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First Steps To Space

v1.1.1 / chapter 3 of 26 / 01 apr 13 / greg goebel / public domain

* In the years following World War II, both East and West tinkered with the technology they had developed or captured, testing to see what it could do and considering possibilities. For the moment, however, nobody in authority felt inclined to do much more.

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[3.1] THE AMERICAN V-2 / VIKING / REDSTONE
[3.2] THE BEGINNINGS OF SPACE SCIENCE / THE MILITARY FRONTIER
[3.3] THE COLLIER'S SPACE PROGRAM
[3.4] THE CONVAIR MX-774

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[3.1] THE AMERICAN V-2 / VIKING / REDSTONE

* Although Germany had lost World War II, Wernher von Braun and his team had emerged as victors of sorts. Relocated to scorching Fort Bliss, Texas, the Germans were now able to pursue their rocket dreams under the protection of a new and much more agreeable patron: the Americans were not going to lock up von Braun for talking about sending men to the Moon, and in fact he would in time find them very receptive to his message.

They weren't particularly receptive to it at the outset, however. The US Army, like the German Army, was generally interested in weapons, not space exploration, and in the years just after the war drastic defense cuts meant that everything was being done on shoestring budgets. Von Braun would complain and submit resignations to his commandant, US Army Major James P. Hammill, who simply filed them. Von Braun settled in for the long haul, bringing over his parents to stay until things picked up back in Germany, and bringing over a pretty teenaged aristocrat, a first cousin, to become his wife, Maria Louise von Braun. By 1949, he would have legal immigrant status, and the rest of his people would become legal immigrants over the next year or so.

Along with the German rocket scientists had come 65 captured V-2s, shipped in to Fort Bliss on freight cars. These rockets were to be launched as part of Project Hermes. The first V-2 was launched from White Sands, not far from Fort Bliss, on 16 April 1946, but lost one of its fins and only made it to an altitude of a little over 4.8 kilometers (3 miles). On 10 May, however, a V-2 flew to an altitude of 114 kilometers (71 miles).

Most of the 64 V-2 launches that followed up to September 1952 went smoothly, a tribute to sound German engineering. There were some problems. A V-2 launched on the morning of 29 May 1947 literally had some wires crossed, and veered off course towards the city of El Paso, Texas, and plowed into a hillside outside of Juarez, Mexico, across the Rio Grande. No one was reported hurt, but the base commander at White Sands got phone calls from US Army Chief of Staff Dwight Eisenhower and US Secretary of State George C. Marshall.

In an attempt to get to higher altitudes, a WAC-Corporal was put on top of a V-2. The combination was called "Bumper-WAC". There were a total of eight Bumper-WAC shots, the first on 13 May 1948, but only the fifth, on 24 February 1949, went perfectly, with the rocket reaching an altitude of 392 kilometers (244 miles). A rocket had finally reached above the atmosphere into space.

* Incidentally, GE also developed a series of other missiles as part of Project Hermes. The Hermes A-1 was an antiaircraft missile patterned on the German "Wasserfall" experimental antiaircraft missile, which in turn was a scaled-down V-2 with four stubby fins around the middle. The Hermes A-2 was similar, but lacked wings.

The Hermes B or Hermes II was actually a "supersonic combustion ramjet (scramjet)" research program, with a GE RV-A-6 experimental scramjet engine flown on the nose of a V-2 in 1948. The final Hermes missiles, the Hermes A-3 series, were liquid-fuel tactical ballistic missiles with a range of 240 kilometers (150 miles) and a 450 kilogram (1,000 pound) warhead. The Hermes project was finally canceled in June 1953, and GE generally got out of the rocket business. The Hermes work never resulted in an operational weapon, but it did provide a great deal of useful data, and GE developed a liquid rocket engine that was introduced in 1949 and provided 60 kN (6,120 kgp / 13,500 lbf) of thrust. This rocket engine was used in the Hermes A-3, and improved variants of the engine would see use later on.

