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By Root 412 0

relations war in Washington, responsibility for Juno—though everyone at ABMA still called the rocket Jupiter C—rested entirely with Debus. Juno’s first stage, the elongated Redstone, needed little prep work. All its components had been thoroughly tested in Huntsville. The carrier’s upper sections, however, had to be carefully fitted together on site since they used solid propellant, a volatile mixture of polysulfide aluminum and ammonium perchlorate that was inherently unstable. Loading the eleven Sergeant rockets that powered the second stage was akin to handling live nitroglycerin charges, an operation best undertaken gingerly and not repeated unnecessarily. A second, more complex phase of the assembly involved balancing the bundled rockets in the special spinning tub that was used to distribute thrust. All eleven motors had to push with the exact same strength at the exact same time for the second stage to work. The rotating platform, turning on its axis at 750 revolutions per minute, negated any irregularities in the individual rockets that might otherwise send the booster off course. But if it wasn’t aligned, in perfect equilibrium, it would vibrate and shake and tear the entire upper stage. Like a car mechanic balancing a wobbly wheel with tiny lead weights, Debus spent the better part of two days supervising minute calibrations on the spinning bucket.

Ernst Stuhlinger, meanwhile, tackled another critical task: a special timing device known as an apex predictor, which determined the precise moment when the second stage had to be fired to reach orbital velocity. Since there were no onboard computers in 1958 capable of quickly making such precise calculations, Stuhlinger would have to figure out the apex on the fly, using Doppler radar, telemetry readings, a slide rule, and some very fast calculations, and call the blockhouse to manually send a signal for the eleven Sergeants to simultaneously ignite. This was the trickiest part of the flight. A mathematical error, a downed phone line, or any other miscommunication could doom the entire mission. Korolev had gotten around the problem by having his giant core booster fire continuously, effectively one enormous stage. For Explorer, however, everything would come down to Stuhlinger, his slide rule, and his ability to speed-dial the command center.

Debus didn’t like the arrangement. “Do you really want to rely on this alone?” he asked Stuhlinger, pointing to the intercom connection with the blockhouse. But Stuhlinger was ahead of him. He had set up his own ignition button as a backup in case his call couldn’t get through. “I’ll push it at the right moment,” he promised. “Good,” said a relieved Debus. “Good luck.”

Luck, however, was not on ABMA’s side, as January 29 rolled around and the jet stream howled in from the Atlantic with winds registering 175 knots at 45,000 feet, reaching 225 miles per hour in some pockets. Cape Canaveral’s commander, General Donald Yates, had been Eisenhower’s meteorologist during the stormy Normandy invasion. He had brashly predicted before dawn on June 6, 1944, that the weather would clear, and Ike had gambled all on his being right. But now he shook his head with professional dismay. The jet stream would not shift, and Juno would not survive that kind of wind shear. With its elongated hull, retrofitted tanks, and added upper stages, it had been stretched to a perilously slender seventy feet, and the swirling crosswinds could twist it or snap it in half. For the sake of structural integrity, the launch would have to wait.

Now it was the army’s turn to start sweating while the navy bided its time. The scrubbed TV3BU launch had been rescheduled for February 3, which meant that ABMA had to get its shot off by January 31 or lose its turn in the rotation. Vanguard still had priority over Explorer at Cape Canaveral, and since U.S. tracking stations could not juggle two satellites at once, a period of three days had to be left idle between rival attempts. So ABMA’s window was now down to forty-eight hours.

The jet stream did not let up on Thursday,