This New Ocean, page 29
“In the course of the last years in the Soviet Union, scientific research and experimental construction work on the creation of artificial satellites on the Earth has been going on,” wrote some martinet whose wire service had no domestic competition and who was therefore unschooled in the art of the attention-grabbing hard news lead. “As the result of a large, dedicated effort by scientific-research institutes and construction bureaus, the world’s first artificial satellite of the Earth has been created. On October 4, 1957, in the U.S.S.R., the first successful satellite launch has been achieved. According to preliminary data, the rocket launcher carried the satellite to the necessary orbital speed of about 8,000 meters per second.” Then came the usual hackneyed bilge: “Artificial Earth satellites will pave the way to interplanetary travel and, apparently, our contemporaries will witness how the freed and conscientious labor of the people of the new socialist society makes the most daring dreams of mankind a reality.”
Working as they did within a closed society that placed heavy emphasis on keeping its workers and peasants as complacent and tranquilized as possible unless ordered to do otherwise, the Russian journalists played the story that first day exactly as they would have played one on record tractor production or the opening of a hydroelectric power station someplace in Siberia. Without direction from the first secretary or anybody else in the Kremlin (none of whom really cared in the slightest about sending anything to space) professional inertia carried the day. But only that day.
Reuters, the BBC, and New York Times reporters in Moscow, on the other hand, knew a big breaking story when they saw one and scrambled to get it out. Hearing the news on Radio Moscow, the Times’ bureau immediately cabled it to the Foreign Desk in New York, which relayed it to the Washington bureau, which passed it on to Walter Sullivan, the newspaper’s senior science writer. Ironically, Sullivan got the word by telephone during an evening reception in the Soviet Embassy for IGY delegates to the Rockets and Satellites Conference. “Radio Moscow has just announced that the Russians have placed a satellite in orbit nine hundred kilometers above the Earth,” an excited editor told him. Sullivan hurried from the downstairs telephone back up to the ballroom and related the news to Berkner and JPL’s Pickering, both of whom instantly understood its significance. Lloyd Berkner then clapped his hands loudly to get everyone’s attention. “I wish to make an announcement,” he said after the room quieted. “I am informed by The New York Times that a satellite is in orbit at an elevation of nine hundred kilometers. I wish to congratulate our Soviet colleagues on their achievement.” Sullivan had the pleasure of jotting down Berkner’s response to the news he had delivered and then writing the story, which described the Russian delegation as beaming. And so they did, offering prodigious amounts of vodka and caviar in return, but not to the reporters, all of whom were by then looking for telephones. The elated Blagonravov, now clearly delighted that the secrecy was over and that his nation had staged an historic triumph, basked in the good wishes of his foreign counterparts and intimated that he had known preparations for the launch were complete when he left Moscow.
While the conference was supposed to have ended on October 5 with the routine endorsement of resolutions, it turned into an occasion at which the Russians accepted formal congratulations. It also provided the ebullient Blagonravov, chalk in hand, with the opportunity to brief Berkner and the others on the formerly secret operation. A photograph of him doing so would run in the Times two days later over one of the paper’s “Man in the News” features headlined “Scientist and Soldier.” Meanwhile, as Sullivan put it, “the model of the American Vanguard buzzed bravely, but a bit forlornly, around the globe elsewhere in the citadel of science on Constitution Avenue.”
When the last of the smoke from the R-7 that carried Sputnik into history drifted away from its launchpad and faded into the Kazakh night, it left a rumor behind that itself drifted all the way back to Moscow and would linger there for decades. According to the story, a routine intelligence report had come into Moscow months earlier confirming that the American IGY Committee was planning on hosting the conference in Washington in late September and early October that would address launching a satellite. But the typist who transcribed the message for Korolyov dropped the word “conference.” The report that was handed to the chief designer therefore said that the United States was planning to launch a satellite in late September or early October. Korolyov, panicked, decided that he would have to launch first so as not to allow the United States to steal the limelight. “They [the Russians] wanted to make a big sort of hullabaloo about it,” Sergei Kapitsa would recall many years later. “But there was no time. It was a question of days that the Americans could beat us. So up it went without any fanfare. As Korolyov was ready to fire … he did.”
