THE ADDITION to the American satellite effort of the Army team-the Army Ballistic Missile Agency (ABMA) at Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama, and its partner, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena-called for a series of high-level decisions in Washington. Some dealt with the scheduling of launches. This was an involved maneuver since both the Vanguard and Army teams would be using the same Cape Canaveral range. They would also be using much the same tracking, telemetry and orbit-computation systems, namely those that the Vanguard electronics experts had developed for their project, supplemented by microlock, a tracking and telemetry network that the Army had been using with its missiles since 1953. Because of these overlaps, sufficient time had to elapse between shots for AFMTC to prepare the requisite range support and for the units in charge of the electronics services to put their equipment in order. Complex as these arrangements were, most of them had been worked out by the end of 1957. By this time the Department of Defense had authorized the Army team to make two "earnest tries" to orbit a small cylinder-shaped satellite to be known as "Explorer," and the Naval Research Laboratory had transferred to the Army a scientific experiment that it had originally assembled for one of the Vanguard satellites. 1 Scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory were modifying this instrumentation for use in the Army payload, and the Army's four-stage Jupiter C missile had reached Cape Canaveral, where a field crew was readying it for erection on the firing table at launch complex 26A, one of the Redstone pads at AFMTC. In addition, the Army had selected 29 January 1958 for its initial launch attempt, with the understanding that the Vanguard team would try to put up another of its vehicles earlier that month.2
During the period covered by these developments, Dan Mazur and his field crew had pushed ahead with the Vanguard program. The TV-3 disaster on 6 December 1957 found a backup vehicle, TV-3BU, ready to leave the hangar. Its erection at launch complex 18A, however, had to await repairs to the Vanguard firing structure. Some of its components had been severely damaged by the explosion. By working around the clock, the crew completed the necessary repairs sooner than had been anticipated. Even so, most of December had passed before all three stages of TV-3BU could be placed on the firing stand and the long and complex prelaunch operations begin. On 23 January the first attempt to put up the vehicle failed when heavy rains shorted some of the ground instrumentation cables during launch countdown. The next three days saw three more countdowns, two of them almost completed-and three more scrubs. Finally, on 26 January, the Vanguard crew removed a damaged second-stage engine, ordered a replacement, and announced that it would make no further efforts to launch TV-3BU until 3 February. 3
Since AFMTC could provide range support for only one shot at a time, this left the Army team with a discouragingly short period-less than a week-in which to make its first launch attempt. Fortunately its preflight preparations at Cape Canaveral were not excessively demanding. The Jupiter C had undergone several flight tests. Moreover, such static tests as the forthcoming attempt necessitated had been taken care of at Redstone Arsenal before the missile moved east. The major activities at the pad consisted of checking out the hazardous solid-propellant upper stages of the vehicle and of making sure that when the tub containing these rockets started to spin on top of the elongated Redstone booster, it would do so smoothly and without destructive vibration. Well in advance of the scheduled launch date, these procedures had been concluded, and preparations for the flight test itself were moving at a satisfactory rate.
Advance publicity was restrained and the launch date was withheld from the press until twenty-four hours prior to the anticipated firing. This policy reflected the determination of General Medaris, the ABMA commander, to protect the Army team as much as possible from the misleadingly optimistic type of attention that the press had heaped on Project Vanguard prior to the TV-3 explosion. Summoned to Washington in late 1957 and again in early 1958 to testify at the Johnson Senate subcommittee hearings on American missile and satellite programs, the general ducked the questions of reporters looking for more specific information. The Senate subcommittee itself gave him no problems on this score. When the matter of the Army's launch schedule came up, Cyrus Vance of the investigating staff informed Medaris that "I am not going to ask you about the date." Medaris' reply was "I am thankful for that, Sir." Appearing before the subcommittee on three occasions, the striking-looking ABMA chief was a colorful and articulate witness and both the senators and their staff handled him with a gentleness that must have made John Hagen, the beleaguered Vanguard director, sigh with envy.4
On 29 January, launch day, the Explorer vehicle, its satellite and its field crew were ready, but disturbing reports were coming in from the AFMTC meteorologists. On the surface the weather was fine. Instrumented-balloon soundings, however, had revealed the presence high above the Cape of a jet stream, a swiftly-moving river of air, almost certain to destroy the missile. Heeding a teletyped advisory from his structural analysis engineers at Redstone Arsenal, Medaris decided to play it safe. Next morning's weather reading was slightly more encouraging. At noon he authorized the crew to begin an eight-hour countdown, only to call it off a few hours later following a report that the jet stream was again menacing.
