If anyone did, Wernher von Braun knew the value of timing. In a coincidence worthy of a Hollywood film, on the evening of October 4, 1957, he was enjoying drinks before dinner at the Redstone Arsenal Officers Club with a roomful of Defense Department and army brass visiting from Washington. The main guest of honor was President Dwight Eisenhower’s new Secretary of Defense designate, Neil McElroy. Community leader W. L. “Will” Halsey Jr., who was present, recalled that the room was so heavy with top brass that “it seemed like the two-star generals were serving drinks to the three-star generals.”1
From his nearby Huntsville home, Gordon Harris, public information chief at the Army Ballistic Missile Agency at Redstone, telephoned the group with the sensational news he had received a moment earlier from a London Times reporter seeking reaction from von Braun and others. The Soviet Union had launched an artificial moon into Earth orbit! It was named Sputnik and it was broadcasting beeping signals for people the world over to hear.2
“Those damn bastards!” was army Maj. Gen. John Bruce Medaris’s response (to Ernst Stuhlinger a little later).3 Von Braun seized the moment with his visitors: “We could have done it with our Redstone two years ago!” He began talking “as if he had suddenly been vaccinated with a Victrola needle,” recalled Medaris. “In his driving urgency to unburden his feelings, the words tumbled over one another.”4
“We knew they were going to do it!” von Braun told McElroy. “Vanguard [the anointed U.S. satellite project] will never make it! We have the hardware on the shelf! For God’s sake, turn us loose and let us do something!”5 Then, a bit more calmly, he pressed on: “Sir, when you get to Washington you’ll find all hell has broken loose. I wish you would keep one thought in mind through all the noise and confusion: We can fire a satellite into orbit sixty days from the moment you give us the green light.”6
“Not sixty days!” objected an incredulous Secretary of the Army Wilber Brucker, who had accompanied McElroy to Huntsville.
“Sixty days,” von Braun insisted.
“Wernher, make it ninety days, will you?” interjected Medaris, not quite so impetuous.
As von Braun remembered it: “‘Okay,’ I said, ‘ninety it is.’ But I really meant sixty.”7
Sputnik shocked America. It was the nation’s Pearl Harbor of space, a national call to action. It also threw into serious question the presumed technological superiority of the United States and its cherished public education system. It heightened fears about national defense; the same powerful Russian rocket that hurled a satellite into orbit could also boost nuclear payloads great distances. Editorial writers railed. The public worried.
I. M. Levitt, the prominent astronomer and director of Fels Planetarium in Philadelphia, soon went public with the charge that an “astonishing piece of stupidity” by Washington had led to this “astounding propaganda victory” by the Soviets. Levitt revealed that the army’s von Braun team could have launched a satellite earlier with a rocket already in hand but was reined in by the Pentagon.8
Much to von Braun’s chagrin, President Eisenhower dismissed Sputnik as “one small ball in the air ... something which does not raise my apprehensions—not one iota.”9 The president’s closest aide, Sherman Adams, also pooh-poohed the orbiter’s importance. He said America’s purpose in planning to launch, eventually, its own satellite was to serve science, not to win “an outer-space basketball game.”
Texas Democrat Lyndon B. Johnson, then majority leader of the U.S. Senate, disputed the Republican administration’s benign assessment. “The Roman Empire controlled the world because it could build roads,” LBJ observed to the press. The World War II navy veteran added, “Later, when men moved to the sea, the British Empire was dominant because it had ships. Now the Communists have established a foothold in outer space.” Referring to Eisenhower’s selection of the navy’s elegantly designed Vanguard over von Braun’s and the army’s jerry-built Jupiter-C, Johnson needled: “It is not very reassuring to be told that next year we will put a ‘better’ satellite into the air. Perhaps it will even have chrome trim and automatic windshield wipers.”10
The morning after Sputnik’s debut, von Braun and Medaris escorted Defense Secretary-designate McElroy and his party of visiting Washington officials around ABMA (Army Ballistic Missile Agency) facilities at Redstone. Next came an impromptu briefing. Army officer Truman F. Cook attended both the reception and the follow-up briefing. Reminiscing years later with von Braun, retired Colonel Cook recalled “being impressed by the confidence of your unrehearsed presentation the following day regarding the Jupiter-C capability to rescue the reputation of the United States in the space race.”11
Out on the speechmaking trail, a frustrated von Braun declared that what America’s various rocket and space projects needed most was freedom from obstruction and interference by government scientific committees and the like. In other, more upbeat remarks, he predicted that the space age obstacles the nation faced—the medical barrier, the propulsion barrier, the atmospheric entry heat barrier—would soon fade away. “Right now, however,” the rocket scientist added, “we’re up against the ‘cash barrier’—and that one doesn’t always fade away so quickly.”12
To those who wondered, and worried, in late 1957 about the Soviets’ obvious lead in rocket launch power, von Braun explained: “There was no ballistic missile development in the United States between 1945 and 1951 because there was no obvious need for it, no interest in it, no money for it.” After World War II, “public interest in the United States turned away from weapons toward consumer goods. Few people in this country realized that the rulers of the Soviet Union were in no mood to lose their wartime gains through hasty disarmament.”13
Von Braun elaborated on that point in a late-1957 magazine interview: “The six years between 1945 and 1951 are irretrievably lost. The Russians are turning out more scientists than we are, and good ones too. We could have done what they did if we had started in 1946 to integrate the space flight and missile programs. Our lot has been one crash program after another. One fine day we suddenly decided we had to have an ICBM. It was like telling the Wright Brothers to build a B-29.”14
But he labeled as “nonsense” much of the self-criticism that swept the United States after Sputnik I. He cautioned Americans against overreacting and beating themselves up over real and imagined national shortcomings.
