Chasing the Moon

Democrats with eyes on the 1960 elections, and possibly the White House, added their dire voices to the chorus of doom. Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson announced that this was the last chance to save Western civilization from annihilation, while Senate majority leader Lyndon Johnson compared Sputnik to a cosmic Pearl Harbor, warning the nation that we “must go on a full, wartime mobilization schedule.”

Taking von Braun’s lead, Johnson forecast a sinister future vision that would delight the heart of a James Bond supervillain: “Control of space means control of the world,” he declared. “From space, the masters of infinity would have the power to control the Earth’s weather, to cause drought and flood, to change the tides and raise the levels of the sea, to divert the Gulf Stream and change temperate climates to frigid.”

Eisenhower scoffed at all the apocalyptic rhetoric, as well as at those who offered a variation on Fred Singer’s idea that the United States should respond to the Soviet Union’s presence in space by sending a rocket to the Moon armed with a warhead. In response, Eisenhower said he would rather have one nuclear-armed short-range Redstone rocket than an expensive and impractical moon rocket. “We have no enemies on the Moon,” he declared.

On Capitol Hill, Lyndon Johnson invited von Braun and General Medaris to testify before a Senate preparedness subcommittee inquiry. Johnson not only recieved the media exposure he desired, but the pair from Huntsville put the White House on the defensive with a few well-crafted lines for the newsreel and television cameras. “Unless we develop an engine with a million-pound thrust by 1961,” Medaris warned, “we will not be in space—we will be out of the race!” Von Braun raised the specter of a hammer and sickle hanging in the heavens, cautioning that the country was “in mortal danger” if the Soviets conquered space. “They consider the control of space around the Earth very much like, shall we say, the great maritime powers considered the control of the seas in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. And they say, ‘If we want to control this planet, we have to control the space around it.’ ”

The country heard them testify to how the Army’s readiness had fallen victim to petty armed-service rivalries, bureaucratic lassitude, and indecisiveness, a situation that Johnson called “nothing short of disgraceful.” Von Braun once again hypnotized the press, particularly a New York Times journalist who described him as a “blonde, broad shouldered and square-jawed … youthful-looking German scientist” who “drew many sympathetic laughs as he smilingly grappled with questions.”

The nation’s attempt to rid itself of Sputnik anxiety came on a morning in December 1957, barely two months after the shocking news from Moscow. Journalists at Cape Canaveral all had their binoculars focused on Launch Complex 18. There had been no official announcement, but word had spread among the newsmen that this was the likely day; sources at the local motels, restaurants, and bars all said something was being planned for that morning.

Shortly before noon on December 6, a cloud of white smoke appeared at the base of the U.S. Navy’s Vanguard rocket as it began to move upward into the sky. CBS News’s Harry Reasoner observed the launch from a privileged position on the porch of a nearby beach house. At the first sign of smoke he shouted, “There she goes!” His assistant, who was inside the house, on the phone with the network’s New York newsroom, immediately conveyed the word. Once the message had been received, Reasoner’s New York colleague promptly put down the phone to get the news on the air. But by that moment Reasoner was shouting, “Hold it! Hold it!” as he watched the Vanguard fall back on the pad and collapse into an expanding fireball, its tiny satellite toppling out of its nosecone. CBS had beaten ABC and NBC in broadcasting the news from the Cape but had incorrectly reported that the launch had gone well.

The shock of the failure was somewhat reduced by the fact that pictures of the explosion hadn’t been broadcast on live television. But the humiliating film of Vanguard’s end was shown repeatedly later in the day, often in slow motion. In the days that followed, the Air Force Missile Test Center chose to impose tighter media regulations, going so far as to prohibit binoculars and cameras on the nearby beaches.

In the wake of the failed launch, General Medaris and von Braun struggled to find their opportunity. Their Jupiter rocket, built in four stages so as to carry a satellite into orbit, was assembled later that month. But when it came to scheduling an available launch date at Cape Canaveral, the Huntsville team had to compete with their rivals, preparing a second Vanguard. The Navy rocket went through four different countdowns in January, but all were canceled due to technical difficulties or bad weather. The Army was alloted only three days —January 29, 30, and 31—to get Jupiter off the ground.

