_Live From Cape Canaveral_ - Jay Barbree [4]
Out on the beach, a young CBS correspondent named Harry Reasoner and his producer, Charles von Fremd, had gained an advantage in the race to be first on the air. They had rented an oceanfront cottage with a view of the Vanguard launch pad. While cameraman Paul Rubenstein took his post on the beach, where the sightlines were better, Reasoner stood on the porch and peered through binoculars. Inside the little house, von Fremd’s wife, Virginia, held a phone that was connected to the CBS newsroom in New York. Reasoner later wrote:
At t-minus zero, the first Vanguard rocket with satellite lifts four feet off the ground before crumbling back on its pad, consumed by its own fires. (Neilon Collection).
…I saw an unmistakable flash of flame and the pencil-thin white rocket began to move. “There she goes!” I shouted. “There she goes!” shouted Virginia into the phone. “There she goes!” shouted the CBS executive in New York, hanging up the phone and charging off to get the bulletin on the air.
We beat ABC and NBC certainly. There was only one problem. A tenth of a second after I shouted, “There she goes!” I shouted, “Hold it!”…
The tiny satellite was blasted off the top of the exploding rocket and bounced into hiding in the Cape’s wilderness. Its small transmitter broadcast its lonely distress. To those listening, it was mournful—a string of unbroken beeps. Columnist Dorothy Kilgallen asked the most appropriate question on CBS’s What’s My Line: “Why doesn’t someone go out there, find it, and kill it?”
It was a black day for a proud country. Space pioneer and storyteller John Neilon, who worked on Vanguard, recalled, “The project was instantly dubbed all sorts of uncomplimentary names like Rearguard, Flopnik, and one newspaper wrote ‘Ill-Fated-Vanguard as if that were the real name of the project.” Neilon can laugh today. He added, “Some of our team with a sense of humor would answer the phone, ‘Ill-Fated-Vanguard Project!’”
The loss of Vanguard wounded our pride and destroyed our confidence, and most of us knew it was time for something to be done. The Russians were kicking us where we sat, and it was time for a stubborn White House to call in the cavalry—to call in the von Braun team.
Eisenhower did, and Redstone missile #29 was hauled out of storage and refitted. More reliable upper-stage rockets were added, and a thirty-one-pound satellite was mounted atop the stack with eighteen pounds of instruments designed to measure space radiation. Eisenhower and his White House crowd didn’t want to be reminded that the rocket was the same damn Redstone that could have placed a satellite in orbit more than a year before Sputnik. The orders came down to change the name of the rocket, and Jupiter-C became Juno 1.
The media were finally invited on the Cape, and after three days of delays caused by high winds, Juno 1 was ready for launch.
On January 31, 1958, at 10:45 P.M., test conductor Robert Moser pushed the launch button. After waiting more than two years to fly, Redstone #29 was suddenly alive and its flames washed over the launch pad. Those lucky enough to be there cheered as broadcasters shouted to be heard above the rocket’s growing roar.
Some around me cried shamelessly as I shouted my on-the-scene report and watched the first rocket with an American satellite climb higher and higher and faster and faster. I knew I was witnessing history. It was surreal with all the shouting, screaming, and joyful crying, and I continued to shout my report and watch the Jupiter-C’s flames grow smaller and smaller. Soon it was a star lost in a black sky filled with many, and I felt my own personal national pride. One of von Braun’s stars, I reminded myself. As a boy, the young rocket master had promised himself he would go to the stars, and this night he was taking his first step on that journey.
The country did not yet have a network of tracking stations in place. Definite confirmation that the satellite was in orbit