* The rocket shots implied a growing support infrastructure. Simply blasting a rocket into space was only part of the job. Besides returning science data, or "science telemetry", the rocket had to return its "flight telemetry", indicating its velocity and altitude, fuel level and consumption, and so on. Guidance systems had to be designed and debugged, and the whole assembly had to be made to work together, which was a difficult exercise in "systems integration". The rocket had to be tracked precisely along its course, and so "transponders" were installed to transmit radio signals for tracking. Ground systems had to be built to handle the tracking and to observe the flight.

The sum of it was a lot of different activities, all needed to get a rocket into space. In the words of one participant, there were "safety considerations, provision for terminating propulsion of the missile in midflight, tracking, telemetering, timing signals, range communications, radio-frequency interference problems, weather reports, recovery of instruments and records, and all that went into assembling, instrumenting, testing, fueling, and launching the rocket." A necessary, in fact valuable, level of process and bureaucracy began to creep into the rocket program.

* The V-2s went up and returned useful data, but they left something to be desired. Even though the Germans had used them in combat, they were still really prototype technology, not really ready for production. They were big, complicated, aging, and expensive to operate, and once the last of the captured rockets was shot off, there would be no more. Something better was needed.

Despite the low level of funding for rocketry at the time, a number of new rockets were developed. One of the most useful was the "Aerobee". Just after the war, the Applied Physics Lab (APL), a business organization associated with Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, that worked on government development contracts, assigned a staff engineer, Dr. James Van Allen, to investigate an improved sounding rocket for US Navy research work.

Van Allen finally ended up contacting Aerojet. Aerojet engineers proposed a new sounding rocket, something like a scaled-up WAC Corporal with a solid-fuel booster stage. The new rocket would be capable of sending a payload of 68 kilograms (150 pounds) to high altitude. In 1946, the US Navy Bureau of Ordnance awarded Aerojet a development contract, and the first Aerobee launch was in November 1947, from White Sands. That launch was unsuccessful, but on the next flight, in March 1948, the Aerobee flew to an altitude of 118 kilometers (73 miles). A series of refined Aerobee variants would be developed, with the rocket performing sounding missions into the mid-1980s.

* A team under Milt Rosen at the US Navy's Naval Research Laboratory (NRL), working with the Glenn Martin Company, developed a more impressive sounding rocket named "Viking" that advanced the state of the art of rocket technology. The original goal of the Viking project was to develop a sounding rocket that could send a payload of 225 kilograms (500 pounds) to an altitude of 160 kilometers (100 miles). That meant a rocket that was about as capable as a V-2, but to keep weight down, Viking was made of aluminum, in contrast to the steel construction of the V-2. Fully fueled, Viking only weighed a third as much as the V-2.

The Viking was powered by a Reaction Motors engine providing 89 kN (9,070 kgp / 20,000 lbf) of thrust. The V-2 used graphite vanes in the exhaust nozzle to control the direction of flight, but this wasted a significant percentage of thrust, and so the Viking used a pivoting "gimbaled" exhaust nozzle instead. Gimbaled engines would become common in later rockets. The Viking project was very successful, producing a capable and reliable sounding rocket at low cost. An improved Viking would be built as well, with one sending a payload of 374 kilograms (825 pounds) to an altitude of 254 kilometers (158 miles) in 1954.

* By the end of the V-2 launches in 1952, von Braun and his people had moved on. They were in Huntsville, Alabama, working on missiles for the military at the Redstone Arsenal.

Redstone had been an ordnance and chemical-weapons production center during the war, but the site had been largely idle since the end of the conflict. In June 1949 the Army Ordnance Rocket Center was started there, with von Braun and his team relocating in April 1950. The overall commandant of the installation was none other than Holger Toftoy, now an Army major general, though von Braun and his people still reported to James Hammill, now a lieutenant colonel.

