Red Moon Rising

11 GOLDSTONE HAS THE BIRD

John Foster Dulles could barely contain his anger. “What happened yesterday has made us the laughing stock of the free world,” he snarled, his face flushed.

Vice President Nixon and the other members of the National Security Council nodded bitterly. They had assembled on December 7 to discuss the fiasco at Cape Canaveral, to try somehow to put the humiliating debacle in a positive light. But so far no one had come up with any sort of silver lining to spin to the clamoring press.

“Mr. President,” Dulles continued, “I sincerely hope that in the future we do not announce the date, hour, and indeed very minute of any satellite launch until we know for certain it is successfully in orbit. All this negative publicity has had a terrible effect on our international standing.”

A plainer truth could not have been spoken. Confidence in the United States was plummeting abroad almost as dramatically as Eisenhower’s popularity was sinking at home. The slide was most pronounced in Western Europe, where polls conducted in Britain and France prior to Sputnik’s launch had shown that only 6 percent of respondents saw the Soviet Union as militarily superior to the United States. Now fully half of those surveyed viewed America as the weaker superpower, which did not bode well for Dulles’s plans to persuade NATO allies to accept intermediate-range rockets on their soil. He had hoped to pitch the ballistic missile deployment at an upcoming NATO conference in Paris, but Vanguard’s charred remains were proving a tough image to overcome. Instead of triumphantly circling the globe, America’s vaunted satellite lay ignominiously in a Florida swamp, where it had been flung during the explosion, and continued to emit its baleful beep until a frustrated reporter finally snapped, “Why doesn’t somebody go out there, find it, and kill it?”

This was hardly a resounding recommendation for nuclear-tipped IRBMs, and judging by the derisive reaction of the European press, Dulles faced a tough sell. “Oh, what a Flopnik,” the London Daily Herald laughed. “Spaetnik”—Latenik—the German dailies played off the word. Vanguard should have more aptly been called Rearguard, snickered the French. Kaputnik, Splatnik, Stallnik, Sputternik, Dudnik, Puffnik, Oopsnik, Goofnik, and every other conceivable permutation blared from domestic and international headlines aimed straight at the heart of America’s wounded pride. “This incident has no bearing on our programs for the development of intermediate range and intercontinental ballistic missiles, which are continuing to make fine progress,” the Pentagon immediately rebutted in a press release, stressing that no military hardware had been involved in the Vanguard mission. But the damage had been done. At the United Nations, Soviet delegates were coyly suggesting that the United States qualified for the technical assistance programs the USSR offered to developing countries. In Moscow, a dead-serious Khrushchev was threatening to target any NATO member accepting U.S. missiles with his own rockets, which, he added snidely, actually worked. “The Soviets are playing this for all its worth,” Dulles spat.

“I’m all for stopping such unfortunate publicity.” Eisenhower sighed. “But I’ve no idea how.”

The president glanced around the sparingly decorated conference room—a few old oil paintings, some ship models, lots of long faces—looking for suggestions. But his cabinet secretaries, the CIA director, the head of the U.S. Information Agency, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff all appeared to be hiding behind a veil of cigarette and pipe smoke. Jim Hagerty, the White House press secretary who had prematurely released Vanguard’s launch date, was nowhere to be seen.

Ike was on his own, that much was clear. The brief reprieve he had been granted after his stroke was over. Hope had been dashed, Vanguard Fries had been stricken from the nation’s menus, replaced by Sputnik Cocktails—one part vodka, two parts sour grapes—and the vengeful media, having angrily crowned Vanguard “our worst humiliation since Custer’s last stand,” were searching for scapegoats. Already, the Glenn L. Martin Company, Vanguard’s general contractor, had been punished. Its stock had taken such a beating that it had been forced to suspend trading. Vanguard’s project manager, the affable John Hagen, had been equally assailed at a raucous press conference. “This program has had unprecedented publicity in the development stage, which is not usually the case,” he said as he tried to defend himself. “The fact that it was a test phase was lost sight of,” he added, deflecting culpability from his scientists to politicians, whom he refused to name. The Democrats had no such reservations, eagerly informing voters exactly where to place the blame. “It lies with the President of the United States,” Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson announced haughtily on NBC’s Meet the Press. The president’s lack of vision, obdurate penny-pinching, and baffling complacency, he groused, were directly responsible for the disaster in Cape Canaveral. “How long, how long oh God, will it take us to catch up with the Soviet Union’s two satellites?” wailed Lyndon Johnson, who had hastily reconvened his Preparedness hearings to capitalize on the national fury, and like Jackson he was going to point the finger at the Oval Office.

After only a few days’ rest at his beloved Gettysburg farm—just enough time to regain what he described as 95 percent of his speech and motor skills—Ike had been thrust into yet another maelstrom. Now the Democrats were insinuating that Eisenhower no longer had the strength and vitality to lead the nation and that he should step down. “There were open and widespread suggestions that the President resign,” Time magazine reported in its December 9 issue, noting that NATO leaders were “shaken to the point of dismay” to learn that he might not be able to attend the big Paris summit in mid-December. “It is the whole free world that is sick in bed with Ike, waiting for his recovery,” a French newspaper commented.

What very few people realized, outside of the president’s most trusted circle of advisers, was that Eisenhower was asking himself the very same thing. “In my mind was the question of my future fitness to meet the rigorous demands of the Presidency,” he later confessed. “The test that I now set for myself was that of going through with my plan of proceeding to Paris.” The Paris conference was a week away, the first ever meeting of all the NATO heads of state, rather than the customary gathering of defense and foreign ministers, and the largest gathering of Western leaders in Europe since the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. It was hugely important not only because of the proposed deployment of American nuclear missiles on the European continent but also because the United States needed to restore the shattered confidence of its anxious allies. Ike had to attend, not only for himself but for the good of the nation as well. “If I could carry out this program successfully and without noticeable damage to myself,” he vowed, “then I could continue my duties. If I felt the results to be less than satisfactory, then I would resign.”

Nixon and Dulles had not been privy to the president’s private pledge. They were not his confidants, like the ferociously loyal Sherman Adams or General Goodpaster, and while the vice president had yet again earned praise for the way he had handled himself during Eisenhower’s incapacitation by not appearing too eager to fill his shoes, his low profile was partly calculated. Nixon was purposefully distancing himself from the president because he had no intention of going down with Ike’s sinking ship. If the president dreamed of golf and retiring to Gettysburg, that was fine, even understandable. But Nixon was still only forty-four years old, and he had his own future to think about. He had paid his dues, and he had suffered untold slights and humiliation, all so he could one day sit at Ike’s desk. And now these blasted missiles were threatening to drag him down too. Slowly, imperceptibly at first, and then demonstratively, the vice president began inching away from his stricken running mate. (The move would inspire a running joke: Martians land in Washington and approach the vice president. Take us to your leader, the aliens demand. “I can’t,” Nixon demurs. “I hardly know the man.”)

