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8 The Art of Rocket Engineering Through the satellites and spacecraft that they have lifted into the heavens, since 1958 launch vehicles have brought remarkable changes to life on Earth. From what we watch on television to the way we wage war, Americans and people throughout the globe have come to depend on satellites. How did launch vehicle technology and access to space evolve so quickly? One key factor was the cold war, whose ending from 1989 to 1991 provides the terminus for this book. It is scarcely credible that the huge investments necessary for developing American missiles, launch vehicles, and satellites would have been forthcoming without the Sputnik launch in 1957 and the fears it aroused about the Soviet Union’s ability to send missiles into the U.S. heartland.1 The total amount of money expended on missiles and launch vehicles during the cold war has probably never been credibly estimated. Clearly it was enormous and constituted a major factor in the rapid development of the requisite rocket technology. One early estimate put total costs for ballistic missiles up to about 1965 at $17 billion (or, converted to 2006 dollars, some $112 billion.) This cost included missile sites, which had no relevance for space-launch vehicles. But it also encompassed factories for producing propellants, engines, airframes, and guidance and control systems; test facilities ; ranges with their testing, tracking, and control equipment; laboratories , and much else.2 To give but one other indicator of the enormous expenditures for missiles and launch vehicles, the total cost of the Saturn launch vehicles from 1959 to 1973 amounted to $9.3 billion. Adjusted for inflation, that came to $58.6 billion in 2006 dollars.3 But the cold war and the spending it stimulated were not enough, by themselves, to bring about the rapid development of missile and launchvehicle technology. Fears of Soviet missile attacks provided the context in which the technology could develop. But Congress, a succession of presi- The Art of Rocket Engineering 315 dents, and the American public would not have invested the many billions of dollars necessary for such rapid development without the prodding of heterogeneous engineers such as Trevor Gardner, John von Neumann, Bernard Schriever, Theodore von Kármán, Wernher von Braun, and William F. “Red” Raborn. This was especially true in the light of the many failures of missiles and rockets in the early years from the late 1950s to the mid-1960s. Given the complexity and increasing size and thrust of the missiles and launch vehicles developed even in the first decade after Sputnik, it is not surprising that many of them failed. The sophistication of these vehicles engendered the popular phrase “rocket science” to characterize the arcane knowledge that developers and operators had to possess. But from the beginning to the present, developers have not always been able to foresee the problems that could arise when rockets operated in the harsh environments of launch and flight through the atmosphere into space. The body of literature, mathematical formulas, ground-testing facilities and equipment, computer tools, and other infrastructure supporting rocket development continued to grow. Yet as recently as the Columbia disaster in February 2003, we learned once more that aspects of rocket behavior in flight defied understanding and prediction. This was far from an isolated instance in the history of rocketry, for lack of predictability had been a part of rocket development and operation from Robert Goddard’s unavailing attempts to reach high altitudes until the present. Could it be that there had never really been such a thing as rocket science, at least if that term is defined to mean a body of knowledge complete enough to permit such predictions ? Of course, uncertainty was by no means foreign to science. Like rocketry , twentieth-century science had flourished amid uncertainties. These ranged from the Heisenberg uncertainty principle (that it was impossible to determine both the precise position and the energy of an electron) to the questions that still swirl around the Big Bang theory about the origin of the universe. And the continued success of rocket developers in overcoming unexpected problems and making their rockets work compares favorably with scientists’ abilities to accommodate unexpected data and adjust their theories accordingly.4 If scientists sought basically to understand the universe or its components, rocket developers primarily tried to make their vehicles work as designed. They employed science and any other resources that would contribute to this endeavor, and they certainly wanted to understand how their...

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