• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

The conversation turned to Vanguard’s progress and then returned to the political fallout from Sputnik. Arthur Larson, Eisenhower’s chief speechwriter, cleared his throat hesitantly, as if he had something unpleasant on his mind. “I wonder if our plans for the next great breakthrough are adequate,” he finally said, referring to the decision not to change the IGY plans or to get ABMA involved in the satellite race. “If we lose repeatedly to the Russians as we have lost with the earth satellite, the accumulated damage will be tremendous. We should accordingly plan, ourselves, to achieve the next big breakthrough first, a manned satellite,” he suggested, “or getting to the moon.”

Nixon rallied behind Larson. The vice president was among the few administration figures “who seemed to grasp the new symbolism,” in the words of the historian Walter McDougall, and once more he advocated announcing immediate increases in both missile and space spending. “The country will support it,” he said. But Eisenhower cut the discussion short. Everyone around the table, he warned, would soon be called to testify before congressional committees. There could be no dissension in the ranks. Everyone had “to stand firmly” behind the decision to stay with the current course.

“In short,” concluded the president, “we should answer queries by stating that we have a plan—a good plan—and we are going to stick to it.”

• • •

Plan? fumed Medaris. What plan? He and von Braun had been following the developments in Washington with increasing fury and apprehension. The political storm that von Braun had predicted had indeed materialized. But the administration’s response was a far cry from what Medaris had anticipated when he ordered ABMA to begin satellite preparations without authorization. The official go-ahead had never come, and as the days passed without word from Washington, it was becoming increasingly clear that he had jumped the gun.

Jim Hagerty, meanwhile, apparently also jumped the gun, announcing that the Vanguard program would launch “a small satellite sphere” in December, before sending up a fully instrumented scientific payload in March 1958. The dates were according to the original IGY schedule. But the December launch had been intended as a quiet dress rehearsal to check Vanguard’s booster and upper stages, which had never been fired in tandem before and still bore the technical designation “experimental vehicle” to denote their untested status. The press secretary, however, had made the date of the test public, guaranteeing that the whole world would be watching what was never meant to be anything more than a trial run. The dress rehearsal had effectively become opening night. “We who could coldly appraise the odds of Vanguard were frankly scared to death,” Medaris recalled, somewhat insincerely. Virtually every new rocket system failed on its first attempt, as both Wernher von Braun and Sergei Korolev could attest from bitter experience. That was why inaugural flights were kept quiet. Only after the kinks were ironed out were successes reported to the general public. Thanks to the White House, however, Vanguard would debut on a national stage, live, in front of television cameras. It was a recipe for disaster, Medaris believed. “How far out on a limb could our poor country get?” he said.

For his part, Medaris was also getting “far, far out on a limb” with his rogue satellite preparations. For the first few days it had been easy to hide the unauthorized expenditures, but as one week turned into two, and then two weeks became three, the costs were mounting, and it was becoming impossible to bury the paperwork. Von Braun’s team had even started eating into the newly reinstated overtime budgets. (The administration, fearing the coming congressional inquests, had quietly rescinded its ban on overtime for missile projects.) Medaris was putting his own career on the line. “I had neither money nor authority, yet work was still going on,” he later confessed. “By the end of the month, I was really sweating, and beginning