People often asked why the United States lagged behind the Soviet Union in space, and what would it take for America to pull ahead. He usually asked his audiences, “How much would you be willing to sacrifice for us to do it?” “The classic answer I got,” he recalled, “was from a fellow who said, ‘We have two automobiles. I’ll sacrifice my wife’s.’”
The rocket team at ABMA was still waiting—and hoping—for the green light from Washington in late October 1957 when the Association of the U.S. Army invited von Braun to share his post-Sputnik thoughts in a talk in the nation’s capital. His address was titled “The Lessons of Sputnik.” With an audience that included Army Secretary Brucker, Chief of Staff Gen. Maxwell D. Taylor, and other army heavyweights, he pulled few punches. “October 4, 1957, the day when Sputnik appeared in the skies, will be remembered on this planet as the day on which the Age of Space Flight was ushered in. . . . For the United States, the failure to be the first in orbit is a national tragedy that has damaged American prestige around the globe.”
Furthermore, he said the “Soviet success” taught America no real lessons in science, technology, or project management. Rather, this country “made some grave errors in judgment. We failed to recognize the tremendous psychological impact of an omnipresent artificial moon, visible to anyone with a pair of good eyes, and audible to anyone with a simple radio receiver.” He warned of other Russian space “firsts” to come.15
The wait was brief. On November 3, a month after the first Sputnik, the Soviets launched Sputnik II. The orbiting 1,120-pound payload included a dog named Laika. America’s Vanguard was nowhere near a launch pad yet.
A few days later the Pentagon said it was ready to direct the army’s Jupiter-C team to “prepare” a satellite payload for launching—if needed. It intended to stop short of giving full authority to launch. Von Braun, Medaris, and their Jet Propulsion Lab partner in California, William H. “Bill” Pickering, all sent word threatening to resign if they did not receive an unqualified go-ahead.16
Fortunately, Defense Secretary McElroy had taken office less than a week before. He remembered the confident sales pitches by von Braun and Medaris at Redstone. On November 8 the wire services carried the story: “The Secretary of Defense today directed the Department of the Army to proceed with launching an Earth satellite.” Under heavy public and congressional pressure, the Eisenhower administration had put aside whatever misgivings and biases it held regarding the army’s von Braun team and its plan. McElroy flashed the green light to Medaris, who immediately gave von Braun the good news over the office intercom: “Wernher, let’s go!”17
With the “Go!” now in hand, the ABMA team followed up on earlier steps to secure a scientific payload superior to the five-pound chunk of hardware von Braun had first proposed in Project Orbiter. Arrangements were made with James A. Van Allen, head of the Physics Department at the University of Iowa, whom Stuhlinger had first visited in 1954 concerning possible satellite experiment packages for Jupiter-C.18
Van Allen had prepared payload instrumentation—cosmic radiation counters and other sensors—that would conveniently fit in the nose compartment of either Vanguard’s Viking composite vehicle or the Jupiter-C. The Iowa scientist recalled decades later that during ABMA-JPL talks, Bill Pickering had pointed out that Van Allen’s cosmic-ray instrument package was the only scientific package planned for America’s International Geophysical Year satellite project that had also been configured for Jupiter-C, as a backup to Vanguard. Van Allen noted that von Braun, “who had endorsed and fostered this decision,” had replied to Pickering with feigned innocence, “Isn’t that interesting?”19
In the frenetic post-Sputnik days, the typically forward-looking von Braun quietly developed a plan to use a standard Redstone missile to put a man in space. ABMA’s General Medaris liked the idea. He dispatched von Braun to Washington to sell it to higher authorities. Teamed with him were then-Col. John G. Zierdt, chief of ABMA’s Control Office, and Ted Hardeman, head of financial planning. The men called on Herbert York, then a member of the President’s Science Advisory Committee (and later the head of the Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency). Major General Zierdt years later recalled the scene, and a memorable von Braun ploy:
Your presentation was lucid and to the point. You answered all the technical questions perfectly and then Dr. York said, “Now let’s talk about money.” At this point you threw up your hands, said, “That is for somebody else to worry about,” and walked out.
