by Jay Barbree
“Seven, six, five, four, three, two, one…”
I was on the line with WALB, and when the countdown reached zero, my report began…
“There’s ignition. We can see the flames…Vanguard’s engine is lit and it’s burning…but wait…wait a moment…there’s…no wait…there’s no liftoff! It appears to be crumbling in its own fire…It’s burning on its pad…Vanguard has crumbled into flames. It failed, ladies and gentlemen, Vanguard has failed.”
It had risen only four feet off its pad, and four feet didn’t count when you were reaching for orbit.
In 1957, the news media was not permitted on the air force’s Cape Canaveral launch facility. These cameras were waiting for the first Vanguard satellite launch attempt. (Barbree Collection).
Out on the beach, a young CBS correspondent named Harry Reasoner and his producer, Charles von Fremd, had gained an advantage in the race to be first on the air. They had rented an oceanfront cottage with a view of the Vanguard launch pad. While cameraman Paul Rubenstein took his post on the beach, where the sightlines were better, Reasoner stood on the porch and peered through binoculars. Inside the little house, von Fremd’s wife, Virginia, held a phone that was connected to the CBS newsroom in New York. Reasoner later wrote:
At t-minus zero, the first Vanguard rocket with satellite lifts four feet off the ground before crumbling back on its pad, consumed by its own fires. (Neilon Collection).
…I saw an unmistakable flash of flame and the pencil-thin white rocket began to move. “There she goes!” I shouted. “There she goes!” shouted Virginia into the phone. “There she goes!” shouted the CBS executive in New York, hanging up the phone and charging off to get the bulletin on the air.
We beat ABC and NBC certainly. There was only one problem. A tenth of a second after I shouted, “There she goes!” I shouted, “Hold it!”…
The tiny satellite was blasted off the top of the exploding rocket and bounced into hiding in the Cape’s wilderness. Its small transmitter broadcast its lonely distress. To those listening, it was mournful—a string of unbroken beeps. Columnist Dorothy Kilgallen asked the most appropriate question on CBS’s What’s My Line: “Why doesn’t someone go out there, find it, and kill it?”
It was a black day for a proud country. Space pioneer and storyteller John Neilon, who worked on Vanguard, recalled, “The project was instantly dubbed all sorts of uncomplimentary names like Rearguard, Flopnik, and one newspaper wrote ‘Ill-Fated-Vanguard as if that were the real name of the project.” Neilon can laugh today. He added, “Some of our team with a sense of humor would answer the phone, ‘Ill-Fated-Vanguard Project!’”
The loss of Vanguard wounded our pride and destroyed our confidence, and most of us knew it was time for something to be done. The Russians were kicking us where we sat, and it was time for a stubborn White House to call in the cavalry—to call in the von Braun team.
Eisenhower did, and Redstone missile #29 was hauled out of storage and refitted. More reliable upper-stage rockets were added, and a thirty-one-pound satellite was mounted atop the stack with eighteen pounds of instruments designed to measure space radiation. Eisenhower and his White House crowd didn’t want to be reminded that the rocket was the same damn Redstone that could have placed a satellite in orbit more than a year before Sputnik. The orders came down to change the name of the rocket, and Jupiter-C became Juno 1.
The media were finally invited on the Cape, and after three days of delays caused by high winds, Juno 1 was ready for launch.
On January 31, 1958, at 10:45 P.M., test conductor Robert Moser pushed the launch button. After waiting more than two years to fly, Redstone #29 was suddenly alive and its flames washed over the launch pad. Those lucky enough to be there cheered as broadcasters shouted to be heard above the rocket’s growing roar.
Some around me cried shamelessly as I shouted my on-the-scene report and watched the first rocket with an American satellite climb higher and higher and faster and faster. I knew I was witnessing history. It was surreal with all the shouting, screaming, and joyful crying, and I continued to shout my report and watch the Jupiter-C’s flames grow smaller and smaller. Soon it was a star lost in a black sky filled with many, and I felt my own personal national pride. One of von Braun’s stars, I reminded myself. As a boy, the young rocket master had promised himself he would go to the stars, and this night he was taking his first step on that journey.
