By the mid-1950s the Korean War was over, but the perilous, thermonuclear-tipped Cold War persisted. Now the Soviet Union had the hydrogen bomb. It also was suspected of leading in the development of large ballistic missiles that could accurately hurl nuclear warheads from one continent to the other. Despite the “star-inspired ideals” that von Braun shared with scientists and a portion of the general public, it seemed he would always be tied to developing rockets as potential weapons of war.
In early 1956 a new chapter opened for the von Braun rocketeers at Redstone Arsenal and for their industrial partners. Their top-priority mission was to develop the Jupiter IRBM (intermediate-range ballistic missile), with a range of twelve hundred miles, while perfecting their shorter-range, nuclear-capable Redstone rocket. They were placed under a new command, the ABMA (Army Ballistic Missile Agency), headed by soon-to-be Maj. Gen. John Bruce Medaris. Von Braun, moving administratively with his civilian team of experts from the existing missile command co-located at the Huntsville base, was named the director of ABMA’s Development Operations Division.
The official birth date of the agency was February 1, 1956. The swashbuckling Medaris arrived brandishing a riding crop, an impressive intellect and photographic memory, and an ego to match. He soon showed himself to be a hands-on, spit-and-polish commander. In two of his first informal edicts he ordered that civilian workers’ shirttails be tucked inside pants, and that Confederate flag images be removed from pickup trucks and other vehicles driven to the post. Early in the civil rights revolution, he opposed the display of that symbol of defiance of Washington by federal employees or government contractor workers on a military base in the “Heart of Dixie” state.1
Medaris quickly assembled his top people—von Braun included—for a meeting to get things moving on the Jupiter Project, and to make sure everyone knew who was in charge. Charles A. Lundquist recalled that Medaris gave the group an opening “pep talk” and emphasized that he “would be available to fix all kinds of problems. ‘If there are any problems you can’t resolve, you let me know.’”
With only the briefest pause, von Braun responded: “Ah, yes, General, there is a problem that we’ve been working on. On the date you have selected for the next launch, there is a full Moon, and this will make optical tracking of the vehicle very difficult.”
“Well,” remembered Lundquist, “Medaris understood he had sorta been challenged: ‘What are you going to do about that full Moon?!’ He took it in good spirit, and some bantering went on. But it was clear that von Braun was testing him with the whole crowd there. Von Braun didn’t let Medaris just get away with making a statement like that.”2
Medaris, who gained the nickname “the Big M” and a second star at Redstone, had begun his military career as an enlisted man in the U.S. Marine Corps. He was just what the army missile program needed. It was locked in a struggle with the air force over control of all U.S. medium- and long-range guided missiles and stood to lose that fight. Von Braun soon came to appreciate his strong-willed commander: “Our survival as a rocket-building team is at stake. Only a tough fighter in command of the Army Ballistic Missile Agency has a chance to keep it alive, and General Medaris is such a man!”3
A mutual respect between the two ripened into friendship. Thirty years later, Medaris told his and von Braun’s old rocket team: “Wernher and I were about the most perfect possible match between two men who wish to pursue great projects together. . . . He called me ‘boss,’ but I am sure that I was as much under his guidance as he may have been under mine. . . . My life was so much richer because his path crossed mine.”4
Medaris headed ABMA for four productive years. When he left, von Braun worked under one other military commander, and then only briefly. But even under a supporter like Medaris, von Braun remained frustrated in his efforts to persuade the U.S. government to undertake space projects. “Galileo, the Wright Brothers, and Thomas Edison wouldn’t have a Chinaman’s chance here today,” the space advocate lamented to a journalist in 1956. “They’d be thrown right out of the Pentagon on their ears!”5
In the years before the fall of 1957 “von Braun was considered by many in the military as something of a flake . . . with this space business,” recalled Col. Edward D. Mohlere, then a U.S. Army Ordnance Corps commander in Detroit and later a member of von Braun’s team in Huntsville. “But he was resolute, and I was captivated by his enthusiasm. I thought, ‘Why not? It’s going to be the wave of the future.’”6
Despite Defense Department resistance to his ideas, von Braun tried to maintain his characteristic optimism. In 1955 an interviewer asked him whether men could be trained to adjust to sleeping and working over long periods in the alien weightlessness of “outer space.” “My personal feeling,” the scientist replied, “is that the time will come when old space men will complain that they can’t sleep in a bed.”7
In the mid-1950s plans were being formulated and then announced in advance for the IGY (International Geophysical Year) for 1957–58. The IGY was to be a cooperative global research emphasis on the physical sciences to advance knowledge of the Earth, the atmosphere, near-space, solar flares, and various other energy emissions from the Sun, through the use of sounding rockets, astronomical observatories, and other means. With his Redstone rocket now performing well in test flights, von Braun and others in U.S. military and scientific circles began seriously thinking of mounting Earth satellites.