At this point-Thursday evening, 30 January-time was running out for the Army team. Project Vanguard's next flight test of TV-3BU was still tentatively set for 3 February, and word from ICY headquarters in Washington was that the electronics units would need three days of preparation for it. The Army must either put up its vehicle on the following day-3l January-or hold off until the Vanguard team had completed its scheduled attempt. Medaris and his crew could only wait and hope. Next morning's 7 o'clock weather reading, as interpreted by the structural analysis engineers, was just favorable enough. "Things look good," it read. "The jet stream has moved off to the north, and by evening should be down to 100 knots." To Medaris that "still sounded like a lot of wind, but it meant the difference between a strain that we knew the missile could stand and one that was dangerous." In a now-or-never spirit, the ABMA commander set in motion another eight-hour countdown, prayerfully heading, as on the day before, for a firing at 10:30 that evening.
Beginning at 1:30 p.m., the countdown
encountered no serious hitches. Late in the afternoon there was
a half-hour hold to complete a number of operations that had fallen
behind schedule, seemingly because crew members were still suffering
from exhaustion after the exertions of the day before. Later they
made up for the lost time. At 9:45 p.m., with the countdown exactly
on schedule, there was a second hold when someone spotted a hydrogen-peroxide
leakage in the tail of the missile. Workmen drained the line and
stopped the leak. When at 10 p.m. the countdown resumed, it was
only 15 minutes behind. At T-12 seconds-X-12, in Army terminology-the
motors started to spin the top stages of the vehicle, technicians
in the control room of the Redstone blockhouse transferred power
from the ground power supplies to onboard sources, and at 10:48
p.m. the Jupiter C lifted off. It rose smoothly from its firing
stand. A complex rocket, however, can fail even after a perfect
start. There were jittery moments for the crew members while they
awaited assurance that the upper stages had fired. For its later
satellite-bearing missiles, ABMA would contrive an onboard system
capable of igniting the upper stages automatically. No such system
flew with the first Explorer missile because the ABMA scientists
and engineers had not yet contrived a dependable one. Instead
they had developed a method for ground-command firing the second
stage at almost the precise second the missile reached its absolute
apex following liftoff. This was done from the Redstone hangar.
There, at an exactly and swiftly calculated moment, approximately
404 seconds after launch, a scientist pushed a button to fire
the second stage. A simple timer then controlled the ignition
of the third and fourth stages, operating so as to allow the full
thrust of each to be applied before the next one fired.
The Vanguard field crew's plans for
making its next launch attempt on 3 February 1958, were a trifle
optimistic. It was two days later before TV-3BU was ready to go,
and again the Martin Company vice president's "prevailing
mathematics of trial and error" (i.e., seven attempts to
launch a satellite were likely to yield three failures) proved
potentially valid.6
The Vanguard team's fifth launch
attempt turned out to be its second failure. This time, however,
there was no spectacular explosion on the pad. The first-stage
engine-the component involved in the TV-3 explosion-worked well.
After a perfectly nominal start, the vehicle rose gently from
its stand, but at about 1,500 feet altitude, after fifty-seven
seconds of normal flight, a malfunction occurred in the control
system. Subsequent investigation showed that spurious electrical
signals had created motions of the first-stage engine in the pitch
plane. These in turn developed dynamic structural loads, coupled
with a rapid pitch-down that superimposed air loads of about the
same magnitude. As a result, the vehicle broke up at the aft end
of the second stage. It would appear that the "prevailing
mathematics of trial and error" were no respecter of satellite-launching
teams, for a month later the Army suffered its first failure.
