Red Moon Rising Sputnik and the Rivalries That Ignited the Space Age - Matthew Brzezinski [145]
One final modification was made to the Jupiter C booster after its arrival at Cape Canaveral in the belly of a specially configured C-124 cargo plane: its name was changed to Juno. The rechristening was ordered by the Pentagon to deemphasize Missile Number 29’s military and Germanic origins. The Jupiter C’s main stage, after all, was a direct descendant of the V-2, and it was said that some folks in Washington wanted the lineage obscured—and a female name would accomplish this task quite nicely. Medaris, however, suspected baser motivations. “It became quite obvious that every effort would be made at the national level to suppress the Army’s participation in this enterprise,” he worried, “and to credit the whole business to the scientific personnel controlling the IGY effort.”
Juno did have civilian components. Its uppermost stages had been designed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology, and JPL had also made the eighteen-pound satellite, which was fitted into the crown of a slender six-foot-long Sergeant rocket that would ignite for six and half seconds just prior to orbit. The satellite, in fact, had been secretly built several years ago, when JPL’s director, William H. Pickering, had conspired with Medaris to circumvent Washington’s decision to go with Vanguard. Without authorization, they had proceeded with work on an army satellite on the sly, “just in case” Vanguard failed. “We bootlegged the whole job,” Pickering later admitted. “When we finished we locked up the satellite in a cabinet so it wouldn’t be found.”
That earlier act of insubordination proved not only prescient but also hugely time-saving, as the contraband satellite was taken out of hiding and put directly into the rocket. Like the first Sputnik, it contained two tiny radio transmitters to relay data to ground stations. A miniaturized Geiger counter to measure cosmic radiation was added by James Van Allen, the renowned astrophysicist from the University of Iowa, who in 1950 had first proposed holding the IGY in 1957. Van Allen had originally designed his radiation metering device for Vanguard, but he “thought it would be wise to prepare it in such a way that it would fit Vanguard as well as Jupiter C so that [he] would be prepared in either case.”
Though Juno’s civilian contributions were not insignificant, it became abundantly clear to Medaris from the wrangling over the classified press releases that were being prepared ahead of the launch that JPL and the IGY committee would get a disproportionate share of the postorbital credit. “Almost every reference to Army-developed hardware was stricken from these documents,” Medaris fumed, “in a rather dishonest attempt to make our first space triumph look like a civilian effort.”
A myth was being born: that the conquest of space had been driven by man’s insatiable appetite for exploration, rather than by the arms race. Even the satellite’s new name, Explorer, bore witness to the elaborate PR campaign quietly being prepared in Washington.
Of course none of this information would ever be released to the public if the launch failed. If the launch failed, it would be the army’s fault, and ABMA would go back to making weapons of mass destruction. “This is our biggest challenge,” Medaris confided to his wife in a rare moment of doubt. “We’ve waited a long while for recognition and now we must make good on our promises. . . . I’m praying for help.”
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Few public figures in Washington could have used as much help as Dwight Eisenhower in January 1958. His approval ratings had fallen another eight points after the Vanguard debacle, bringing the precipitous slide to a total of thirty percentage points in a little over four months, and the beleaguered former general was still not himself, uncertain if he could carry out his duties. But on a positive note, the trip