High winds canceled any possibility of a launch on the first two days, but at the last available opportunity, at 10:48 P.M. on January 31, 1958, Jupiter lifted off. NBC News used a motorcycle courier, a light airplane, and a police escort to rush their film of the launch to an affiliate station in Jacksonville, where it was processed and broadcast nationally within ninety minutes.

By the time the film was ready, von Braun, University of Iowa astrophysicist James Van Allen, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s William Pickering were holding a midnight press conference in a small camera-packed room at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington. Pickering’s JPL, in Pasadena, had designed and built Jupiter’s payload, the Explorer 1 satellite; Van Allen was in charge of the United States’s International Geophysical Year satellite program. Basking in triumph before a bevy of reporters, the trio held above their heads a full-size replica of Explorer, in a pose that became an iconic press photo.

In Huntsville, few were watching television at that late hour. The town that had seen its population triple in the eight years since the Army brought its rocket-and-missile center to northern Alabama had informally renamed itself “the Rocket City.” Led by a call from its mayor broadcast over the local radio station, Huntsville’s police sounded squad-car sirens and honked horns as citizens gathered downtown to celebrate with cheers of vindication and jubilation. Close to midnight, thousands gathered in the town’s Courthouse Square, which had been watched over by a granite statue of a Confederate soldier since 1905, erected and dedicated a few months after a notorious lynching on the same spot. The crowd held signs reading SHOOT FOR MARS!, OUR MISSILES NEVER MISS!, and MOVE OVER MUTTNIK!

© NASA/Marshall Space Flight Center

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s William Pickering, physicist James Van Allen of the University of Iowa, and Wernher von Braun celebrate the launch of Explorer I, the first American satellite, at their midnight press conference in Washington, D.C., on January 31, 1958.

The mayor joined the rowdy celebration, lighting skyrockets and ducking exploding firecrackers. A Life magazine photographer pointed his Speed Graphic camera at the gleeful crowd, which hoisted high an effigy of former defense secretary Charles Wilson; images with unsettling reminders of the town’s past. After his 1956 memo restricting the Army’s missile program, Wilson had become the most hated man in Huntsville, and he was now widely blamed for allowing the Soviets to be first in space. As the effigy was torched, the revelers waved American and Confederate flags and shouted, “The South did rise again!”

Von Braun was the man of the moment. His face was on the covers of Time and Der Spiegel. Eisenhower invited him to a White House state dinner. When he appeared in Washington, overflow crowds of journalists and photographers would attend, yet never were there any questions about his war years. Congressmen requested that he pose for photographs with members of their family. As a Capitol Hill session on space appropriations was breaking up, one congressman was even heard asking, “Dr. von Braun, do you need any more money?”

Von Braun signed with a speakers’ bureau and commanded as much as two thousand five hundred dollars for an appearance. Columbia Pictures and a West German studio commenced discussions to determine whether his personal journey from Nazi weapons engineer to Cold War American hero might serve as the basis of a successful dramatic film.

The attention and adulation given von Braun and his Huntsville team neglected one important German without whom Explorer would never have orbited. Hermann Oberth had joined the German rocket community in Huntsville, after von Braun had reached out to his former mentor and offered him work in the Army Ballistic Missile Agency’s research-projects office. But Oberth hadn’t been able to stay current with the ever-changing technology, and as a German citizen, he was restricted from reading classified information. He worked alone on projects of his own design, but his research produced little of consequence. Oberth’s prickly personality didn’t help. He felt out of place in Huntsville and in the United States and harbored resentment for some of his former colleagues, who he believed had betrayed him.

