To a Distant Day: The Rocket Pioneers

9. Sputniks and Muttniks

Arguably the most famous dinner party in the annals of twentieth-century science took place on April 5, 1950, at the home of physicist James A. Van Allen in the Washington dc suburb of Silver Spring, Maryland. The guest of honor was the distinguished British geophysicist, Sydney Chapman. Another guest was Lloyd V. Berkner, a radio engineer who shifted into scienti fic research after serving on the first Antarctic expedition of Adm. Richard Byrd. Also present were three other geophysicists—J. Wallace Joyce, S. Fred Singer, and Ernest H. Vestine. All of these scientists had taken part in the Second International Polar Year, a worldwide geophysical research effort in 1933. So when conversation turned to the state of geophysics , Berkner suggested that advances in science recommended the observance of a third polar year in 1957 and 1958, a period of maximum sunspot activity. The idea won the support of everyone present, and after international scientific bodies approved the concept, scientists from around the world began work on what became known as the International Geophysical Year (igy), a worldwide series of scientific observations to be conducted in every part of the earth and its atmosphere. The igy took place from July 9. Sputniks and Muttniks Considerable prestige and psychological benefits will accrue to the nation which first is successful in launching a satellite. The inference of such a demonstration of advanced technology and its unmistakable relationship to inter-continental ballistic missile technology might have important repercussions on the political determination of free world countries to resist communist threats, especially if the USSR were to be the first to establish a satellite. National Security Council nsc-5520, May 20, 1955 1, 1957, to the end of 1958, and ultimately involved sixty thousand scientists from sixty-six countries. During planning for the igy in 1954, the idea was raised of launching a satellite containing scientific instruments to measure the upper atmosphere and space from earth orbit, complementing the igy’s other activities. The idea won approval from scientists like Van Allen, who was already launching “rockoons”—small instrumented sounding rockets launched from platforms lifted by balloons to high altitudes—to probe the upper atmosphere, and Singer, who in 1953 proposed a research satellite called mouse, or Minimum Orbital Unmanned Satellite, Earth, to transmit data about earth’s magnetic field and conditions in space from an orbit two hundred miles above earth. In the fall of 1954, with strong urging from U.S. scientists, the igy’s coordinating committee passed a resolution calling for the launch of a scientific satellite during the igy. Scientists were far from the only ones thinking about satellites in the early 1950s. The U.S. Air Force and the U.S. Navy were battling for jurisdiction over activities beyond the atmosphere as they contended for control of missiles. At war’s end, the navy’s Bureau of Aeronautics supported studies into the High Altitude Test Vehicle, a rocket powered by liquid hydrogen that it hoped could loft satellites into orbit with a single stage. Because budgets were tight, the navy asked the Army Air Force in March 1946 whether it would be interested in joining in an in-depth study of satellites . The responsible air force official, Maj. Gen. Curtis LeMay, turned the navy down and then commissioned a satellite study from Douglas Aircraft. The air force wanted the study done quickly so it could establish primacy in the field of satellites. Douglas set up the “Research And Development” project, or Project rand, which completed a 336-page report in May called Preliminary Design of an Experimental World-Circling Spaceship. The classi fied report contained engineering information on rockets that was based on the Germans’ V-2 data and discussed what kinds of rockets were needed to loft satellites into orbit. The rand report’s introduction famously predicted that satellites could become “one of the most potent scientific tools of the Twentieth Century” and that launching a satellite “would inflame the imaginations of mankind, and would probably produce repercussions in the world comparable to the explosion of the atomic bomb. . . . To visualize the impact on the world, one can imagine the consternation and adsputniks and muttniks | 145 miration that would be felt here if the United States were to discover suddenly that some other nation had already put up a successful satellite.” A chapter in the report by Dr...