* The number of bombers increased each year from 1946, when the Air Force had 148 B-29s. A total of 446 B-36s, 2,048 B-47s, and 744 B-52s were delivered to the Air Force. They far outnumbered and out-flew their Badger and Bear counterparts. (Polmar and Laur, Strategic Air Command, pp. 229, 236, 241.)
* President Lyndon B. Johnson would echo this when he made the first official, though oblique, reference to clandestine space surveillance. “I wouldn’t want to be quoted on this,” he told a small group of government officials and educators in Nashville in March 1967, “but we’ve spent thirty-five or forty billion dollars on the space program. And if nothing else had come out of it but the knowledge we’ve gained from space photography, it would be worth ten times what the whole program has cost. Because tonight we know how many missiles the enemy has and, it turned out, our guesses were way off. We were building things we didn’t need to build. We were harboring fears we didn’t need to harbor.”
* He also had two other reasons for assigning the U-2 program to the CIA. He thought that the program would somehow be less provocative if it was run by a civilian agency, though the fact that the civilians were professional spies made that reasoning somewhat dubious. Second, he was afraid that the Air Force would somehow antagonize the Soviets, in the process raising tensions. That, too, is dubious.
* The secrecy was all the more pointless because the Soviets tracked U-2 flights and were well aware that they photographed the huge complex. The facility was a principal target of Francis Gary Powers’s ill-fated mission on May Day 1960. (Brugioni, “The Tyuratam Enigma,” p. 108.)
* Arthur C. Clarke, then of the British Interplanetary Society, is credited with first proposing satellites as communication relays, some in geosynchronous orbit, in letters to the magazine Wireless World in February and October 1945. (Emme, “Presidents and Space,” pp. 8, 31.)
* Except for a corner of a parking lot, JPL is actually in La Cañada-Flintridge, a community bordering on Pasadena. Perhaps because Caltech is in Pasadena, or because it is an easier name to remember, or it fits more easily into a dateline, Pasadena was and remains widely accepted as JPL’s hometown.
* As originally used, the term meant “companion,” or “fellow traveler,” with Earth. But the word soon took on the generic meaning for any spacecraft. Whatever its proper name, Russians refer to any Earth satellite as a “sputnik.”
* In fact, nine were initially used, and the selection process was more complicated than might be imagined. All had to be mongrels because it was decided that they were more rugged than purebreds and therefore better able to withstand cold and deprivation. They also had to be female because the special spacesuits and sanitation apparatus were better suited to them than to males; be all or mostly white because that color showed up better on film and television; and weigh no more than sixteen pounds because of the rockets’ lifting limitation. A succession of dogs with names such as Albina (Whitey), Kozyavka (Gnat), Malyshka (Little One), and Tsyganka (Gypsy) were sent up with instruments monitoring their pulses and respiration rates. Some parachuted back to Earth in their capsules, surviving both ascent and descent and emerging “completely normal,” as Pokrovsky put it. Others did not. (Rhea, Russians in Space, pp. 140–41.)
† Typically, exact launch locations were not given for reasons of military security, which would irritate and frustrate Western scientists.
* The substitution was a carefully guarded secret during the cold war. In 1973, for example, Tikhonravov gave a paper at an international astronautical meeting at Baku. After reporting that a number of sputniks had been built, he added that “the first of them, the simplest in construction, was launched on 4 October 1957.” This gave the impression that the first sputnik in space had gone up in its assigned order. (Tikhonravov, “The Creation of the First Artificial Earth Satellite: Some Historical Details.”)
6
To Race Across the Sky
The New York Times hit the street on the morning of October 5, 1957, with an eight-column-wide banner headline shouting:
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.
