"Live From Cape Canaveral": Covering the Space Race, From Sputnik to Today (3 page)

The two men finished and left. Now I was the one feeling smug. It was dumb luck for sure, but just what in hell were they talking about?

The next launch was
Atlas 10B
. That I knew. But they were talking about Ike’s message from orbit.
10B
wasn’t going to orbit anything! Or was it? I had been told how Atlas rockets almost achieve orbit each time they are launched on intercontinental ranges. Could that be it? Well, why in hell not? They could be orbiting something with
10B
. That was it! They could be orbiting a message from the President.

I rushed back to my office. A message from Jim Kitchell in New York waited. I returned his call and learned Jim was already on the story. We compared notes on what each of us knew, and I was quickly on my way to see a few solid sources. I had no idea only eighty-eight people nationwide were officially in the know, and I was greeted with blank faces. Then, good old RCA, NBC’s parent company came through. The playback unit and transmitter were being put together by RCA, and my source played me the tape. I had it all. But as the “spook” had said, there was little I could do. We could film, r
ecord, and stand by. Nothing more.

I phoned Kitchell and he flew cameraman Bruce Powell down from
Chicago.
Atlas 10B
roared from a freshly darkened Earth at 6:02
P.M
. Eastern time, December 18, 1958.

And God! What a launch!

10B
climbed into the darkness, the
Atlas
’s thrust lighting the night as hundreds of launches had before. But then, a little more than a minute off the ground, the rocket instantly r
eappeared from the darkness. The line of shadow cast by Earth stretched far over our heads, and now
Atlas 10B
was rushing across a lit sky above our darkness. It was bathed in sunlight from a sun that had already disappeared beyond the Cape’s horizon.

We stood frozen by what we saw. Rocket flames growing blood-red
followed by dazzling blues and greens and yellows, all creating a shimmering aurora in space. We were looking at a multicolored sky alive and dancing. It was as if the gods were welcoming Ike’s message with their own shimmering Christmas tree.

Atlas 10B
lifts off with Project Score.
(USAF).

No one had ever seen before or will ever see again this incredible sight. The temperature, the moisture in the air, and the light rays from a hidden sun were just right. The stunning colors and lights glimmered and lingered in the heavens, and official phones were ringing off their walls. Some thought the world was ending. Others thought the rocket had blown up.

Meanwhile, inside Range Control, those who were tracking the Atlas were watching the big rocket grab for all of Earth’s rotational push.
10B
needed all the help it could get to make it into orbit. It was headed due east and off the safety charts. The range safety officer (RSO) was about to have a fit. He was reaching for the destruct button to blow the Atlas to harmless debris when he felt a hand grab his wrist. General Donald Yates stood over his shoulder with a firm grip. “Don’t push that button, Captain,” the general ordered. “I’ll take full responsibility.”

“But, Sir,” the air force captain protested, “if we have a failure the missile could hit Africa.”

“Big deal,” the general bellowed. “A lot of jungle out there.” Yates released his grip. “Don’t touch that damn button, Captain. That’s a direct order.”

The range safety officer leaned back in his chair and began to sweat. General Yates held his breath, and an anxious White House awaited word.

Five minutes after
Atlas 10B
’s magnificent liftoff, the rocket sailed into Earth orbit and became the planet’s largest and heaviest man-made satellite.

Other press members reported it as a routine launch. I didn’t report anything. I grinned as NBC cameraman Powell sped away for his chartered plane to our Jacksonville affiliate. If the whole damn scheme worked, we’d have an NBC network report.

The air force returned the news media to Headquarters Building 425 at Patrick Air Force Base, where we had left our cars. Immediately, ev
eryone was off the bus and off to the bars, believing the story was over.

Major Ken Grine, our air force escort, decided to stay in his office, and I decided to stay with him. We both knew why we were waiting, and two hours after
10B
’s launch, direct from the White House we had confirmation from the President himself.

“Tonight,” Ike began, “An Atlas satellite was launched into orbit from Cape Canaveral. On board is this recorded message by me.”

The President turned and pointed to the White House radio technician:

NBC News was the only agency with film, and we enjoyed our little exclusive.

In 1958, launches at Cape Canaveral had become the hottest news in the country. NBC’s Chet Huntley, America’s number-one broadcaster, was often at the Cape. From left to right: author Jay Barbree, Major Ken Grine, Chet Huntley. (Barbree Collection).

P
roject Score reached orbit five months into my employ by NBC News, and by now I knew my way around the Cape and the military.

As a farm boy of sixteen without a home, I lied about my age and talked myself into the air force, where I spent four years in search of an education. After basic training in Texas, I was assigned to Scott Air Force Base in Illinois. There, I spent my off-duty time studying for my general equivalency diploma and watching the fighters and bombers climb into the sky from Scott Field. Sometimes I would walk to the end of the runway and stand, drinking in the energy of an F–80 jet thundering over my head, tucking up its gear and fleeing into puffy white clouds.

