_Live From Cape Canaveral_ - Jay Barbree [5]
Eight minutes later, an excited voice shouted, “They hear her, Wernher! They hear her!”
The satellite was in a slightly higher orbit than expected, accounting for its delay. Men and women hugged, and Wernher von Braun walked onto the stage of an adjoining auditorium filled with reporters.
“It was one of the great moments of my life,” he said. “I only regret we weren’t permitted to do it earlier.”
A grateful and jubilant America was at von Braun’s feet and his hometown, Huntsville, Alabama, rocked with a wild and furious celebration. Horns blared and cheering thousands danced and hugged each other in the streets. Retired defense secretary Charles E. Wilson, who had single-handedly stopped von Braun’s efforts to reach Earth orbit, was hanged in effigy.
German-born Wernher von Braun became an instant American hero. He was on the front pages of newspapers, on radio networks, on television talk shows and evening newscasts, and even on the prestigious cover of Time. The country’s leading news magazine wrote: “Von Braun, 45, personifies man’s drive to rise above the planet. Von Braun, in fact, has only one interest, the conquest of space, which he calls man’s greatest adventure.” Soon thereafter Eisenhower summoned von Braun to a white-tie dinner at the White House and presented him with the Distinguished Federal Civilian Service Award. Charles E. Wilson did not attend.
Wernher von Braun’s satellite was named Explorer 1. It weighed only thirty-one pounds, but despite its size, it made science’s first discovery by a satellite. Dr. James A. Van Allen’s Geiger counter on board Explorer 1 learned that Earth is surrounded by huge bands of high-energy radiation composed of particles trapped in our planet’s magnetic field. Scientists honored Van Allen by naming the belts after him. Today, when astronauts travel in space they avoid these radiation belts discovered by Explorer 1, the little satellite that catapulted America into the space age, and into a fierce competition for national prestige with the Russians.
Just around the corner, the race to the moon was moved to the starting blocks.
TWO
The Early Days
There are some fishing villages that are cocooned in time, content to let progress pass them by. In the late 1950s one such community was Cocoa, Florida. It was like many other coastal towns of its vintage, moving with the effortless politeness that was its major contribution to its citizens—citizens who spent most of their days on the water, the docks, and the fishing piers.
“Salt Water Trout Capital of the World” was what Cocoa called itself, while progress lay barely ten miles to the northeast on a palmetto and scrub-brush sand spit jutting into the Atlantic that had been named Cape Canaveral by Spanish explorers five hundred years ago. A cutting-edge, high-tech laboratory sprouting missile and rocket gantries along the ocean’s shore, it served as the anchor of a five-thousand-mile-long missile range of natural island tracking stations reaching to Ascension, a British island in the south Atlantic.
In the late 1950s and early ’60s, Cocoa and its seaside sister community of Cocoa Beach suddenly became boomtowns—men and women with an average age of twenty-seven were arriving in airliners, in automobiles, and by train, some even by Greyhound. They were the engineers, the technicians, the scientists, and the hucksters coming to build America’s spaceport, seeking membership in the newest and most elite fraternity that would carry the Western world into the second half of the twentieth century.
The easygoing town of Cocoa, Florida, hosted only a small, two-lane causeway to Cape Canaveral during the birth of America’s spaceport. Irate missile and rocket workers demanded the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers keep the drawbridge closed to boat traffic during rush