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The rival teams eyed each other warily at the increasingly crowded Cape. From their vantage point at launchpad 18A, the Vanguard crew watched anxiously as von Braun and his rocket team began setting up shop at launch complex 26A, a few hundred yards away. “We could see the Army preparations on their launch pad not too far from us,” recalled the Vanguard propulsion engineer Kurt Stehling. Like his competitors, Stehling had been born in Germany. But rather than work for the Nazis, his family had fled to Canada, and he later emigrated to the United States to pursue his space dreams. Now, as he looked over his shoulder at the elongated Redstone being erected nearby, he bitterly reflected how the army’s “warhorse” rocket held an unfair advantage over his “skittish thoroughbred” because its “progenitor was built in Germany” at a cost of thousands of lives. But then justice and morality had no place on the launchpad; science was blind that way.

TV3BU, TV3’s designated backup vehicle, was proving as skittish as its late predecessor. General Electric and Martin were still squabbling over who was responsible for the original explosion, and several botched static tests on the replacement rocket in early January did not augur well for the relaunch. Nonetheless, with Medaris and von Braun breathing down their necks, Hagen and the rest of the Vanguard bosses were determined not to lose their turn in Cape Canaveral’s tight launch rotation schedule.

The weather, on Wednesday, January 22, boded equally ill, as the final, frenetic preparations got under way. “The night was miserably cold and wet,” Stehling recalled. “With rain and hail alternating. Somehow, that night, the noise of the electric generators, the roaring of the gas compressors and the steady scurrying and shouting around the blockhouse, the squawking of the intercom boxes and the jangling of the telephones, the sizzling of the hamburgers in the Garbage [food dispensary] truck, the clicking of telemetry relays in the room, all seemed to be more discordant than usual, and we all had a premonition that the countdown would be unsuccessful.”

Sure enough, with only four and a half minutes to launch on Thursday morning, a short circuit due to rain forced a postponement. The countdown clock was reset to 1:00 PM, and the rapidly evaporating liquid oxygen tanks were refilled for another try at 4:00 PM. More glitches pushed the liftoff time to 7:00 PM. Then with only nine minutes to go, a wall of ominous clouds rolled over the Cape. For an hour and a half, everyone waited for the front to pass. But it refused to budge. “Scrub,” the safety officer finally ordered, to general groans and curses. They would have another go the next day. “By this time the field crew had the usual number of unshaven men with dark circles under their eyes, and that gastric acid bubble uprising,” Stehling recalled. And there was the question of what to do with the fueled rocket. The liquid oxygen and especially the corrosive nitric acid in the secondstage tanks would wreak havoc on seals, valves, and plugs if left too long. Should the entire system be drained, which would require working through the night? No, said the contractors, the seals would hold another day. The red-eyed, nerve-racked navy engineers were dispatched to the Vanguard Motel in Cocoa Beach for a few hours of much-needed sleep.

At launchpad 26A, meanwhile, where dozens of army binoculars constantly trained on the competition, ABMA’s anxious observers also took a welcome break from their nervous vigil. “Our people did not take kindly to the idea of sitting around twiddling their thumbs until Vanguard took off,” Medaris later recalled. As everyone at the ABMA complex well knew, TV3BU had only another seventy-two-hour window within which to launch, and then it would be Explorer’s turn. They were counting the hours.

The following day, with the sun beating down on the Florida coast and the all-clear signal given by the meteorologists, Vanguard got to within twenty-two hair-raising seconds of liftoff, when its umbilical cord stuck. It was supposed