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Creating NASA

v1.1.1 / chapter 7 of 26 / 01 apr 13 / greg goebel / public domain

* Although the development of ICBMs and spy satellites were the top American priorities in space technology, the challenge of Sputnik wasn't ignored by the US government, with President Eisenhower authorizing the creation of a civilian space organization, the National Aeronautics & Space Administration (NASA). NASA quickly moved forward to consolidate US civil space activities and consider placing a man in orbit under Project Mercury.

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[7.1] CONCEIVING A US SPACE AGENCY
[7.2] NASA IS BORN
[7.3] NASA LOOKS FORWARD / PROJECT MERCURY
[7.4] US BOOSTER DEVELOPMENT EFFORTS

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[7.1] CONCEIVING A US SPACE AGENCY

* While the Americans traded space stunts with the Soviets, the US government groped towards a formal policy towards space activities. The US IGY Committee had considered the merits of a civilian "National Space Establishment" for peaceful space research in the summer of 1957, leading to a report with that title that was sent to James Killian, Eisenhower's three-man Science Advisory Council, and to Caltech President Lee DuBridge on 27 December 1957.

The Science Advisory Committee passed on recommendations for such an organization to Eisenhower, and he did the logical presidential thing: on 4 February 1958, he appointed a blue-ribbon panel under the committee to investigate the issue and make recommendations. The four-man panel included:

• General Jimmy Doolittle, who along with a career littered with accomplishments was a bonafide war hero for leading a daring B-25 raid on Japan in early 1942 when the war was going badly for the US.
  
  
• Edwin "Din" Land of Polaroid, later famous for the instant "Land Camera", and a key player in US reconnaissance research and development.
  
  
• Herbert York, a prominent physicist.
  
  
• Edward Purcell, a Harvard physicist and Nobel laureate.

Congress was getting into the act as well. On 6 February, the US Senate created the "Special Committee on Science & Astronautics". It was the brainchild of Senator Lyndon Johnson, and he became its chairman. Not to be left out, a month later House Speaker Sam Rayburn and Congressman John W. McCormack created a corresponding House committee, with McCormack as chairman.

Meanwhile, the blue-ribbon SAC panel completed its deliberations, and on 26 March 1958, produced a report titled "Introduction To Outer Space". Eisenhower used it in a press conference to outline the government's directions. The report outlined four rationales for going into space:

• The urge to explore and discover.
  
  
• National defense.
  
  
• National prestige.
  
  
• Scientific and technological research.

The report outlined a rough agenda for exploring space, starting with preliminary experiments; then moving on to automated exploration; followed by limited manned space missions; robot missions to the planets; manned flights to the Moon; and ultimately the manned exploration of Mars. No timetable was given, but it was assumed that there would be a methodical progression from one step to the next. The report downplayed defense applications. That was in keeping with Eisenhower's distrust of the defense establishment, which he worried would attempt to control space exploration.

* Eisenhower had reason to be suspicious, since both the Air Force and the Army were working to take control of the American space effort. General Medaris, von Braun's boss at the ABMA, was particularly zealous in his belief that a space program run by civilians would be national disaster. Medaris was strong-willed, overbearing, the sort of general who walked around with a swagger stick. He also had strong religious convictions, which were manifested in what others perceived as a belief that his personal agendas were inspired and supported by divine authority. MIT's James Killian, who Eisenhower signed up as a presidential science and space adviser, effectively in charge of the Science Advisory Committee a few weeks after the launch of Sputnik 1, ended up dealing with Medaris. Killian was experienced in politics and could be assumed to be used to differences of opinion, but found Medaris so obnoxious that Killian belittled him in his autobiography.

However, the civilians had Ike on their side. The civilian faction was also well organized, due to the cooperative network set up under the International Geophysical Year. The IGY had brought together a number of US organizations interested in space science. The NAS, NSF, and Science Advisory Committee were key players, and a number of other players who had been involved in launches of sounding rockets, such as the "Rocket & Satellite Research Panel", what had been the "V-2 Panel" in earlier days, and the "National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA)". NACA had been founded in 1915 with a mandate for research on aircraft design and other aviation issues. Although it was a relatively obscure organization, it became the leading contender as the basis for the new space agency. A critical mass was coming together.