The country did not yet have a network of tracking stations in place. Definite confirmation that the satellite was in orbit would have to wait until it had almost completed a trip around Earth as it raced over a tracking station in California. Dr. von Braun had calculated that it would take the satellite 106 minutes to pass over the California station. When it didn’t, he began to pace.
Eight minutes later, an excited voice shouted, “They hear her, Wernher! They hear her!”
The satellite was in a slightly higher orbit than expected, accounting for its delay. Men and women hugged, and Wernher von Braun walked onto the stage of an adjoining auditorium filled with reporters.
“It was one of the great moments of my life,” he said. “I only regret we weren’t permitted to do it earlier.”
A grateful and jubilant America was at von Braun’s feet and his hometown, Huntsville, Alabama, rocked with a wild and furious celebration. Horns blared and cheering thousands danced and hugged each other in the streets. Retired defense secretary Charles E. Wilson, who had single-handedly stopped von Braun’s efforts to reach Earth orbit, was hanged in effigy.
German-born Wernher von Braun became an instant American hero. He was on the front pages of newspapers, on radio networks, on television talk shows and evening newscasts, and even on the prestigious cover of Time. The country’s leading news magazine wrote: “Von Braun, 45, personifies man’s drive to rise above the planet. Von Braun, in fact, has only one interest, the conquest of space, which he calls man’s greatest adventure.” Soon thereafter Eisenhower summoned von Braun to a white-tie dinner at the White House and presented him with the Distinguished Federal Civilian Service Award. Charles E. Wilson did not attend.
Wernher von Braun’s satellite was named Explorer 1. It weighed only thirty-one pounds, but despite its size, it made science’s first discovery by a satellite. Dr. James A. Van Allen’s Geiger counter on board Explorer 1 learned that 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. Today, when astronauts travel in space they avoid these radiation belts discovered by Explorer 1, the little satellite that catapulted America into the space age, and into a fierce competition for national prestige with the Russians.
Just around the corner, the race to the moon was moved to the starting blocks.
TWO
The Early Days
There are some fishing villages that are cocooned in time, content to let progress pass them by. In the late 1950s one such community was Cocoa, Florida. It was like many other coastal towns of its vintage, moving with the effortless politeness that was its major contribution to its citizens—citizens who spent most of their days on the water, the docks, and the fishing piers.
“Salt Water Trout Capital of the World” was what Cocoa called itself, while progress lay barely ten miles to the northeast on a palmetto and scrub-brush sand spit jutting into the Atlantic that had been named Cape Canaveral by Spanish explorers five hundred years ago. A cutting-edge, high-tech laboratory sprouting missile and rocket gantries along the ocean’s shore, it served as the anchor of a five-thousand-mile-long missile range of natural island tracking stations reaching to Ascension, a British island in the south Atlantic.
In the late 1950s and early ’60s, Cocoa and its seaside sister community of Cocoa Beach suddenly became boomtowns—men and women with an average age of twenty-seven were arriving in airliners, in automobiles, and by train, some even by Greyhound. They were the engineers, the technicians, the scientists
, and the hucksters coming to build America’s spaceport, seeking membership in the newest and most elite fraternity that would carry the Western world into the second half of the twentieth century.
The easygoing town of Cocoa, Florida, hosted only a small, two-lane causeway to Cape Canaveral during the birth of America’s spaceport. Irate missile and rocket workers demanded the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers keep the drawbridge closed to boat traffic during rush hour. (Florida Historical Society).