One catalyst for action in 1954 was Frederick C. Durant III, the president of the IAF, whom von Braun had befriended at the time of the 1951 IAF congress in London. Ex-naval aviator Durant arranged a June 25 private conference for von Braun and several other key leaders from academia, industry, and government with Cdr. George Hoover, chief of the Office of Naval Research in Washington. The subject was the possibility of lofting an Earth-orbiting satellite in the near future.
Hoover later remarked: “By the end of the meeting, they were all quite surprised by von Braun. He had been doing so much writing that they had almost forgotten what a very practical scientist he is. When he discussed the combination of the Loki-Redstone configuration as a possible solution to [launching] the first satellite and went into the nuts and bolts of the thing, they were really impressed.”8
The ad hoc meeting produced an army-navy plan using existing hardware to lift a five-pound payload into an orbit of at least two hundred miles’ altitude as early as the fall of 1956 and no later than November 1957. It would employ a souped-up Redstone with lengthened fuel tanks as the booster rocket; upper stages of clustered small solids such as the air force’s Loki, refined by Cal Tech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory; a satellite designed by the navy; and navy tracking facilities.
Could the army be counted on to provide one of its Redstones for the proposed project? Von Braun took Hoover and his boss, Capt. Bill Fortune, U.S. Navy, to see his own army boss at the time, Maj. Gen. Ludy Toftoy. “Don’t worry about it,” Toftoy said, by von Braun’s account. “There’s only one method for getting ahead in this game. That’s by action. I promise you all the cooperation you need.”9
The plan was first code-named “Project Slug,” for reasons of military politics, and later renamed the less obtuse “Project Orbiter.” Von Braun put key people on his team to work on the project, which had so far been authorized only at lower levels, in a clandestine “skunk works” that was “quietly tolerated by his superiors” at Redstone, recalled Ernst Stuhlinger.10
Gerhard B. Heller, von Braun’s scientific assistant from 1953 to 1958 and a colleague since 1940, reminded him years later: “You wrote a letter to me [in Huntsville] from the Silver Sands Motel in Cocoa Beach [Florida] in August 1954 which shows essentially the concept of the first U.S. satellite [vehicle]. This letter caused me to become awfully busy.” Heller was working on solving the problem of atmospheric reentry of longer-range ballistic missiles by launching a test nose cone on a multistage rocket using the Redstone as the first stage. “Your satellite vehicle configuration in the letter used the same first three stages as your reentry vehicle and the fourth stage as the orbiter,” remembered Heller, noting the “amazing” coincidence.11
American officials and scientists had known since the early 1950s of Soviet intentions to launch Earth satellites. In the fall of 1954 General Toftoy submitted the Project Orbiter proposal—written by von Braun and several team members—to higher authority within the army. About the same time, the American Rocket Society’s Space Flight Committee, chaired by Milton Rosen, submitted an independent report to the National Science Foundation suggesting a study on satellites. Also, the air force was working on a satellite project that would use its future Atlas missile as a launch vehicle.
No formal response to any of those initiatives had been heard by July 29, 1955, when the Eisenhower administration announced that it had opted for a high-level government committee’s choice of the Naval Research Laboratory’s Project Vanguard to launch the first American satellites sometime in 1957. The chosen launch vehicle would combine a modified General Electric Viking liquid-fueled first stage, an Aerojet liquid-rocket second stage, and another contractor’s solid-propellant third stage. The rocket was to be capable of boosting research satellites of up to forty pounds into three-hundred-mile-high orbits. The White House, rejecting the use of a military missile—such as the proven Redstone—for the job, lauded the Vanguard’s composite launch vehicle as a new, elegantly engineered, and wholly “scientific” rocket befitting an IGY undertaking. It was also an untested design.
“This is not a design contest,” von Braun protested. “It is a contest to get a satellite into orbit, and we [the army] are way ahead on this.” To the claim that the Vanguard possessed “more dignity” than the army-navy Project Orbiter proposal, a frustrated von Braun retorted: “I’m all for dignity. But this is a Cold War tool. How dignified would our position really be if a man-made star of unknown origin suddenly appeared in our skies?”12
The Soviet Union followed the Vanguard announcement with a public statement that it, too, planned to launch an orbiter during the IGY. Its top space officials could hardly believe that Washington had chosen the Vanguard concept with its unproven launch vehicle over an existing, reliable rocket such as the von Braun team’s upgraded Redstone.13
“The United States has no time to lose if it wants to be first in orbit,” von Braun told reporters in 1956. He had pleaded in the early 1950s that an “American star” rising in the West would greatly impress the peoples of Asia and the rest of the world—and that it could be done with little difficulty and at no great cost. Now, he warned, Russia was “working hard” to launch its satellites.