The Army also had reasons to avoid bringing attention to the mentor of the world’s most famous rocket designer. Oberth was notorious for making provocative or controversial remarks. He might, for instance, insist with icy certitude that at age sixty-four he should be chosen as an astronaut. “They should send old men as explorers. We’re expendable.” Or he might try to argue why Hitler “wasn’t all that bad” or explain how if Germany had won the war Hitler would have funded space travel more vigorously than either the Soviets or the Americans.

And then there were the UFOs. By the mid-1950s Oberth had announced that the rash of UFO sightings indicated that Earth was being visited by extraterrestrials. He appeared at UFO conferences and expounded with deadly seriousness about the lost continent of Atlantis and its connection to Germany.

So when he reached the mandatory retirement age of sixty-five, few in Huntsville objected to his decision to collect his pension back in Germany. Oberth announced he would devote his time to philosophy. “Our rocketry is good enough, our philosophy is not.”

VON BRAUN’S TRIUMPH with Explorer did little to rectify the ongoing competition among the different branches of the armed forces. Former defense secretary Wilson’s decision two years earlier to give the Air Force responsibility for long-range ballistic missiles implied it would become the branch designated to oversee any future military activities in earth orbit. However, von Braun and General Medaris at the Army Ballistic Missile Agency continued to work on their own ambitious ideas, including plans for a large heavy-lifting rocket that could place human-piloted vehicles in orbit.

The ongoing competition extended into the services’ public marketing campaigns, with the Army, Air Force, and Navy each promoting their leadership in the dawning space age. The Navy regarded space as a new ocean to conquer and command, in keeping with von Braun’s allusion to the great maritime powers of the past. The Air Force argued that space was an extension of the conquest of the air, just at a higher altitude, and coined its own marketing term, “aerospace.” And the Army, while regarding rocketry as a high-powered extension of the artillery, also used the launch of Explorer to promote itself as the team that got things done.

Shortly after Sputnik and the panic on Capitol Hill, the Air Force inaugurated its own piloted spacecraft program, called Man in Space Soonest. Its Special Weapons Center even commissioned a top-secret fast-track study, code named Project A119, to evaluate the scientific paybacks of Fred Singer’s proposal to explode thermonuclear weapons on the Moon, an idea some in the Air Force believed would demonstrate to the world America’s military prowess and instill patriotic pride at home.

© Recruiting posters (Public Domain, private collections)

By the late 1950s, the Army, Navy, and Air Force were each employing space age–themed marketing campaigns to encourage new recruits. The Army’s poster celebrates the launch of Explorer I, the Navy’s includes a picture of Vanguard, and the Air Force promotes its plans for a human military presence in outer space.

President Eisenhower realized he needed to resolve the ongoing service rivalry that was becoming counterproductive and costly to the country. He was also increasingly wary of the power of some personalities in the American military to influence public opinion and gain congressional backing for their ambitious and expensive projects. Accordingly, Eisenhower decided to reduce the military’s role in future human spaceflight by signing into law the National Aeronautics and Space Act. His announcement in late July 1958 followed a Presidential Science Advisory Committee that recommended developing space technology in response to the “compelling urge of man to explore and to discover, the thrust of curiosity that leads men to try to go where no one has gone before.” It was a declaration that—when slightly reworked with the adverb “boldly” in the prelude to the television series Star Trek eight years later—would become one of the most familiar catchphrases of the latter half of the twentieth century. Presciently sensing the emotions those words would invoke, Eisenhower noted in an accompanying letter, “This is not science fiction … every person has the opportunity to share through understanding in the adventures which lie ahead.”

The National Aeronautics and Space Act created a new civilian space agency, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), built in part from the half-century-old National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), which was already dedicating half its resources to space-related projects, including Vanguard and the X-15 suborbital space plane. Chosen as NASA’s first administrator was the president of Case Institute of Technology, T. Keith Glennan, a former member of the Atomic Energy Commission.

Within the first week of NASA’s creation, the Air Force terminated its nascent Man in Space Soonest initiative. NASA would now oversee a new civilian-run program, named Project Mercury, dedicated to putting the first Americans into space. Instead, the Air Force would concentrate on its own piloted winged space glider, known as Dyna-Soar, which, after being launched on top of a ballistic missile, would allow military crews to service satellites, conduct aerial reconnaissance, and possibly intercept enemy satellites.