On 5 March the second Explorer missile lifted off well, but the
fourth stage failed to ignite and the satellite, Explorer II,
fell into the Atlantic. The Army team had now completed the two
"earnest tries" originally authorized. Within hours
after the failure of the second one, however, the Department of
Defense dispatched orders for Medaris and his crew to prepare
for flight a duplicate Jupiter C that ABMA had shipped to Cape
Canaveral, just in case, and preparations for a third try had
been inaugurated.7
It was now Project Vanguard's turn
again. The vehicle this time was TV-4 identical with TV-3 and
TV-3BU save for minor modifications that the manufacturers had
made as the result of the lessons learned from the unsuccessful
efforts to launch a satellite with the two earlier vehicles. The
Army's failure to orbit its second Explorer was dispiriting to
the members of the Vanguard field crew. If an old and tested rocket
like Jupiter C could fail, they saw little reason to be sanguine
about their relatively untried and far more sensitive and complicated
bird. For TV-4 and all subsequent vehicles, the project managers
instituted a change in the launching procedure. Instead of trying
to run off the countdown on one day, they divided it into two
phases, with the first one on T- l day-the day before scheduled
liftoff -and the second and longer phase on launch-day itself.
Scientific considerations were a factor in the decision to introduce
this procedure. Some of the experiments scheduled for future Vanguard
satellites were unlikely to function effectively unless their
carriers achieved orbit within specified hours of the day. The
two-phase countdown, extending over two days, would make it easier
for the crew to get the launch vehicle up within a time period
limited by these considerations.
During the opening weeks of March,
erratic weather and recurring mechanical and electronic problems
aggravated a general, if rarely expressed, fear that TV-4 would
go the way of its two immediate predecessors. Three canceled countdowns
were the vehicle's record when on 16 March the crew embarked on
the first phase of what was to be the final launch operation.
This phase of the countdown moved to its conclusion without incident,
and at four o'clock the next morning, St. Patrick's Day, the second
phase began. At 6:50 a.m. there was a short hold: more electronic
problems. At almost literally the last second, there was another
and even shorter hold, or more exactly, a "stretch-out,"
when calculations showed that if the countdown concluded at that
moment, Explorer I would be passing overhead just as TV-4
arched into the heavens. Passage of the Army satellite at that
time, according to the electronics men, might interfere with the
signals from the Vanguard payload. "An unprecedented event,"
Kurt Stehling would later call this moment: "I must confess
that never in my earlier life did I expect to see the day when
one would have to wait until satellite traffic in the sky was
cleared for the launching of another orbiter."
8
The seventeenth of March 1958, was
a beautiful day. At 7:15:41 a.m. after a nervewrackingly reluctant
start that came close to carrying the launch stand itself into
the air, TV-4 rose into a brilliantly sunny sky flecked with small
white clouds. Now began the post-launch countdown. At the open-air
communications center that the crew had improvised a thousand
yards or so northwest of the blockhouse, Paul Walsh was again
on the telephone to John Hagen in Washington. At approximately
T + l second he was shouting into the receiver, "There she
goes, John ...the flame is wonderful. Engine is burning smoothly."
At T + 150 seconds, he was telling the project director, "John,
the second stage is separated." And at T+490 seconds, triumphantly,
"John, the third stage has separated." There was reason
now to believe that the payload was in orbit, but already long-deferred
plans for victory celebrations remained in abeyance while, "like
expectant fathers," everybody involved waited for confirmation
from the Minitrack station at San Diego, California. In Washington,
about 9:30 a.m., there was a clatter on the teletype linking the
NRL control room with the California station. "We have got
no signal yet," San Diego reported. Then: "Stand by,
we may have it." The NRL operator tapped out a return message:
"Give us the word ASAP [as soon as possible]." San Diego
came back immediately: "This is it. We have 108.03
also 108.00 [the two radio frequencies of the satellite]
Good
signal
no doubt
congratulations
" In his
cubicle of an office John Hagen put in a phone call to Alan Waterman,
Director of the National Science Foundation. "It is in orbit,"
Hagan said. "You can inform the President," The little
sphere that would be known as Vanguard I was circling the
globe every 107.9 minutes-apogee, 2,466 miles; perigee, 404 miles;
expected lifetime of satellite and its trailing third-stage casing,
about 2,000 years. It goes without saying that, in the eyes of
the public, the members of the Army team remained the heroes of
the space age; it was they who had put up America's first satellite.