So I was left holding the bag and trying to explain some dollar figures I had never seen before. I muddled through somehow, but I have always remembered how neatly you dumped the problem in my lap.20
Von Braun’s plan ultimately gained approval—and necessary funding. It was also in the Sputnik aftermath that von Braun telephoned an old colleague in Boston, Joachim Kuettner, who was not then working with the ABMA missile/ space team.
“Would you want to head up a project to put the first man in space?”21
“Of course,” Kuettner answered, “but I think I don’t know enough about it.”
“Neither does anybody else,” replied von Braun.
Recalled Kuettner: “That was all, and I was off for Huntsville.”22
The navy’s Vanguard/Viking had already suffered test failures. On December 6, 1957, carrying the nation’s intended first satellite payload, it was readied for flight from Cape Canaveral. The navy gave it the downplayed designation of TV-3, for Test Vehicle 3, in case of failure. It exploded at liftoff, tracking the pattern of almost all untried rockets on their first few attempted launchings. The fiery failure, which was splashed all over television screens, the front pages of daily papers, and the covers of news magazines, shook the national psyche. Labeled “Kaputnik” and “Stayputnik” by the press, the disaster turned the spotlight brighter on the experienced, unsurprised von Braun group, who were busy working offstage.
Within a week of having gained the green light from the Pentagon on November 8, von Braun had looked ahead and made a launch-pad reservation at Cape Canaveral for January 29, 1958. The Number 29 super-Redstone (Jupiter-C) vehicle—set aside in 1956 under the subterfuge of a “long-term storage test”—was hauled out and made ready. “All she needed was a good dusting,” von Braun later remarked.23
On the night of January 29, the army’s rocket and its satellite payload were “Go” on the pad. Weather conditions were not. Strong winds at high altitudes forced a postponement until the next night. The same thing happened then. The evening of January 31 arrived. For a change, the weather cooperated. It was time to launch. First-stage ignition came at 10:55 PM EST. The rocket rose on cue, its “spinning tub” of assemblies of small rockets whirling at the top for added stability in flight. The launch vehicle roared upward.
General Medaris was at the cape for the launch, but von Braun was waiting out the countdown and liftoff in Washington, along with Pickering and Van Allen. They had been told “in so many polite words,” von Braun recalled, “that we had to sweat it out” in the Pentagon’s Communications Center. He had worn a dark suit that evening because “we had been told that if it was successful we had to go meet the press” at the National Academy of Science in Washington. “Nobody had said what we should do if it missed. But just in case things didn’t come off so well, I had a pair of dark sunglasses with me and was determined to sneak away to a still darker movie theater.”24
Von Braun had calculated that the tracking station east of Pasadena should begin receiving radio signals from the orbiter 106 minutes after liftoff, or at precisely 12:41 AM. JPL’S Pickering got an open phone line to the California station. At 12:41 he asked if there was any signal. The answer was no. More minutes passed.
“None of the stations had heard a thing” from the overdue satellite, von Braun recalled. “That went on for what appeared to be hours. Meanwhile, we had to keep up appearances, and had to smile and convince everybody that things were in perfect shape.” At one point Army Secretary Brucker probed, “Wernher, what happened?” Anxious generals looked at one another and asked, “What’s wrong? What happened?” Von Braun said, “I heard Bill [Pickering] shouting into the telephone, ‘Why the hell don’t you hear anything?!’” Then, in quick succession, four receiving stations “came in and said they had a clear signal. At this moment we knew that we were in the satellite and space business.”25
The delay was later attributed to a slightly greater velocity at fourth-stage burnout and, thus, a higher orbital path than expected. What had seemed an eternity to von Braun and the others had lasted eight minutes. “Those moments were the most exciting eight minutes of my life!” he recalled.
President Eisenhower made the public announcement: “The United States has successfully placed a scientific satellite in orbit around the Earth” as part of the nation’s IGY participation. He named the eighteen-pound, four-foot-long satellite Explorer. It was in an elliptical orbit measuring 223 by 1,580 miles.26
At the full-scale, 2 AM press conference in Washington, a joyful von Braun told reporters: “We have firmly established our foothold in space. We will never give it up again.” He noted that there was “dancing in the streets of Huntsville”—a spontaneous, late-night celebration had erupted downtown in the Courthouse Square—“and jubilation all over the country.” Of the Explorer feat and his team of German-born rocket experts, now “Americans by choice,” von Braun told an interviewer: “It makes us feel that we paid back part of the debt of gratitude we owed this country.”27
A news photo showed von Braun, Pickering, and Van Allen holding a full-scale model of the satellite over their heads in triumph. Van Allen’s comment on first seeing the picture was, “Wernher, as usual, carries the brunt of the load!”