The White House did not view this as a “space race” and did not share von Braun’s sense of urgency. Presidential assistant Sherman Adams had advised Eisenhower that no one would get excited about a trifle like a little manmade object circling Earth.
Von Braun also had a tough time “convincing Congress that launching a satellite was possible,” Gen. James M. Gavin, U.S. Army, recalled later.14 So, as chief of Army Research and Development at the time, he brought von Braun before a Senate committee. “Dr. von Braun began to talk about the Soviet capabilities” for satellite launching, remembered Gavin. “After listening a while, Senator [Allen Joseph] Ellender [Democrat-Louisiana] said that we must be out of our minds, that the Soviets couldn’t possibly launch a missile or a satellite. He had just come from a visit to the Soviet Union, and after seeing the ancient automobiles, and very few of them, on the streets, he was convinced that we were entirely wrong.”
As von Braun listened, nodding his head in polite acknowledgment that he was at least hearing the nonsense coming from the senator, Gavin grew concerned that the nods were being misconstrued and recorded as agreement. So he handed von Braun a note suggesting that he be careful not to give the impression of concurrence with the senator, “since I knew that neither of us did agree with him.”
That did it, Gavin recalled. “The chairman of the committee brought the hearing to an end and then called me before him and threatened to throw me out . . . for attempting to influence a witness. It brought the hearings to an end and no one was convinced that the Soviets could possibly launch a satellite.”15
Despite the Eisenhower administration’s decision, and the attitude in Congress, the never-say-die Wernher von Braun and company persisted with Project Orbiter. They promoted it as a backup to Vanguard, in case the untried launch vehicle ran into problems. In April 1956, a congressional committee shot down that proposal by a split vote. “Wernher von Braun and his rocket team, the world’s most experienced, were specifically ordered to forget about satellite work,” Time magazine later wrote. “They did no such thing, and neither did their Army bosses.”16
Von Braun showed a similar resolve a year later, when Secretary of the Army Wilber Brucker, acting on orders from Eisenhower’s defense secretary, visited him. Brucker said there was much current talk of satellites and warned von Braun to confine his work to weapons development. The secretary asked, “Do you hear me?” Stuhlinger reminded von Braun: “You said, ‘Yes, sir,’ because you had heard him.”17 While immediate military commanders looked the other way, the von Braun team continued to prepare a satellite and booster rocket for the day when a call would come for its services. Shrugging off its frustration over being officially left out of the satellite picture, the army missile team pressed on with its primary job, the Jupiter Project.
During this time, von Braun continued to take a hands-on interest in his coworkers. Young army officer R. P. “Hap” Hazzard, who served from 1956 to 1959 with ABMA at Redstone Arsenal, reminded von Braun years later of “one early incident in those traumatic years [that] served to set my own mind at ease that I was working among a dedicated and understanding group.”
“To the young officers of the [Jupiter] Project Office you were . . . a rather unknown quantity,” then-Brigadier General Hazzard told von Braun. Assigned the task of comparing the technical features of the air force’s Thor IRBM with those of the army’s Jupiter, he had first examined “the relative reentry wind-drift error of the opposing nose cones. Lacking today’s computer support, I had addressed the problem with a slide rule, the enthusiasm of youth, a shaky data base, and the inexperienced knowledge of a recent graduate student.” After Hazzard’s presentation, von Braun had complimented his conclusion as basically correct—“but commented with a degree of understanding not usually attributable to technical directors, that you felt that the indicated size of the error was about an order of magnitude too small (which it was).” With this “helpful redirection, all of us were convinced that you were not only human, but a human with empathy.” The incident had a lasting favorable influence on the group, recalled Hazzard.18
The Huntsville-based rocket team’s work on the Jupiter IRBM, in competition with the air force’s Thor, actually gave the army the chance it needed in the satellite sweepstakes. Saying he must have test vehicles to work on nose cone and other developmental problems with Jupiter, von Braun won permission to build twelve Jupiter-Cs. They bore an uncanny resemblance to the juiced-up Redstones he had proposed for Project Orbiter in partnership with the navy.19
By September 20, 1956, von Braun’s team had readied the first Jupiter-C for launch from the air force missile test range at Cape Canaveral. The four-stage rocket contained a dummy satellite package in its nose. Pentagon bosses, suspicious that von Braun might try to pull a fast one and beat Vanguard into orbit, sent specific “Don’t you dare!” orders to General Medaris, who had no choice but to comply. “Wernher,” said Medaris in a telephone call to the cape, “I must put you under direct orders personally to inspect that fourth stage to make sure it is not live.”20
The Jupiter-C, with an inert fourth stage and no satellite aboard, flew to an altitude of six hundred miles and covered a distance of thirty-three hundred miles—a record then for any U.S. rocket. As reports confirming the success reached him in the blockhouse, von Braun did a little dance. Any doubts that they could put a satellite into orbit evaporated.
