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By Root 518 0

he was at his wit’s end—fed up with the army, the politics, the ceaseless wrangling. He’d walked away from soldiering several times before in his eclectic career, and he had always returned to the military’s bosom because civilian life was just too dull. But he was tired of the nonsense, he was frustrated by the low pay that (coupled with his own extravagant tastes) perennially left him in debt, and he was losing his will to fight. More and more he’d been turning to prayers for guidance—Medaris had found religion during World War II—and taken to wondering if his was the right calling. (The religious rebirth, apparently, had not made him any less argumentative; his hard-headed outbursts had simply assumed “a fierce religious zeal” and a “pious belligerence,” according to Killian, who was no fan.)

Medaris was not the only one ready to throw in the towel. Von Braun also tendered his resignation. Already his brother Magnus had quit the army to work for Chrysler for twice the pay, and now von Braun was threatening to join him unless ABMA got a green light. Stuhlinger and several other top engineers added their names to the growing list of walking papers, and in Washington a minor panic ensued. The entire army missile program was about to resign, and something had to be done. ABMA, Quarles now decided, would have its shot. But only in January, and regardless of whether Vanguard was successful. For von Braun, that was enough. “Vanguard will never make it,” he declared with a certainty that bordered on arrogance.

• • •

By mid-November, it was no longer a secret that the navy’s quasicivilian bid to orbit a satellite was in serious trouble.

Despite the Pentagon’s determined assurances that “all test firings of Vanguard have met with success,” America’s answer to Sputnik was looking decidedly shaky. Vanguard’s launch vehicle—a modified three-stage Viking research rocket under the experimental designation Test Vehicle 2—had failed to lift off on five consecutive occasions between August and October because of mechanical malfunctions. Just about everything that could have cracked, leaked, broken, delaminated, depressurized, detached, smoked, sparked, or shorted out had done so with such maddening regularity that Dan Mazur, a frustrated Vanguard project manager and launch supervisor, begged the navy to stop sending him “garbage” instead of rockets.

Like a great many high-end concepts that looked good on paper, Vanguard was proving difficult to put into practice. When the project had first been pitched in 1955, it had won over the Pentagon’s satellite selection committee with its imaginative and elegant design and cutting-edge components such as an “almost developed” gimbaled General Electric main engine that swiveled on its own axis. This was a revolutionary departure from traditional steering methods, which employed fins or small side thrusters, and was only one of the many innovations the pencil-thin rocket promised to unveil. “For all practical purposes the Vanguard vehicle was new, new from stem to stern,” said Jim Bridger, a navy engineer. “More to the point, it was an awful high-state-of-the-art vehicle, especially the second stage rocket. In the nature of things, the business of developing the vehicle and getting the bugs out so it would work was fraught with difficulties.”

No one on the Stewart Committee, the panel Donald Quarles had convened to rule on the different satellite proposals, apparently foresaw the potential pitfalls of picking a blueprint on such a tight schedule. “It was either forgotten, or not understood, that the last ten percent of ‘almost developed’ missile hardware was the most difficult,” recalled Kurt Stehling, Vanguard’s propulsion chief. The fact that some members of the Stewart Committee simultaneously drew paychecks from the aerospace companies bidding on the Vanguard contract had also apparently been overlooked. Committee chairman Homer Joe Stewart, for instance, was a paid consultant for the Aerojet-General Corporation, which hoped to manufacture Vanguard’s second stage. Senior panel member Richard