With Explorer aloft and America at last in space, von Braun became an instant national hero in the eyes of many and a household name in many lands. Among the stacks of congratulatory messages was a telegram that read: “Please accept my warmest congratulations on your great achievement which has thrilled and delighted us here in Britain. You and I had some differences during the war. I am so glad we are now working together for the same cause. I hope we may meet personally one day. Best wishes.”28
The well-wisher was Duncan Sandys, the British intelligence officer who had helped plan the devastating 1943 RAF strike against the Peenemünde rocket center. His specific task had been to target the quarters of von Braun and his key team members and blow them to oblivion. Sandys, son-in-law of wartime Prime Minister Winston Churchill, had become minister of defense in the 1950s.
News of the launching of Explorer also elated von Braun’s parents, then living in Oberaudorf, West Germany. “We have been waiting for a long time for Wernher to get a chance to show what he can do,” a happy Baron Magnus von Braun told reporters. “Two years ago, Wernher warned over television that sooner or later we would see a ‘Red star’ rising over the horizon. Few people believed him then, but now they have turned to him to match that Red star.” The elder von Brauns cabled their middle son with this happy message: “BEEP, BEEP, BEEP!”
The space scientist had waxed philosophical—and poetic—to the press when the Soviets orbited the first space satellite. He observed that Sputnik had launched an era that “will free man from his remaining chains, the chains of gravity which still tie him to this planet. It will open to him the gates of heaven.” After Explorer 1 he philosophized in a speech about this “small beginning” and the unpredictable, intangible benefits of man’s leaving Earth and exploring other worlds:
We have stepped into a new, high road from which there can be no turning back. As we probe farther into the area beyond our sensible atmosphere, man will learn more about his environment; he will understand better the order and beauty of creation. He may then come to realize that war, as we know it, will avail him nothing but catastrophe. He may grasp the truth that there is something much bigger than his one little world. Before the majesty of what he will find out there, he must stand in reverential awe. This, then, is the acid test as man moves into the unknown.29
Von Braun could not resist pointing to Explorer 1 as an affirmation of his earlier exhortations that his team must stay together and not defect to industry, if it was to make history, accomplish the greatest good, and achieve collective glory. “What corporation,” he emphasized, “would have sent up a satellite?”30
Less than a week after their satellite triumph, President Eisenhower invited von Braun, Pickering, and Van Allen, among other guests of honor, to a White House dinner saluting Explorer and other recent national achievements. The JPL director, von Braun, and their wives were staying at Washington’s DuPont Plaza Hotel and planned to share a cab that evening to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
“About ten minutes before the taxi was due,” Pickering recalled, “Wernher called up to my room and said, ‘Have you got a spare white tie?’ I said, ‘What do you mean? I rented my suit and I got one white tie with it.’ Wernher said, ‘I rented my suit and I got zero white ties with it. What are we going to do?’” Pickering suggested that von Braun ask the hotel manager for help. Von Braun’s young army aide, Lt. Fred Kleis, had already phoned formal wear rental shops in the capital but found all had closed. “After a while,” Pickering recalled, “Wernher called back and said, ‘No, the hotel manager was no help. But I have decided that maybe we ought to just go to the White House, and when we get there they should be able to handle this problem.’”31
Presidential Press Secretary James Hagerty was telephoned and told about the problem. He told von Braun not to worry, that a white tie would be awaiting him at the White House. “We drive up to the front door, get out, and somebody whips Wernher aside,” Pickering recalled. “He’s gone for about ten seconds, and he comes back to the line—with a white tie on!” After a delay, and with the guests already seated in the dining room, to von Braun’s shock the president entered the room wearing a black tie and complaining to his press secretary, “Jim, I can’t seem to find my white one anywhere.” Ike apologized both for being late and for wearing a black tie, Pickering recalled.32 “We looked all over the White House,” said the president, “but we could not find my white tie.”33
Soon after Explorer’s ascent, a class of first-graders in New York wrote von Braun and sent their drawings of suggested satellite designs. When he answered them and sent an autographed picture, the children’s teacher proudly hung a sign in their classroom proclaiming “Wernher’s Little Learners.” And when a group of children in Illinois mailed him $50 they had collected to boost America’s second-place space program, he returned it with the suggestion the class “might wish to apply the money in some way to reward deserving boys and girls who do well in science or mathematics.”34
In February 1958, a second Vanguard satellite launch attempt fizzled within fourteen seconds of ignition. By March, when von Braun’s team prepared to launch its second Explorer, only two man-made moons—Explorer 1 and Sputnik II— circled the planet. Sputnik I’s orbit had decayed fast, and the trailblazing satellite had burned up on reentering the atmosphere. The ABMA team fell short with Explorer 2 when a JPL upper stage failed to ignite. Later in March the beleaguered Vanguard team succeeded on its third try and put a satellite into orbit. The army soon recovered with back-to-back successes with Explorers 3 and 4 that year.
Earlier in the year, the von Braun/ABMA team had received a new directive saying it could return to developing and test launching rockets of greater range than the standard two-hundred-mile Redstone. The United States had the army’s Jupiter IRBM, first fired successfully in 1957; the comparable air force Thor; and the air force’s much more powerful Atlas ICBM in the works. Still, the Soviet Union held a commanding lead in launch power.
