Echoes Among the Stars: A Short History of the U.S. Space Program

A Short History of the U.S. Space Program

Patrick J. Walsh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780765605382
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134942367
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Political Process
• Index: History

Emphasizing the importance of the space programme to the scientific, social and cultural history of the last half of the 20th century, this brief history celebrates the almost unimaginable technological leap that the space programme represents, a feat of teamwork, innovation, dedication and mastery unprecedented in the history of mankind. Walsh's narrative begins just before the Mercury programme, covers the original seven astronauts, the Gemini and Apollo programmes, through Skylab and up to the space shuttle. The glories and emotion of space exploration are presented against the backdrop of the Cold War, the presidential administrations of Eisenhower, JFK, LBJ, Nixon, Ford and Carter, and other singificant events in US history. The positive accomplishments of the astronauts are put in context of an increasingly negative domestic situation in the '60s and '70s, the Bay of Pigs, civil rights, assassinations, growing involvement in and dissension about Vietnam, the Watergate scandal, and Nixon's resignation.

echoes

among the stars

1

NASA Lifts Off: The 1950s

The story of how humanity first managed to break free of its cradle, earth, and venture into the vastness of space begins, appropriately enough, with an international conference. Convened in Rome in October of 1954 to plan the International Geophysical Year of 1957–1958, the gathering of scientists from forty different countries resulted in a far-ranging plan of experiments and exploration in disciplines as varied as physics, geology, meteorology, and aerospace. Of all the ambitious objectives the participants sought to undertake, the most novel was the plan to launch a small satellite into earth orbit.

A modest goal by modern standards, the plan to send a basketball-sized probe containing few (if any) scientific instruments into orbit around the earth seemed a fantastic notion to the average American when it was formally introduced in July 1955. As a result of the Rome conference and in cooperation with other countries, the U.S. government announced its intent to play the leading role in the satellite launch.

Following a familiar pattern, the government of the Soviet Union also announced a plan to send a satellite into orbit during the International Geophysical Year.¹

The American move was both strategic and tactical, and its aims were political as well as scientific. Far beyond the obvious benefits to space science that would result from the development of the equipment, systems, and procedures necessary to create and launch the satellite, the U.S. effort was also calculated as a means to outpace the USSR’s increasingly optimistic pronouncements about the progress of its own space plans. Thus the seeds of the space race, as it would become known in earnest within the next decade, were sown in the mid-1950s.

Spoils of War, Visions of Space

For both the United States and the USSR, the first fruits of the Allied victory in World War II included a generous portion of German rocket technology, as well as many of the scientists and technicians who had developed it. Of particular interest to both sides was the German V-2 rocket; many of the Soviets’ earliest steps toward space were based on further development of the basic V-2, and the United States began firing captured V-2s as well as American-made counterparts in White Sands, New Mexico, in 1946.

The Soviets incorporated many German technicians into their rocket development efforts immediately after the war, gaining the benefit of their expertise and then gradually allowing them to return to Germany in the early 1950s. But, fearing Soviet retribution for Hitler’s savage Russian campaigns, a large majority of the most sought-after German scientists surrendered to the Western Allies at the end of the war. As a result, the United States received the lion’s share of V-2 rocket expertise, including the skills of pioneering space scientists Hermann Oberth and Wernher von Braun.²

Given the political and social climate of the day, with the former allies sliding precariously into the first decade of the nuclear age and the initial years of the cold war, it seems inevitable—and in many ways beneficial—that the United States and USSR would embark on a decade-long competition to send first satellites, then human beings, into orbit and eventually to the moon. The two nations’ race to develop their space programs coincided with the initial stage of their harrowing development of vast stockpiles of nuclear weapons. Locked into an arms race that by its nature provided no hope of victory but at the same time gave neither side any practical way to withdraw, America and the Soviet Union feverishly pursued the benefits of propaganda and prestige that early hegemony in space could provide.

From the beginning, the contest of technologies and engineering skills reflected the central tenets of each nation’s belief system. Superiority in the space race was increasingly seen as a validation of national pride and the preeminence of one way of life over the other. And even as the cold war ground on, with its intransigent nuclear adversaries a world apart in ideology as well as geography, humanity’s shared preoccupation with space offered a proving ground for the first great superpowers that reduced their potential for fatal miscalculation more than any comparable earthbound alternative.³

First Sounds from Space: Sputnik 1

On October 4, 1957, 10:28 p.m. Moscow time, the USSR launched the Sputnik 1 satellite from a site in Tyuratam, in Soviet Central Asia. A simple device, an aluminum sphere with four antennas and a radio transmitter, Sputnik 1 was the first human-made object to orbit the earth. The space age had begun.