I was one of them, shouting into a microphone a play-by-play broadcast as I chased runaway missiles and exploding rockets in the greatest show of technology the world had ever seen. I would tell our listeners that ballistic missiles did not simply blow up. They did not yield their life energy without a struggle. The flame began in spurts, from the arteries of fuel lines and the reservoir of tanks, and then in long, fiery streamers. Shards of the doomed rockets fell blazing toward an indifferent ocean.
This was Cape Canaveral in the early days, a world of missiles and rockets and of nights exploding violently as launch crews huddled within the protection of thick steel-and-concrete blockhouses, peering through periscopes, each shouting liftoff as more satellites followed Explorer 1 and Sputnik into orbit, the successes making things happen. The defense budget was increased significantly, and military rocket programs were given more or less a blank check. Most forms of government-subsidized research began to grow. The nation’s education system was overhauled, and federal dollars poured into the schools to help produce an unmatched generation of scientists and engineers who would become the heart of the American space reply to the Russians.
In the early days, the security gate to Cape Canaveral appeared to be out of The Grapes of Wrath.
The Pentagon formed the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) to guard against further U.S. technological slippage.
And the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) was born.
America was on the move, and someone had to manage the new space effort. Who would lead? The army, navy, and air force all sought the assignment, as did the Pentagon’s ARPA and the Atomic Energy Commission. But the White House focused on the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), an inconspicuous group of scientists who oversaw federal flight-technology laboratories.
NACA possessed some of the best engineering talent in the country. Under civilian control, it was too obscure to have been caught up in partisan politics, and most pleasing to all, it was a stranger to the red tape of government bureaucracy. This small but talented agency got the job of challenging Russia’s lead in space.
Reborn as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the agency gathered under its umbrella NACA’s five laboratories and eight thousand technicians; the California Institute of Technology’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory; the navy’s Vanguard project; and the army’s four-thousand-strong rocket team headed by Dr. von Braun. But Congress insisted the Pentagon also maintain a separate space effort.
I had gone to work for NBC News on July 21, 1958 and was soon introduced to the network’s executive producer in charge of space coverage. He was a tall, stout, grinning New Yorker named Jim Kitchell with a reputation for getting things done. First out of his mouth he told me to never work in New York or Washington and to build myself a small empire as the man who knew the answers to all questions about space flight. He added, “Never be a threat to any of your coworkers.” I bought a Shetland pony, rode low, and stayed under everyone’s radar, and I was soon known as the man with the space answers that did not want any New York or Washington job. Kitchell’s suggestion proved to be the best advice I was to receive in my life.
The man from the city had personally gotten the media on the Cape’s highly secret air force launch installation, and now he was getting ready for television’s first-ever live coverage of a breaking news event. To make it work, Kitchell worked out an agreement with the air force, as well as one with our affiliate WFGA, Channel 12, in Jacksonville.
There was another young go-getter at WFGA named Herb Gold, and he and Jim became close friends. Herb had no clue what he was in for, and he was soon coaxed into dragging a live studio setup, cameras and all, 170 miles south through the rain.
Herb bought an old truck built for delivering pies, filled it with the equipment needed to transmit through microwave or coaxial cable to the network, and loaded it with three-hundred-pound television cameras. He hauled the cameras to the Cape, and by jerry-rigging ropes and tackles and employing the biggest muscles around, Herb and crew then hauled them up the backside of an abandoned radar building overlooking the launch pads. A live television signal was fed through the “pie truck” to the network, and when a Thor-Able rocket headed for the vicinity of the moon on November 8, 1958, Jim Kitchell and Herb Gold and their scavengers had legendary broadcaster Roy Neal reporting live on the NBC television network. For the first time, a breaking news event arrived live on your home television set.
NBC had its live television breaking news report, and NASA was now a fact, but the “spook” boys around the Pentagon weren’t happy. The Russians hurled large payloads in orbit, and our puny satellites could only watch. The Advanced Research Projects Agency decided something had to be done, and they came up with a propaganda doozey. They decided to put a whole damn Atlas into orbit. The entire missile would be the satellite. Let’s see the Russians top that!