Nixon was not the only administration official wondering whether the leader of the world had lost confidence in himself. “This man is not what he was,” Adams confided to James Killian, in a rare moment of doubt. The change was dramatic. Only a day earlier the president had seemed on the road to recovery, determined to prove to the country and to himself that he could lick “this cerebral thing.” Everyone in the White House had noticed a new energy, a spring in Ike’s step, a fighting spirit reminiscent of his first-term buoyancy. That rekindled vigor was now gone. It was as if Vanguard had sucked all the wind out of his sails. Looking around the room at his ambitious vice president, the powerful Dulles brothers, Secretary McElroy, and the assembled NSC staff, Eisenhower must have indeed seemed a shadow of his former self. Once the supreme commander of the greatest fighting force ever assembled, he was now frail and exhausted, an old man presiding uncertainly over a jittery country. If there was a low point, a single, most downcast occasion in Ike’s long career in public service, this was almost certainly it.

After a few seconds of uncomfortable silence, Donald Quarles hesitantly cleared his throat. Since he had appointed the Stewart Committee and had ultimately chosen Vanguard, this was his mess. “I think, Mr. President, that in a sense, we were hoisted by our own petard yesterday,” he said, launching into another one of his impassioned justifications and rationalizations. The United States had committed itself to share all data from Vanguard with the IGY, he said, and had included the launch date so that scientists in other countries could have their ground stations ready to receive signals from the orbiting satellite. (What he conveniently failed to mention was that the December 6 test flight had never been intended as an official IGY launch.) “I’m not trying to make excuses for what happened yesterday, Mr. President,” he added, “I’m just trying to explain why we are obligated to publicly announce launches.”

“Do we have to do this in the future?” interrupted John Foster Dulles, whose “irritation” was clearly recorded in the minutes. “The Soviets kept their launches secret, why couldn’t we?”

The unfortunate Quarles, who had recommended that Eisenhower downplay Sputnik just prior to his disastrous October 9 press conference, and then compounded the error by overestimating Vanguard’s chances of success, would find little respite from the hot seat in the coming weeks. Again he tried to explain that the United States had formally committed itself to conduct satellite research as a purely peaceful, scientific pursuit, with complete openness. “It would involve fundamentally changing our policy,” he stammered.

“Well, maybe we should change our policy,” Dulles shot back. “Yesterday was a disaster for the United States.”

While America plunged into a national funk and Vice President Nixon scrambled for high ground, the man responsible for all the turmoil lay exhausted in a sanatorium in southern Russia. Sergei Korolev’s fragile health had finally caught up with him. During the marathon preparations for Sputnik II’s rushed launch, he had taxed his delicate system to the breaking point and had collapsed shortly after completing his mission. He was rushed to Moscow’s most exclusive hospital, one reserved for ranking party officials, where the Soviet Union’s leading heart specialists were summoned to his bedside. The Chief Designer was diagnosed with arrhythmia, coupled with “over-fatigue,” and the doctors prescribed thirty days of bed rest. Khrushchev himself issued the directive, since Korolev had a penchant for ignoring his physicians’ advice.

Despite the order to stay off his feet, Korolev had no intention of remaining idle. Kislovodsk, the spa he chose for his enforced recuperation, had been popularized a century earlier by the poet Aleksandr Pushkin and frequented by the czarist aristocracy for the medicinal powers of its warm sulfuric springs. Nestled between the Caspian and Black seas at the foot of the snowcapped Caucasus, it was the burial site of Friedrich Tsander, Korolev’s first real mentor and the man who had opened his eyes to the possibility of space travel in the late 1920s.

With his customary zeal, Korolev had turned the peaceful sanatorium into a bustling base from which to launch a region-wide search for Tsander’s grave. Local officials, clerical administrators, archaeologists, and even experts from Moscow were summoned, cajoled, threatened, berated, and rewarded until every cemetery in the area had been scoured and the rocket pioneer’s final resting place at last found. There, Korolev ordered a monument erected in homage to the visionary who had planted the seed for the Sputniks.

In Moscow, meanwhile, Valentin Glushko and some of the Chief Designer’s other envious detractors were taking advantage of his absence to sow seeds of doubt about the R-7 within the Kremlin and the military. For all of Sputnik II’s political and propaganda achievements, the mission had not been a technical success. Pravda and its wire-service sibling, TASS, had made much of Sputnik II’s living payload, regaling readers both at home and abroad with tales of the mixed-breed terrier Laika, hurtling through space 1,000 miles above the earth’s surface at a speed of 17,600 miles per hour. Telemetry readings, the public had been told, had shown that her heart rate had jumped dramatically during liftoff, to 260 beats per minute, but she had settled down, enjoying her gelatinized treats as she paved the way for human interplanetary travel in her climate-controlled capsule. In fact Laika had died shortly after launch, when both the heat shields and the cooling systems had failed, and she had suffered a horrific fate akin to being slow-roasted alive in a convection oven. The tragedy would be kept secret until after the collapse of communism, but within the Soviet scientific community it cast grave doubt on Korolev’s plans to send human beings into space.

Similarly, the Soviet press had gone to great lengths to publicize Sputnik II’s other significant contribution to scientific exploration, its onboard meters that would map the radiation belts that were believed to surround the earth. To better impress the West with its technological prowess, Moscow released astonishingly detailed descriptions of the devices, and yet after the launch no major announcement of glorious discoveries had been heralded by Moscow. The truth of the matter was that Sputnik II had been such a rush job that half the systems on the satellite had malfunctioned. It had performed its political mission, but not much else.

The military, especially, had been unimpressed. The more Marshal Nedelin grew familiar with the slow-loading R-7, the less he wanted it for his Strategic Rocket Forces. Glushko had long been whispering in his ear that the rival R-16 would be better suited for warfare, and in the Chief Designer’s absence Nedelin had finally taken the matter to Khrushchev.

“Tell me, Sergei Pavlovich,” the Soviet leader confronted Korolev upon his return to Moscow, “isn’t there some way we can put your rocket at a constant readiness, so that it can be fired at a moment’s notice in the event of a crisis?”

“No,” Korolev conceded. But he reacted furiously to suggestions that his missile used the wrong propellant. Cryogenic oxidizers like liquid oxygen, he told Khrushchev, were much safer than the highly toxic and inherently unstable acid mixes proposed by Yangel and Glushko, which he called “the devil’s venom.” The Chief Designer stubbornly dug in his heels, and he switched the topic to space, his favored distractive ploy, igniting the first secretary’s imagination with tales of the 5,000-pound Sputnik III he wanted to launch in the new year; the lunar probes he would send shortly thereafter; and the manned space missions that would follow. Beguiled by visions of political glory, Khrushchev momentarily forgot the fuel issues and in a burst of enthusiasm begged his star scientist “to deliver,” in Korolev’s words, “the Soviet Coat of Arms to the Moon.”

