The New York Times-20080129-Remembering When U-S- Finally -and Really- Joined the Space Race
Return to: The_New_York_Times-20080129
Remembering When U.S. Finally (and Really) Joined the Space Race
Full Text (1292 words)If Sputnik 1 was the beep-beep-beep heard round the world, Explorer 1 announced itself 50 years ago this week by the collective sigh of relief from an anxious American public.
It was late in the evening, Jan. 31, 1958, almost four months after the Soviet Union stunned the world on Oct. 4 with the launching of Sputnik, the first artificial Earth satellite. A second, larger Sputnik soon followed, carrying a canine passenger.
The first American attempt, with the modest Vanguard 1 in December, was an embarrassing failure, immediately derided as flopnik.
Now it was up to a rocket assembled from German V-2 technology and American upper stages to boost the slender, bullet-shape Explorer into orbit. Liftoff from Cape Canaveral, Fla., looked good. That was progress. Vanguard had shut down a few feet above the launching pad, collapsing and exploding for all to see on live television.
But flight controllers waited and waited for a signal that Explorer had reached orbit. Tracking antennas were sparse in those days, communications unreliable. Only after the satellite had almost completely circled the globe was its signal finally received, by alert amateur radio operations near Los Angeles.
The news was positive. Leaders of the Explorer team, who had been standing by in Washington, hurried to the National Academy of Sciences and proclaimed that the United States had successfully responded to the Soviet challenge. The space race was joined.
At a 2 a.m. news conference at the academy, the three leaders -- Wernher von Braun, the rocket scientist; William H. Pickering, director of the laboratory that built the satellite; and James A. Van Allen, the principal scientist -- hoisted a copy of the Explorer like a victor's trophy. The photo of that symbolized the country's entry into space.
Many elements thus came together to compose this iconic image, writes Steven J. Dick, chief historian of NASA. Here were the people and the technology, he notes, and the news media present in the knowledge that the event was bound to be of historic proportions.
It was the beginning of a half century of spaceflight for the United States, he adds, that may have disappointed the most optimistic visionaries, inspired others and drawn criticism as a diversion of resources better used on earthly problems.
In an essay on the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Web site for the Explorer anniversary, Dr. Dick concludes, Like the railroad and the airplane, spaceflight has impacted society in ways even the visionaries could not have foreseen, and that we cannot fully fathom even today.
One had to be alive amid the cold war to know the anxieties of a world under the threat of mass destruction. Nobody could predict the outcome of the conflict between the two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union. People feared the worst, and the Sputnik scare turned up the heat.
It happened that at the time of the first Sputnik, an Army missile team in Huntsville, Ala., had a rocket in storage that its leaders said could have beaten the Russians into orbit, had the government not forbidden its use in deploying a satellite. When the news of Sputnik 1 broke, Dr. von Braun, the German-born engineering leader of the team, pleaded with a Pentagon official, For God's sake, turn us loose and let us do something!
At the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., frustrations also ran deep. Its plans to build a satellite had been ordered back to the shelf. Dr. Van Allen, a physicist at the University of Iowa, had worked with J.P.L., sending up balloons and small rockets to study cosmic rays entering the upper atmosphere. His Geiger counter was designed to fit into Vanguard or Explorer, and ready.
Not until after the second Sputnik, in November 1957, were the Army and J.P.L. teams authorized to prepare for flight. The Vanguard failure, in December, heightened the urgency of their round-the-clock efforts. (Vanguard would later have its successes.)
The engineers in Pasadena named their secret undertaking Project Deal. The manager of the project, Jack Froehlick, a poker player, had said after Sputnik, When a big pot is won, the winner sits around and cracks bad jokes, and the loser cries, 'Deal!'
As Carl Raggio, a mechanical engineer on the team, recalled last week: We had no deadline. Just get it up.
He said: At the time, we didn't know a great deal, but we felt comfortable that we could put something up. And we liked the difference between our satellite and Sputnik. Ours flew science, the Van Allen experiment.
More than 100 engineers, electronics experts and machinists under Dr. Pickering had the job of converting the upper unit of the four-stage rocket into a satellite. The upper stage was a projectile six and a half inches in diameter and shorter than seven feet, most of it housing the solid-rocket motor for achieving final orbit. The challenge was to fit instruments, limited to 13 pounds, into the 18 1/2-pound forward section of the stage. The components, the effective payload, included two transmitters and sets of batteries, temperature sensors, micrometeorite detectors and the Van Allen radiation counter.
We had no slack at all, Henry Richter, an electronics expert who headed the design team, recalled. We were pretty young, in our 20s and 30s and gung-ho, and buckled down and did it.
Dr. Richter was in the control room at Cape Canaveral for the liftoff. The Jupiter-C stages fired in sequence. But when the final stage, Explorer 1, should have reached orbit, a tracking station downrange on Antigua failed to pick up a signal. And when the satellite should have reached California, if it was in orbit, again there was no signal.
A tracking antenna at J.P.L. was blinded by interference from high-voltage transmission lines. Amateur radio operations, nearby in Temple City, heard nothing at the appointed time, and finally picked up the first signals. The satellite had climbed into a higher, slower orbit and was eight minutes late -- a miserable eight minutes, Dr. Richter remembers.
In the weeks ahead, the orbiting Explorer 1 kept in touch, but there was one peculiarity in its signal. The radiation counter fell silent for a few minutes on each orbit. Dr. Van Allen eventually realized that the detector was overloaded, not failing. A few months later, Explorer 3 returned more data confirming that the overload was from trapped radiation encircling Earth, now known as the Van Allen radiation belts. The detection of the belts was the first scientific discovery of the space age.
Afterward, the California Institute of Technology-operated J.P.L. was shifted to NASA from the Army, and the Huntsville engineers were incorporated into the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center. American astronauts landed on the Moon, and robotic spacecraft traversed the solar system. Satellites for communications, navigation, weather forecasting and military surveillance populate high orbits, and the litter of derelict spacecraft hardware in orbit is thought to be a growing hazard to spacefaring.
But this week, in Huntsville and Pasadena, those who are left of the Explorer 1 teams are celebrating the start of it all. They will miss their three leaders in the picture of triumph taken 50 years ago.
[Illustration]GRAPHIC: FIVE DECADES OF SPACE EXPLORATION: Explorer 1, the first successful American satellite, launched 50 years ago this week. Less than seven feet long, the bulletshaped craft carried 13 pounds of scientific instruments into orbit, including two transmitters, temperature and micrometeorite sensors and a cosmic ray detector.; OBJECTS IN ORBIT: The government tracks more than 12,000 manmade objects in Earth orbit. Last year, which began with the destruction of a Chinese satellite, was the worst year ever for orbiting debris. (Sources: NASA; Jet Propulsion Laboratory) (GRAPHICS AND CHARTS BY FRANK O'CONNELL AND JONATHAN CORUM/THE NEW YORK TIMES)