The tiny satellite, weighing in at just under 185 pounds, its radio transmitting an innocuous beep that ham radio operators around the world could hear as it passed overhead, had an immediate galvanizing effect on American popular opinion. That the Soviets had beaten the Americans into space was bad enough, but many Americans worried about the achievement’s larger implications for the magnitude of the Soviet military threat; to a large degree, the idealism of space exploration and the fear of powerful rocket-mounted weaponry went hand in hand in the early years.⁴ Members of Congress and various media representatives wondered aloud whether rockets powerful enough to send radios into space would also be powerful enough to send nuclear warheads careening toward American cities, and worried openly about the national-security threat the satellite posed for the United States and Western Europe, as it passed overhead every hour and a half.⁵ Such fears were exacerbated by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, who consistently politicized the achievements of Sputnik 1 and its successors to promote Soviet ideology around the globe and consolidate his own political power at home.⁶

U.S. president Dwight Eisenhower, meanwhile, sought to downplay the military significance of Sputnik 1. In several major speeches, he reassured the American people that the Soviet space probe presented no practical military threat, and he repeatedly stated that he was confident that an American satellite would soon be joining Sputnik 1 in the heavens. Eisenhower is often represented as having underestimated the importance of the Soviets’ fast start in space, but the gradual declassification of documents from the early cold-war era indicate otherwise. Details of the Naval Research Laboratory’s Galactic Radiation and Background (GRAB) satellite, for example, demonstrate the president’s clear understanding of the intelligence benefits of the early space program.⁷

Design work on the GRAB satellite began within a year of the first Sputnik flight, and the odd-shaped ball—looking much like an old-fashioned deep-sea diver’s helmet with too many view holes—was launched on June 22, 1960. The launch took place just five days after U.S. pilot Francis Gary Powers was shot down by the Soviets in his U-2 spy plane. Powers’s capture led to an embarrassing public disclosure of American spying techniques, and added a bit of tarnish to Eisenhower’s considerable reputation as an exceptional commander in chief. Only a small handful of government officials were aware at the time that the country’s spying efforts were already advancing into space, a fact that, had it been disclosed, might well have laid to rest a good deal of public anxiety about the so-called missile gap between the United States and USSR.⁸

The president’s insistence that the United States was not far behind the Soviets generally fell on deaf ears in Congress and the media, and the issue grew in stature during the 1960 presidential campaign between Eisenhower’s vice president, Richard M. Nixon, and Democratic challenger John F. Kennedy.

Well Ahead of Sputnik: Early U.S. Satellite Surveillance

In retrospect, it is obvious that Eisenhower understood the need for American space successes that could be made public. At the same time, he was also aware that such a program would be a long, arduous undertaking that would require years of hard work before the United States could surpass the Soviets. The secret spy satellite, on the other hand, was immediately useful in the short term for detecting Russian air defenses, and arguably put the United States well ahead of the Soviets in the burgeoning space race. In fact, the only major drawback of the tiny GRAB device was that the government couldn’t tell anyone about it. (The satellite’s existence was made public by the Naval Research Lab and the National Reconnaissance Office in June 1998, in honor of the navy lab’s seventy-fifth anniversary).⁹

While the U.S. program raced to catch up, the Soviets enjoyed further success with the launch of Sputnik 2 on November 3, 1957. In this second satellite, a much larger, heavier craft, the Soviets included a female husky named Laika, who enjoyed a “dog’s-eye view” of the earth from space. The craft’s pressurized cabin and life-support system represented a remarkable achievement in systems engineering, and the project garnered valuable biomedical data for a week before life support ran out and the dog was put to sleep.

The American path into space featured several roads being traveled all at once, with separate systems being developed by the Naval Research Laboratory, the army, and the air force. The navy’s Vanguard program got the initial go-ahead, but lost its chance to put the first U.S. satellite into orbit with an early-December failure of its three-stage test vehicle.

