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. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Iowa City, Iowa—November 16, 1956.VanAllenpickedup thephoneandrecognizedthecourtlybuturgentvoiceofErnst Stuhlinger even before the physicist identified himself. Stuhlinger cut straight to the point. A launch of a Jupiter C rocket in September could have sent a satellite into orbit but, under direct orders of the defense department, it fired with a dummy payload instead of the real thing. “TheVanguardprogramwon’tdeliverontime,”hetoldVan Allen, referring to America’s official contender in the race to launch a satellite into orbit—and to get it there first. Both scientists agreed that the choice of the Vanguard had been a big mistake. Now Stuhlinger asked Van Allen to develop a hushhush cosmic ray experiment to load on the undercover satellite being built for the Jupiter C. VanAllengambled.Hiscosmicrayexperimentalreadyheld one of the top four priority spots planned for the Vanguard satellite launches. But he decided to hedge his bets and configure instruments to fly on either the Vanguard or the Jupiter C. “Presently, [von Braun’s scientists] have the proven capability of projecting 18.5 pounds into orbit . . . might have about two pounds available for us later in the year,” Van Allen wrote in his journal. • • • Project Vanguard entered the first lap of the space race under the auspices of the International Geophysical Year (IGY), a year of worldwide scientific collaboration planned for 1957– 1958. The IGY eventually involved sixty-six countries, some 60,000 scientists and hundreds of research programs. But all eyes were fixed on the satellites and the two players building them: the United States and the Soviet Union. The Vanguard incorporated retooled renditions of the Viking launcher with Sputnik and the Space Race 9 a high-flying version of the Aerobee for the upper stages—seemingly triedand -true technology. Yet little more than a year into the Vanguard program, it was clear to Van Allen that America had bet its money on the wrong rocket and left the ready contender in the dust. That contender was the Jupiter C rocket and satellite being developed by von Braun and the rocket team at the Army Ballistic Missile Agency in Huntsville, Alabama. Rejected for the IGY mission and dropped into limbo as an army missile project, the Huntsville team developed the Jupiter C officially asamilitarytestvehiclebuthidonerocketawayasasatellitelauncher.General JohnMedarisfundedthesatellitedevelopmentoutofunrestrictedbudgetallocations , and Pickering kicked in some funding from JPL. VonBraun’scolleaguesoftenmoonlightedontheprojectontheirowntime. Stuhlinger built the hand-operated detonator to fire the upper stages of the rocketinhisgarage,buyingandmakingpartshimself.HeevendesignedasimpleapexcalculatortopredictwhentheJupiterChadreacheditshighestpoint , thesplit-secondpointwhereupperstagesshouldbefired.JosefBoehmworked at the arsenal hour after hour on a satellite, perfecting a design he and von Braun had discussed for years. Notations about the “Boehm-Van Allen lineup ” appeared in von Braun’s daybooks soon after Stuhlinger’s call to Iowa. TheJupiterC’ssuccessandescalatingdelaysintheVanguardprogrambrought increased urgency to build the secret satellite. They had found a way “to bootleg a program to launch satellites,” said Herbert York, an Eisenhower science advisor. A top secret report completed by Douglas Aircraft Company engineers in May 1946 laid out the feasible steps necessary to develop an earth-orbiting satellite and determined it could be designed, built, and launched within five years at a cost of $150 million. The report, “Preliminary Design of an Experimental World-Circling Spaceship,” envisioned the satellite as the “baby” of a four-stage rocket that had no fins and looked like a giant artillery shell. The Douglas engineers conceded that such a rocket would be “bulky, expensive and inefficient” but justified the project as a potent military and research tool to “inflame the imagination of the world.” The report was commissioned by the air force from Project Rand, the research and development think tank of Douglas Aircraft. “In our [rocket] panel, we expected satellites to be launched as soon as propulsion capability existed. It was implicit in our discussions and most of us were acquainted with the military projects,” Van Allen said. Youdidn’tneedclassifiedreportstofindoutaboutsatellites,however.“The orbit of a space rocket would assume this form. The trajectory would be an Sputnik and the Space Race 123 ellipse with the center of the earth in one of its focal points,” noted science writer Willy Ley in his 1944 book Rockets: The Future of Travel Beyond the Stratosphere. He discussed the need for a two-stage rocket to achieve orbit. PopularSciencereportedinMarch1947aboutplanstosendintoorbitfragments of an explosive launched by a V-2 rocket. “We first throw a little something into the skies. Then a little more, then a shipload of instruments—then ourselves ,” said Caltech physicist Fritz Zwicky in the article. Van Allen predicted in the article that America would send a rocket to the moon [“one...

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