Russians captured all the German scientists at Peenemünde,” a remark that astounded many in Huntsville, as it was an outright lie. Unstated by Eisenhower was his relief that Russia had established the controversial precedent of orbital overflight. In the future, neither the Soviets nor other nations could voice their diplomatic objections when the United States eventually orbited its planned surveillance satellites.
The American media’s reaction to Sputnik was far less measured than the president’s. Columnists bemoaned the shocking loss of national prestige and criticized Eisenhower’s blasé reaction as lack of leadership. Opposition politicians appeared on television, expressing fear that the Soviets might use their powerful rockets to position a nuclear sword of Damocles above any nation.
Overshadowed by the news of Sputnik was another event at the Barcelona astronautical conference that captured the Cold War zeitgeist. Dr. S. Fred Singer, a young Austrian-born physicist noted for his work in cosmic radiation, was there to deliver a provocative paper. One of von Braun’s Project Orbiter colleagues and a leading member of the American Astronautical Society, Singer had also cultivated a talent for getting his name into print by fearlessly saying things his more prudent scientific colleagues would avoid.
Singer’s paper was titled “Interplanetary Ballistic Missiles: A New Astrophysical Research Tool” and argued in favor of exploding thermonuclear bombs on the Moon as a way to conduct scientific research. It was an idea that, he said, was “not only peaceful, but also useful, and, therefore, worthwhile.” This proposal, he believed, might lead to other experiments, such as exploding thermonuclear devices on the planets or an attempt to create a new star. But more immediately, Singer suggested, this initiative would promote world peace, as “the H-bomb race between the big powers would then be reduced to the much more tractable problem of seeing who could make the bigger crater on the Moon.” He was especially excited by the possibility of rearranging lunar geography. “The idea of creating a permanent crater as a mark of man’s work is an appealing one,” he said. “One is left with a nice crater on the Moon which is unnamed and therefore provides unique opportunities for perpetuating the names of presidents, prime ministers, and party secretaries.”
The Soviet delegates sitting in the lecture hall listened to Singer’s proposal with understandable astonishment and outrage. However, Singer later remarked that the Soviet reaction to his paper was “blown out of proportion.”
As Sputnik dominated the headlines, newspapers gave less attention to the big story out of Little Rock, Arkansas, where a week earlier President Eisenhower had ordered 1,200 members of the Army’s 101st Airborne Division to assist with the desegregation of Little Rock Central High School. The day before Eisenhower’s order to mobilize the troops, more than a thousand white protesters had rioted to prevent nine black students from attending the school. After Sputnik was launched, Radio Moscow seized upon an opportunity to shame the United States for hypocritically calling itself “the land of the free”: It alerted its global listeners to the exact moment when the satellite would pass over Little Rock, news that was specifically intended to be heard in the emerging independent nations of Africa.
Incensed that he and his new boss at Huntsville’s Army Ballistic Missile Agency, General John Medaris, hadn’t been given an opportunity to ready a modified Redstone rocket to launch a swift response to Sputnik, von Braun covertly made his case in the media, despite having received orders from Washington not to make any public comments. Magazine features called him “The Prophet of the Space Age” and “The Seer of Space,” portraying him as the brilliant visionary whose bold ideas had been ignored by petty bureaucrats, unimaginative military officials, and cowardly politicians. And knowing that nothing motivated people as powerfully as fear, von Braun evoked the specter of atomic annihilation, arguing that it was imperative that the United States establish its superiority in space if the nation was to survive.
Eisenhower became increasingly irritated by von Braun’s arrogance, celebrity status, and self-serving pronouncements. In fact, the president’s growing frustration with von Braun likely accounted for his wildly inaccurate comment at his press conference about the Russians having all the German scientists. If it had been intended to belittle von Braun’s reputation and public profile, it backfired badly.
The media panic only increased when in early November the Soviets orbited Sputnik 2. A much heavier satellite, it carried the first living creature on a one-way trip into orbit, the photogenic husky-terrier mix, Laika. NBC’s Merrill Mueller, a reporter who had covered D-Day, the Battle of the Bulge, and the bombing of Hiroshima, grimly faced the television camera as he told viewers, “The rocket that launched Sputnik 2 is capable of carrying a ton-and-a-half hydrogen-bomb warhead.”
Democrats with eyes on the 1960 elections, and possibly the White House, added their dire voices to the chorus of doom. Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson announced that this was the last chance to save Western civilization from annihilation, while Senate majority leader Lyndon Johnson compared Sputnik to a cosmic Pearl Harbor, warning the nation that we “must go on a full, wartime mobilization schedule.”
Taking von Braun’s lead, Johnson forecast a sinister future vision that would delight the heart of a James Bond supervillain: “Control of space means control of the world,” he declared. “From space, the masters of infinity would have the power to control the Earth’s weather, to cause drought and flood, to change the tides and raise the levels of the sea, to divert the Gulf Stream and change temperate climates to frigid.”
Eisenhower scoffed at all the apocalyptic rhetoric, as well as at those who offered a variation on Fred Singer’s idea that the United States should respond to the Soviet Union’s presence in space by sending a rocket to the Moon armed with a warhead. In response, Eisenhower said he would rather have one nuclear-armed short-range Redstone rocket than an expensive and impractical moon rocket. “We have no enemies on the Moon,” he declared.
On Capitol Hill, Lyndon Johnson invited von Braun and General Medaris to testify before a Senate preparedness subcommittee inquiry. Johnson not only recieved the media exposure he desired, but the pair from Huntsville put the White House on the defensive with a few well-crafted lines for the newsreel and television cameras. “Unless we develop an engine with a million-pound thrust by 1961,” Medaris warned, “we will not be in space—we will be out of the race!” Von Braun raised the specter of a hammer and sickle hanging in the heavens, cautioning that the country was “in mortal danger” if the Soviets conquered space. “They consider the control of space around the Earth very much like, shall we say, the great maritime powers considered the control of the seas in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. And they say, ‘If we want to control this planet, we have to control the space around it.’ ”
The country heard them testify to how the Army’s readiness had fallen victim to petty armed-service rivalries, bureaucratic lassitude, and indecisiveness, a situation that Johnson called “nothing short of disgraceful.” Von Braun once again hypnotized the press, particularly a New York Times journalist who described him as a “blonde, broad shouldered and square-jawed … youthful-looking German scientist” who “drew many sympathetic laughs as he smilingly grappled with questions.”
The nation’s attempt to rid itself of Sputnik anxiety came on a morning in December 1957, barely two months after the shocking news from Moscow. Journalists at Cape Canaveral all had their binoculars focused on Launch Complex 18. There had been no official announcement, but word had spread among the newsmen that this was the likely day; sources at the local motels, restaurants, and bars all said something was being planned for that morning.
Shortly before noon on December 6, a cloud of white smoke appeared at the base of the U.S. Navy’s Vanguard rocket as it began to move upward into the sky. CBS News’s Harry Reasoner observed the launch from a privileged position on the porch of a nearby beach house. At the first sign of smoke he shouted, “There she goes!” His assistant, who was inside the house, on the phone with the network’s New York newsroom, immediately conveyed the word. Once the message had been received, Reasoner’s New York colleague promptly put down the phone to get the news on the air. But by that moment Reasoner was shouting, “Hold it! Hold it!” as he watched the Vanguard fall back on the pad and collapse into an expanding fireball, its tiny satellite toppling out of