Not widely known is the fact that the U.S. Navy had shown interest in the Jupiter back in late 1955 as a shipboard-launched IRBM. Design changes and engineering support from the army ensued with that in mind, laboratory director Hans Hueter related. His Systems Support Equipment Lab within the von Braun organization at Redstone Arsenal proceeded to develop “a support equipment and [on]board launch concept” that examined aspects such as “ship motions, missile training, emergency missile dumping, missile tail grab and release mechanisms,” Hueter reported in 1960. But after several months of development, a contractor’s study found that “the handling of large quantities of liquid propellant on board a ship was . . . too hazardous.” The result: “the Navy cancelled the project and turned to solid propellants.” Still, the army’s Jupiter, which was later turned over to the air force, retained design features that resulted from the navy’s interest.35
Also in 1955, a senior engineer on von Braun’s team, Georg von Tiesenhausen, conducted a Secret study for the navy on a submarine-launched Jupiter IRBM. It was called “Project Navy: A Study on Submersible Launching Containers for Guided Missiles.” The investigation harked back to a concept pursued at Peenemünde near war’s end that envisioned floating V-2s long distances before firing them at New York and other targets.36
Several months into the space age, von Braun detected certain assumptions being made by a sizable segment of the U.S. public and its national leadership—assumptions that perturbed him. He spoke out in what was fast becoming characteristic candor, and was widely quoted.
I am getting hot under the collar in a most unscientific fashion. Like it or not, the United States is in a space race, yet our science program lags. Apparently a large section of the public believes that we can sit on our hands until Soviet science falls apart as it is bound to do, they assume, under a dictatorship. That is wrong.
The second assumption is that we can catch up if we spend enough money. Wrong again. The third is that we have no business in space. That is the worst mistake of all.37
Von Braun also warned against the U.S. preoccupation with reacting to whatever its chief competitor did, rather than pursuing a maximum effort of its own design. The von Braun group had done preliminary work at ABMA on a space launch vehicle with a booster stage of more than one million pounds of thrust—for a possible lunar project. The team submitted a proposal to conduct developmental studies of clustering engines for the first stage of the Nova heavy-lift rocket to the Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency. ARPA had been created in 1957 to referee among the military branches and their competing space proposals. It had yes-or-no authority over all space proposals with defense applications.
Representatives of ARPA visited Redstone in early 1958 for a meeting on ABMA’s Nova booster proposal. After a briefing by von Braun, an ARPA official inquired, “How much funding will you require?”
“How much do you have?” asked von Braun, no fool.
The official replied that $10 million was all the agency could spare.
“That’s wonderful!” exclaimed von Braun. He’d take it, he said, and the project would get under way.38 It did. The big-booster work would lead directly to the team’s Saturn family of heavy-duty space launch vehicles.
Donald R. Bowden was a young project engineer with ABMA in the late 1950s when he gave one of his first briefings to von Braun. He discovered a surprising trait that made him agree with Hermann Oberth’s assessment of his former protégé; of the qualities he “admired most” in von Braun—“your organizational talent . . . relentless drive . . . self-discipline . . . even-tempered fairness and engaging ways . . . most of all I enjoyed your frankness and easy comportment, never putting on airs.”39
Bowden was working in California on the Jupiter missile’s S-3D engine with North American Aviation’s Rocketdyne group. A technical problem with a critical valve had arisen, and the contractor came up with a solution. Back in Huntsville, he went to von Braun’s office seeking approval of the proposed change. “I was explaining to him how this new valve worked,” remembered Bowden. “And he said, ‘Wait a minute, wait a minute! You’re on Lesson Two here, and I need Lesson One. Tell me how this valve works, and what does it do, and how does the gas generator feed the turbine here, and ... ’”40
The young engineer was “astounded that a world-famous rocket scientist would admit he needed some ‘Lesson One’ instructions.” Bowden gave von Braun a detailed A-to-Z explanation of the new valve and how it would solve the problem. He quickly grasped the specifics. But the briefer had seen “humility,” he said, in his leader that day. Bowden, who stayed for years with the von Braun team as project manager and later succeeded as an entrepreneur and corporate CEO, added: “The lesson I learned from von Braun is that no matter how important or even famous you are, if you don’t understand something, you don’t let your ego get in the way of your truly learning the details.... Don’t try to fake it and go on to make a wrong decision.”41
Around 1958-59, von Braun became involved with ABMA’s foreign missile intelligence unit at Redstone, recalled Rankin A. “Randy” Clinton, then the intelligence unit’s technical chief. He needed to know what he could and could not say about Soviet missiles and space capabilities, from a classified-information standpoint, as he prepared to testify before Congress or to give a major speech: “He would come over to our office for a session,” remembered Clinton, “and he’d always say, ‘Randy, make me smart!’ In other words, he had to learn what information was cleared for ‘white world’ use,” as opposed to the “black world” of military secrecy. “He was very sensitive to the security aspects of it.”42
Von Braun soon became directly engaged in the analysis of photographs taken by America’s high-flying U-2 spy planes. “Many times he would come over and look . . . at the film of Soviet missile emplacements,” Clinton revealed. “We bought a stereo microscope for his use, so we wouldn’t have to set up a screen display every time. He was certainly helpful to us. He could spot the ‘fingerprints’ of old [Peenemünde] colleagues” in the U-2 photos.43 “It took a presidential waiver to clear von Braun for this work with us,” added Clinton, because the newly naturalized U.S. citizen’s security rating was not high enough.44
Meanwhile, with the Soviet Union continuing to boast of its space victories, U.S. leaders, including Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson, urged that space exploration be given a high national priority. In April 1958 a still-lukewarm President Eisenhower sent Congress a proposal to establish a national space agency. A month later the Russians orbited Sputnik III—a record-setting three-thousand-pound satellite. Congress passed the Space Act in mid-July to create NASA (the National Aeronautics and Space Administration) largely from the old NACA (National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics) headquartered at Langley, Virginia. Ike signed the measure into law later that month and appointed T. Keith Glennan as NASA’s first administrator.