In response to the military crisis in Korea and the rapidly growing Cold War, the Germans began to work on a derivative of the V-2 appropriately named "Redstone", which was a short-range battlefield ballistic missile with a reach of 320 kilometers (200 miles) and a nuclear warhead. First launch was in 1953.

In hindsight, it might have seemed that von Braun and his people had gone off on a dead-end track. While the Air Force and Navy had a mandate for building really long-range missiles that could be applied to space exploration, the Army did not, and the Redstone was no great leap forward in technology, being heavily rooted in the V-2. In fact, major aerospace firms did not want to take the contract for building Redstone, since they correctly believed that there was no long-term future in building such vehicles for the Army. The Redstone was built by Chrysler, an automobile manufacturer, simply because the company needed the money and didn't care about a long-term commitment.

However, von Braun was always looking ahead. He and his people were biding their time, honing their skills. Chance favors the prepared mind, and when chance gave them an opportunity, they would be ready. The Redstone, designed as a weapon, would never be fired in anger, but it would play a significant role in the first American steps into space.

In the meantime, the Germans thought over their ideas and dreams. Things were starting to look up for von Braun after his frustrating years in the desert. With the Cold War settling in, the US military was finally starting to get serious about big rockets; he was gradually becoming more prominent among the emerging society of American and international space enthusiasts and engineers; and he was leading a comfortable middle-class existence in Huntsville with his wife and two daughters, with a son to join them in a few years. It still wasn't Germany, but it was much more pleasant than scorching-hot Fort Bliss.

He and his people became involved with the local community. The citizens of Huntsville were good Southerners and at first were suspicious of the Germans, who had so recently been America's enemies. However, in time the rocket designers would bring greater prosperity to Huntsville, helping establish libraries, a museum, even a symphony. In April 1955, forty of the Germans, including von Braun, would attend a mass ceremony where they and their wives and children became citizens of the United States. They were now officially good old Alabama boys themselves, even if they spoke English with German accents and not Southern drawls.

* One of von Braun's assignments at Redstone led him to an appreciation of the late Robert Goddard. With the US government building and flying new big rockets, the Goddard estate had pressed claims of patent infringement, and in 1950 von Braun was handed a stack of Goddard's patents for examination. Von Braun concluded that the Goddard estate had a good case on many counts, and in 1960 the government would settle with an award of a million dollars, a serious amount of money at the time. Von Karman might have not thought very much of Goddard, but von Braun saw Goddard as a fellow visionary, and he would become an advocate of Goddard's memory.

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[3.2] THE BEGINNINGS OF SPACE SCIENCE / THE MILITARY FRONTIER

* Along with the logistics of launching rockets came the need to establish what precisely would be done with them. While the launches took place, a "space science" community began to assemble to determine agendas and a roadmap for the future.

In October 1945, the US Navy's Bureau of Aeronautics had set up a "Committee for Evaluating the Feasibility of Space Rocketry". Within a few weeks the committee concluded that a single-stage "Earth satellite vehicle" propelled by liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen was practical and recommended funding the program for scientific purposes. Development of a rocket using such fuels would prove more difficult than expected, however.

Because of the committee's favorable report, the Navy contacted Caltech to perform research on such a vehicle. It became clear that to pursue the Earth satellite project to completion would cost from $5 million to $8 million USD, and the Navy simply didn't have that kind of cash at the time. Navy attempts to collaborate with the Army on rocket development went nowhere. Rocketry was a new frontier and both services wanted to dominate it, making cooperation difficult.

Simultaneously, the NRL established a "Rocket Sonde Research Section" to perform upper-atmosphere research. NRL had considered a satellite at first, but ran into the cost barrier as well. NRL sounding rockets such as the Viking were to prove a significant first step towards later space efforts. NRL was also instrumental in establishing initial scientific research goals for rocket experiments. The Army had offered to allow experiments to be carried on its rocket tests, and so in January 1946, Ernest H. Krause of the NRL invited a number of scientists and other workers interested in upper atmosphere and astronomical research to meet and plan the experiments.