BACK_TO_TOP

[7.2] NASA IS BORN

* A bill proposing the creation of a civilian space agency quickly worked its way through Congress. The bill's main backer was Senator Lyndon Johnson, with the measure supported in the House of Representatives by a fellow Texan, powerful House Speaker Sam Rayburn. Knowing that the military would oppose the measure, Johnson made sure that they were informed of it only at the last possible moment, with the senator commenting that the legislation "must have been whizzed through the Pentagon on a motorcycle." By the time the military became aware of what was going on, the momentum had become too great to stop.

President Eisenhower signed Public Law 85-568, the "National Aeronautics & Space Act", on 29 July 1958, establishing a civilian space agency named the "National Aeronautics & Space Administration (NASA)" effective 1 October 1958. Headquarters were set up at the Dolley Madison House in Washington DC, across Lafayette Square from the White House, until better facilities could be found in the city.

T. Keith Glennan became the first NASA Administrator. He had been president of the Case Western University in Cleveland, Ohio, and then one of the commissioners of the US Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) under President Truman. He took charge of an organization that was designed to move quickly and efficiently. There were only two political appointees, the administrator and his deputy, and the rules for hiring, firing, and procurement were streamlined. There were few levels of management, with mid-ranking managers assigned a remarkable level of authority and a comparable level of responsibility.

NACA was the core of the new agency, and a number of pre-existing NACA operations were now NASA centers:

• The Langley Aeronautical Laboratory near Norfolk, Virginia. Langley would continue to perform aeronautical research.
  
  
• The Ames Aeronautical Laboratory in California. Ames would perform aeronautical research in NASA, but would later also become involved in deep space probe development.
  
  
• The Lewis Flight Propulsion Laboratory in Ohio. Lewis would focus on space propulsion and power systems.
  
  
• The High Speed Flight Test Station at Edwards AFB in California. Edwards would be the site for aeronautical flight experiments.
  
  
• The Wallops Island sounding-rocket launch station off the Virginia coast. Wallops Island would continue to launch sounding rockets and would eventually launch small satellites as well.

Hugh L. Dryden, previously boss of NACA, became Glennan's deputy administrator. The presence of Dryden in the top ranks of NASA ensured a degree of organizational continuity between the old and new agencies. Dryden was also valued because of his reputation with the troops, who regarded him as honest, kindly, conscientious, and competent.

NASA also inherited the NRL space effort, including Vanguard, and its remaining funding. Glennan had his eye on other assets as well. If NASA was going to be a space agency, it would need rocket and space technology expertise as well. The Army's ABMA and JPL organizations were tempting targets, because the Army's hold on big-rocket technology was weaker than that of the Air Force. Glennan felt that Wernher von Braun, with his vision clearly focused on space exploration, really belonged with NASA, and the brilliant and charismatic von Braun would be an asset to the organization in any case. The fact that von Braun was a public media star wouldn't hurt, either.

Hugh Dryden warned Glennan that he was putting himself on a collision course with the Army, and so Glennan ran his notions of acquiring ABMA and JPL past President Eisenhower and his space adviser James Killian, who both approved. Glennan went to the Pentagon in late October to discuss his proposal. He was expecting some antagonism, since he had visited Huntsville some weeks earlier and come back with unpleasant impressions of General Medaris. Glennan was a solid, unexciteable Midwesterner and no stranger to politics, but he later labeled Medaris a "martinet".

Glennan still was startled by his meeting with Army Secretary Wilbur Bruckner, describing Bruckner's reaction to his proposals as "irate". Glennan assured him that NASA didn't want to deprive the Army of the ability to develop the tactical missiles they needed, but NASA really had to have the ability to develop the big boosters for space missions. Glennan immediately realized that he had said something wrong, since Bruckner lost his temper and hosed down Glennan with a lengthy tirade. Glennan left, as he put it, with his "tail between his legs." Glennan had assumed that the Army was in the rocket business for purely military purposes and that space was just a sideshow, but the reality was that it was almost the other way around.

