American Experiment (389 page)

The Soviet embassy, Washington, Friday, October 4, 1937.
The old mansion on Massachusetts Avenue had a festive air as Russians and Americans danced, sang, and laughed together. No one was enjoying the party more than William Pickering, head of the American satellite program—until the science writer of
The New York Times
burst into the room and accosted him. What was this “spootnik” that the Russians had launched into orbit? Pickering looked at him in amazement, and then, with his equally startled American colleagues, he gamely toasted the Russians. Then they rushed off to begin a crude calculation of Sputnik’s orbit. American space scientists and administrators would later remember that night, wrote Clayton R. Koppes, “much as other people could recall how they felt when they heard of the deaths of presidents or the bombing of Pearl Harbor.”

Indeed, Berkeley physicist Edward Teller somberly told a television audience that the United States had lost “a battle more important and greater than Pearl Harbor.” Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson
picked up the cry, adding that “we do not have as much time as we did” after that attack. With scientists and politicians feeding the hysteria of Americans unable to absorb “the realization that Buck Rogers might prove to be a Russian peasant,” President Eisenhower was prompted to reassure the nation that only its pride, not its security, had been damaged.

The surprised reactions—especially among the experts—were unwarranted. For two years the Soviets had been signaling their intentions and progress in a series of statements and press reports, and four months before Sputnik, they had announced their readiness to loft a satellite—and even advertised the frequency on which it would transmit. Some American scientists, moreover, had been urging competitiveness. In 1954 the German émigré physicist Wernher von Braun, requesting $100,000 for “a man-made satellite,” which “no matter how humble (five pounds) would be a scientific achievement of tremendous impact,” said that
“it would be a blow to U. S. prestige if we did not do it first. “
In August 1955 the United States announced that in the eighteen-month International Geophysical Year it would put into space a series of “small, unmanned, earth-circling satellites.”

But before Sputnik, speed was not the Eisenhower Administration’s main consideration. The President and his advisers were concerned that the satellite work not detract from weapons research and that the nascent space program be divorced as far as possible from the military. Thus in deciding the interservice competition over whose rocket would launch the first American satellite, the Administration in fall 1955 rejected the Army’s Project Orbiter, though it had the better booster and promised the earliest launch date. The Navy’s proposal, with its stronger scientific, nonmilitary character, was accepted. The choice would prove fateful: Orbiter’s launch date had been August 1957, Vanguard’s was to be December. Sputnik left earth on October 4, 1957.

The inevitable next leg of the space race was the launching of a human being into space, and this mission was entrusted to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, an independent civilian agency established in 1958. The first goal of NASA’s Mercury program was to “shoot a man from a cannon,” and the vehicle to take him up and down was a haphazardly assembled combination of an ICBM-Redstone booster and a capsule with a cramped cabin. The original seven Mercury astronauts, all of them hard-boiled test pilots, were signed to a munificent exclusive contract with
Life
magazine and aggressively promoted as “lovable freckled heroes,” men who were “cheerfully facing torture, danger and perhaps death for their country.” Alan B. Shepard, Jr., was chosen to man the first Mercury flight—a brief suborbital mission. But before he could be launched—a
mere three weeks before—the Americans once again were trumped, as the Soviets announced that
Vostok I
had carried cosmonaut Major Yuri A. Gagarin into orbit around the earth.

At 9:34
A.M.
on May 5, 1961, as 45 million watched on television, the spacecraft
Freedom
7, with Shepard strapped in atop the huge rocket, lifted off its pad at Cape Canaveral to “go roaring upward through blue sky toward black space”—but only toward, not into, space. He splashed down in the Atlantic fifteen minutes later, his flight an anticlimax after Gagarin. In July,
Liberty Bell
7 took Gus Grissom up and down on a longer but still suborbital ride.

For Americans, playing eternal catch-up—and not even catching up— was not the right stuff. Three weeks after Grissom, cosmonaut Gherman Titov made 17.5 orbits of the earth, on a flight lasting more than twenty-five hours. The pressure on NASA to fling a man into orbit was immense. The man whom NASA chose to fling first, a forty-year-old Korean War veteran, John Glenn, had been disappointed when Shepard was given the initial launch. But after
Vostok I,
Glenn realized that Shepard’s was no longer
the
mission. It mattered now to be the first American to orbit and, with his test pilot’s cocksureness and his ambition, Glenn was ready.