Despite the idealistic rhetoric about exploration and adventure, it was impossible to conceal the reality that the civilian agency planned to send Americans into space atop repurposed military missiles developed to deliver warheads and transport reconnaissance spy satellites. The United States therefore chose to emphasize the open, peaceful, and cooperative nature of its civilian space program, which stood in contrast with the secretive and militarily aligned Soviet effort.

Remarkably, the Soviet Union had never placed a high priority on launching the world’s first artificial satellite. Rather, its military rocket program had been developed to inform the world that Russia had the capability to strike other nations with nuclear weapons. Sputnik was an unexpected dividend after von Braun’s Soviet counterpart, Sergei Korolev, developed a heavy-lifting rocket—the R-7—capable of delivering a six-ton nuclear warhead. But the Soviet warhead turned out to be far lighter than the original estimate; Korolev had designed a rocket much more powerful than needed.

Korolev realized the R-7 could put a satellite in orbit, if that was of interest to the Kremlin. Following Eisenhower’s International Geophysical Year announcement, Korolev sent a memo noting that should Russia want to set a world record by launching a satellite, they could do so at practically no additional cost. When Khrushchev gave his consent, he never anticipated the alarmist reaction in the United States. While the Soviet space program’s principal purpose was—and remained—military, Sputnik’s overnight success suddenly elevated the role of space research in the eyes of the Kremlin, making it an engineering, scientific, and propaganda priority.

NASA’s charter specifically restricted it from any responsibility for military defensive weapons or reconnaissance satellites. That separation between NASA and the Pentagon allowed it to act as Washington’s public face for promoting scientific research, furthering exploration, and bolstering national prestige, while deflecting attention from ongoing military space initiatives. In fact, during NASA’s first year of operation, the Pentagon’s space budget was nearly 25 percent larger.

NASA’s formation left the fate of the Army Ballistic Missile Agency in Huntsville uncertain, with both General Medaris and von Braun taking a predictably negative view of the new civilian agency. In addition to the existing NACA facilities, NASA brought the Army’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Navy’s Vanguard group under its umbrella. Glennan, NASA’s new administrator, proposed bringing half of von Braun’s group at the Army Ballistic Missile Agency within NASA, an idea that von Braun immediately killed by using his celebrity status to sway political and public opinion. Both General Medaris and von Braun feared that under NASA, the Huntsville group would lose its unique position and become a small part of a larger, and probably dysfunctional, government agency.

As 1958 came to a close, President Eisenhower surprised the world with his own space-propaganda stunt, intended to deliver multiple messages. One was a message of peace; a second was a bit of blatant saber rattling directed at the Soviets; a third was a ploy to silence Eisenhower’s critics; and a fourth was a sly dismissal of America’s premier space-age celebrity. Under tight secrecy, an Air Force Atlas missile weighing more than four tons was launched into orbit. Transmitted from a tiny box inside the huge Atlas, a recording of Eisenhower’s voice proclaimed, “America’s wish for peace on Earth and goodwill toward men everywhere.” By orbiting the entire Atlas missile—an achievement of little distinction in itself—the United States could technically claim to have placed the heaviest satellite into space.

Still, it wasn’t lost on the Soviets that the sentiments voiced on the tape had in fact been delivered by a new ICBM, specifically designed to transport a thermonuclear warhead. Nor was it lost on von Braun and many in the media that Eisenhower had excluded the Army’s team in Huntsville from a starring role in a space-age first, intended to boost American prestige. The head of the new Advanced Research Projects Agency, which oversaw Project SCORE as it was called, described it as essentially “a propaganda ploy designed to put a really big, heavy object into space as a means of silencing press and congressional complaints about small payloads and rocket failures.”