Von Braun went to Washington late that summer for a private meeting with Glennan. He was aware of discussions between the new NASA chief and Defense Secretary McElroy about the possible transfer of von Braun and the bulk of his 4,800-person Development Operations Division to NASA. He was also aware of Secretary of the Army Brucker’s and General Medaris’s vigorous opposition to that move. Glennan reminded von Braun years later that the scientist understandably was trying to learn more about how his team and operation would fare if the transfer to NASA went through. Glennan reminisced:
While I would not accuse you of it, I think I detected an effort to secure a preferred status for your group. After a discussion that lasted more than two hours in which you were unable to gain your desired objective, you rose to depart. Your final remark, delivered with that wonderful smile of yours, was one I shall never forget. It went, “Dr. Glennan, all we really want is a very rich and generous uncle!” That, you did get!45
Von Braun also got an early taste of intra-agency intrigue and infighting in the late 1950s during the transition to NASA’s control over U.S. space activities. And some of his Huntsville teammates got a good look at a von Braun not easily shut out of the game. As plans for America’s Project Mercury and its one-man space “capsules” were taking shape, von Braun took a planeload of ABMA people up to Langley, later called “the first Houston.” Elements of what was to become NASA’s Manned Spacecraft Center (later Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center) in Texas were then still housed at the Virginia center.
The discussions dealt with various aspects of implementing Mercury. NACA’s Robert R. “Bob” Gilruth, soon to become director of the Houston field center, took a leading role in the talks. They went on all day and covered the von Braun team’s plan for using its standard Redstone rockets to loft the first U.S. astronauts into space on arcing, fifteen-minute, suborbital flights over the Atlantic. The plan was deemed the quickest way to get Americans technically “into space,” albeit short of orbit.
Charles A. Lundquist, a member of the Huntsville contingent, recalled that the dialogue at the meeting eventually took a testy turn. “Toward the end of the meeting von Braun said to Gilruth, ‘I hear reports that you’re planning some kind of two-man capsule and you’re talking to the air force about it. Would you care to give us a briefing on it?’ And Gilruth said, ‘No, I wouldn’t.’ And von Braun said, ‘Well, we’ll see about that.’”
And on that combative note, Lundquist remembered, the meeting ended. “It was the Gemini program they [Gilruth and company] were working on and they were trying to exclude Huntsville,” he recalled. “When von Braun went to headquarters he got the assignment for us to be involved in the [launch] vehicle end of it.”46
At the outset of their relationship, master aeronautical engineer Bob Gilruth cared little for von Braun, according to Houston space center’s Christopher Columbus “Chris” Kraft and scientist Charles Lundquist of the von Braun team. Gilruth had been engaged in warplane design in World War II, worked for a time in England, and came to detest Nazi Germany’s V-2 missile effort and those behind it, Kraft wrote.
His early distrust of von Braun eventually developed into mutual professional respect, von Braun colleagues maintained. “In the pre-Apollo days, when roles and responsibilities were not yet decided, there was some early resentment between the centers” and their directors, Frank Williams recalled. “It was not the most harmonious of relationships.”
