Beyond: Our Future in Space (6 page)

The visionaries never gave up their ambitions for humans to leave the Earth. But for the next ten years, dreams of space travel were overshadowed by nightmares of nuclear holocaust.

The United States didn’t clash with the Soviet Union directly. The rivalry played out as a toxic brew of military jockeying, proxy wars, support of strategic allies, espionage, propaganda, and technological and economic competition. The cutting edge of the Cold War was a nuclear arms race. As the war ended, America was confident of its advantage in developing nuclear weapons, so American experts were shocked when the Soviets exploded their first atomic bomb in 1949.

The Manhattan Project was the US research and development project to build an atomic bomb. It had been so secret that Vice President Harry Truman was unaware of its existence, but it was riddled with spies. Both countries began massive investment in their arsenals. America was the first to detonate a hydrogen bomb in 1952, but the Soviets followed suit less than a year later.

The Space Race began when the United States and the Soviet Union developed ballistic missiles that could launch objects into space. It was kicked off in 1955 by announcements only four days apart that both nations were planning to launch artificial Earth satellites.
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Stockpiles of nuclear weapons grew rapidly; the underlying goal was the capability to target and destroy any city in the opposing country within hours.

In the United States, development of intercontinental ballistic missiles was hampered by the three branches of the military each wanting their own capabilities. The Air Force developed the Atlas rocket, the Navy had the Vanguard rocket, and von Braun’s US Army team was perfecting the Redstone rocket, a direct descendant of the V-2. As the Space Race intensified, President Dwight Eisenhower gave the nod to the Navy, since its Vanguard rocket was being developed by the Naval Research lab, which was seen as a scientific rather than a military organization. The Atlas and Redstone programs were iced. Eisenhower wanted to avoid the overt militarization of space, and he didn’t want to hand the Soviets a propaganda victory.

Meanwhile, the Soviets pursued intercontinental ballistic missiles with a relentless focus and ample funding. Sergei Korolev developed the R-7, which was more powerful than any American rocket; it could deliver a three-ton warhead 5,000 miles. Derivatives of the R-7 have been used in the Soviet and the Russian space programs for more than fifty years. On October 4, 1957, the Soviets shocked the world when they launched into orbit a beeping metal sphere the size of a beach ball and the weight of an adult man: the satellite Sputnik 1 (
Figure 8
).

Stakes in the Space Race suddenly became very high. The Americans and the Soviets each developed satellites as part of the International Geophysical Year of 1957–1958, which, ironically, was a project conceived after Stalin’s death to thaw the Cold War. While small satellites could be used for scientific research, the deeper concern was that large satellites could put nuclear weapons into orbit. Whoever controlled the frontier of space would control the world.

The United States rushed to match the feat of Sputnik, but the country experienced humiliation when a live national TV audience watched a Vanguard rocket explode seconds after launch. Newspapers called it “Flopnik” and “Kaputnik,” and the Soviet UN delegate offered the United States aid under a “Soviet program of assistance to backward nations.” Called into action, von Braun and his team rose to the challenge, and Explorer 1 was launched into orbit on January 31, 1958. It was a face-saving success, but the Soviets still held an edge: Sputnik weighed 84 kilograms, as much as a grown man, while Explorer weighed in at just 5 kilograms, not much heavier than a brick.

Although it was the height of the Cold War, and space could easily have become the exclusive preserve of the military, the cool head of the commander-in-chief prevailed. Eisenhower was playing catch-up with a well-funded and better-organized adversary. As a former general, Eisenhower knew enough about military bureaucracy to prefer a civilian organization. He also knew that the best innovation would come from a national space agency rather than small groups often working in competition and in isolation. When Congress held hearings on the subject, one of the key players forcing the pace was a young senator from Texas, Lyndon Johnson.
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The events leading to the formation of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) laid bare the tension among the competing motivations to go into space. As Sputnik orbited the Earth, Eisenhower appointed James Killian as his special assistant for science and technology. Killian was the president of MIT, so his selection provided a strong signal that Eisenhower wanted to keep a civilian emphasis on space. Late in 1957, Killian wrote a memo to Eisenhower saying that many scientists strongly opposed Defense Department control of the space program because it would limit space research to military objectives and tar all US space activity as military in nature. Meanwhile, the Senate Armed Services Preparedness Subcommittee heard from dozens of experts who said the United States would never have been beaten to the punch by Sputnik if the military had held sway. Then in May 1958, the Soviets launched the one-ton Sputnik 3, and the sheer size of the satellite triggered recriminations and new calls to action. The voices of the hawks grew louder.
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Eisenhower held firm. On October 1, 1958, he established NASA as a civilian organization for the peaceful exploration of space. The new agency began with 8,200 employees and a budget of $340 million. Its charter in the Space Act had eight objectives, which included expanding knowledge of space, improving space vehicles, preserving the leadership of the United States in space science and technology, and collaborating with our international partners and allies.
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The Space Act was signed a little less than a year after the beeping Soviet satellite had rocked the world.

