Red Moon Rising Sputnik and the Rivalries That Ignited the Space Age - Matthew Brzezinski [144]
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The one nugget of information the Johnson subcommittee could not mine from its witnesses was when the United States would attempt to orbit another satellite. “Soon” was all Medaris would say when pressed in his testimony on January 7, 1958.
“I am not going to ask you about the precise date,” Cyrus Vance persisted, seeking to pry a more exact answer out of the general. “I am thankful for that, Sir,” Medaris replied, not taking the bait. To the launch crew at Cape Canaveral, he wired the following instructions the next day: “Do not admit to the presence of the vehicle. Shroud upper stages with canvas and move to the pad not later than 6:30 A.M.”—that is, under the cover of darkness—“Identify the vehicle as a Redstone. Great care should be taken concerning the movements of key personnel from the agency in your vicinity. They will be flown directly by special plane. Any violation of this decoy plan will be dealt with severely.”
To his own staff at ABMA headquarters, Medaris issued similar injunctions against discussing any aspect of the pending launch, even with their wives. “I desire it well understood that the individual who violates instructions will be handled severely,” he reiterated. The lessons of Vanguard had been well learned. There would be no advance notice this time. It wasn’t just the press that Medaris was worried about. The last thing he needed was a herd of self-aggrandizing politicians descending on Huntsville and the firing range in Florida. Not only would they be a distraction, bringing down hordes of pesky journalists and putting unnecessary pressure on his whole team, but their mere presence could also inadvertently scuttle a launch. “Personal observation had convinced me that the chances of success on any important firing effort were in inverse proportion to the number of VIPs present,” Medaris later explained. With half of Washington looking over their shoulders, ABMA’s launch crew would be reluctant to scrap or postpone a shoot because of inclement weather or minor technical glitches, which could prove disastrous. Medaris knew that “there was every human tendency to decide in marginal cases to go ahead and accept the risk rather than disappoint the visitors.”
Medaris was not going to allow that to happen. The VIPs would remain in Washington and would be kept in the dark like everyone else. Only a few people in the Pentagon and at the National Security Council were told that liftoff was scheduled for Wednesday, January 29. To further mask its activities, ABMA began referring to the satellite booster in all official communications simply by its serial designation: Missile Number 29. Missile 29 was one of the original Jupiter Cs that Medaris had quietly diverted during the 1956 reentry tests “for more spectacular future purposes,” as he had hopefully put it. Taken out of cold storage, the test missile had been completely disassembled in late November. It consisted of four stages. The main stage was an elongated Redstone. Eleven scaled-down Sergeant rockets formed the second stage. Three Sergeant motors formed the third stage, while the satellite would be embedded into the final Sergeant rocket in the fourth stage. Von Braun’s team had worked day and night throughout December to reconfigure the four-stage carrier. A new fuel, hydyne, had replaced alcohol to increase thrust from 75,000 to 83,000 pounds, and the turbo pumps had been upgraded to work longer, extending the Redstone’s burning time from 121 to 155 seconds. The entire forward section, which housed the upper stages, had also been modified to accommodate a special “spinning bucket” that spun on its axis, creating a gyroscope that would keep the cluster of smaller top-stage rockets in perfect equilibrium. An improved inertial guidance system was installed, as were a series of tiny directional air-jet nozzles that would keep the uppermost