Hopes rose for a December 1961 launch date, but technical procedures and run-throughs of the mission pushed the date into 1962. January 23 was finally announced to the press, but before the reporters had a chance to assemble at the now familiar dateline of Cape Canaveral, the launch was again shifted—to the twenty-seventh. Twenty minutes prior to launch, after Glenn had been in the capsule for five hours, the mission was again postponed, because of bad weather. The largely untried new Atlas rocket was purged of propellants and stored. On January 30 it was refueled, but ground support noticed a leak in a kerosene tank. Another delay; this time, until February 13. Twenty-four recovery ships and sixty aircraft manned by 18,000 personnel were recalled. More bad weather on the thirteenth, though. The forecast for Tuesday, February 20, was good, and on Monday night the ground crew began its 610-minute countdown.

Glenn was awakened at 2:20
A.M.
Tuesday morning for a breakfast of steak and eggs. After a 135-minute delay while part of the booster guidance system was replaced and the dawn skies cleared, Glenn stepped into
Friendship
7 at 6:03. A broken bolt on the hatch and a stuck fuel valve caused further delays. One hundred million people at their television sets shared some of Glenn’s tension. At T minus six and a half minutes the Bermuda tracking station experienced a power failure—further delay for repairs. Finally, at 9:47, the Atlas, with a huge tail of fire, lifted off the pad, and mission announcer John A. Powers spoke the words Americans had
waited so long to hear: “Glenn reports all spacecraft systems go! Mercury Control is go!” After three orbits in just under five hours, Glenn splashed down in the Atlantic near Bermuda.

The earthbound gave Glenn a tumultuous welcome. His footprints on the deck of the recovery ship were marked with white paint. Schools and highways were renamed in his honor. Four million screaming, shoving New Yorkers jammed Broadway for a ticker-tape parade. Glenn addressed a joint session of Congress—“I still get a real hard-to-define feeling when the flag goes by”—and met with a fascinated admirer at the White House.

Ten months before Glenn’s flight—and six weeks after Gagarin’s—John Kennedy had taken the first step of a journey whose end he would not see: “Now it is time to take longer strides—time for a great new American enterprise—time for this nation to take a clearly leading role in space achievement, which in many ways may hold the key to our future on earth. … I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.” The United States, he declared, had never before “made the national decisions or marshalled the national resources required for such leadership.”

Congress enthusiastically acceded to the President’s request. With a goal so distant in time and in place, Kennedy had dramatically lifted the Soviet-American space rivalry to a different plane: over the longer run, American economic and technological superiority would provide a crucial advantage, if indeed the Soviets dared to compete at all. And if some in the scientific community believed that $20 billion would be better spent on unmanned flights, they for the most part kept silent, knowing that $20 billion would not be forthcoming without the goal of a manned moon landing.

Before the decade was out—on July 20, 1969—a fragile lunar module hovered above the moon’s rocky surface. Four hundred thousand workers, two hundred colleges and universities, many thousands of corporations had joined forces to produce this moment. As the world watched transfixed, the lander,
Eagle,
first separated from its command ship,
Columbia.
While Michael Collins waited in
Columbia,
Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin looped into their own orbit around the moon’s surface. Twelve minutes before landing Houston transferred control to
Eagle:
“You are go. Take it all at four minutes. Roger, you are go—you are to continue powered descent.”

At 33,500 feet crisis threatened—the navigational computer was overloading near its limit. If it exceeded that limit the mission would have to be aborted. Armstrong searched the surface for a suitable landing spot,
and found only rough ground which would destroy the module. As Armstrong took navigational control from the computer, Aldrin read vital figures from the control panel. The attitude control handle in Armstrong’s right hand tilted the spacecraft in any direction; the thrust control handle in his left moved the craft horizontally. The computer maintained control over rate of descent.

Fuel was low, but still Armstrong rejected site after site. Finally he found his spot. A few tense moments as the craft eased down. Then he spoke: “Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.”