But Nedelin and the military would not let the matter rest. The word was spread that the Chief Designer had lost his bearing, had become too wrapped up in space, and had lost all sense of priority. “Korolev works for TASS,” making newspaper headlines, the Red Army chieftains grumbled, whereas “Yangel works for us.” They decided to throw their support behind the rival designer. Nedelin would arrange another audience with Khrushchev, this time with Glushko alone.

As the Soviet military plotted its revolt against Sergei Korolev, the Army Ballistic Missile Agency was feverishly preparing to leap into space. ABMA had shed the requisite crocodile tears for Vanguard’s fiery demise, making the expected public statements of support and sympathy, but privately there had been widespread relief in Huntsville that the competition had failed.

Things were finally looking up at ABMA, whose fortunes seemed inversely related to the White House’s woes. In addition to finally getting its satellite shot, ABMA had just received a huge boost from the intense pressure brought by Lyndon Johnson’s hearings. Johnson, on November 27, had called McElroy and Quarles to appear before his subcommittee. Expecting a politically charged tongue-lashing, the secretary of defense began his testimony by throwing Johnson a bone in the hope that he might deflect accusations that Charlie Wilson’s missile cuts had put America in danger. “Before you begin your questioning, I have a brief statement to make,” McElroy said. “We have been undertaking during the past few days an intensive re-assessment of our position,” vis-á-vis Wilson’s directive to eliminate duplicate Army and Air Force IRBMs. “We are today authorizing the placing into production of both the Jupiter and Thor missiles.”

Privately, McElroy was less than thrilled with the concession. “The chief reason” for salvaging the Jupiter, he said, was “to stiffen the confidence and allay the concern of our people.”

A similarly preemptive tactic was used to co-opt Medaris’s potentially damaging testimony. Johnson obligingly played along with the ploy, which took some of the sting out of his hearings, but just as important allowed him to share in the credit for shoring up America’s missile program. The army, a smiling and decidedly more docile Medaris informed the subcommittee, “was being authorized to proceed on a ‘top-priority’ basis with the development of a solid-fuel missile,” the Pershing, a storable, next-generation rocket that could be launched on a moment’s notice.

All of Huntsville rejoiced at the twin coups. Not only was Jupiter officially and irrevocably saved but ABMA, at long last, had a new assignment. It wasn’t going to be disbanded, its staff wasn’t going to be snatched up by the rapacious air force, and von Braun’s designers weren’t going to be limited to any more idiotic 200-mile-range rules. “With feelings much different from those that had had my head bowed and my spirit beaten a year before,” a rejuvenated Medaris now set about pressing his advantage and capitalizing on ABMA’s rising prospects.

If von Braun were to launch his satellite without a hitch, ABMA would be ideally positioned to take the lead in America’s space effort. The door to the heavens had been flung open, and space was now a legitimate political destination. In Congress, Senators Albert Gore of Tennessee and Clinton Anderson of New Mexico had introduced bills to place all space programs under the Atomic Energy Commission. At the White House, Vice President Nixon was said to be especially receptive to proposals for creating a single national space agency. It was clear that the Russians had one and intended to send a man into orbit, so despite Eisenhower’s misgivings the administration needed to plan ahead. Medaris wasn’t going to let an opportunity like this slip by. He ordered von Braun, whose sole brush with space to date was the nose cone Eisenhower had displayed during his pep talks, to devise a comprehensive road map for America’s future cosmic conquests. Von Braun’s $21 billion blueprint, cumbersomely titled “Proposal for a National Integrated Missile and Space Vehicle Development Program,” envisioned orbiting an astronaut in 1962 and putting a man on the moon by 1970. The plan hinged, naturally, on ABMA’s central participation.

Medaris was equally anxious to explore opportunities in the potentially lucrative new field of spy satellites, which, like space, was now also wide open. Since the air force had shown so little enthusiasm for developing its WS-117L reconnaissance satellite platform, there was an opening to grab the mandate for the army. General Bernard Schriever, Medaris’s archrival at the air force’s missile command, was too busy trying to get the Thor and Atlas operational, while shuttling “like a yo-yo,” in his own words, between congressional appearances and his West Coast offices. He might not even have time for satellites, Medaris reasoned. But after a few discreet inquiries, ABMA’s liaison officer at Schriever’s Los Angeles headquarters “found the door completely shut.” The air force, all of a sudden, had developed a proprietary interest in the WS-117L. “Sputnik woke us up,” Schriever later conceded, and he wasn’t sharing any information with his rival. Medaris responded in the petty spirit of interservice rivalry: “So I also closed the door and told our people to give the Air Force no information on our satellite plans.” It was juvenile and “preposterous,” he admitted in retrospect, but he couldn’t help himself.

Unbeknownst to Medaris, there was a reason for the newfound secrecy; a third party also coveted the WS-117L: the CIA. Richard Bissell had been eyeing the project ever since he had started searching for a replacement for the U-2. He had helped fund Vanguard from his slush fund and tried to covertly buy the Itek Corporation, an optical research laboratory in Boston, which was working on recoverable cameras that could operate from outer space. In the summer of 1957, Bissell, Edwin Land, and James Killian had begun hatching a scheme with Schriever for the CIA to assume direct control over spy satellites, as it had done with spy planes. Schriever was amenable because his missiles would be used to launch the CIA satellites, and he could still play a significant role in the operation. The idea was brought to General Goodpaster at the White House, who had not thought the timing right to approach the president with the plan. After the launch of Sputnik I, Eisenhower himself broached the topic and asked for a briefing on reconnaissance satellite developments.

The problem with the WS-117L was that it relied on video image transmission, a technology that was still embryonic and would not be perfected for many years. Land and Killian were proposing an interim solution: cameras similar to those used on the U-2 would be launched by a two-stage Thor into orbit, where they would snap shots of Soviet targets and jettison canisters of film. The negatives, in heat-resistant containers, would fall back to earth at predetermined locations and deploy parachutes that could be recovered in midflight. Momentum for the proposal grew in November, as Sputnik II increased the sense of urgency that the WS-117L needed to be fast-tracked, and that the air force’s bureaucracy simply moved too slowly for the job. The Vanguard fiasco finally gave the CIA the opening it needed. In the stunned aftermath of the explosion, Allen Dulles, Jim Killian, and Neil McElroy quickly convinced Eisenhower to secretly promote the reconnaissance satellite to a “national security objective of the highest order,” a prerequisite for Bissell’s friendly CIA takeover.