The meeting was held at Princeton on 27 February 1946, and included representatives from the military, industry, and academia. Most significant of the academics were Fred Whipple of Harvard, an astronomer, and Van Allen of Johns Hopkins, who was interested in cosmic-ray studies. The group, which was first called the "V-2 Panel", had no mandated goals; the Army was supportive of whatever the panel agreed to do. The group eventually expanded to 50 members. The NRL provided specially-designed V-2 nose sections to accommodate the experiments, and provided the communications infrastructure needed to obtain the data from the rocket as it rose into space.

The next year, in 1947, the US Navy's Office of Naval Research (ONR) began a high-altitude scientific balloon program under "Project Skyhook", in which new-technology polyethylene balloons took research payloads to altitudes of over 30 kilometers (100,000 feet). Payloads included stacks of photographic film designed to trap cosmic rays, as well as seeds, mice, hamsters, and monkeys to determine the level of hazard presented by space radiation. None of the animals showed any ill effects, though the seeds did sometimes suffer mutations.

The "passengers" on the flights needed to be protected from extreme cold and provided with a breathable atmosphere, leading to development of gondolas with life-support systems that could be seen as primitive precursors of space vehicles. The balloons also needed an organization to launch them, monitor and track them, and recover the payloads. In the mid-1950s, the Navy would follow up the Skyhook flights with the manned "Strato-Lab" program, while the Air Force would conduct a similar manned balloon program named "Man-High" in parallel, taking balloonists to the edge of space to help determine how humans could survive under such conditions.

Balloon flights also dovetailed with the sounding rocket effort. In 1952, the ONR would follow the Skyhook program with the "Rockoon" program, in which the balloons carried sounding rockets to high altitudes for launch into space. Dr. Van Allen was one of the drivers of the program.

* There other options for the new rockets that America was developing, with the help of German researchers conveniently inherited from Adolf Hitler. In March 1946, US Army Air Forces General Curtis LeMay, who would become commander of the Strategic Air Command (SAC) when the US Air Force became a separate service a year later, asked the Douglas company of El Segundo, California, to examine the possibilities of a military space satellites.

In response, Douglas set up a "think tank" named the "Research And Development (RAND)" Project, which produced a report titled "Preliminary Design Of An Experimental World-Circling Spaceship" in May 1946. The RAND study owed a great deal to the paper von Braun had written for his captors the year before, but went much further. It outlined the design of a four-stage liquid-fuel rocket to launch a satellite into Earth orbit, and suggested this satellite could be used for weather observation, communications relay, or, most importantly, military reconnaissance.

RAND produced a follow-up report focusing on reconnaissance satellites in February 1947. RAND was then spun off by Douglas to act as a non-profit contractor for the Air Force, and produced a series of studies of advanced technologies to support America's strategic interests. One particularly interesting RAND report, published by staffer Paul Kecskemeti, raised an issue that would become very important. What if the Soviets objected to American spy satellites overflying their territory? In other words, would there be a "freedom of space", just as there was a "freedom of the seas", where any nation could travel without restriction? Kecskemeti suggested that the first satellites should be for scientific purposes and be launched into orbit over the equator. They would not overfly the USSR, and would set a precedent for freedom of space. That was an abstract issue at the time, since for the moment nobody had any real plan to put satellites in orbit.

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[3.3] THE COLLIER'S SPACE PROGRAM

* While scientists and military officers considered what could be done in space, the US rocketry and space exploration community was engaged in a successful attempt to sell space to the American public. The audience was receptive, as demonstrated by popular science-fiction movies and flying-saucer scares.

Willy Ley had been a member of the German VfR before emigrating to the US before the war. He had written the influential book ROCKETS & SPACE TRAVEL in 1947 and lectured on space flight for the public audience. In the fall of 1951, Ley conducted a symposium on space exploration and technology at the Hayden Planetarium in New York City. Attendance was by invitation only, but reporters were invited, including correspondents from COLLIER'S magazine. COLLIER'S management found space an interesting topic, and a few weeks later one of the associate editors, Cornelius Ryan, later famous for his history of the Normandy invasion titled THE LONGEST DAY, went to an Air Force meeting on space medicine in San Antonio, Texas, to see if there was a story in it.