Glennan did not protest the browbeating he had taken from Bruckner; there was no need to. There hadn't been a meeting of minds between the two men, but Glennan wasn't the one on the wrong track. The Army's case for hanging on to ABMA was weak; the service had no particular charter for space exploration, while NASA had been specifically signed into existence by Eisenhower to focus on precisely that mission. If push came to shove, Glennan knew Eisenhower would back NASA, and the Army knew that as well.

The Army decided to sacrifice JPL to NASA in order to help maintain the service's grip on ABMA. JPL was basically a CalTech operation working for the Army, which meant that changing masters was relatively straightforward. A deal was worked out where the lab itself became a NASA facility while the employees remained on the payroll of CalTech, with NASA providing the funding to the university. Eisenhower approved the transfer on 3 December 1958, and it became effective on 1 January 1959.

* JPL's Pickering was happy with the move, since he wanted to get the lab out of the rocket business, and felt that NASA was the way of the future for his organization. However, the transfer would prove more troublesome than anyone expected.

The problem was that JPL had never formally been a government agency, and JPL's work with the Army had been loosely supervised. The lab's Army steering committee would show up at White Sands wearing loud sport shirts, and they would get into wild food fights in the cafeteria. Old-timers would long recall that General James Gavin, who had led the 101st Airborne into Normandy on D-Day, was a particularly enthusiastic participant. NASA was not the kind of organization that could be tolerant of such informality, and Glennan judged that JPL had a particularly poor grasp of reasonable management processes. In return, JPL staff generally had a low opinion of government bureaucrats as well as a certain academic snobbery, and didn't always conceal either very well. The friction was such that Glennan would later describe the JPL staff as "able, extremely brilliant, and spoiled brats."

* Although it might not have seemed obvious at the time, the formation of NASA gave the US an major advantage over the USSR. The Soviet space effort was being conducted by a set of organizations that were only loosely coordinated and were prone to rivalries. Space activities were more or less opportunistic, and developing a coherent long-range plan was troublesome. Korolyev understood this perfectly well and had lobbied for a centralized organization to handle the Soviet civilian space effort, but the authorities weren't interested. The proposal went nowhere.

BACK_TO_TOP

[7.3] NASA LOOKS FORWARD / PROJECT MERCURY

* Glennan's immediate concern was to weld together the different organizations that had come together with NASA, and to provide direction to the various space satellite efforts that had become NASA's responsibility. There was also the question of what to do next. In a sense, it was obvious. All the people pushing for the exploration of space wanted to put a man up there. In fact, schemes were already in the works.

Wernher von Braun, never short of ideas, had come up with a proposal he called "Project Adam", in which a volunteer would be put into a capsule on top of one of von Braun's Redstones and shot up about 240 kilometers (150 miles). Backers of the concept within the Army faction blandly claimed the exercise was a step towards rocket troop transports, but nobody was fooled. Hugh Dryden, then still head of NACA, mocked it as having "about the same technical value as the circus stunt of shooting a young lady from a cannon." Von Braun patiently filed the idea away for possible later use. Dryden's remark did not please Congress, and was one of the reasons he did not get the top job when NACA became NASA. He was unsuited for a basically political job in any case, being far too direct and scrupulous.

A team working under an aerodynamicist named Maxime Faget at the NACA Langley lab had even drawn up a design for such a man-carrying capsule. Faget had described it at a conference at NACA Ames in March 1958 in a paper with the stilted title: "Preliminary Studies of Manned Satellites, Wingless Configuration, Non-Lifting". The capsule resembled a truncated cone sitting on a dish-shaped heat shield and carrying parachutes in the nose.