As the exploratory Mercury and Gemini had pioneered Apollo’s way to the moon, so too did Apollo cut a path for the space-laboratory Skylab missions in 1973 and 1974 and the joint American-Soviet Apollo-Soyuz of 1975. Pioneer and Mariner probes surveyed Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus. Between 1957 and 1984, nearly 14,000 objects had been launched into space and some 5,000 of them remained in earthly orbit, including telecommunications satellites of the Department of Defense, the National Weather Service, AT&T, and RCA.

On Sunday morning, April 12, 1981, four IBM computers, with a fifth as backup, kicked into gear and took over launch control. Majestically, a giant new rocket rose slowly from its platform, a truly space-age spacecraft strapped to its back. The crew could feel the swing of the vehicle and the surge of power as the booster rockets fired. The ground shook with the thrust of space shuttle
Columbia’
s main engines, running at 104 percent of their rated power. The craft accelerated as it left the earth; its engine ran more efficiently at higher altitudes, and the burning of fuel lightened the vehicle. At launch plus eleven seconds the crowd three miles below saw
Columbia
roll over in the sky onto its back and felt and heard the roar. After eight minutes the main engines had burned out, and
Columbia
achieved orbit.

After two days the engines were again turned on to slow the craft and it began its descent out of orbit. Four hundred thousand feet above the earth
Columbia
still traveled twenty-five times the speed of sound. Nothing this big had ever been brought back to earth, much less landed on an airstrip. Computers again assumed control to perform split-second navigational functions. Its speed down to four times the speed of sound,
Columbia
crossed California’s northern coast and started its descent into the Mojave Desert. Across the state
Columbia’s
sonic booms drew people’s attention skyward. At Edwards Air Force Base, hundreds of thousands of persons
watched as the world’s first reusable manned spaceship, under its pilot’s control, glided in and gracefully touched down at 225 miles per hour.

Over the next five years, the American shuttle fleet flew twenty-three more missions, and NASA set an ambitious schedule of fifteen flights in 1986 alone. But as early as the second shuttle flight, technicians had noticed that the O-rings—enormous circles of rubber that helped to seal segments of the booster rocket together—had charred. Routine reports were filed, but the problem recurred on flight after flight. Both the shuttle research facility at Marshall Space Flight Center and contractor Morton Thiokol’s people decided they would develop a plan to fix the O-ring seal problem themselves rather than review it with NASA management—but personnel changes and wrangling with Congress delayed action. By the end of 1985 ten flights had experienced seal failures. Rather than break the flight schedule, waivers were signed that allowed the flights to continue despite the threats to safety.

Preparations for
Challenger
mission 51-L began on a cold Monday in January 1986. Project manager Allan J. MacDonald warned his superiors that low temperatures affected the O-rings and Thiokol engineers recommended against the launch unless the temperature of the O-rings was at least fifty-three degrees Fahrenheit. But on Tuesday, January 28, at 3:10
A.M.,
the launch crew began pumping liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen into the giant external tank of
Challenger.
Reports of surface temperatures were not part of the routine, so the twenty-five degrees of the left booster and the eight degrees of the right were not communicated to the launch room. The flight had already been postponed several times. Children across the country were glued to televisions for this flight of Christa McAuliffe, the first “teacher in space,” part of NASA’s program to loft ordinary citizens. The countdown continued and
Challenger
was launched. Tremendous pressure from the expanding gases inside the rocket booster strained against the flawed rings. Falling ice, steam, and distance obscured the puff of ominous black smoke as
Challenger
rose.

Still seconds into the ascent,
Challenger
was saved by milliseconds when the melted joint created a temporary seal. At T plus 60 seconds, as the main engines throttled up to 104 percent, rookie astronaut Mike Smith yelled, “Feel that mother go.” But the rocket’s vibrations had broken the temporary seal: the O-ring had failed. At T plus 73, NASA officials witnessed the explosion on their television monitors. Nine miles above the Atlantic, Mike Smith could see the flames outside his window. “Uh, Oh!” he said as the cabin broke from the rocket. It plunged 65,000 feet to the sea in two minutes and forty-five seconds. All seven astronauts died, from
asphyxiation or fire or impact, as they smashed into eighty feet of water at 207 miles an hour.