The Atlas was, at the time, the country’s intercontinental ballistic missile, and for it to hurl a warhead more than five thousand miles, the stage-and-a-half rocket had to achieve a speed just under orbital velocity. Engineers figured if they stripped an Atlas down to its socks, to what they called a “hot rod” rocket, it would go into orbit with the assist of Earth’s easterly rotation. This meant Atlas had to be launched due east, out of the range of safety guidelines, but Major General Donald Yates, commander of the Air Force Eastern Test Range, told the White House he could handle that.
Only eighty-eight people were brought in on the plan. They had to strip Atlas 10B of everything not needed to fly, and they had to place a tape playback unit and a broadcast transmitter inside the missile. The tape was what we in the business call a closed loop. It would continually repeat a message recorded by President Eisenhower wishing all peoples peace on Earth from the world’s largest satellite.
The scheme was given the name “Project Score,” and Atlas 10B was ready to fly on December 18, 1958. The mission was the most secret American launch ever, and the “spooks” were off and grinning.
The newly created remote television truck is seen here at the Cape. Inside is executive producer Jim Kitchell (second from center). Correspondent Roy Neal (third from center) is seen talking to unit manager Dick Auerbach. The November 8, 1958, launch of the Thor-Able rocket to the vicinity of the moon is seen captured by NBC’s cameras—the first live television of a breaking news event. (Gold Collection).
Four days before the launch, I was in a stall in the men’s room down the hall from General Yates’s office when I heard a familiar voice. It was the general himself, talking to an ARPA man.
“Check the place out,” Yates ordered.
The ARPA man scanned the men’s room before bending over and looking under each stall’s door. By then my feet were up around my ears.
“We’re clear.”
“Okay,” the general said, adding, “My biggest concern is some damn reporter will find out about the launch.”
“So what?” The spook sounded gleeful. “If he tells the world, and we fail, we’ll simply deny it. He’ll be left out on the proverbial limb.”
“Right,” Yates agreed, “but if we get Ike’s message in orbit, then the President can announce it himself from the White House.”
The two men finished and left. Now I was the one feeling smug. It was dumb luck for sure, but just what in hell were they talking about?
The next launch was Atlas 10B. That I knew. But they were talking about Ike’s message from orbit. 10B wasn’t going to orbit anything! O
r was it? I had been told how Atlas rockets almost achieve orbit each time they are launched on intercontinental ranges. Could that be it? Well, why in hell not? They could be orbiting something with 10B. That was it! They could be orbiting a message from the President.
I rushed back to my office. A message from Jim Kitchell in New York waited. I returned his call and learned Jim was already on the story. We compared notes on what each of us knew, and I was quickly on my way to see a few solid sources. I had no idea only eighty-eight people nationwide were officially in the know, and I was greeted with blank faces. Then, good old RCA, NBC’s parent company came through. The playback unit and transmitter were being put together by RCA, and my source played me the tape. I had it all. But as the “spook” had said, there was little I could do. We could film, record, and stand by. Nothing more.
I phoned Kitchell and he flew cameraman Bruce Powell down from Chicago. Atlas 10B roared from a freshly darkened Earth at 6:02 P.M. Eastern time, December 18, 1958.
And God! What a launch!
10B climbed into the darkness, the Atlas’s thrust lighting the night as hundreds of launches had before. But then, a little more than a minute off the ground, the rocket instantly reappeared from the darkness. The line of shadow cast by Earth stretched far over our heads, and now Atlas 10B was rushing across a lit sky above our darkness. It was bathed in sunlight from a sun that had already disappeared beyond the Cape’s horizon.
We stood frozen by what we saw. Rocket flames growing blood-red followed by dazzling blues and greens and yellows, all creating a shimmering aurora in space. We were looking at a multicolored sky alive and dancing. It was as if the gods were welcoming Ike’s message with their own shimmering Christmas tree.