Of course, the USAF had plans of their own. General Schriever was pushing a proposal known as "Man In Space Soonest (MISS)", with the powerful backing of General Curtis LeMay. MISS was the outgrowth of Convair studies that described a man-carrying capsule launched into orbit around the Earth by an Atlas, and in fact the Langley studies had been initiated in support of the MISS proposal. However, President Eisenhower knew that the USAF didn't really have an operational need to put a man into space. Neither did NASA, then in the process of being formed, but manned spaceflight seemed much more a civil than a military endeavor, and so it fell into NASA's domain. Eisenhower wasn't crazy about doing it at all, but the public pressure to keep up with the Soviets forced his hand.

Even as NASA was formally being born, the agency had a preliminary plan for launching a man into orbit in place. Glennan organized an eight-man ARPA-NASA "Joint Manned Satellite Panel" in September 1958, and at the end of the month the panel issued their conclusions in the form of a report titled "Objectives And Basic Plans For The Manned Satellite Project". The report basically endorsed the Faget capsule, and outlined the details required for conducting and supporting the launch. The man-in-space effort was formally approved on 7 October 1958. Requests for preliminary proposals for a formal capsule design were sent out to industry in early November 1958.

Langley remained at the center of the effort, with the project under control of the "Space Task Group (STG)", led by Dr. Robert S. Gilruth, Langley's low-key assistant director. The STG was an outgrowth of a NACA organizational initiative to define how an aviation-oriented agency was going to tackle the challenge of spaceflight, and included a number of NACA old-timers who would play significant roles in the future, including Max Faget, Christopher Kraft, Glynn Lunney, and Walt Williams.

Abe Silverstein, who had been an official at the NACA Lewis laboratory and was now the aggressive director of the NASA's "Office of Space Flight Development", gave the program a name: "Mercury", the winged messenger of the gods. Glennan made a public announcement of the name on 17 December 1958, the 55th anniversary of the Wright brothers' first flights at Kitty Hawk. The McDonnell company was awarded the contract for the capsule on 12 January 1959.

Initial test launches of engineering prototypes of the capsule would be performed by a small solid-fuel booster named "Little Joe" that would basically toss it to high altitude and let it drop. The first flights of operational capsules, both with and without passengers, would be on top of a Redstone, providing a short "suborbital" trip into space. There was also a plan to perform test shots of the capsule on a Jupiter IRBM to evaluate the heat shield, but that would never actually happen. Full orbital missions would be performed using an Atlas booster.

By this time, the US had already sent an American of sorts into space. On 13 December 1958, a squirrel monkey named "Gordo" was blasted downrange over the Atlantic on top of a Jupiter IRBM. Although Gordo survived the flight itself, the reentry vehicle sank after landing, taking the monkey with it. Obviously, putting a man into space was going to need some work.

* Despite the fact that JPL didn't formally become part of NASA until the beginning of 1959, the lab was involved in the space planning activities. In late October 1958, Abe Silverstein sent JPL's Pickering a request for a list of projects the lab considered worthwhile.

Pickering responded that JPL was focused on planetary exploration. His initial plan considered flybys of the Moon, Mars, Venus, Mercury, and even Jupiter, all to be launched by the end of 1963. Lunar exploration was low on the JPL priority list. Launch windows to the Moon were effectively continuous, but launch windows to the planets could take years to come around and so they had to be exploited when they were available. Nothing could have demonstrated the gap between the thinking of JPL and NASA headquarters, or the gap between JPL's ambitions and reality. NASA headquarters was focused on near-Earth and lunar exploration, making planetary exploration was a second priority, and in hindsight the idea that JPL would have the technical capability to send a probe to Jupiter by 1963 seems absurd.

* As NASA ramped up, ARPA space programs were gradually handed over to the new agency. ARPA didn't wither away and die by any means, however. The agency moved on to evaluating other new advanced technologies for possible military use, performing fast-track evaluation programs to prove the practicality and usefulness of these technologies, and then passing them on to the services for operational development.

ARPA's approach was not always successful, since it is in the nature of experiments that some or most of them will be dead ends. The agency also had to deal with the turf battles of the military services, which in general would have preferred for fairly sensible reasons to spend the money being given to ARPA on systems for which there was a need in the here-and-now. In addition, the military brass were sometimes suspicious of the futuristic projects favored by ARPA. Despite these difficulties, ARPA scored some major successes, most prominently with the development in the late 1960s of a distributed computer communications network designed to continue working after the US had suffered a nuclear strike. The "Arpanet" provided the technical and structural basis for the Internet, which by the end of the century was proving to have as radical an impact on world society as television before it.

