Moon Shot

by Jay Barbree

  “Beeps,” Harris told him. “Just beeps. Over and over and over. That’s all. Beeps.”

  Von Braun turned to McElroy. “We knew they were going to do it,” he said acidly. “They kept telling us, and we knew it, and I’ll tell you something else, Mr. Secretary.” A tremor of suppressed fury entered his voice. “You know we’re counting on Vanguard. The president counts on Vanguard. I’m telling you right now Vanguard will never make it.”

  McElroy gestured in protest. “Doctor, I’m not yet the new secretary. I don’t have the authority to—”

  “But you will,” von Braun broke in, his expression and words raw with emotion. “You will be, and when you have the authority,” he said sternly, “for God’s sake, turn us loose! The hardware is ready. Just give us the green light, Mr. Secretary. Just give us the green light. We can put up a satellite in sixty days.”

  Medaris did some quick calculations on all the work that needed to be done and told his keyed-up friend, “No, Wernher, ninety days.”

  “Just turn us loose,” von Braun pleaded as he walked quickly from the room, not turning around. But his friends didn’t miss the tears of anger and frustration in his eyes.

  The world reacted with shock and no small measure of fear. A satellite racing overhead had seemed impossible until this moment. Screaming headlines repeated over and over that Sputnik was circling the earth again and again and again, at incredible speeds, unstoppable.

  No one was more disturbed than the Americans. The United States had been considered the world’s unchallenged technological leader, with the Soviets trailing far behind. The satellite not only marked the emergence of the Soviet Union as a technologically accomplished society, but it demonstrated for the first time that the Russian military had the rocket power to deliver nuclear weapons across continents and oceans.

  American skies had been violated. During World War II no Nazi or Japanese aircraft had penetrated U.S. air space. But here was Sputnik, made in Russia, passing overhead several times a day. The Eisenhower administration was caught by surprise. In general, its spokesmen tried to minimize the significance of the Soviet achievement and the threat it represented to national security. “After all,” Eisenhower told a news conference, “the Russians have only put one small ball in the air.”

  Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev saw it differently, boasting that Sputnik demonstrated the superiority of communism over capitalism. “People of the whole world are pointing to the satellite,” he stated. “They are saying the U.S. has been beaten.”

  People everywhere were looking up at the sky, hoping to glimpse the satellite. Newspapers, radio, and television reported that Sputnik was as bright as a fourth-magnitude star, and observers lucky enough to catch the right angle at the right time—just before sunset or after sunrise, when it was dark on earth’s surface but still sunlit where the new satellite traveled—could follow the incredible moving star (it was really the rocket that put the tiny Sputnik in orbit) as it passed overhead.

  In Rhode Island a young U.S. Navy test pilot, Alan Shepard, was definitely interested in seeing it.

  Shepard was attending the Naval War College in Newport, the admirals’ school for officers who were marked for quick promotion through the naval ranks. The young lieutenant commander would rather have been back at the Patuxent River Naval Air Station in Maryland, testing new and experimental jets. He wanted wings, not a desk. But in the eyes of his supervisors he had promise, and the top brass pointed to the Naval War College and said, “Go.” So he was burning books instead of kicking in afterburners.

  The paper said Sputnik could be seen that evening, and Shepard went outside to take a look at the satellite whose success gnawed at his insides. He was angry that the thing up there didn’t belong to America. It instead belonged to a nation he felt was technologically inferior—a nation that couldn’t even build washing machines and refrigerators that worked!

  Shepard looked up into the early evening sky. A high-pressure area had stalled over Rhode Island, and the crisp, cold autumn evening was clear.

  Sputnik was to appear in the southwest and move to the northeast, and Alan Shepard focused on an area just south of the bright evening star. No sooner had he settled into a comfortable position than he saw it. Sputnik’s rocket appeared as a star that blinked as it moved. “That little rascal,” he said to himself as it moved closer. He stared in astonishment as it zipped overhead and disappeared in the northeastern sky. Shepard knew he was catching a glimpse of the future, and he stood with his feet planted solidly in place, not wanting that brief slice of tomorrow to leave. But all he could do was watch as Sputnik and its rocket disappeared from view on its journey over Nova Scotia and across the north Atlantic and Europe to begin its sweep over its native Russia.