But the Project Vanguard people had the satisfaction of knowing
that in record time-only two years, six months, and eight days-they
had developed from scratch a complete high-performance three-stage
launching vehicle, a highly accurate worldwide satellite-tracking
system, and an adequate launching facility and range instrumentation;
more to the point, they had accomplished their mission, which
was to put one satellite in orbit during the International Geophysical
Year.9
By the time Vanguard I went
into orbit, several changes had occurred in the administrative
framework of the country's space effort, and an even more significant
change was in the offing. The appearance of the Russian Sputniks
in fall 1957 engendered a widespread clamor that the United States
embark on a vastly expanded space program. Throughout the remainder
of the year and into 1958, considerable discussion dealt with
the question of who should operate this undertaking: one or more
of the military services, some existing civilian agency such as
the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics or the Atomic
Energy Commission, or a new organization, separate from existing
governmental units? If a new organization, should its managers
be military officers or civilians or both? Scientific opinion,
emanating chiefly from the National Academy of Sciences and the
American Rocket Society, favored a new agency under civilian aegis.
A miscellany of bills, introduced in Congress during the first
month of 1958, ran the gamut of possibilities. President Eisenhower
proceeded slowly. Jolted by the intensity of public reaction to
the Soviet space triumphs, he originated the office of Special
Assistant to the President for Science and Technology, filling
the position with James R. Killian, President of the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology. Killian's duties were purely advisory,
but the creation of his office foreshadowed the administrative
changes to come.
Under ARPA and later under NASA,
the Army team continued to participate in the satellite effort
throughout both the IGY and the one-year extension of it known
as the International Geophysical Cooperation (IGC). During this
two-and-a-half-year period, the Army made nine attempts to launch
a satellite, with four successes, an impressive percentage given
the state of the art at the time. The Jupiter C put up Explorers
I, III, and IV. A more sophisticated version of the
Army missile, the Juno II, was the launching vehicle for Explorer
VII, a 91.5-pound satellite established in orbit on 13 October
1959, about a month and a half before the conclusion of the IGY-IGC.
11
Project Vanguard became a part of
NASA on its inception. One of the NASA Administrator's first official
acts, however, was to delegate management of the project back
to the Naval Research Laboratory. In actuality, therefore, no
significant administrative change took place, and the members
of the Vanguard field crew continued to put up their vehicles
in accordance with the one-a-month schedule established shortly
before the launching of Sputnik I. The success of TV-4
in March left them with a spare vehicle on their hands since the
Martin Company had assembled and the hangar crew had checked out
a backup vehicle, TV-4BU, against the possibility of failure.
In accordance with a suggestion from the IGY committee, TV-4BU
went back to GLM so that technicians at the Maryland plant could
remove some of the test instrumentation and convert it into an
SLV-a production satellite-launching, or mission, vehicle-for
use in a later flight. Field preparations for the next scheduled
launching proceeded in an atmosphere of some tension. Although
the vehicle involved, TV-5, was only a test vehicle, its mission
was to try to orbit the first fully instrumented Vanguard satellite,
a 20-inch, 21.5-pound sphere. By the first week of April the first
stage of TV-5 was on the firing stand at launch complex 18A, but
the pad managers postponed erection of the upper stages because
of facts brought out in a motion picture of the TV-4 launch. The
film revealed that at the liftoff of that vehicle, the hydraulic
disconnects had not separated smoothly. The belief was general
that the pull-away stand that the Martin Company was in the process
of completing would take care of this potentially troublesome
situation. Unfortunately the new movable firing structure would
not be ready for some time. For the scheduled flight test of TV-5,
the only course open to the crew was to make some modifications
in the old stationary structure and hope for the best.