The launch of Explorer 1 on January 31, 1958, led the way into space for the United States. The tiny satellite lifted off atop a modified Jupiter rocket developed in large part from the blueprint of the German V-2 and the expertise of Wernher von Braun. While primarily remembered for redeeming America’s virtue in light of the achievements of the first two Sputniks, Explorer 1 also demonstrated the practical scientific value of space exploration, as it discovered the earth’s radiation belts, later named for Dr. James Van Allen, who had the foresight to equip the tiny satellite with a Geiger counter. Khrushchev ridiculed Explorer 1 for its small size, but made no mention of a subsequent Soviet failure the following month.¹⁰

The Vanguard program redeemed itself handsomely in March of that same year, lifting Vanguard 1 into an orbit that it maintains to this day. In fact, Vanguard 1 is expected to remain in orbit for the next 250 years or so, until sometime around 2250.¹¹

Space science took another leap forward with the Soviet launch of Sputnik 3 on May 15, 1958. The satellite’s mini-laboratory transmitted data about the earth’s ionosphere, magnetic field, radiation belts, and cosmic rays for nearly two years.

Dancing With the Moon: Luna 3

The final stages of the first era of space exploration pointed explicitly toward the future. The Soviets began aiming unmanned probes at the moon in the fall of 1958, and flew past it with the Luna 1 probe in January 1959. Luna 1 continued on into solar orbit, accomplishing yet another first. Luna 2 was launched September 12, 1959, and completed its mission two days later, when it crash-landed in Mare Imbrium on the surface of the moon. And on October 4—the second anniversary of the Sputnik 1 launch—Luna 3 lifted off. Three days later it solved one of humanity’s most enduring cosmographical mysteries when it captured the first photographic images of the moon’s far side.¹²

U.S. attempts to equal the Soviet moon accomplishments were hindered by a series of failed launches in 1958 and 1959. In March of 1959 the American Pioneer satellite shot past the moon and into orbit around the sun, as Luna 1 had a few months earlier. Three more American lunar probes failed even to reach earth orbit between November 1959 and the end of 1960, and American attempts to reach the moon then ended until the advent of the Lunar Orbiter, Ranger, and Surveyor projects of the mid-1960s.

The main accomplishments of the U.S. program in the late 1950s were more organizational than operational. Acutely aware of the need to appropriately separate civilian and military authority based on his own experiences as supreme commander of Allied forces in World War II, President Eisenhower suggested to Congress in April 1958 that the U.S. space program be placed under civilian control. Given the climate of the time, with Americans’ fear running rampant in response to the tensions generated by the arms race, the cold war, and the USSR’s Sputnik successes, it was a courageous decision.¹³

Congress agreed that the exploration and potential development of space should be governed by civilian rather than military authority, and as a result, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) was formed on October 1, 1958, with T. Keith Glennan as its first administrator. NASA absorbed the former National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, which had been established in 1915, and assumed complete responsibility for America’s space program, except for those activities necessary for national defense, which would remain the responsibility of the military.

Eisenhower’s foresight effectively ended the interservice squabbling that characterized the attempts to launch the first U.S. satellite, and opened the space agency to a wider array of engineering and scientific talent. Perhaps most important of all, it established an aura of civilian participation that would seem in later years to give average Americans a stake in the program’s success or failure. The connection between the support of the general public and the agency’s ability to receive and maintain the funding necessary for its eventual trip to the moon was fundamental from the very beginning.¹⁴

The wide involvement of ordinary citizens also spoke to the basic American ideal of honest and open government. Inherent in NASA’s role as America’s civilian space authority is the promise that at each step along the way, in success or failure, the agency will be accountable to the American people.

Soviet Intransigence: The “Chief Designer”

In stark contrast, the Soviet program was tightly controlled by the central authority of the Communist government. Few details of flights, payloads, or the success or failure of a mission’s objectives were ever released until a flight had been deemed a success.

The career of Sergei Korolev offers a prime example of the space program’s success in spite of the encumbrances of the Soviet pol...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1 NASA Lifts Off: The 1950s
• Chapter 2 Project Mercury: Setting the Sights
• Chapter 3 Project Gemini: A Bridge to the Moon
• Chapter 4 Apollo 1: Lives in Eclipse
• Chapter 5 Apollo Before the Moon: Into the Light
• Chapter 6 Apollo 11: Life on an Ancient World
• Chapter 7 Apollo 12 and Apollo 13: Storms in Space
• Chapter 8 Before the Short Day Ends: Apollo in Twilight
• Chapter 9 Skylab: A Place in Space
• Chapter 10 Apollo-Soyuz Test Project: A Handshake Across the Heavens
• Chapter 11 The 1970s: Journeys Without and Within
• Chapter 12 Echoes: The Shuttle Era and Beyond
• Chronology: The First Era in Space, 1957–1975
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author