The plan was set in motion over the next few weeks. “Our first goal was to put the genie back in the bottle,” Bissell recalled. The air force photoreconnaissance program had received far too much publicity; the New York Times had written about it in front-page stories, and Johnson’s subcommittee had discussed it in open sessions. The project would have to be canceled, and with as much fanfare as possible. They would pick a slow news day over the next few months for the Pentagon to make the announcement. Cost overruns, technical difficulties, or some other excuse would be invented. Outside of a few top generals like Schriever, not even the air force would be told the real reason. The program would be restarted on the sly under a new code name. “I had to invent an elaborate cover explanation,” Bissell recalled. Finances and procurement would be handled through bogus departments and fictitious front companies in much the same vein as the U-2. “We also had to have a plausible cover story for that part of the project that couldn’t be hidden from the public,” Bissell said. The frequent launches from Cape Canaveral would be explained by an IGY-inspired civilian research program that would build genuine research satellites and produce reports and studies. They would call it Discover, which had a peaceful, scientific ring. Its real code name would be Corona, after the typewriter on which Bissell outlined the takeover scheme. It would be the most ambitious, secretive, and costly operation in CIA history. If all went well, that is.

Richard Bissell and Bruce Medaris were not the only ones to find a silver lining in Vanguard’s implosion. The catastrophe was also serving Lyndon Johnson well, as it presented fiery evidence of American missile missteps and focused public attention on the Preparedness hearings.

Never one to pass up a media opportunity, Johnson played the disaster for all it was worth. John Hagen, the soft-spoken Vanguard program director, was hauled in as a witness and bludgeoned until he confessed that funding shortages had contributed to his rocket’s less than spectacular debut. Johnson then set his sights on military missile programs, which he claimed suffered from the same penury, exposing America to the terrifying might of Soviet rockets. “Some awful needles were stuck into this thing,” George Reedy chuckled apologetically decades later. “I can still remember the hearing when we left with a distinct impression that the Soviets outnumbered us by a factor of fifteen to one. We were giving them credit for maybe 1,500 missiles and we were only supposed to have thirty.”

Thus a new gap, “a missile gap,” was born from the ashes of Vanguard. “We will be walking a very tight wire with our lives for the next five years,” a senior executive from General Dynamics testified, explaining how the late start in developing the Atlas ICBM his company was building meant that for the foreseeable future the United States would have to rely on planes to defend itself against the Soviet Union’s virtually indestructible new missiles.

The administration, it went without saying, was responsible for the strategic imbalance that now imperiled the nation. For all his bipartisan pledges—his noble talk of there being no Republicans or Democrats after Sputnik, only Americans—Johnson had effectively put Eisenhower’s entire government on trial. The indictment was all the more devastating because it was subtle. Johnson studiously avoided histrionics and tended to chide gently, more the reproachful schoolteacher than the vengeful prosecutor. “There are too many people in government who have the right to say no,” he admonished. “Too few who have authority to say yes, and even less who dare to do so.” Johnson never directly pointed the finger at the White House. That was left to others—supposedly impartial scientists, who decried Eisenhower’s “false economies” and wrongheaded policies, or friendly journalists, who railed against the grave dangers the country faced as a result. “At the Pentagon they shudder when they speak of the ‘gap,’” reported the columnists Joseph and Stewart Alsop in one of their more alarming dispatches from the hearings. “They shudder because in these years, the American government will flaccidly permit the Kremlin to gain an almost unchallenged superiority in the nuclear striking power that was once our specialty.”

Few readers could have missed the implication. Ike was “flaccid,” rolling over for the Russians. Johnson, on the other hand, stood strong and tall, seeking truth and security at a time when America, as Harper’s magazine metaphorically put it, was “a leaky ship, with a committee on the bridge and a crippled captain sending occasional whispers up the speaking tube from his sick bay.”

In his pursuit of publicity—and perhaps even in pursuit of truth and security—Johnson was relentless, shuffling the attending representatives of the press like a circus master. Photographers would be ushered into one chamber, shots snapped, then hustled out to make room for the reporters. “Speaking so fast that no one could take a word-by-word account,” observed the historian Robert A. Caro, “he would rip through a briefing on a committee session, pant that he was ten minutes late for a luncheon speech he had to make. ‘The statements will be up in a minute anyway,’ burst out of the room to give the television interviewers time for ‘just three’ questions, then flaring up when a fourth was asked—‘I told you, just three,’” he would add, before running down the hall with a dozen reporters in tow.

Grabbing the next day’s newspapers, Johnson would scream, shout, cheer, sob, curse, and vow vengeance, depending on how his heroics had been portrayed. Then he would call a press conference and start all over again. “Control of space means control of the world,” he would warn, posing dramatically for the cameras. “From space the masters of infinity would have the power to control the earth’s weather, to cause drought and flood, to change the tides and raise the levels of the sea, to divert the Gulf Stream and change the temperature climates to frigid.” Nothing short of planetary domination hung in the balance of “this ultimate position,” Johnson railed against America’s seeming inability to achieve orbit. “Our national goal and the goal of all free men must be to hold that position.”

“Light a match behind Lyndon and he’ll orbit,” cynical journalists joked about the senator’s harried pace. But the public was not so jaded. America was watching and listening, and Lyndon Baines Johnson was making sense.

The one nugget of information the Johnson subcommittee could not mine from its witnesses was when the United States would attempt to orbit another satellite. “Soon” was all Medaris would say when pressed in his testimony on January 7, 1958.

“I am not going to ask you about the precise date,” Cyrus Vance persisted, seeking to pry a more exact answer out of the general. “I am thankful for that, Sir,” Medaris replied, not taking the bait. To the launch crew at Cape Canaveral, he wired the following instructions the next day: “Do not admit to the presence of the vehicle. Shroud upper stages with canvas and move to the pad not later than 6:30 A.M.”—that is, under the cover of darkness—“Identify the vehicle as a Redstone. Great care should be taken concerning the movements of key personnel from the agency in your vicinity. They will be flown directly by special plane. Any violation of this decoy plan will be dealt with severely.”

To his own staff at ABMA headquarters, Medaris issued similar injunctions against discussing any aspect of the pending launch, even with their wives. “I desire it well understood that the individual who violates instructions will be handled severely,” he reiterated. The lessons of Vanguard had been well learned. There would be no advance notice this time. It wasn’t just the press that Medaris was worried about. The last thing he needed was a herd of self-aggrandizing politicians descending on Huntsville and the firing range in Florida. Not only would they be a distraction, bringing down hordes of pesky journalists and putting unnecessary pressure on his whole team, but their mere presence could also inadvertently scuttle a launch. “Personal observation had convinced me that the chances of success on any important firing effort were in inverse proportion to the number of VIPs present,” Medaris later explained. With half of Washington looking over their shoulders, ABMA’s launch crew would be reluctant to scrap or postpone a shoot because of inclement weather or minor technical glitches, which could prove disastrous. Medaris knew that “there was every human tendency to decide in marginal cases to go ahead and accept the risk rather than disappoint the visitors.”

