_Live From Cape Canaveral_ - Jay Barbree [6]
I was one of them, shouting into a microphone a play-by-play broadcast as I chased runaway missiles and exploding rockets in the greatest show of technology the world had ever seen. I would tell our listeners that ballistic missiles did not simply blow up. They did not yield their life energy without a struggle. The flame began in spurts, from the arteries of fuel lines and the reservoir of tanks, and then in long, fiery streamers. Shards of the doomed rockets fell blazing toward an indifferent ocean.
This was Cape Canaveral in the early days, a world of missiles and rockets and of nights exploding violently as launch crews huddled within the protection of thick steel-and-concrete blockhouses, peering through periscopes, each shouting liftoff as more satellites followed Explorer 1 and Sputnik into orbit, the successes making things happen. The defense budget was increased significantly, and military rocket programs were given more or less a blank check. Most forms of government-subsidized research began to grow. The nation’s education system was overhauled, and federal dollars poured into the schools to help produce an unmatched generation of scientists and engineers who would become the heart of the American space reply to the Russians.
In the early days, the security gate to Cape Canaveral appeared to be out of The Grapes of Wrath.
The Pentagon formed the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) to guard against further U.S. technological slippage.
And the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) was born.
America was on the move, and someone had to manage the new space effort. Who would lead? The army, navy, and air force all sought the assignment, as did the Pentagon’s ARPA and the Atomic Energy Commission. But the White House focused on the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), an inconspicuous group of scientists who oversaw federal flight-technology laboratories.
NACA possessed some of the best engineering talent in the country. Under civilian control, it was too obscure to have been caught up in partisan politics, and most pleasing to all, it was a stranger to the red tape of government bureaucracy. This small but talented agency got the job of challenging Russia’s lead in space.
Reborn as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the agency gathered under its umbrella NACA’s five laboratories and eight thousand technicians; the California Institute of Technology’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory; the navy’s Vanguard project; and the army’s four-thousand-strong rocket team headed by Dr. von Braun. But Congress insisted the Pentagon also maintain a separate space effort.
I had gone to work for NBC News on July 21, 1958 and was soon introduced to the network’s executive producer in charge of space coverage. He was a tall, stout, grinning New Yorker named Jim Kitchell with a reputation for getting things done. First out of his mouth he told me to never work in New York or Washington and to build myself a small empire as the man who knew the answers to all questions about space flight. He added, “Never be a threat to any of your coworkers.” I bought a Shetland pony, rode low, and stayed under everyone’s radar, and I was soon known as the man with the space answers that did not want any New York or Washington job. Kitchell’s suggestion proved to be the best advice I was to receive in my life.
The man from the city had personally gotten the media on the Cape’s highly secret air force launch installation, and now he was getting ready for television’s first-ever live coverage of a breaking news event. To make it work, Kitchell worked out an agreement with the air force, as well as one with our affiliate WFGA, Channel 12, in Jacksonville.
There was another young go-getter at WFGA named Herb Gold, and he and Jim became close friends. Herb had no clue what he was in for, and he was soon coaxed into dragging a live studio setup, cameras and all, 170 miles south through the rain.
Herb bought an old truck built for delivering pies, filled it with the