But that antipathy eased as soon as Project Apollo roles were established and other major issues settled. “The two shook hands. They didn’t go out drinking together, but there was definitely a mutual respect, admiration, and friendliness between the two,” added Williams. Von Braun gained further appreciation from Gilruth ”by giving him more payload [weight] than promised [through increased launch vehicle thrust], because all three Apollo spacecraft modules came in overweight.” From the Houston end, Gilruth’s chief engineer, Maxime “Max” Faget, concurred, “They got along very well together.”47
As NASA field center chiefs, the two men followed different program management styles and remained cutthroat competitors for new roles and funding. For public consumption, however, the pair sought to present “an image of full cooperation,” for the good of the overall program.48 Von Braun, in particular, worked hard to preserve that perception and never spoke ill of Gilruth, in private or otherwise, according to both Stuhlinger and von Braun management associate James T. Shepherd. But the “hard feelings” between Houston and Huntsville were the reality, and the “image of unity” was a fabrication, Shepherd recalled.49
Through the years Gilruth gave every sign of believing that all von Braun wanted was everything. He was not far off the mark. Von Braun’s organization had long controlled army rocket launch operations at Cape Canaveral, as well as testing at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, and von Braun lobbied hard for basing the astronauts and their training activities at Huntsville. As the NASA organizational battles came and went, von Braun won some and lost some. While Gilruth had Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson of Texas in his corner, von Braun could count on help from savvy veteran Senator John Sparkman of Huntsville. Before long the von Braun–led space center had facilities and operations at five locations in four southern states, including support activities at Cape Canaveral and a coast-to-coast network of project branch offices.
The first of ABMA’s Redstone/Jupiter-C rockets carrying space payloads—the Explorer satellites—were rechristened “Juno I” vehicles. When the agency’s more muscular Jupiter IRBMs were pressed into service as space launchers, they gained the unmilitary-sounding designation “Juno II”—Jupiter plus three upper stages. In early March 1959 it was an army Juno II that launched the unmanned Pioneer 4 spacecraft on the first intentional fly-by of the Moon. The spacecraft went on to become the first U.S. satellite to go into permanent planetary orbit around the Sun. (Two months earlier, the Soviets’ Luna 1—in Russian, Lunik— had missed its planned lunar landing and gone into solar orbit.)
Less than three months later, America’s first space passengers of significance—small rhesus monkey “Able” and squirrel monkey “Baker”—took a sixteen-hundred-mile, suborbital ride in the nose cone of a Juno I rocket as a warm-up for Mercury astronauts. Both primates survived the test flight and were safely recovered, although “Able” died while navy surgeons were removing biomedical probes. “Miss Baker” went on to live a long and healthy life as the star of the show at Huntsville’s U.S. Space & Rocket Center.
The army’s von Braun group had a string of three straight Explorer successes going when, in the summer of 1959, it prepared to launch Explorer 6 at Cape Canaveral. The satellite had a planned orbit with a perigee, or low point in altitude, of about one hundred miles. But at launch the Jupiter-C rose briefly, veered abruptly, and then dived back low over the launch site. The range safety officer pulled the “destruct” switch, and the rocket and its satellite payload were blown up before anyone got hurt.
The payload designer, team veteran Josef Boehm, was distraught when his two years of work were obliterated in seconds. He managed at least a smile a few days later, though, when von Braun handed him a photograph. It showed the errant rocket zooming horizontally among the launch towers at a height of only two to three hundred feet. The picture bore an inscription:
To Josef Boehm—
Nothing wrong with it,
just perigee a little low
Wernher von Braun
“I will always treasure your inscription,” Boehm reminisced years later. “Many of your associates will remember situations where you eased the impact caused by mishaps or frustrations with your generous attitude and exuberant humor.”50
It was in 1959 also that von Braun began mentoring a young Associated Press reporter. The arrangement evolved into “a lasting friendship,” remembered Howard Benedict, who went on to become a space author and the dean of print aerospace correspondents at Cape Canaveral through more than three decades.51
The day Sputnik I opened the space age, Benedict was the only Associated Press news features reporter at work in the New York offices and available to do a Sunday feature analyzing the meaning of it all. One of the people he interviewed by telephone was von Braun. The piece, via an accident of timing, “made me an ‘expert,’” Benedict recalled. The Associated Press called on him to write any “space story” that came up thereafter, and he found himself being dispatched to Florida all through 1958 for the early U.S. satellite launchings and attempted launchings.
The world’s largest wire news service moved him the next year to Cape Canaveral to cover the missile-space beat full time. Benedict was still a “befuddled reporter” the day he met von Braun soon after settling in. He “probably could surmise from my questions at a news conference that I knew very little about missiles or rockets,” recalled the journalist. “Von Braun [also] knew that one way to sell his ideas, to get people thinking about them, was through the popular press, especially those with worldwide circulation, like the Associated Press.” Benedict continued:
That is probably why he approached me after that first news conference and asked me if he could be of help in educating me about rocketry. I was flattered, and a couple nights later I met with him in his room at the Silver Sands Motel in Cocoa Beach, where he often stayed. For the next two hours, over a couple beers, this wonderful man saturated my brain with answers to questions like: How does a missile work? How does a satellite reach orbit, and how does it stay there? How will man survive once he rockets into space? Heady stuff for this reporter who was a novice in this new space era that the world was entering.52
Further Silver Sands tutorials followed. “Von Braun educated me on the history of rockets and enthralled me with tales of his early rocket experiments in Germany,” Benedict related. To the journalist, the engineer-scientist was “a man with a vision, and he never stopped pushing his dream of one day harnessing this immense rocket power to send men into space and to the Moon and to develop orbiting colonies.”53
The transfer of the von Braun group on paper from ABMA to NASA was assured in the fall of 1959 when the army negotiated a deal to leave itself a missile R&D core capability from which it could rebuild. ABMA’s General Medaris at first had objected to losing the von Braun group. But then there was talk of giving the team to the air force and archrival Gen. Bennie Schriever; von Braun even met with him. The army decided there were worse things than losing the group to NASA. And so the decision was made to move most of the 4,800 people of von Braun’s Development Operations Division and its facilities for building and testing rockets to the control of the new space agency. That included virtually all the Peenemünders still with the team. Most of the employees administratively making the move would stay at their same desks and workbenches in the same buildings as before, at least until new office buildings for some could be constructed.