12
Once again hope exceeded accomplishment.
Launched at 9:53 pm., 28 April 1958, the last of the Vanguard
test vehicles lifted off without difficulty, but its intricately
devised payload never reached orbit. Flight was normal through
second-stage burnout. The second-stage sequence, however, did
not complete itself electrically. Its failure to do so prevented
arming of the coasting flight control system with the result that
the third stage was unable to separate and fire. Three more failures
followed. After a successful liftoff, the first mission vehicle,
SLV-l, encountered trouble at second-stage burnout. At that point
a disturbance in the control system had the effect of launching
the third stage at an angle of approximately sixty-three degrees
to the horizontal, thus precluding an orbit. SLV-2 also lifted
off satisfactorily, but the second-stage propulsion shut down
after eight seconds of burning. This action reduced the velocity
of the vehicle to the point where the third stage could not fire.
Launched in September 1958, SLV-3 had the advantage of the new
movable firing structure. During the liftoff period, flight was
normal or better than normal, but the performance of the second
stage was below the anticipated minimum. The burned-out third
stage and the payload reached an altitude of nearly 265 miles,
but the velocity was about 250 feet per second short of the 25,000
required to orbit.13
Thanks to Martin's intensive follow-up
activity, Vanguard's fourth mission vehicle was considerably better
than its predecessors. Launched on 17 February 1959, SLV-4 succeeded
in establishing in orbit the 20-inch, 23.7-pound satellite now
known as Vanguard II. Not that SLV-4 was a completely satisfactory
vehicle in the eyes of its conscientious progenitors. Its payload,
Vanguard II, exhibited an undesirable tumble rate. Telemetered
data indicated that this had occurred because, following separation
of the payload from the third stage, remnants of solid propellant
remained in the rocket. When these ignited, they overtook and
"nudged" the satellite, creating the undesirable tumble
rate. Concluding that the trouble arose as the result of interference
between the spring and a sharp shoulder on the separation device,
GLM technicians placed in the separation hardware a thin metal
sleeve. Their objective was to prevent binding in the succeeding
mission vehicles, but although the identical problem did not present
itself again SLV-5 and SLV-6 failed. SLV-5 was unable to orbit
a 13-inch magnetometer and an expandable aluminum sphere because
pitch-attitude control of the second stage was lost during first-stage
separation. The resulting tumbling motion in the pitch plane aborted
the flight. SLV-6 was unable to orbit a 20-inch, 23.8-pound payload
because a restriction in the propellant tank pressurant lines
created a rapid decay of tank pressures immediately after second-stage
ignition, followed by bursting of the pressurizing gas tank.
14
To appreciate more comprehensively
the significance of this accomplishment calls for a glance at
the work of the public information officers the PIOs-assigned
to the project. In charge of this activity throughout most of
the program was Larry G. Hastings, who prior to joining Vanguard
in the fall of 1957 had been with the Public Appearances Branch
of the Office of the Secretary of the Air Force. A tall and generously
proportioned man, Hastings' amiable manner and round face curtained
a tough and agile mentality. Assisting him was Mike Harloff, who
came to Vanguard in May 1955, from the Headquarters of the Civil
Air Patrol at Bolling Air Force Base.
Many problems were bound to arise
from the schizophrenic nature of the program. On the one hand
Vanguard was a part of the International Geophysical Year. As
such its operations and its scientific findings were, so to speak,
public property. On the other hand national security required
that some elements of the undertaking, notably the components
of the launching vehicle, be withheld from unauthorized scrutiny.