Beneath the head were three Sputnik-related stories and a picture. The lead article came out of Moscow and reported the start of the space age. The others, including one by Walter Sullivan, ran under Washington datelines and supplied additional information. And there was a detailed diagram tracing one of the spacecraft’s orbits. Sputnik was called both an “earth satellite” and a “Soviet-made moon.” The placement of the stories on page one under a three-bank head showed the editors understood that Sputnik’s flight was a major historical event. Curiously, however, the story yielded first place in the international section of the index to rioting in Warsaw and instead was relegated to news about health and science.
There was nothing tentative about reaction to the event, however, and it came swiftly.1 Joseph Kaplan, chairman of the U.S. IGY satellite program, called the feat “fantastic,” the more so because Sputnik weighed eight times as much as any spacecraft then being planned by the United States. J. William Fulbright,2 the widely respected senator from Arkansas whose scholarships were sending some of the country’s best minds to study abroad, reacted with studied calm. He gently dismissed Sputnik as a relatively inconsequential “trick.” “It does not feed their people.… It does not convert anyone to communism. So far as real prestige is concerned, it is nothing.” Representative James G. Fulton3 of Pennsylvania adamantly refused to concede the Russians anything. Instead, he turned their own often-used ploy on them by claiming that they had benefited from pioneering American rocketry. “There is a feeling in many quarters that it was like the canary that jumps on the eagle’s back,” he said. “When the eagle flies high as it can and then just as it reaches the top the canary jumps thirty feet higher and it has the record.” But even in those first hours, it was obvious that Sputnik was no hitchhiking canary.
Columbia University sociologist C. Wright Mills,4 the acerbic left-wing author of The Power Elite, dismissed the Soviet spacecraft out of hand and warned against sliding into a blind, irrational race to space with the Russians. “Who wants to go to the Moon anyway?” he asked. Then, characteristically, he answered his own question by insisting that “the whole space gambol” was “a lot of malarkey.”
William A. Holaday, a Pentagon guided missile expert, correctly observed that Sputnik’s flight did not mean the Soviet Union was superior to the United States in missile and rocket development. And, he added, Vanguard was an open, as opposed to secret, program and was not being conducted on a “crash” basis. That was putting it mildly. The implication was that the opposition had poured enormous resources into the project to embarrass the United States, which was not true.
Donald Quarles, by then deputy secretary of defense, told the Science Advisory Committee, under whose auspices the Killian panel had written one of the most important and far-ranging foreign policy documents of the postwar period, that the Russians had in fact done the United States a great favor. They had ended the old legality question once and for all, unintentionally establishing the concept of freedom of international space. That included the freedom to send spy satellites there. Sputnik was doing what Vanguard had been supposed to do.
No Trespassing in Celestia
Quarles and the Department of State’s lawyers may have taken the Soviet Union into consideration on the freedom of space issue, but they somehow overlooked its impact on James T. Magnan,6 a Chicagoan who had claimed nine years earlier that all of space was a nation called Celestia and that he was its absentee spacelord. He therefore immediately charged the Russians with trespassing. “I refuse to issue any license to Russia for use of outer space. Neither Russia, the United States, nor Great Britain has any claim to space except through my nation, Celestia,” the angry industrial designer told United Press International.
The Sputnik Cocktail: Vodka and Sour Grapes
Rear Admiral Rawson Bennett, the chief of naval operations and therefore the Vanguard program’s ultimate superior officer, expressed his own unambiguous feelings about the red moon. It was “a hunk of iron almost anybody could launch,” he growled before drawing on his military expertise to state that the spacecraft’s given weight seemed to be “erroneous.” Clarence B. Randall,8 one of Eisenhower’s special advisers, understandably belittled the Soviet accomplishment, calling Sputnik “a silly bauble.”