Medaris was not going to allow that to happen. The VIPs would remain in Washington and would be kept in the dark like everyone else. Only a few people in the Pentagon and at the National Security Council were told that liftoff was scheduled for Wednesday, January 29. To further mask its activities, ABMA began referring to the satellite booster in all official communications simply by its serial designation: Missile Number 29. Missile 29 was one of the original Jupiter Cs that Medaris had quietly diverted during the 1956 reentry tests “for more spectacular future purposes,” as he had hopefully put it. Taken out of cold storage, the test missile had been completely disassembled in late November. It consisted of four stages. The main stage was an elongated Redstone. Eleven scaled-down Sergeant rockets formed the second stage. Three Sergeant motors formed the third stage, while the satellite would be embedded into the final Sergeant rocket in the fourth stage. Von Braun’s team had worked day and night throughout December to reconfigure the four-stage carrier. A new fuel, hydyne, had replaced alcohol to increase thrust from 75,000 to 83,000 pounds, and the turbo pumps had been upgraded to work longer, extending the Redstone’s burning time from 121 to 155 seconds. The entire forward section, which housed the upper stages, had also been modified to accommodate a special “spinning bucket” that spun on its axis, creating a gyroscope that would keep the cluster of smaller top-stage rockets in perfect equilibrium. An improved inertial guidance system was installed, as were a series of tiny directional air-jet nozzles that would keep the uppermost stages perfectly aligned with the earth at the point of orbit. Everything was tested and retested until von Braun pronounced himself satisfied. “Ship it to Florida,” he declared on December 20. “It will do the job.”

One final modification was made to the Jupiter C booster after its arrival at Cape Canaveral in the belly of a specially configured C-124 cargo plane: its name was changed to Juno. The rechristening was ordered by the Pentagon to deemphasize Missile Number 29’s military and Germanic origins. The Jupiter C’s main stage, after all, was a direct descendant of the V-2, and it was said that some folks in Washington wanted the lineage obscured—and a female name would accomplish this task quite nicely. Medaris, however, suspected baser motivations. “It became quite obvious that every effort would be made at the national level to suppress the Army’s participation in this enterprise,” he worried, “and to credit the whole business to the scientific personnel controlling the IGY effort.”

Juno did have civilian components. Its uppermost stages had been designed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology, and JPL had also made the eighteen-pound satellite, which was fitted into the crown of a slender six-foot-long Sergeant rocket that would ignite for six and half seconds just prior to orbit. The satellite, in fact, had been secretly built several years ago, when JPL’s director, William H. Pickering, had conspired with Medaris to circumvent Washington’s decision to go with Vanguard. Without authorization, they had proceeded with work on an army satellite on the sly, “just in case” Vanguard failed. “We bootlegged the whole job,” Pickering later admitted. “When we finished we locked up the satellite in a cabinet so it wouldn’t be found.”

That earlier act of insubordination proved not only prescient but also hugely time-saving, as the contraband satellite was taken out of hiding and put directly into the rocket. Like the first Sputnik, it contained two tiny radio transmitters to relay data to ground stations. A miniaturized Geiger counter to measure cosmic radiation was added by James Van Allen, the renowned astrophysicist from the University of Iowa, who in 1950 had first proposed holding the IGY in 1957. Van Allen had originally designed his radiation metering device for Vanguard, but he “thought it would be wise to prepare it in such a way that it would fit Vanguard as well as Jupiter C so that [he] would be prepared in either case.”

Though Juno’s civilian contributions were not insignificant, it became abundantly clear to Medaris from the wrangling over the classified press releases that were being prepared ahead of the launch that JPL and the IGY committee would get a disproportionate share of the postorbital credit. “Almost every reference to Army-developed hardware was stricken from these documents,” Medaris fumed, “in a rather dishonest attempt to make our first space triumph look like a civilian effort.”

A myth was being born: that the conquest of space had been driven by man’s insatiable appetite for exploration, rather than by the arms race. Even the satellite’s new name, Explorer, bore witness to the elaborate PR campaign quietly being prepared in Washington.

Of course none of this information would ever be released to the public if the launch failed. If the launch failed, it would be the army’s fault, and ABMA would go back to making weapons of mass destruction. “This is our biggest challenge,” Medaris confided to his wife in a rare moment of doubt. “We’ve waited a long while for recognition and now we must make good on our promises…. I’m praying for help.”

Few public figures in Washington could have used as much help as Dwight Eisenhower in January 1958. His approval ratings had fallen another eight points after the Vanguard debacle, bringing the precipitous slide to a total of thirty percentage points in a little over four months, and the beleaguered former general was still not himself, uncertain if he could carry out his duties. But on a positive note, the trip to Paris had gone surprisingly well. The British and the Italians had agreed in principle to accept Thor intermediate-range missiles as part of NATO’s defense shield, though now the United States would also have to find a home for the additional Jupiters it had agreed to produce to satisfy Lyndon Johnson’s subcommittee. More important, Ike had impressed his hosts with a combative attitude that belied his weakened medical condition. He was once again the war hero of old that the Europeans remembered.

But somewhere over the Atlantic, the president once more lost his fighting spirit. When he returned to Washington and appeared with John Foster Dulles at a televised press conference to report on the NATO summit, he seemed listless and deflated. Dulles did almost all the talking, while Ike, at times, looked completely detached and uninterested as his secretary of state droned on. After observing the joint television appearance, Harry Truman quipped that he had been “just about as thoroughly bored with Mr. Dulles as the President was.” The press pounced with renewed calls for Eisenhower’s resignation. Time did its bit to further deflate the sinking American leader. “The symbols of 1957 were two pale, clear streaks of light that slashed across the world’s night skies and a Vanguard rocket toppling into a roiling mass of flame on a Florida beach,” it noted in its year-in-review issue. “On any score 1957 was a year of retreat and disarray for the West. In 1957, under the orbits of a horned sphere and a half-ton tomb for a dead dog, the world’s balance of power lurched and swung toward the free world’s enemies. Unquestionably, in the deadly give and take of the cold war, the high score of the year belongs to Russia. And, unquestionably, the Man of the Year was Russia’s stubby and bald, garrulous and brilliant ruler: Nikita Khrushchev.”

As the American press hailed Khrushchev’s ascent with grudgingly glowing cover stories, Eisenhower was quietly conferring with his attorney general to “make some specific arrangements” for the vice president to succeed him in the event of further incapacitation. He was also preparing a highly unusual State of the Union address in which he would concede that 1957 had been “no ordinary” year. “I decided to confine the annual message—probably for the first time in history—to just two subjects,” he said, “the strength of our nation: particularly its scientific and military strength, and the pursuit of peace.”

The State of the Union would be one last “Chin Up” talk, using the biggest stage afforded to an American leader to try to put the nation’s plight in perspective. He would stress the country’s considerable resources, talents, and relative merits, and he would outline specific plans to shore up what he considered minor education and defense shortcomings. He would rally the troops, as he had done on D-Day and at the Battle of Bulge. And he would try to steal Lyndon Johnson’s thunder in doing so.