In their effort to preserve the fragile line between what could
be told the public and what could not, the information officers
had the able guidance of James J. Bagley, head of the Security
Review Branch of NRL and his assistant, H. W. "Ott"
Ottenstroer. For each launch at Cape Canaveral, the Vanguard Project
set up a crude communications control center for Project officers
and the PIOs in and alongside a wooden shack- "of outhouse
dimensions," according to Harloff, and some 1,200 feet from
the Vanguard pad, well within the danger zone. Here they took
turns manning the phone over which they relayed information for
dissemination to reporters covering the event both at the Cape
and at the NRL news center in Washington. On these occasions,
patient and understanding Jim Bagley was on hand. Every now and
then the NRL security expert would tap the shoulder of the PIO
at the phone, a signal that the information he might be about
to relay for use by the reporters might trespass on classified
domain.
Even had Project Vanguard been free
of security elements, its scientific status would have been a
source of friction to the news media at times. Since Vanguard
was a research and development program, its hoped-for accomplishments
could not be reliably forecast. "To ask us when we are going
to put up our next satellite," director Hagen once remarked,
"is at this point somewhat like asking medical researchers
when they are going to find a cure for cancer." Like all
experimenters, the Vanguard people could not say for certain what
they were going to do until they did it. Obviously the policy
of refusing to make public their unstable launch dates in advance
was amply justified in those early days of the space age. It was
scarcely calculated, however, to make life easy for Hastings and
Harloff, one of whose jobs was to cope with the gripes of some
reporters, plagued by deadlines and editors hungry for "hard
news" about the just-dawned space age.
After the explosion of TV-3, the
job of rebuilding the shattered public image of Project Vanguard
was one long uphill climb. The orbiting of Vanguard I on
l7 March 1958, of Vanguard II on l7 February 1959, and
of Vanguard III on the following 18 September-even together,
these successes failed to blot from the public's consciousness
the picture of TV-3 bursting into raging flame on its launch pad.
On the eve of TV-4BU, the launch that successfully resulted in
Vanguard III, one reporter filed a story, the lead of which
opened with these words: "Another ill-fated Vanguard stands
poised on its pad at Cape Canaveral." Chancing to meet the
author of this piece shortly after its publication, Hastings lost
his customary geniality and heatedly said, "You must have
knowledge that none of us on the Project have, and since you seem
to have this advance information that the launch will fail, I
think you have a duty as a citizen and taxpayer to call Washington
and advise them that this launch should be scrubbed." So
taken aback was the reporter that his only reaction was a feeble,
"Say, you're mad about this, aren't you?"
During the life span of the project,
the public relations officers undoubtedly had much to be "mad"
about. "Our main problem," Hastings has commented, "was
the fact that Vanguard had the unique position in those early
days of the space age of being a public, or basically unclassified
project. Vanguard was the only 'open project,' so it bore the
brunt of the national displeasure with early space failures."
17
Under these circumstances, the Vanguard
public information officers could only do their best, from day
to day, to tell the true story as it developed, taking what satisfaction
they could from the knowledge that just as the Vanguard scientists
and engineers were pioneering space-age hardware and procedures,
they were also among the pioneers in space-age public relations.
Following the launching of TV-4BU
in the fall of 1959, America's first purely scientific satellite
program came to an end. In the language of officialdom it was
"phased out" with practically all the NRL members of
the project assuming positions with the various research and development
programs of NASA. In the minds of those who were with the project
more or less from start to finish, it remains vividly alive to
this day. Its annual dinners on the seventeenth of March, anniversary
of the launching of Vanguard I, draw in the neighborhood
of a hundred of the team members, as well as veteran reporters
who had sympathized with their efforts, to swap cherished reminiscences
and to replay old Vanguard jokes. Dan Mazur speaks for all of
them when he says that "for the great majority of us old
Vanguard hands, putting up those rockets was never a job. It was
a way of life."18
on 31 January 1958.
Wernher von Braun of ABMA, James Van Allen of the State University
of Iowa, and William Pickering of Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Word that the upper stages had fired
in response to ground command marked the start of still another
period of nervous waiting and wondering. Was the satellite in
orbit? Tracking stations on the West Coast would have to answer
that. One or more of them would be the first to pick up the radio
signal showing that the payload had circled the globe. General
Medaris has described with understandable feeling the moment when
"someone came up and shoved a piece of paper in my hands
on which were these magic words: Goldstone has the bird."