3

Send In the Robots

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Fly Me to the Moon

Sputnik was a technological “Pearl Harbor moment” for America, but the feeling of scrambling to keep up with the Soviets continued.

In the first five years of their space program, the Soviets reeled off an impressive series of achievements: first satellite in orbit, first object to leave Earth’s gravity, first data link to space, first probe to crash-land on the Moon, first probe sent to Venus, first probe sent to Mars, first man in space, first woman in space, first dual manned spaceflights, and, last but not least, the first dogs to be put into orbit and safely returned to Earth.
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Yuri Gagarin became the first human to orbit the Earth on April 12, 1961, rising from the barren steppes of Kazakhstan aboard the Vostok 1 spacecraft. His modest stature—Gagarin was just 5 feet 2 inches—helped him fit into the tiny capsule. His flight lasted only one orbit and Gagarin didn’t control the spacecraft; it was flown in automatic mode as a precaution, since medical science didn’t know what would happen to a human subjected to the stresses of launch and subsequent weightlessness. Gagarin had the ability to take over control of the spacecraft in an emergency by opening an envelope and typing a special code into the computer.
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Nevertheless, Vostok 1 was hailed as a historic event (
Figure 9
).
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The United States experienced an echo of the shock and embarrassment felt with the launch of Sputnik.

A new young president responded quickly. Less than two months after Gagarin’s flight, and less than three weeks after Alan Shepard became America’s first astronaut in a fifteen-minute suborbital flight, John F. Kennedy addressed a special joint session of Congress: “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely.”
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The first phase of the manned space program took place against a backdrop of Cold War escalation. Even though the first astronauts in the Mercury program didn’t fly their spacecraft, putting humans in orbit was concomitant with the larger goal of mastery of space. Mastery of space in turn was seen as a vital tool in the power struggle between the two superpowers. After the failure of Kennedy’s covert plan to topple Fidel Castro, the Soviets increased their military support for Cuba. In Europe, American and Soviet tanks were facing off across the newly constructed Berlin Wall. When the Soviets prepared to install nuclear missiles in Cuba in October 1962, it felt as if the world had come to the brink. The United States had more than 30,000 nuclear weapons and the Soviet Union was rapidly catching up. The deterrence logic of “mutually assured destruction” was scant solace.

So began the Apollo program, the largest and most complex technical undertaking in human history.
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At its peak, it involved 500,000 people and 20,000 companies. Its cost in present-day dollars was more than $100 billion.

To get to the Moon so quickly, NASA needed a huge budget and a tight and single-minded focus on the goal. At the time of Kennedy’s speech, only two humans had ever traveled in space. As a precursor to Apollo, NASA began Project Gemini in 1962. Gemini spacecraft carried two astronauts and the missions tested docking technology, practiced working outside a spacecraft, and orbited long enough to mimic a trip to the Moon and back. All the early Apollo crews were veterans of the Mercury and Gemini programs.

America was hopeful that the two superpowers might collaborate rather than duplicate the vast effort required for a race to the Moon. After stepping back from the brink following the Cuban missile crisis, Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev had developed a mutual understanding. In 1963, in a speech to the United Nations General Assembly, Kennedy proposed a joint space effort. Khrushchev initially rejected the overture but was poised to accept it when Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963. Even Kennedy was hedging his bets, though, wavering between cooperation and competition. In the speech he never lived to give on November 22, he was to have said, “The United States of America has no intention of finishing second in space.”
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Within a year, Khrushchev had been ousted and Lyndon Johnson and Leonid Brezhnev had a frosty relationship, so joint ventures in space were taken off the table.

The relationship between the world’s two superpowers was plagued with misinformation and misperceptions. This has only become clear in hindsight and with the release of documents that were classified at the time.
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Each country was fearful of the other, and each overestimated the capabilities of the other. The Soviets refused to cooperate in space in part because they didn’t want to expose the technical shortcomings of their program. With his famous 1961 speech, Kennedy in effect dared them to show their stuff.

Space travel in the early days was risky. Most of the Soviet losses were kept secret at the time but have come to light since.
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In 1960, more than a hundred top Soviet military and technical personnel were killed when the second stage engine of an R-16 rocket ignited the propellant tanks of the first stage, causing an explosion and fire. Chief Marshal of Artillery Mitrofan Nedelin was vaporized, and his only identifiable remains were his war medals. A year later, a Soviet cosmonaut was incinerated in a fire in a test chamber with high oxygen content. The Soviets erased all evidence that he had ever existed, which was particularly tragic, since the Apollo 1 flight crew died in similar circumstances in 1967; knowing about the Soviet incident might have led to a redesign of the capsule. As it happened, a spark ignited an oxygen fire in their capsule during a ground test, and Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee were severely burned and then asphyxiated after all the oxygen had burned away. The same year, Vladimir Komarov died after a trouble-plagued flight in Soyuz 1, when the parachute system failed to slow his descent.