BACK_TO_TOP

[7.4] US BOOSTER DEVELOPMENT EFFORTS

* The first American space boosters were feeble in comparison to Korolyev's R-7. The payloads that Vanguard and Jupiter C could put into orbit could be easily carried by one person.

New boosters were emerging. In the fall of 1957, Air Force General Schriever had authorized a project to build a booster to test the big re-entry vehicle for the Atlas. This booster would be based on a Thor fitted with a second stage, and was designated "Thor-Able". Aerojet engineers had suggested using the second stage of the Vanguard booster, but the Martin Company, which built Vanguard, had none to spare. Fortunately, Aerojet built the engine and most of the assemblies for the Vanguard second stage; the only significant piece they could not provide was a guidance system. The Air Force contracted for Aerojet to provide the upper stage and arranged for Ramo-Wooldridge to provide the guidance system, a modified version of the guidance system a team under the company's James Fletcher, later a NASA Administrator, had built for Thor itself.

Von Braun and the ABMA, not be outdone, came up with a derivative of the Jupiter IRBM that they called "Juno II". This featured an upper-stage system consisting of a cluster of solid rockets similar to that used on the Jupiter C / Juno 1.

* Thor-Able and Juno II were improvements, but were still unimpressive compared to the R-7. The Atlas ICBM offered new options. The Air Force was working on the Hustler, later Agena, upper stage for the Atlas as part of the WS-117L effort, while JPL was investigating an upper-stage system known as "Vega" that would consist of a Vanguard first stage and, when required by the mission, a JPL-designed third stage powered by storable propellants.

The Air Force was investigating an even more potent upper-stage option for Atlas, using an engine powered by liquid oxygen ("LO2" or "LOX") and liquid hydrogen ("LH2"). Such a propulsion shad been recognized as potentially offering high efficiencies as far back as the writings of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, and bench-test LOX-LH2 engines had been built since the 1940s.

When Sputnik went up, the Air Force was working on LOX-LH2 engine technology in a program codenamed "Suntan", and the NACA Lewis center was performing experiments as well. At General Dynamics' Convair Astronautics Division Krafft Ehricke, a strong advocate of LOX-LH2 engines, had proposed a LOX-LH2 upper stage with four engines to the Air Force in early 1957.

Ehricke's proposal was not accepted, but in August 1958 ARPA gave the go-ahead on a LOX-LH2 twin-engine upper stage named "Centaur", with formal contracts awarded in October and November. Convair would build Centaur while Pratt & Whitney developed the LOX-LH2 "RL-10" engine for the upper stage. The Suntan program was canceled, with its technology and expertise handed over to the Centaur program. LOX-LH2 propulsion is particularly tricky, mostly because liquid hydrogen must be kept at extremely low temperatures, and the Centaur program would prove very troublesome.

* The Titan ICBM then in development offered other booster options, but von Braun and others weren't satisfied just to match the USSR. They wanted to take a leap over incremental improvements and build a booster that would put the US well ahead of Soviet technology.

New engines were being developed to power such big boosters. The preliminary studies that the Air Force had begun funding at Rocketdyne in 1955 for a next-generation engine had led to an engine designated the "E-1" with a thrust capability of 1,570 kN (160,000 kgp / 360,000 lbf). Rocketdyne received a development contract for the E-1 in 1956.

Rocketdyne believed the engine could be scaled up to a more powerful version, the "F-1", with a thrust capability of 4,415 kN (450,000 kgp / 1,000,000 lbf). The Air Force awarded Rocketdyne a short-term development contract for the F-1 in August 1958, which was followed up by a full-scale development contract awarded by NASA in January 1959, with NASA shooting for a thrust level of 6,670 kN (680,000 kgp / 1,500,000 lbf). Rocketdyne performed the initial static test of a prototype F-1 thrust chamber in March.