But America was in no mood to listen to its old soldier. The public did not want to be placated with soothing words. Words were empty. What America wanted was action, the sort of call to arms that the flamboyant senator from Texas was advocating. A low point had been reached where no amount of reassuring would restore the country’s shattered confidence, either in itself or in its commander in chief. Only a successful satellite would make things right again. The only question was which satellite: the army’s or the navy’s?

Vanguard’s TV3 might have died a very public death, but the $110 million program behind it was still very much alive. The administration simply had too much invested in Vanguard, in terms of both financial and political capital, to pull the plug just because of one highly publicized failure. In the new spirit of discretion demanded by John Foster Dulles, launch dates were now classified. But otherwise, the six-vehicle program remained unchanged. It still enjoyed priority over ABMA’s Explorer satellite, and on Thursday, January 23, it was given one last shot to beat the army into space.

The rival teams eyed each other warily at the increasingly crowded Cape. From their vantage point at launchpad 18A, the Vanguard crew watched anxiously as von Braun and his rocket team began setting up shop at launch complex 26A, a few hundred yards away. “We could see the Army preparations on their launch pad not too far from us,” recalled the Vanguard propulsion engineer Kurt Stehling. Like his competitors, Stehling had been born in Germany. But rather than work for the Nazis, his family had fled to Canada, and he later emigrated to the United States to pursue his space dreams. Now, as he looked over his shoulder at the elongated Redstone being erected nearby, he bitterly reflected how the army’s “warhorse” rocket held an unfair advantage over his “skittish thoroughbred” because its “progenitor was built in Germany” at a cost of thousands of lives. But then justice and morality had no place on the launchpad; science was blind that way.

TV3BU, TV3’s designated backup vehicle, was proving as skittish as its late predecessor. General Electric and Martin were still squabbling over who was responsible for the original explosion, and several botched static tests on the replacement rocket in early January did not augur well for the relaunch. Nonetheless, with Medaris and von Braun breathing down their necks, Hagen and the rest of the Vanguard bosses were determined not to lose their turn in Cape Canaveral’s tight launch rotation schedule.

The weather, on Wednesday, January 22, boded equally ill, as the final, frenetic preparations got under way. “The night was miserably cold and wet,” Stehling recalled. “With rain and hail alternating. Somehow, that night, the noise of the electric generators, the roaring of the gas compressors and the steady scurrying and shouting around the blockhouse, the squawking of the intercom boxes and the jangling of the telephones, the sizzling of the hamburgers in the Garbage [food dispensary] truck, the clicking of telemetry relays in the room, all seemed to be more discordant than usual, and we all had a premonition that the countdown would be unsuccessful.”

Sure enough, with only four and a half minutes to launch on Thursday morning, a short circuit due to rain forced a postponement. The countdown clock was reset to 1:00 PM, and the rapidly evaporating liquid oxygen tanks were refilled for another try at 4:00 PM. More glitches pushed the liftoff time to 7:00 PM. Then with only nine minutes to go, a wall of ominous clouds rolled over the Cape. For an hour and a half, everyone waited for the front to pass. But it refused to budge. “Scrub,” the safety officer finally ordered, to general groans and curses. They would have another go the next day. “By this time the field crew had the usual number of unshaven men with dark circles under their eyes, and that gastric acid bubble uprising,” Stehling recalled. And there was the question of what to do with the fueled rocket. The liquid oxygen and especially the corrosive nitric acid in the secondstage tanks would wreak havoc on seals, valves, and plugs if left too long. Should the entire system be drained, which would require working through the night? No, said the contractors, the seals would hold another day. The red-eyed, nerve-racked navy engineers were dispatched to the Vanguard Motel in Cocoa Beach for a few hours of much-needed sleep.

At launchpad 26A, meanwhile, where dozens of army binoculars constantly trained on the competition, ABMA’s anxious observers also took a welcome break from their nervous vigil. “Our people did not take kindly to the idea of sitting around twiddling their thumbs until Vanguard took off,” Medaris later recalled. As everyone at the ABMA complex well knew, TV3BU had only another seventy-two-hour window within which to launch, and then it would be Explorer’s turn. They were counting the hours.

The following day, with the sun beating down on the Florida coast and the all-clear signal given by the meteorologists, Vanguard got to within twenty-two hair-raising seconds of liftoff, when its umbilical cord stuck. It was supposed to release automatically just prior to flight, but now a technician in a cherry picker was sent out to disconnect the cord by hand. For the sixth time, the countdown clock was reset for another attempt three hours later. This time it got to T minus fourteen seconds, when a valve alarm sounded. The liquid oxygen had been in the tanks so long that it had frozen a valve in the open position. It would have to be drained, and another day would be lost, as the countdown was reset yet again, this time for 1:00 PM on Saturday. Now, Vanguard was truly running out of time. What’s more, nitric acid had been sitting in the upper stage for several days now, and soon it would start eating away at the rocket’s innards.

Saturday brought more delays and technical glitches, and at 11:00 PM the launch was postponed once again. The window had narrowed to less than twenty-four hours; Sunday, January 26, was TV3BU’s last shot. At ABMA, engineers chain-smoked, gulped coffee by the gallon, and paced like expectant fathers. No one could concentrate on the Juno. The navy was getting closer and closer with every attempt. Eventually it would get its bird off the ground.

On Sunday, exhausted launch crews from both teams reassembled before noon. The three-hour countdown was slated to start at 1:00 PM, and Vanguard technicians in hard hats and gray coveralls were giving TV3BU a final once-over when a human shriek followed by an ear-piercing siren erupted from launchpad 18A. A worker was screaming in agony, holding his face. Brown fumes, the sign of an acid leak, were rising from the middle of the rocket. Firefighters were dispatched to douse the leak, while senior engineers ran to assess the damage. It was serious. Acid had burned its way into one of the motors. The entire second-stage engine would have to be replaced. A meeting of Vanguard’s top personnel was hastily convened. They could scavenge a new motor from TV4, which was ready at the assembly hangar, but that would take time and would create new risks. There was really only one option, they realized with creeping dread: cancellation. “Above our meeting in the hangar hovered a ghostly consortium, von Braun and his ABMA group,” a deflated Stehling recalled. “The Army rocket stood nearby, almost insolent. We had had it.”