I was in awe of flying machines, and I began spending much of my spare time at a nearby private airport. I had no money for flying lessons, but I would stand there and watch the pilots shout “Contact!” to the mechanics that would grab the wooden props and swing them down suddenly; each aircraft engine would fire with a stuttering cough. I loved to stand behind the ships when the pilots revved them up for a power check. The air blast whipped back, throwing up dust and flattening the grass, blowing strong in my face.

Soon, I was an airport fixture. I was the pilots’ “go-fer.” I gladly ran their errands and helped them with their planes, and they repaid me with local rides.

I’ll never forget my first hop. The airplane was old, its fabric faded, splotched yellow, and the engine dripped oil. It smelled of gasoline in the air; it shook my teeth, but I didn’t care. After a few weeks, the pilots let me handle the stick and rudder foot pedals in flight, adding instructions when possible.

Then there was the day the man with the red-and-white Stearman biplane landed at our field. I helped the pilot with the awesome ship, running behind the right wing and pushing on the struts. We got the machine refueled, and I answered all the pilot’s questions, bringing him coffee and a couple of fresh doughnuts. And while he downed the cof
fee, I stood on a box, cleaning the cockpit glass, polishing the gleaming red-and-white surface as the pilot watched in silence.

“Hey, buddy!” he shouted. “Would you like a ride?”

My grin was my answer and minutes later we were in the air, where, for the first time, I experienced aerobatics as earth and sky vanished and reappeared with startling rapidity. It began with me staring at a vertical horizon and realizing the edge of the world now stood on its end. But not for long, as the Stearman continued on over, rolling around the inside of an invisible barrel in the air, until the ground was up and the sky was down. I had just enough t
ime to catch my breath when the nose went down and an invisible hand pushed me gently into my seat and glued me there as the nose came up, and up. The horizon disappeared again, and the engine screamed with the dive. Then the nose was coming up, higher and higher, and the engine began to protest. The sun flashed in my eyes, and I found myself on my back as the Stearman soared up and over in a beautiful loop.

As we flew on, my pleasure grew, and my eyes were glazed with delight by the time the biplane whispered onto the grass landing strip.

There could be no stopping me now. I lived and slept flying, and within a year I had my pilot’s license along with my high school
diploma, and I earned two years of college credits in night aviation classes. I was transferred to the Scott AFB Link Trainer Section, where I was appointed an air force instrument flight simulator instructor at the age of eighteen.

The author as an eighteen-year-old pilot at Scott Air Force Base, Illinois. (Barbree Collection).

A couple of the other pilots in the Link Section and I bought an Aeronica Champion, and in the months to come, logged endless hours in the single-engine land aircraft. At that time I only saw my future in aviation, but I soon learned the pay wasn’t promising, and I met a portly radio-station owner endowed with both a full bosom and a desire to possess my young body. Broadcast crept into my life, pushing flying aside, and once out of the air force, a living I had to make.

I kicked around a couple of radio stations before landing at WALB Radio & TV in Albany, Georgia, where, after three years, the “space bug” sunk its teeth in me and I was off to Cape Canaveral. I managed a little piece of bachelor’s heaven in a studio apartment on the beach, and when it came to making friends, I was lucky. Some of them were even famous, but I suppose the one I liked to hang out with the most was a wild New Yorker named Martin Caidin. Caidin stepped aside for no man, and he was arguably the greatest aviation and space writer ever. He lived in New York but when he fi
nished writing a book, Caidin would be off to the Cape, where we would raise hell and get in some serious flying.

We were an odd couple: he a wise-ass New Yorker, I a Georgia plowboy. We just seemed to piss off the right people, which I reasoned was because Caidin was an orphan and we’d both grown up without. When two people who never had much meet, well, there’s instant trust.

Mostly, when Marty came down, we would go flying. He had bought a German World War II ME–108 fighter, and I remember one particular night when we were upstairs in calm air and the old Messerschmitt was rock steady, and we could see the Cape spread out before us; we could see where brilliant searchlights converged on an Atlas missile. It was too far away to make out details at first, but we could see the plume of escaping liquid-oxygen vapor flashing in the light.

America’s new spaceport was an enchanted land of lights and colors, and as we flew closer, we could see along the northeast beach the four
massive gantry towers for Atlas, including the missile undergoing a fueling test on its pad, and the dark shapes where engineers and construction workers were rushing the completion of four complexes and their towers for the mighty Titan. And south of the Cape’s point, there were the gantries for the family of intermediate-range ballistic missiles; Thor, Jupiter, Redstone, and Jupiter-C; and the new launch pads for Polaris.