  It appeared that Sputnik’s rocket changed its flight path as it moved over the earth’s surface. But it didn’t. It was the earth that moved. The satellite was in its own independent orbit, moving around the globe every ninety-six minutes on a firm, invisible track fixed by earth’s gravity. Earth at the equator was rotating beneath it at the rate of a thousand miles each hour.

  Some three hours and two orbits after Shepard observed the Sputnik tandem the earth rotated eastward three thousand miles beneath Sputnik’s orbital track. It was ascending over the southern Pacific, moving northeast across southern California and Edwards Air Force Base. There, another young test pilot had decided to go take a look at the newest member of the heavens.

  At the time Deke Slayton was a member of the highly talented Fighter Test Group at Edwards. These pilots were flying higher and faster than any others in the world. They were the best. It was nothing for them to fly upward of twelve or fourteen miles from the earth’s surface and then roar off at more than twice the speed of sound.

  Tonight Deke waited to see something flying higher than he’d ever flown—forty times higher, fifteen times faster. So he stood in the desert with his dog, Ace, and they looked at the heavens. Deke was convinced this was the beginning. Men would soon be up there as well.

  Ace barked furiously at something in the desert. He wanted to cut loose and chase, but Deke gripped the leash tightly and kept his face on the evening sky. He looked for anything moving, waiting until it was clear that the only things overhead were the stars and planets and what he thought might be Pegasus, the flying horse, riding over the mountains to the south. I must have been looking in the wrong place, he thought.

  Ace was getting impatient, and Deke turned and took him back inside. The dog could not know that one of his own soon would be making history.

  Only a month after Sputnik 1, the Soviet Union did it again. Sputnik 2 weighed 1,120 pounds, and it soared more than a thousand miles above earth. The numbers were unbelievable to an American public struggling to understand what was going on. Where were our rockets? Where were our satellites? And what the hell was inside that thing? A dog? A dog called Laika?

  Americans were livid. Was President Eisenhower fiddling as the American space program burned? The United States’ chief executive got the message and acted, prematurely as it turned out. A civilian launch team working on Vanguard rushed the unproven rocket to its launch pad. On top was a grapefruit-size satellite that was so small it weighed only a laughable three pounds.

  Dr. von Braun had warned that Vanguard wasn’t ready and had reminded Washington that his Jupiter-C was. But the brass wanted a civilian, and not a military, launch. They may have wanted a civilian rocket, but they didn’t want a civilian press. Jay Barbree was among the reporters and photographers pounding on the locked gates. The Air Force wouldn’t budge. The media were kept outside on sand dunes, in boats, on any spot with a view of the slender rocket. For Barbree it was a telephone booth near Cape Canaveral’s south gate.

  The day was December 6, 1957, and as the launch neared, an anxious hush fell over a hopeful America.

  “T-minus ten seconds and counting,” the short-wave broadcast informed Coast Guard ships near waters’ edge.

>   “Seven, six, five, four, three, two, one . . . ”

  Despite the knots in his stomach, Barbree started reporting. “There’s ignition. We can see the flames. Vanguard’s alive . . . but wait . . . wait . . . there’s . . . no wait, there’s no liftoff! It appears to be crumbling in its own fire . . . It’s burning on its pad . . . Vanguard is burning. It’s failed ladies and gentlemen. Vanguard has failed.”

  It was a bleak day for America. The Vanguard failure generated feelings of lost confidence, wounded pride, confusion—and awe at the Soviet achievements.

  Something had to be done. President Eisenhower, stung by the criticism, finally relented, gave the Army and the von Braun team the green light to take its Jupiter-C—Missile 29—out of storage and to the launch pad.

  More reliable upper stage rockets were added, and at the Cape a thirty-one-pound satellite was mounted atop the stack. It carried eighteen pounds of instruments designed to measure space radiation.