Von Braun was very interested in using such big engines to build a heavy-lift booster. In fact, his ideas were so ambitious that when he presented a "laundry list" of future booster options to NACA officials in the spring of 1958, NACA management did everything possible to avoid even giving the impression that they endorsed von Braun's ideas. ARPA, firmly on the military side of the fence, was more enthusiastic. They worked with von Braun and his ABMA people to define a heavy-lift booster, known informally as "Super Jupiter" and with a variety of designations that finally evolved into "Juno V".

Von Braun had originally envisioned the Juno V as powered by four E-1 engines, with eight fuel tanks "clustered" around a larger central fuel tank. The clustering scheme bypassed the need to engineer a single large tank system, with the peripheral tanks derived from Redstone fuel-tank technology and the large central tank derived from Jupiter fuel-tank technology.

ARPA suggested that basing the Juno V on the unproven E-1 was risky, and instead proposed the use of eight "H-1" engines, an improved version of the family of Navaho-derived Rocketdyne engines that included the "S-3D" engine used on Jupiter and "MB-3" engine used on Thor. The H-1 would initially provide 736 kN (75,000 kgp / 165,000 lbf) thrust, with later versions uprated to 834 kN (85,000 kgp / 188,000 lbf) thrust.

Von Braun regarded such a large number of engines as unreliable, though ARPA replied that the scheme provided a degree of redundancy: if a single engine failed, the others could take up the load. Von Braun was a very focused but not an obstinate man, and he basically shrugged and went with the eight engines. ARPA gave the formal go-ahead for Juno V development in August 1958, with a contract awarded to Rocketdyne for the H-1 engine in early September. Various upper stage options were considered, but no commitments were made for the moment. The upper stage issue could be dealt with later.

* With the creation of NASA, Keith Glennan moved to take over space booster development. On 27 January 1959, NASA released a "National Space Vehicle Program" document, which basically consolidated all the booster programs in progress under the agency's umbrella. The list included Atlas-Hustler, Atlas-Vega, Atlas-Centaur, and the Juno V, which was renamed "Saturn" a few days later in hopes of differentiating it from various confusing advanced-Juno proposals that von Braun had been pushing in 1958. The plan also proposed a truly huge booster named "Nova" with clustered F-1 engines. The definition of Nova shifted for the next few years until the name faded out, though it would be eventually take form under a different name as the booster that was to put Americans on the Moon.

The plan didn't neglect the other end of the booster scale, including a small, cheap satellite launcher "Scout", a tortured acronym for "Solid Controlled Orbital Utility Test" rocket. Scout was based on the integration of various solid-fuel rocket technologies then in development, such as Polaris and Sergeant. NASA Langley was put in charge of Scout, which would become one of the most successful and least noticed boosters in the entire NASA program for three decades.

The plan was all very nice, but factionalism remained the reality for the moment. Although ARPA supported the transfer of Centaur to NASA, the Air Force balked, and NASA wouldn't formally gain control of the program until July 1959. The Army held on to von Braun and ABMA even more tightly, though as time ran on the case the Army's case for participating in the exploration of space continued to fade out.

The Navy also tried to stay in the space exploration game. During July and August 1958, even as NASA was being formed, the Naval Ordnance Test Systems (NOTS) organization was trying to put a satellite resembling a hockey puck into orbit, using a booster cobbled together from available solid rocket assemblies and launched from a Douglas Skyray jet fighter. The satellites were known as "NOTSniks" in honor of Sputnik. The NOTSnik program was a failure, with four of the boosters failing immediately; two others soared off into the sky and simply disappeared.

Two years later, in 1960, the Navy launched a pair of improved NOTSnik boosters on test flights under project CALEB, and would then go on to test-fly a bigger booster named "Hi-Hoe" from a McDonnell Phantom fighter. The same booster was also ground-launched as a potential antisatellite weapon. The last Hi-Hoe launch was in 1962; for whatever reasons, the Navy gave up on the effort. Air-launched boosters were a scheme for a later generation.