After years of rejection, months of upheaval, and four agonizing days, ABMA’s fate was finally in its own hands. Now there were no more distractions, and Kurt Debus, von Braun’s unflappable firing crew chief, could concentrate on getting Juno ready. Debus was in charge of all ABMA operations at the Cape. A Peenemünde alumnus and a veteran of over two hundred V-2 shoots, he was probably the most experienced launch master on the planet. Like Voskresenskiy with Korolev, he was one of the only people at ABMA who could override von Braun, and even Medaris deferred to his judgment once the countdown started. Quiet and unassuming, Debus spoke English with a heavy accent. He had an uncanny ability to parse the torrents of information that flooded the command center just prior to launch, and with his nerves of steel he had a seeming immunity to the adrenaline rush that sent everyone else’s pulse racing so madly when rockets thundered to life. Debus did, however, have one failing, and it had almost prevented him from coming to the United States in 1945. Army investigators had classified him as “an ardent Nazi,” who had “denounced his colleagues to the Gestapo.” But such was Medaris’s confidence in his firing chief, now a U.S. citizen, that von Braun would not even be present for the January 29 launch. Medaris wanted von Braun in Washington when Explorer went into orbit so that ABMA would be represented at the press conference the IGY committee was planning to hold the moment it got word that the mission was successful. Von Braun was unhappy with the arrangement, but Medaris insisted that he would be of far greater value in the capital, making sure the army got the credit it deserved. A great deal of future funding was riding on it.

With von Braun heading north to wage the public relations war in Washington, responsibility for Juno—though everyone at ABMA still called the rocket Jupiter C—rested entirely with Debus. Juno’s first stage, the elongated Redstone, needed little prep work. All its components had been thoroughly tested in Huntsville. The carrier’s upper sections, however, had to be carefully fitted together on site since they used solid propellant, a volatile mixture of polysulfide aluminum and ammonium perchlorate that was inherently unstable. Loading the eleven Sergeant rockets that powered the second stage was akin to handling live nitroglycerin charges, an operation best undertaken gingerly and not repeated unnecessarily. A second, more complex phase of the assembly involved balancing the bundled rockets in the special spinning tub that was used to distribute thrust. All eleven motors had to push with the exact same strength at the exact same time for the second stage to work. The rotating platform, turning on its axis at 750 revolutions per minute, negated any irregularities in the individual rockets that might otherwise send the booster off course. But if it wasn’t aligned, in perfect equilibrium, it would vibrate and shake and tear the entire upper stage. Like a car mechanic balancing a wobbly wheel with tiny lead weights, Debus spent the better part of two days supervising minute calibrations on the spinning bucket.

Ernst Stuhlinger, meanwhile, tackled another critical task: a special timing device known as an apex predictor, which determined the precise moment when the second stage had to be fired to reach orbital velocity. Since there were no onboard computers in 1958 capable of quickly making such precise calculations, Stuhlinger would have to figure out the apex on the fly, using Doppler radar, telemetry readings, a slide rule, and some very fast calculations, and call the blockhouse to manually send a signal for the eleven Sergeants to simultaneously ignite. This was the trickiest part of the flight. A mathematical error, a downed phone line, or any other miscommunication could doom the entire mission. Korolev had gotten around the problem by having his giant core booster fire continuously, effectively one enormous stage. For Explorer, however, everything would come down to Stuhlinger, his slide rule, and his ability to speed-dial the command center.

Debus didn’t like the arrangement. “Do you really want to rely on this alone?” he asked Stuhlinger, pointing to the intercom connection with the blockhouse. But Stuhlinger was ahead of him. He had set up his own ignition button as a backup in case his call couldn’t get through. “I’ll push it at the right moment,” he promised. “Good,” said a relieved Debus. “Good luck.”

Luck, however, was not on ABMA’s side, as January 29 rolled around and the jet stream howled in from the Atlantic with winds registering 175 knots at 45,000 feet, reaching 225 miles per hour in some pockets. Cape Canaveral’s commander, General Donald Yates, had been Eisenhower’s meteorologist during the stormy Normandy invasion. He had brashly predicted before dawn on June 6, 1944, that the weather would clear, and Ike had gambled all on his being right. But now he shook his head with professional dismay. The jet stream would not shift, and Juno would not survive that kind of wind shear. With its elongated hull, retrofitted tanks, and added upper stages, it had been stretched to a perilously slender seventy feet, and the swirling crosswinds could twist it or snap it in half. For the sake of structural integrity, the launch would have to wait.

Now it was the army’s turn to start sweating while the navy bided its time. The scrubbed TV3BU launch had been rescheduled for February 3, which meant that ABMA had to get its shot off by January 31 or lose its turn in the rotation. Vanguard still had priority over Explorer at Cape Canaveral, and since U.S. tracking stations could not juggle two satellites at once, a period of three days had to be left idle between rival attempts. So ABMA’s window was now down to forty-eight hours.

The jet stream did not let up on Thursday, January 30. Despite the fact that at sea level only a gentle breeze ruffled the flags outside ABMA’s assembly hangar, at 41,000 feet the winds raged at 205 miles per hour. High-altitude weather balloons were sent up every few hours to track the disruptive air currents, which showed some signs of subsiding by late afternoon. “What’s happened? What are you going to do?” a helpless and clearly frustrated von Braun messaged frantically over the Pentagon’s Teletype machine from Washington. Much like the Vanguard crew a few days earlier, Debus and Medaris now faced the dilemma of whether to fuel Juno. If the winds didn’t die down, and the countdown was scrubbed, they would have to drain the rocket and replace all the seals rather than risk a repeat of TV3BU’s corrosion problems. But if they were too cautious, they risked missing their opportunity, since the weather forecasts were growing increasingly optimistic. Debus decided to compromise: load the fuel but hold the liquid oxygen until the last moment. That would mean less work if they had to scrub.

A final set of weather balloons was released three hours before the scheduled 10:30 PM liftoff. As data floated back to receiving stations an hour later, the initial reports seemed promising. The liquid oxygen tankers were put on standby while Debus had the numbers sent to ABMA’s Computation Lab in Huntsville for more detailed analyses. “Highly marginal,” the lab messaged at 9:20 PM. “We do not recommend that you try it.”

Drain the rocket, Debus ordered, to collective groans. The engineers shook their heads in disbelief. To have come so far, to have battled back from the political brink so many times, only to bested by the wind. It was maddening. Unbelievable. The height of poetic injustice. And now they were down to their last shot, with Vanguard breathing down their neck.

Get some sleep, Medaris counseled his dejected crew. Tomorrow would be a long, hard day.

The first weather report on Friday, January 31, gave a little reason for hope. The high-altitude winds had tapered off slightly overnight but still gusted at 157 miles per hour. A Redstone would have no problem slamming through this turbulence, but the more fragile, overextended Juno could still sustain damage in such conditions. Medaris munched nervously on a ham and egg sandwich. “Everyone was going on sheer nerve,” he recalled. “The men were tired. They had been working long and irregular hours, snatching sleep whenever they could.”