This meant that at 12:51 a.m., 1 February 1958-one hour and fifty-three
minutes after liftoff-a newly installed tracking station in California
had picked up the satellite "on its first trip back around
over the United States." The big headlines in that morning's
newspapers invoked an all but audible sigh of relief across the
country. The challenge of the Russian Sputniks had been met. America's
first artificial satellite, Explorer I, was orbiting the
earth.5
top in the blockhouse before launch, ..
receiving data from the Minitrack stations.
While Congress and the Executive
wrestled with the problem, Defense Secretary McElroy instituted
first one and then a second reorganization of those elements of
his department directly involved in the space effort. In November
1957, be named William Holaday, his special assistant for guided
missiles, to the position of Director of Guided Missiles, with
enlarged powers where both the missile and space programs were
concerned. A few months later Congress passed a law authorizing
the Defense Secretary to "engage in advanced research projects,"
and McElroy set up within the DoD a separate unit to be known
as Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) - Holaday transferred
his responsibilities to ARPA, and under the direction of Roy Johnson,
a vice president of the General Electric Company, the new unit
funded and supervised the country's space projects for a few months.
That this arrangement was to be a temporary one became apparent
soon after its inception. ARPA achieved formal status in early
February 1958, but by that date the prevailing opinion in Congress
and at the White House was that America's nonmilitary space program
should be handled by a special civilian body set up outside the
Department of Defense. In a message to Congress on 2 April, President
Eisenhower proposed the of the National Aeronautics and Space
Agency with the proviso that the functions of the National Advisory
Committee for Aeronautics be absorbed into this new agency. In
July, Congress passed and the President signed the necessary legislation,
and on l October 1958 the National Aeronautics and Space Administration
began life, with Thomas Keith Glennan, president since 1947 of
the Case Institute of Technology in Cleveland, as its first administrator.
10
twenty-inch Vanguard satellites. It was launched by TV-5,
28 April 1958, but failed to achieve orbit because the third stage did not fire.
To the Martin Company men responsible
for the reliability of the vehicle, none of these failures was
a total loss. In every case they obtained sufficient telemetered
and filmed data to spot what appeared to be the pertinent deficiencies
and to make corrections. Indeed the care with which these follow-up
procedures were carried out was one of the causes for the program's
overall success. For the purpose of correcting deficiencies, the
Martin design groups responsible for the various Vanguard subsystems
kept in daily communication with their field counterparts by telephone
and via direct teletype. In addition, they made constant use of
a more formal channel for liaison and reliability follow-up form
known as the "Discrepancy and Trouble Report," on which
all malfunctions and actual or potential problem areas were recorded.
At the plant the design men screened copies of these for problems
requiring immediate action. Consisting of members from the engineering,
manufacturing, quality, and procurement departments, a group called
the Corrective Action Team met periodically to review each discrepancy
report and to initiate corrective action or to verify action already
taken as a result of the informal liaison maintained between shop
and field. The Martin design groups learned as much, if not more,
from success as they did from failure. One of the project's most
successful flights, that of TV-4, for example, engendered more
remedial action than any other single flight.
launch vehicles. The second stage, the "brains" of the vehicle,
being hoisted into place.
The flight testing of SLV-6 on 22
June 1959 reduced Project Vanguard's arsenal to only two vehicles.
