’s Vanguard, which might then beat them into space. Von Braun knew that the Jupiter-C launch vehicle, a descendant of the Redstone, was ready, but the weather still had to cooperate.
Fickle weather was the bane of rocketeers the world over. Sudden wind or a lazy drizzle could scrub a launch. Fortunately for the army’s Redstone team, after two rainy days, the skies cleared that January evening. Cape Canaveral’s chief meteorologist, to von Braun’s relief, gave the launch a late-evening thumbs-up. At 10:48 p.m., the Jupiter-C rose exactly as planned, disappearing into the upper atmosphere and then beyond. The stages fell away on cue, leaving America’s first orbiting satellite, Explorer 1, circling the Earth. Von Braun was euphoric when he heard confirmation of Explorer’s radio signal, after it first circled Earth. At 1:00 a.m. on February 1, two hours after the launch, he emerged in a state of jubilation to announce his ABMA team’s success to the sleepy press corps, who had been given no advance warning of the launch. It was the triumph of the Huntsville team. Pleased with the breaking news, Secretary of the Army Wilber Brucker and Army Chief of Staff Maxwell Taylor congratulated von Braun and touted the launch as a great American achievement. Speaking on behalf of all the Operation Paperclip rocketeers, von Braun said, “It makes us feel that we paid back part of the debt of gratitude we owe this country.”
The next morning, newspapers and broadcasts on radio and TV ballyhooed the success of Explorer 1, which had brought relief and considerable delight to millions of Americans. Most major U.S. newspapers suggested that the Explorer was the first step toward American space supremacy. The San Francisco Chronicle headline read, “First U.S. Moon Circling Globe” while the Orlando Sentinel boasted, “Moon Over the Cape.” President Eisenhower was ecstatic upon hearing the news at his cottage at Georgia’s Augusta National Golf Club. Repeating the word wonderful three times when told of the success, he admitted, “I sure feel a lot better now,” though he also gave orders to “not make too big a hullabaloo over this.”
Three days after the Explorer launch, the navy’s Vanguard TV-3BU fared only a little better than its predecessor, breaking up in midair long before reaching space. But in the wake of Explorer’s success, the U.S. government wasn’t overly concerned. Major General Medaris boasted that the trifecta of the U.S. Army, academic science wizards, and the aerospace industry was indeed the winner of the interservice rivalry with the navy. “This is the beginning,” von Braun said, “in a long-range program to conquer outer space.”
Measuring just 6.4 inches in diameter, Explorer wasn’t very sophisticated or large—Nikita Khrushchev famously derided it as the “grapefruit satellite”—but it proved a trouper, orbiting Earth until 1970, while both Sputniks disintegrated upon reentry just months after launch. Not to be outdone in the competitive one-upmanship mode, the Soviets decided to launch a complex geophysical laboratory for their next satellite, and the TASS News Agency in
Moscow claimed that the Kremlin’s advanced space initiative was the most ambitious yet, designing rockets that would go near the moon as soon as 1959. The U.S.-Soviet space race was accelerating.
Encouraged by Explorer but still wary of pouring funds into space, Congress began looking into upgrading the peaceful aspects of American space exploration. Likewise, President Eisenhower, in an effort to harness government activities in the technology field, ordered Defense Secretary McElroy to streamline space activities across the army, air force, and navy. As a result, the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) was created in February 1958 with a budget of $520 million. According to McElroy, ARPA’s mandate was to coordinate cutting-edge research in artificial satellites, planet probes, and other space-related endeavors. It would act as a technology hub, overseeing existing research laboratories within each branch of the military while also sponsoring scientific work in private business and academia—all with the goal of beating the Soviets in overall space innovation.
The first director of ARPA, a civilian named Roy Johnson, ran the agency on a lean budget. A former General Electric executive, he had a dubious grasp of science but surrounded himself with aerospace experts and astrophysicists who appreciated that the new agency could help them achieve space feats. Hunting for a big-league success, Johnson lobbied around U.S. government power corridors on behalf of his bagful of space imperatives.
American Moonshot Page 18