  Eisenhower, his science adviser James Killian, and others in the White House didn’t want to be reminded that the rocket was the same damn Jupiter-C that could have placed a satellite in orbit more than a year before Sputnik. The Army was told to keep that information quiet—in fact, to change the name of the rocket, and Jupiter-C became Juno 1.

  After three days of delays caused by high winds, Juno 1 was ready to lift off on January 31, 1958. At 10:45 P.M., test director Robert Moser flipped the switch to ignite the first stage. Yellow flames shot down and then splashed outward in all directions beneath the rocket. A huge pillow of dazzling fire gushed forth and thunder crashed across the Cape.

  Observers, blinking at the searing flames and bathed in that marvelous roar, unleashed cheers and screams of excitement as broadcasters shouted to be heard above the thunder. Men and women cried shamelessly as Juno climbed higher and faster.

  The rocket burned a fiery path into the night sky as it reached for von Braun’s stars. Meanwhile, the architect of the American space age, a dreamer who had wanted to go to the moon rather than build weapons, was kept away from Cape Canaveral by Pentagon bureaucrats when his creation roared from the pad.

  “Wernher, you will be needed in Washington,” General Medaris had told him. “All the key players will be at the Pentagon for a news conference once the satellite is in orbit.”

  “I can hold a news conference at the Cape,” von Braun protested. “I need to be there. I want to be there.”

  “Brucker says it’s important that you be there, no argument,” Medaris said with finality, referring to Army Secretary Wilber Brucker.

  Von Braun monitored the liftoff of his beloved rocket from a chilly communications room in the Pentagon, along with Brucker; Dr. William Pickering, head of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where the satellite was built; and Dr. James A. Van Allen of the University of Iowa, who provided the radiation-monitoring Geiger counter for the payload. Von Braun was extremely uncomfortable in Washington. As the rocket rose, he could hear his own heart beating rapidly as he shifted in his seat and then paced the floor.

  He was greatly relieved when all four stages of his rocket burned as planned. But no one could tell for certain if the satellite was in orbit.

  The country didn’t have a network of tracking stations in place, just a few, and definite confirmation of orbit would come from a tracking station in California only after the satellite had made nearly one complete revolution of the globe. Everyone would have to wait to find out if the fourth stage had burned properly, at the right angle and altitude, and with the required speed.

  The minutes passed and, as the moment of confirmation neared, there was a nervous shuffling of feet in the Pentagon room. Von Braun had calculated that it would take the Juno 1 106 minutes to reach the California tracking station. When the satellite signal was not received at the expected time, von Braun again began to pace about the room.

  Pickering was on an open phone to the California station. “Why the hell don’t you hear anything?” he shouted.

  Brucker, pale and trembling, looked at von Braun. “Wernher, what happened?” he demanded.

  Before von Braun could answer, Pickering’s excited voice boomed through the room. “They hear her, Wernher! They hear her!”

  The satellite was in a slightly higher orbit than expected, accounting for an eight-minute delay in picking up the signal.

  Men and women hugged one another with unchecked joy. Wernher von Braun walked onto the stage of an adjoining auditorium filled with applauding reporters.

  “It was one of the great moments of my life,” he said. “I only regret we didn’t do it earlier.”

  A jubilant America was at his feet.

  In Huntsville, the town square rocked with a wild and furious celebration of fireworks, sirens, blaring horns, and the cheers of thousands of people dancing and embracing in the streets. Former Defense Secretary Charles E. Wilson, who had long throttled von Braun’s program, was hanged in effigy, and the courthouse was topped with a mockup of the Jupiter-C. Except for the accents, you couldn’t tell Alabaman from German, northerner from southerner, easterner from westerner, in Huntsville’s thronged streets. America was celebrating itself.

  Instantly Dr. Wernher von Braun became a national hero. He was on the front page of every newspaper and on the cover of many magazines. “Von Braun, forty-five, personifies man’s drive to rise above the planet,” Time magazine declared. “Von Braun, in fact, has only one interest, the conquest of space, which he calls man’s greatest venture.” Soon thereafter Eisenhower summoned von Braun to a white-tie dinner at the White House and presented him with the Award for Distinguished Federal Civilian Service.