Ryan went to a cocktail party after the meeting and ran into Wernher von Braun, who described his ideas about the human future in space to Ryan. Although Ryan had not been interested in space exploration before that night, von Braun was a strong-willed person with a dream, and he could deliver a very convincing sales pitch. Ryan was impressed; he went back to New York and proposed an entire series of articles on space exploration to be run in COLLIER'S.

The result was a sequence of eight articles that appeared in COLLIER'S from 1952 to 1954. The articles were extremely detailed, featuring the striking artwork of illustrator Chesley Bonestell and other leading illustrators. The series featured articles by Ley, von Braun, and others, under the editorial supervision of Ryan. The articles were closely linked, describing a detailed technical blueprint for space exploration as envisioned by von Braun.

Huge three-stage stage winged rockets, 81 meters (265 feet) tall and descendants of the wartime A-11 booster concepts, would carry supplies and personnel into orbit. A wheel-shaped space station, 76 meters (250 feet) feet in diameter and sustaining a crew of 45 in a polar orbit 1,730 kilometers (1,075 miles) high, would be the centerpiece of the program, allowing Earth surveillance, support for missions to the Moon and to the planets, and other functions:

BEGIN QUOTE:

... a ruthless foe established on a space station could actually subjugate the peoples of the world. Sweeping around the earth in a fixed orbit, like a second moon, this man-made island in the heavens could be used as a platform from which to launch guided missiles. Armed with atomic warheads, radar-controlled projectiles could be aimed at any target on the earth's surface with devastating accuracy.

END QUOTE

There was a Cold War on, after all. The series outlined almost every necessary detail, from space taxis and space suits, to Moon shuttles and lunar bases, and, in the last installment, details of a massive manned Mars expedition.

Von Braun followed up the magazine articles with a series of books, some in collaboration with Willy Ley or others, once again with superb artwork, particularly by Bonestell. Von Braun's articles and books sold, providing a welcome bonus to his pay, and he also got on what would eventually be known as the TV "talk show" circuit to promote the COLLIER'S series and show his face to the American public.

* They would see it again soon. The COLLIER'S space program attracted the attention of Walt Disney and his chief animator and collaborator, Ward Kimball. They felt that translating the magazine series to a TV format would be very popular and help promote the "Tomorrowland" section being planned for the new "Disneyland" theme park in California. Disney then hired von Braun, Willey Ley, and others to provide inputs on the design of Tomorrowland and help put together a video series. Three episodes were produced, including MAN IN SPACE, MAN AND THE MOON, and MARS AND BEYOND, with initial broadcasts in the fall of 1954 on the popular "Disneyland" TV show.

The whole thing cost a cool million dollars, an unprecedented sum for a television production in those early days, but Disney, an extraordinarily shrewd businessman, knew it was worth it. The public ate it up, and von Braun used it to send his star higher. Disney's slick salesmanship suited von Braun's own sophisticated promotionalism perfectly. The charismatic von Braun became a national celebrity and took every advantage of it. Some of von Braun's colleagues disapproved of the showmanship and grandstanding, but von Braun had a mission and he was going to promote it.

The Army was perfectly tolerant of von Braun's "consulting" activities, since they helped promote the service's agenda. In the era of nuclear confrontation, it was the Air Force with their strategic nuclear bombing role that was the high-profile power, and anything that might be done to raise the Army's visibility was all for the good. Ironically, while the Army allowed von Braun to become a celebrity, they also kept him under surveillance. Disney staffers who took a ride with von Braun were startled when he pointed out the car tailing them, and he added that his phone was tapped. The surveillance was not simply out of distrust, however: there were also concerns that Soviet agents might try to kidnap him. In hindsight, that seems like a pulp fiction idea, but it was an indication of the climate of the 1950s that it was taken half seriously.