But von Braun knew better. As it happened, he and Major General John B. Medaris, the commander of the Army Ballistic Missile Agency at the Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, were entertaining Neil H. McElroy, the secretary of defense-designate, and Army Secretary Wilbur M. Brucker that very night. The U.S. Army’s chief rocket designer had good reason to know that spacecraft were anything but easy to launch. And he especially did not believe they would be easy to launch by the Navy, a point he went out of his way to make to McElroy as soon as he heard the electrifying news about Sputnik.
“Vanguard will never make it,” an exasperated von Braun told the new secretary of defense, undoubtedly thinking about the development problems the Navy’s thoroughbred was having relative to his own proven Redstones and Jupiters. “We have the hardware on the shelf,” he implored. “For God’s sake, turn us loose and let us do something. We can put up a satellite in sixty days, Mr. McElroy! Just give us a green light and sixty days.” He kept repeating “sixty days” until Medaris interrupted: “No, Wernher, ninety days.” McElroy left for Washington without committing himself.
The father of the V-2 was not engaging in idle promises. The Army Ballistic Missile Agency had remained stubbornly committed to launching a satellite despite the president’s preference for Vanguard. And the fact that the Navy project was experiencing problems only made Huntsville more frustrated and determined. On September 20, 1956, the Army launched a Redstone from Canaveral that carried two scaled-down Sergeant upper stages, both of which were set spinning before launch in a stabilization technique that worked perfectly. The Redstone-Sergeant combination tossed an eighty-four-pound payload 3,300 miles downrange over the Atlantic.10 A properly angled trajectory, von Braun would later point out, would have carried a satellite to orbit. It was on that basis that he would later complain bitterly, and with justification, that the Army could have beaten the Russians to space by a year.
What von Braun did not know, of course, was that there were people in the White House, the Department of State, and even the Pentagon who were not unhappy about the Soviet Union beating the United States to space. And Don Quarles, of course, was one of them.
The immediate reaction on most of Capitol Hill was that the Soviet spacecraft circling Earth was somehow an unfair surprise and, given the obvious power of the rocket that got it up there, a dangerous one. It was yet another manifestation of the Red Menace.
Senator Henry L. “Scoop” Jackson, a military hard-liner from Boeing’s home state of Washington and the Democratic chairman of the Military Applications Subcommittee of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, called Sputnik nothing less than “a devastating blow to the prestige of the United States as the leader of the scientific and technical world.” Stuart Symington, another cold warrior on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said that he considered the satellite “one more proof of growing Communist superiority in the all-important missile field. If this now known superiority develops into supremacy,” he warned, “the position of the free world will be critical.”
A shrill cacophony spread across the land like a prairie fire. And it didn’t take long for it to lick at Dwight Eisenhower. The Democratic Advisory Council, which included Harry Truman and Adlai Stevenson, the party’s foremost intellectual and its defeated presidential candidate, accused the administration of “unilateral disarmament.…12 The all-out effort of the Soviets to establish themselves as master of [the] space around us,” the staunch liberal declared, “must be met by all-out efforts of our own.”
Lyndon Baines Johnson, a onetime schoolteacher who rose to become the majority leader of the Senate, used a little history to construct a dire, if sophistic, historical picture with typically majestic flair. “The Roman Empire controlled the world because it could build roads,” he drawled. “Later—when moved to the sea—the British Empire was dominant because it had ships. In the air age, we were powerful because we had airplanes. Now the Communists have established a foothold in outer space. It is not very reassuring to be told that next year we will put a better satellite into the air. Perhaps it will also have chrome trim and automatic windshield wipers.”
The reference to satellites flying through “air” reflected the fact that the ambitious Texas Democrat had no apparent interest in space before Sputnik. But the Russians had handed him a superb cause; one which he instinctively recognized he could ride to glory. “The urgent race we are now in,” he would tell a Democratic conference three months later, “—or which we must enter—is not the race to perfect long-range ballistic missiles, important as that is. There is something more important than any ultimate weapon. That is the ultimate position—the position of total control over Earth that lies somewhere out in space.”