One of these, TV-2BU-a left-over backup vehicle-was no longer
usable. Set aside for exhibition purposes, TV-2BU stands today
in rocket alley, between the Air and Space Museum and the Arts
and Industries Building of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington,
D.C. The other remaining vehicle was TV-4BU, the left-over backup
test vehicle that the Martin Company had converted to mission
status. The first two stages of this vehicle, as converted, reflected
all the modifications that GLM had made in the Vanguard mission
vehicles to correct deficiencies discovered in flight. In addition
it was equipped with a new third stage. The top stage of all previous
Vanguard vehicles had been the solid-propellant rocket motor designed
and fabricated by the Grand Central Rocket Company. Grand Central's
rocket consisted of a steel cylinder with a very thin-0.030-inch-skin,
a hemispherical forward dome, and an aft dome fairing into a steel
exit nozzle. At the center of the forward dome a shaft acted as
the forward spin axis and supported the satellite. For TV-4BU
the Allegany Ballistics Laboratory had built and tested a new
solid-propellant third stage. Its shape was similar to the Grand
Central rocket, but both its case and nozzle were made of glass-reinforced
plastic. Theoretically, according to project engineers, as a satellite-launcher
TV-4BU was as perfect as a vehicle of its thrust and configuration
could be, and hopes were high at Cape Canaveral when in September
1959 preparations began for what was to be the Vanguard crew's
final launch attempt. On the eighteenth of that month theory became
reality. TV-4BU sent into orbit the fully instrumented 52.25-pound
satellite now known as Vanguard III, along with its 42.3-pound
third-stage motor case. The vehicle performed almost exactly as
predicted. Thorough analysis of the flight brought forth no recommendations
for change. In only fourteen launch attempts, the members of Project
Vanguard had created an "operational" vehicle, capable
of putting a 100-pound payload into orbit with a perigee of 180
miles.15
movable firing structure. The velocity of the third stage fell
short of orbital velocity.
Professionally both men were well
seasoned, but a decade later both would admit in Hastings' words,
that "Vanguard produced situations for which we could find
no precedents in our experience." In the beginning, the two
PIOs developed information procedures as they went along. "A
project official might give us a ring," Harloff has recalled.
"'Fellows, 'he'd say, 'here's a new problem. How do we handle
it? ' We had to come up with an answer, so we'd say 'Handle it
this way' or 'Handle it that way.' Then and there the 'this way'
or 'that way' became public relations policy."
Shown are the satellite in position, the launch, and "birdwatchers":
left, Robert Schlechter, head of the Martin Co. field crew; center,
Captain Peter Horn, Director of NRL; and, far right, Richard Porter
of GE and Daniel Mazur.
Baker-Nunn camera emplaced at the combined radio and optical
tracking station at Woomera, Australia.
A painful example of the tensions
inherent in this situation is found in one of the misunderstandings
that arose following the explosion of TV-3 in December 1957. At
that time, one reporter seems to have made substantial effort
to set the record straight. Writing in England's Manchester
Guardian,16 Alistair Cooke pointed out that true
to their established practice, the Vanguard people had NOT announced
the "great event" in advance. The premature release
of the scheduled launch date of TV-3 was the result of a "leak,"
and NOT an announcement. Lyndon Johnson, the then Democratic leader
of the Senate, clearly reflected worldwide feelings when he was
quoted by Cooke as saying, "I shrink a little inside of me
when the United States announces a great event and it blows up
in our face. Why don't they perfect the satellite and announce
it after it is in the sky?"
ending Project Vanguard's flight program.
A source of unending irritation to
the Vanguard team, and the PIOs in particular was the practice
of some scientists not connected with the project to talk freely
when approached for comment on Vanguard. Since they seldom, if
ever, had access to the full picture of what was going on, their
remarks were often misleading and sometimes unbelievably bizarre.
To counter this stream of incorrect speculation, the information
officers evolved techniques designed to eliminate error and to
discourage speculation by placing correct, unclassified information
in the hands of reporters as rapidly as circumstances permitted.
To this end they prepared a simple, yet specific information plan
for each launch for use by NRL and DoD personnel. This contained
instructions as to what project official should be phoned for
what type of data. In addition, they prepared in advance for issuance
to newsmen a series of so-called "contingency statements."
One such statement, for example, began with the words, "The
Vanguard, rocket was launched at today. (seconds)
(minutes) after launch it (exploded) (fell back) (achieved orbit),"
etc. Another statement was designed to take care of delays in
meeting a scheduled launch date, this statement containing a blank
space in which to record the reasons. After a launch or a postponement,
when a reporter called in, he was quickly provided accurate information,
based upon the appropriate contingency statement.