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to release automatically just prior to flight, but now a technician in a cherry picker was sent out to disconnect the cord by hand. For the sixth time, the countdown clock was reset for another attempt three hours later. This time it got to T minus fourteen seconds, when a valve alarm sounded. The liquid oxygen had been in the tanks so long that it had frozen a valve in the open position. It would have to be drained, and another day would be lost, as the countdown was reset yet again, this time for 1:00 PM on Saturday. Now, Vanguard was truly running out of time. What’s more, nitric acid had been sitting in the upper stage for several days now, and soon it would start eating away at the rocket’s innards.

Saturday brought more delays and technical glitches, and at 11:00 PM the launch was postponed once again. The window had narrowed to less than twenty-four hours; Sunday, January 26, was TV3BU’s last shot. At ABMA, engineers chain-smoked, gulped coffee by the gallon, and paced like expectant fathers. No one could concentrate on the Juno. The navy was getting closer and closer with every attempt. Eventually it would get its bird off the ground.

On Sunday, exhausted launch crews from both teams reassembled before noon. The three-hour countdown was slated to start at 1:00 PM, and Vanguard technicians in hard hats and gray coveralls were giving TV3BU a final once-over when a human shriek followed by an ear-piercing siren erupted from launchpad 18A. A worker was screaming in agony, holding his face. Brown fumes, the sign of an acid leak, were rising from the middle of the rocket. Firefighters were dispatched to douse the leak, while senior engineers ran to assess the damage. It was serious. Acid had burned its way into one of the motors. The entire second-stage engine would have to be replaced. A meeting of Vanguard’s top personnel was hastily convened. They could scavenge a new motor from TV4, which was ready at the assembly hangar, but that would take time and would create new risks. There was really only one option, they realized with creeping dread: cancellation. “Above our meeting in the hangar hovered a ghostly consortium, von Braun and his ABMA group,” a deflated Stehling recalled. “The Army rocket stood nearby, almost insolent. We had had it.”

• • •

After years of rejection, months of upheaval, and four agonizing days, ABMA’s fate was finally in its own hands. Now there were no more distractions, and Kurt Debus, von Braun’s unflappable firing crew chief, could concentrate on getting Juno ready. Debus was in charge of all ABMA operations at the Cape. A Peenemünde alumnus and a veteran of over two hundred V-2 shoots, he was probably the most experienced launch master on the planet. Like Voskresenskiy with Korolev, he was one of the only people at ABMA who could override von Braun, and even Medaris deferred to his judgment once the countdown started. Quiet and unassuming, Debus spoke English with a heavy accent. He had an uncanny ability to parse the torrents of information that flooded the command center just prior to launch, and with his nerves of steel he had a seeming immunity to the adrenaline rush that sent everyone else’s pulse racing so madly when rockets thundered to life. Debus did, however, have one failing, and it had almost prevented him from coming to the United States in 1945. Army investigators had classified him as “an ardent Nazi,” who had “denounced his colleagues to the Gestapo.” But such was Medaris’s confidence in his firing chief, now a U.S. citizen, that von Braun would not even be present for the January 29 launch. Medaris wanted von Braun in Washington when Explorer went into orbit so that ABMA would be represented at the press conference the IGY committee was planning to hold the moment it got word that the mission was successful. Von Braun was unhappy with the arrangement, but Medaris insisted that he would be of far greater value in the capital, making sure the army got the credit it deserved. A great deal of future funding was riding on it.

With von Braun heading north to wage the public