Chasing the Moon. Robert Stone
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.
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