The elation was short-lived. The Jupiter-C success was rewarded two months later with an order from Defense Secretary Charles E. Wilson limiting army missiles to two hundred miles—regressing the German-born rocketeers to the range of their V-2 days. Wilson was burned in effigy in Huntsville’s Courthouse Square. The U.S. Air Force and its savvy Maj. Gen. Bernard “Bennie” Schriever had temporarily won the missile political wars. (Wilson’s edict was later rescinded.) A measure of perceived justice came in 1957. The defense secretary pinned the Civilian Service Award, the Pentagon’s highest nonmilitary citation, on von Braun’s chest for ABMA’s successful first reentry by a nose cone using the agency’s innovative ablative design.
The Vanguard Project’s top leadership included older and newer acquaintances of von Braun. John P. Hagen, a new acquaintance, was project director; Milton Rosen was chief engineer (and a persistent critic of the gung-ho von Braun’s early ideas on space); and Richard Porter (a key interrogator of von Braun and his team in Germany after their surrender) headed General Electric’s work on the Viking booster. All were able professionals, yet von Braun and the army knew that Vanguard was bound to hit technical snags because of the complexity of the new, unproven, if beautifully conceived, launch vehicle. Sure enough, setbacks arose with the start of Vanguard testing in 1956. The von Braun group offered to partner with the Vanguard team and substitute the Old Reliable Redstone (Jupiter-C) for the Viking-based rocket but keep the Vanguard name and payload. The navy spurned the offer.
Von Braun had one more card to play. As a contingency plan for the future, he decided to hang on to one of the Jupiter-Cs for what he officially termed, with tongue firmly in cheek, a “long-term storage test.” Under the same cover story, Jet Propulsion Lab officials did likewise with several Sergeant solid-propellant, upper-stage substitutes for the previously chosen Loki rockets. Just as a backup.21
In November 1956, von Braun talked about Vanguard with visiting astronomer John O’Keefe in his office at Redstone Arsenal. O’Keefe worked for the map section of the Army Corps of Engineers and had come to ask von Braun for precise geographic data on Moscow for missile targeting—and to discuss satellites. Just weeks earlier the von Braun team had been forbidden to allow the fourth stage of its uprated Redstone to achieve orbit. He told O’Keefe that radar scans showed the Soviets were firing ballistic missiles capable of putting up satellites.
Early signs revealed Vanguard was in trouble. It all meant an open path to a Russian coup in orbit, von Braun warned. An upset O’Keefe asked what he could do. The hyperconfident von Braun answered: “I want you to go see John Hagen . . . and I want you to tell him that if he wants to, he can paint “Vanguard” right up the side of my rocket. He can do anything he wants to, but he is to use my rocket, not his, because my rocket will work and his won’t.”
Escorting O’Keefe out, von Braun said Hagen would probably respond that it doesn’t matter who reaches orbit first. If that happens, von Braun implored, “Will you say to him, if that’s what he really thinks, will he for Christ’s sake get out of the way of the people who think it makes a hell of a lot of difference!”22
In the early autumn of 1957, members of the von Braun team had detected various clues that the Soviet Union was on the brink of launching an artificial moon around planet Earth. Most U.S officials and army brass were unbelieving: Not those technologically backward, peasant Russians! On October 1, Radio Moscow broadcast the radio frequencies to which people could tune in for transmissions from a forthcoming USSR object in space.
Then, on October 4, the “man-made . . . Red Star” that von Braun had warned about appeared in the heavens. It was spherical, weighed 184 pounds, and emitted beeping signals from orbit. It was named Sputnik (“Little Moon”). It stunned the United States and other nations of the West. It gave birth to the space age.
Von Braun got word of it during cocktails before a private dinner party at Redstone with visiting senior army and Defense Department officials from Washington. His response: “I’ll be damned!”23