Von Braun, who had written of man in space since boyhood, met his first real-life astronauts-to-be in 1959. He helped host the debut visit by America’s original spacemen to ABMA at Redstone. He spent hours with the seven pilots as they inspected a Mercury-Redstone booster and spoke of their coming adventures. Asked at a news conference with them if he wished he were going with them into space, he answered: “Sure, why not? I envy them. But they just told me I’m too fat!”
During that same visit the future spacefarers inspected the Mercury spacecraft in which one of them was to ride atop a Redstone and become the first American in space. Vachel “Val” Stapler, an engineering technician, recalled that one of the most confident of the seven, Alan Shepard, took a good look at the launch vehicle and the compact spaceship and exclaimed in mock horror:
“You mean I’m supposed to ride in that?! I quit!”
“What are you talking about, Commander?” von Braun retorted. “You never had it so good!”54
In 1959, authority over the Huntsville team’s Saturn rocket program was transferred from ARPA in the Defense Department, which envisioned no military uses for rockets that big, to NASA, which saw plenty of uses. NASA set up the Saturn Vehicle Evaluation Committee with Abe Silverstein as chairman. He was the new agency’s director of Space Flight Development.
A NACA veteran, Silverstein had done years of research on liquid hydrogen at what became NASA’s Lewis (later Glenn) Research Center in Cleveland, and he favored using it as a more efficient fuel in upper stages of the future Saturn vehicles. The conservative von Braun, leery of the volatility of super-cold liquid hydrogen, preferred more conventional, safer fuels. Silverstein’s view prevailed. In its December 1959 report, his committee gave its blessing to liquid hydrogen. Von Braun accepted the verdict, and later acknowledged the lightness of it. Hydrogen packs more propulsive punch per pound. Saturn ground crews in Huntsville, at contractors’ facilities, and eventually at Cape Canaveral all proved up to the task of safely handling the tricky fuel. (In the thirty-two flights of various Saturn rocket configurations, no mishaps occurred and all were successful, a performance record unprecedented in rocketry.)
The flap over Saturn propellants would not be the last technical wrangle between Silverstein and von Braun. The two respected scientists, even with their apparent mutual professional regard, never developed a personal rapport, according to NASA official Robert C. Seamans Jr. “The feeling came up among von Braun’s associates that Silverstein was against the von Braun group on general principles.” Stuhlinger and Fred Ordway termed that belief “unfortunate,” noting that “von Braun and his coworkers considered Silverstein as the best rocket man in NASA Headquarters, and they would much rather have seen a brother-in-arms in him than an antagonist.” Silverstein responded that “there is no basis for that feeling.... We got along very nicely. I had a great deal of respect for von Braun’s capability. He was a wonderful leader.”
Years after von Braun’s death, Silverstein acknowledged his awareness of the Huntsville rocket team’s perception in remarks to Eberhard Rees, von Braun’s successor as Marshall Center director: “You guys in Huntsville always thought that I was against you. That simply is not so. I always respected you. In fact, ever since the von Braun team faded out of NASA, something essential has been missing in the space program.” He also cited several instances that showed his high esteem for von Braun and his team. One was the fact he had lobbied hard to have the army rocket-and-space team brought into NASA.55
In October 1959, NASA Administrator Glennan made his formal request to transfer the ABMA group to the newborn space agency. Within days Eisenhower announced his approval, subject to congressional concurrence. That action came in March 1960, and on July 1 all but a fraction of von Braun’s division at Redstone transferred.
With von Braun as director, the team would staff a new NASA field center whose main business was to be propulsion systems. It was named the George C. Marshall Space Flight Center. The name was suggested by Glennan, and swiftly endorsed by Eisenhower, in memory of his World War II comrade—a five-star army general, secretary of state, and the Nobel Peace Prize–winning architect of the Marshall Plan that rescued postwar democratic Europe. Marshall had died the year before.
Eisenhower presumably recognized the irony of having a center named by him, the wartime supreme Allied commander in Europe, to honor another great U.S. military leader in World War II, and having that center’s first director being a prominent enemy in that war.
It was the first time in twenty-eight roller-coaster years that von Braun was not working for the military, not developing weapons, either in Germany or America. He was forty-eight. His most professionally fulfilling years lay ahead.