The media gave the stunt plenty of coverage during the holiday season, but it ultimately achieved little of importance, not even as the first device to transmit a message from space to people on Earth. It was quickly forgotten. Von Braun had concluded that despite their potential to revolutionarily change society, communications satellites would never engage the public or motivate politicians to fund a massive space effort like the piloted program he envisioned. He knew that the fear of annihilation, the loss of military superiority, or the erosion of national prestige were greater motivators among those in power, just as they had been in his dealings with the Third Reich. He was intrinsically aware that the public’s imagination would be fully engaged only when an intelligent being was on board a spacecraft, providing a vicarious adventure of a singular and historic nature.

And, indeed, nothing NASA undertook during its first year captured the public’s attention more than the selection of the nation’s first astronauts. It was this step that brought the dream that had consumed the minds of Clarke, Ley, von Braun, and many others for nearly three decades to the verge of reality.

Sensing that this was not only a good story but also a turning point in human history, journalists searched for a way to portray the men who would experience the unique, dangerous, and otherworldly. Even though there was little to distinguish the first seven astronauts from any other group of military pilots when NASA introduced them at a Washington, D.C., press conference in April 1959, the media rapidly promoted them as exemplars of American masculinity, courage, resourcefulness, and intelligence.

Though they spoke of wanting to travel into space in the near future, both Clarke and von Braun were already a few years older than John Glenn, who at age thirty-seven was the oldest of the seven Mercury astronauts. He had been chosen from an initial group of five hundred applicants, with the finalists representing the Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps. Five had experienced air combat in World War II or Korea, and the same number had been military test pilots. All were reported to have IQs greater than 130, and, coincidently—or not—all were firstborn or only children. Coming from a fraternity of combat fliers and jet jockeys, the Mercury Seven, as they came to be called, had no intention of being treated like confined lab rats in a glorified orbiting science experiment. They saw themselves first and foremost as active pilots.

However, neither they nor NASA were prepared for how their fairly routine press conference would become a pivotal moment in the marketing of the American space program and the transformation of modern celebrity. Preceded by stories of past air heroes like Charles Lindbergh and a decade of Hollywood science-fiction films, the seven pilots were thrust into starring roles in the television age’s first heroic real-life narrative. They and their families were abruptly placed under the modern media’s spotlight. Ghostwritten and sanitized versions of their lives appeared in heavily promoted issues of Life magazine, the result of a controversial NASA-approved contract that gave the magazine exclusive rights to the personal stories of the astronauts and their wives, even though the men were government employees. Since information related to their work had been understood to be freely available to all, journalists from rival publications naturally felt as though they were being shut out and they criticized the arrangement, to no avail. As part of the agreement, the astronauts were given a life-insurance policy and additional income to supplement their modest military salaries. Almost as important to them, the exclusive nature of the contract gave them justification to decline countless other media requests, and as a result it indirectly protected the privacy of the astronauts and their families when they were not the focus of a Life feature.

Not surprising given the tenor of the time, NASA gave no consideration to women as astronaut candidates. Despite the example of Jacqueline Cochran, who had set a series of historical firsts during a career as a military and air-race pilot, no woman in the United States had been granted an opportunity to gain experience as either a combat or test pilot. But provocative speculation never hurt sales, so the question of whether a woman might fly in space, and when, often arose in popular magazines. In reality, it was a non-issue, and NASA avoided public statements that would only exacerbate controversy.

When Real, a publication that advertised itself as “the Exciting Magazine for Men,” had considered the question in 1958, it concluded that women would indeed have a place on lengthy future space missions—as crew members willing to ease the strong sexual urge of men in the prime of life. The author, Martin Caidin, who became a fixture among the Cape Canaveral press corps during the next decade, attempted to make his argument by considering the alternative: “If you ignore the problem, you’re letting yourself in for emotional dynamite and homosexuality—and that is not acceptable.” In a similar vein, whenever von Braun was asked a question about the possibility of women serving as astronauts, he usually responded with a wry smile and a prepared answer: “We have talked about adding provisions in the space capsule for one hundred twenty pounds of recreational equipment.”