Once again, liftoff was tentatively scheduled for 10:30 PM, and at 1:30 PM the countdown clock was set to T minus eight hours, leaving an hour leeway for unforeseeable delays. The wind was still not cooperating, and as he waited for weather updates Medaris chain-smoked and forced himself to catnap. By late afternoon decision time was approaching. Juno would have to start fueling soon. The highly noxious dimethylhydrazine von Braun had swapped for alcohol required special care, and technicians in hermetically sealed suits with integral breathing apparatuses needed extra time to load the toxic propellant. They would need to start the operation no later than 6:30 PM to be ready. It was do or die. For the umpteenth time, Medaris and Debus pored over the weather charts. Cape Canaveral’s chief meteorologist, a twenty-four-year-old first lieutenant by the name of John Meisenheimer, predicted a shift in the jet stream by late evening, with winds declining to within acceptable norms. But not everyone agreed with the young lieutenant. If he was wrong, it could mean disaster and could set ABMA back cruelly. But if he was right and they didn’t seize the opportunity, Vanguard would get another chance at making history. “Every man on the crew was conscious that the hopes of a Nation were riding with us,” Medaris reflected. The hell with it. He would gamble the hopes of the nation, and the future of his five thousand employees, on the word of a twenty-four-year-old kid. Fuel the rocket, he ordered.

News that the launch was a go was quickly wired to Washington, where von Braun, Defense Secretary McElroy, Army Secretary Brucker, and the rest of the top brass descended on the Pentagon’s main communications center to follow the final countdown on large-screen Teletype monitors with direct links to the Cape. President Eisenhower would not be present during the launch. He was at a golfing retreat in Augusta, Georgia, but Jim Hagerty, his press secretary, would keep him informed of the developments.

At 9:42 PM, a warning horn sounded on launchpad 26A, as a giant gantry crane was slowly pulled away and the gleaming white Juno was doused in the bluish embrace of powerful sodium searchlights. Vapors hissed and swirled from the missile and rose through cumulus clouds, which parted to reveal a bright waxing moon. A pebbled casing of ice encrusted Juno’s midsection, reflecting the glare from a pair of red signal lights winking on the pad below.

“T minus fifty minutes,” loudspeakers throughout Cape Canaveral blared, while at the Pentagon the VIPs read the Teletype. “The searchlights are going on and lighting up the vehicle,” the Teletype relayed. “It’s a beautiful sight.”

“T minus fifteen,” the countdown continued, and Medaris felt the bile rising in his stomach. “There is nothing that I have ever encountered to equal the feeling of suspended animation that comes during those last minutes,” he later recalled. Soon, the automated firing sequence would commence, and there would be nothing to do but watch and wait and worry. “When the countdown reaches zero,” Medaris teletyped Secretary Brucker, “the bird will not begin to rise immediately so don’t be worried if we don’t tell you it’s on its way.”

“T minus eight and counting. The blockhouse is buttoned up.” The area around the launchpad was clear. Juno began powering up. Inside the rocket, motors whirred, valves opened and closed, and pressure started building up in the fuel pumps. The spinning bucket with the eleven second-stage Sergeants began to rotate, slowly at first, then faster, and faster still, until it was whizzing at 550 revolutions per minute and the entire missile hummed. T minus one hundred seconds. Inside the sealed concrete blockhouse, the fifty-four systems engineers grew quiet, scanning their instruments for any signs of trouble as Debus ran through a final checklist. “T minus ten,” he announced, his voice hoarse but calm. Just before 11:00 PM, the firing command was given, and the ignition switch was flipped. “Main stage!” For fourteen and three-quarters seconds, Juno remained on the pad, as flames tumbled beneath it, growing brighter and stronger, until the entire pad was shrouded in pink flaming dust. Then it moved. “It’s lifting,” the Pentagon’s Teletype sang. “It’s soaring beautifully.”

In Washington and at the Cape, grown men danced and hugged and whooped like excited teenagers, shouting, “Go, baby! Go!” Overhead, the missile’s red glow receded from view as it pierced the clouds, slashed through the edge of the jet stream, and rose toward the stratosphere. “It looks good. It looks good. Still going good,” Medaris’s information officer, Gordon Harris, dictated to the Teletype operator.

Five miles away from the blockhouse, in a small, equipment-laden cubicle at ABMA’s noisy assembly hangar, Ernst Stuhlinger was also tracking the missile’s progress, slide rule in hand. He’d practiced his calculations countless times, had the math down till it was almost second nature, but now that it mattered, there was no signal from him. More than six and a half minutes had elapsed since takeoff, and the Redstone main stage should have reached its apex by now. Where was the signal? T plus four hundred seconds. Juno was now 225 miles above the earth, in the nearly horizontal position needed to circumnavigate the globe. Still no signal. Something must be wrong. Get Stuhlinger on the line, Medaris frantically shouted, just as red panel lights flashed SECOND STAGE IGNITION. Stuhlinger had done it. But what if he had made a mistake? What if he was just a fraction of a second or degree off? Either way, they would know soon enough. The upper stages fired for only six and a half seconds each, in rapid automated succession. Thirteen agonizing seconds later, at six minutes and fifty-two seconds into the flight, relief swept the room. Another indicator light flashed. “It’s in orbit,” said a technician matter-of-factly. For a stunned instant, the blockhouse fell completely silent. Should they tell Washington? Harris asked, finally breaking the trance. “No,” replied Medaris, with a smile. “Let ’em sweat a little.”

But Medaris himself was not done sweating. Like Korolev nearly four months earlier, he too would now have a tense hour-and-a-half wait to see if Explorer had built up enough momentum to stay in orbit. Only when tracking stations on the West Coast picked up its signal after a complete revolution would he know for certain if the satellite was truly in orbit. “I’m out of coffee and running low on cigarettes,” Army Secretary Brucker impatiently wired good-humoredly from Washington. “Send out for more and sweat it out with us,” Medaris replied.

Von Braun, meanwhile, had taken out his own slide rule, calculating the estimated time Explorer would cross into signal range of Goldstone, the big tracking station in Earthquake Valley, California. It would take 106 minutes, he announced, at 12:41 AM.

At 12:40, William Pickering, the JPL chief responsible for Juno’s upper stages, could no longer contain himself. “Do you hear her?” he asked the Moonwatch station in San Diego. “No, sir,” came the reply.

“Do you hear her now?” he demanded two minutes later. Again, negative. “Why the hell don’t you hear anything?” Pickering had lost his cool.

By now, everyone at the Pentagon and the Cape was becoming seriously concerned. Three, four, and then five minutes passed. Messages were sent to every station on the West Coast. Anything? Nothing. Explorer was now eight minutes overdue. Satellites simply weren’t late. They were governed by immutable laws. Something must have gone wrong.

“Wernher,” Secretary Brucker’s tone turned suddenly icy, “what’s happened?” Von Braun, for once, was at a loss for words. Just then, a message clattered off the Teletype. “They hear her, they hear her,” a jubilant Pickering shouted. It was the Earthquake Valley station. “Goldstone has the bird!”

The United States of America had just entered the space age.