_Live From Cape Canaveral_ - Jay Barbree [3]
Minutes passed and as Gene had calculated, we saw a star moving. It raced over our heads and disappeared below the star-filled horizon. Its flight path appeared to change as it moved across the sky. But it didn’t. It was Earth that moved. Like Sputnik itself, the booster rocket was in its own independent orbit, moving around the planet every ninety-six minutes on a firm track fixed by gravity. Earth was rotating beneath it at the rate of about eight hundred miles each hour at Albany’s latitude. We knew we were seeing the future.
I did a report on Sputnik and began to imagine ways I might move to Cape Canaveral and cover the impending space race. I had no idea then that I would spend more than fifty years covering every space flight by astronauts and amassing the most detailed files of known and unknown facts of space history. I built sources and contacts not only in America but in Russia as well, and in the autumn of my career I would write this book—my lifetime’s most important story. Besides, I had had a run-in with Albany’s Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, which made relocating seem even more attractive. I wouldn’t say I was run out of town but I sure as hell was out in front, leading the parade.
Only a month after Sputnik 1, the Russians did it again. Sputnik 2 weighed 1,120 pounds, and it soared more than a thousand miles above Earth. The numbers were unbelievable to an American public struggling to understand what was going on. Where were our rockets? Where were our satellites? And what the hell was inside this thing? A dog?
Sputnik 2 raced through orbit with Laika, seen here before being placed in the satellite. (Caidin Collection).
Americans were livid. Was Washington burning and President Nero fiddling? Eisenhower got the message and he acted. Prematurely, but he acted, and a civilian team working on Vanguard rushed the unproven rocket to its launch pad. On top was a grapefruit-size satellite that weighed a laughable three pounds.
Dr. von Braun had warned that Vanguard wasn’t ready and had reminded Washington that his Jupiter-C was. But, again, he was ordered to keep his rocket in the hangar. No military launch. Civilian only, if you please. But you say the Vanguard is a navy rocket? Hush! Shut your mouth!
They may have wanted a civilian rocket, but they didn’t want a civilian press. I was among the reporters and photographers pounding on the gates of Cape Canaveral. The military wouldn’t budge. The media were kept outside on sand dunes nicknamed bird-watch hills, in boats, on any spot with a view of the slender rocket. For some of us, telephones were more important than great views, and no nearby phones went unused. Housewives rented theirs for extra cash. I found mine in a row of phone booths at the south gate of the Cape.
The day was December 6, 1957, and as the launch neared, an anxious hush fell over a hopeful America.
“T-minus ten seconds and counting,” the short-wave broadcast reported to the nearby Coast Guard.
“Seven, six, five, four, three, two, one…”
I was on the line with WALB, and when the countdown reached zero, my report began…
“There’s ignition. We can see the flames…Vanguard’s engine is lit and it’s burning…but wait…wait a moment…there’s…no wait…there’s no liftoff! It appears to be crumbling in its own fire…It’s burning on its pad…Vanguard has crumbled into flames. It failed, ladies and gentlemen, Vanguard has failed.”
It had risen only four feet off its pad, and four feet didn’t count when you were reaching for orbit.
In 1957, the news media was not permitted on the air force’s Cape