  The satellite von Braun’s rocket had launched was named Explorer 1. It weighed only thirty-one pounds, but Dr. Van Allen’s Geiger counter made the first discovery of the new era—that the earth is surrounded by huge bands of high-energy radiation composed of particles trapped in our planet’s magnetic field. Scientists honored Van Allen by naming the belts after him.

  With Explorer 1, the United States was catapulted into the space age and into what would become a fierce competition with the Soviet Union for dominance of this new frontier.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The Pilots

  CALIFORNIA’S MOJAVE DESERT is a barren and inhospitable place, a blistering, snake-infested expanse where sand and sun whiten the bones of long-forgotten misadventurers. Powerful winds knife through the gnarled and broken Joshua trees standing like wounded sentries at Edwards Air Force Base, a great military installation on the edge of nowhere.

  At the heart of this high-tech flight center, huge aircraft hangars rise like shimmering images from the boundless sea of desert. Edwards’ test pilots favor the flat, hard desert because it stretches for miles in all directions, offering the world’s longest runways.

  It was at Edwards Air Force Base that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in 1958 focused its search for America’s first astronauts. Created in the frantic aftermath of Sputnik, NASA had assumed the responsibilities of the old National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics, and it also accepted the burden for investing in the great new technologies of space exploration. NASA was to develop the means to send humans into space at speeds in excess of seventeen thousand miles an hour and to return them safely to Earth.

  The immediate obstacle facing NASA was that there simply weren’t any highly skilled test pilots with the engineering experience and discipline to risk flight in the most dangerous craft in the world. There were test pilots, of course, but before they could become astronauts and slip through the atmosphere’s barriers into the vacuum beyond the planet, they had to begin not only training for space flight but to work in concert with engineers and scientists to define the parameters of space exploration.

  There was no shortage of volunteers when NASA began its search, but the agency rejected outright the mountain climbers, racecar and speedboat drivers, parachutists and daredevils. NASA wanted stable, college-educated professionals
who had been screened for security. Many military test pilots fit the bill, and Edwards, just 150 miles northeast of Los Angeles, was one place where they could be found.

  It was a beautiful airfield, where pilots could come burning out of the sky and always have a place to land, where landing-speed restrictions were nonexistent and where pilots could experience the thrill of touching down faster than many airplanes could even fly.

  It was almost impossible to define the particular quality that marked the special and closed fraternity of test pilots who worked at the base. Esprit de corps, pride, honor, dedication, skill, and courage were all qualities required of the men who would become astronauts, but these qualities did not go far enough in describing the particular character of the pilots, who were all highly intelligent, skilled, and knowledgeable, and who all exhibited a strong survival instinct and fierce will to succeed. Fools didn’t last long at Edwards.

  Deke Slayton was the lead pilot, assigned to test the new Republic F-105 Thunderchief, a fighter-bomber designed to fly and fight day and night, in clear skies and in rotten weather, as fast as twice the speed of sound. When Slayton flew, other pilots at Edwards would dump their gear in the Flight Ops Ready Room and watch and listen.

  On one particular day the corps of test pilots crowded to the Ready Room when they recognized a familiar sound: the deep-throated rumble of the 105’s powerful jet engine spinning faster and faster in its start-up mode. Fuel tankers, ambulances, fire trucks, and communications vehicles all were ready, and the pilots watched as the Thunderchief turned onto the runway, its nose bobbing gently as Deke Slayton braked the ship to a stop, checking his machine before the tower gave him the call.

  He fed the 105 power. A deep, winding cry thundered across the flight line, echoing back from hangars, booming hoarsely as thrust increased. Deke rechecked the gauges. Satisfied with the readouts, he released the brake. The swept-wing fighter-bomber lurched forward, accelerating swiftly. From the cockpit the runway flashed by smoothly. All was strangely quiet under Deke’s helmet. He brought up the nose wheel, and the 105 seemed to hang in the air as it swept ahead, the earth falling away beneath the wings. Blue sky replaced desert brown. Deke felt the gear come up and lock, the gear doors close to form a sleek shape, and in that wonderful rush of jet flight he arrowed skyward.