Von Braun basically shrugged about the surveillance, and went on pursuing other avenues of promotion. In October 1955, he gave a lecture at the US Armed Force Staff College. He gave an overview of space technology, and then got to the bottom line: a satellite in a low polar orbit could cover the entire globe with telescopic cameras in a day's time. The information would allow the US to locate and target every major military installation in the Soviet Union with great accuracy. At the time, von Braun did not know such a program was already in progress in secret.

Military applications were all to the good for selling space, but the rocket enthusiasts really wanted to send a man to the Moon. The problem was to find someone willing to pay big money to do it. US President Dwight Eisenhower repeatedly warned that space exploration was an expensive proposition. Something dramatic had to happen to sell space exploration to taxpayers, whose votes kept the politicians who provided the money in office. For the moment, the military remained the only real game in town.

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[3.4] THE CONVAIR MX-774

* It was obvious to all that a long-range missile would be an ideal way to attack a target with a nuclear weapon, but the technical obstacles were formidable. The accuracy required for a missile to carry a nuclear weapon halfway around the Earth and hit a military base or a city was beyond the technology of the time. It was like driving a golf ball several kilometers downrange and dropping the ball directly into the hole. The US Air Force believed piloted bombers, which could accurately place a nuclear weapon on target, were the nuclear weapon delivery system of choice for the time being, and that dreams of intercontinental missiles were for visionaries.

That did not mean that the USAF was completely disinterested in the idea of developing long-range, nuclear-tipped missiles. The technology would be available sooner or later, and the nation that laid the groundwork would have an advantage. In October 1945, the Army Air Forces' Air Technical Service Command issued a request for proposals for a ten-year program to develop four different classes of rockets, with ranges from 32 kilometers (20 miles) to 8,000 kilometers (5,000 miles).

Convair was one of the firms sent the request. A Convair engineer named Karel "Charlie" Bossart, who had been born in Belgium and emigrated to the US in the 1920s, was interested in the design of long-range rockets and managed to persuade the management to let him lead a team to work on the Air Force request. The group proposed a number of designs, including a cruise missile along the lines of the German V-1 but much bigger and more capable, and rocket designs. The Air Force awarded Convair a contract worth $1.9 million USD to develop a test prototype for a long-range rocket. The program was given the name "MX-774", which was actually the designation for the entire Air Force study.

$1.9 million USD wasn't nearly enough to develop an operational system even then, and Bossart focused on what he could do to get the best value for the money. He was an expert in aircraft structures, and decided to take a new approach to the rocket design.

Von Braun's V-2 was built around a steel framework, which enclosed fuel tanks and other gear, and which was enclosed in turn by an outer metal skin. Bossart decided to make the fuel tank walls the outer skin and to dispense with the supporting framework. The fuel tanks would be pressurized with nitrogen to keep them in shape, essentially keeping them "inflated" like a balloon. Although the MX-774 was two-thirds as big as a V-2, it only weighed an eighth as much.

To keep costs down, Bossart's group designed the MX-774 to look as much as possible like a V-2 externally, reducing the need for aerodynamic testing. Reaction Motors provided the rocket engine, the four-chamber "XLR-11", which was being developed for the Bell X-1 supersonic research rocket plane. The XLR-11 featured a high-speed turbopump and produced 35.6 kN (3,630 kgp / 8,000 lbf) thrust.

In the face of postwar defense cuts, the Air Force was forced to axe funding for the MX-774 project. Bossart managed to talk Convair management into providing a little company funding to carry on the project, and three MX-774s were launched from White Sands in 1948. The rocket had been designed to reach altitudes of 160 kilometers (100 miles), but due to premature engine cutoff and other problems, none ever flew higher than 48 kilometers (30 miles). Bossart felt the problems could be resolved, but there was no more money and that was the end of the MX-774. However, the program was far from a failure, since it validated design concepts that Convair would find very valuable in a few years' time.