Red Moon Rising Sputnik and the Rivalries That Ignited the Space Age - Matthew Brzezinski [152]
But Medaris himself was not done sweating. Like Korolev nearly four months earlier, he too would now have a tense hour-and-a-half wait to see if Explorer had built up enough momentum to stay in orbit. Only when tracking stations on the West Coast picked up its signal after a complete revolution would he know for certain if the satellite was truly in orbit. “I’m out of coffee and running low on cigarettes,” Army Secretary Brucker impatiently wired good-humoredly from Washington. “Send out for more and sweat it out with us,” Medaris replied.
Von Braun, meanwhile, had taken out his own slide rule, calculating the estimated time Explorer would cross into signal range of Goldstone, the big tracking station in Earthquake Valley, California. It would take 106 minutes, he announced, at 12:41 AM.
At 12:40, William Pickering, the JPL chief responsible for Juno’s upper stages, could no longer contain himself. “Do you hear her?” he asked the Moonwatch station in San Diego. “No, sir,” came the reply.
“Do you hear her now?” he demanded two minutes later. Again, negative. “Why the hell don’t you hear anything?” Pickering had lost his cool.
By now, everyone at the Pentagon and the Cape was becoming seriously concerned. Three, four, and then five minutes passed. Messages were sent to every station on the West Coast. Anything? Nothing. Explorer was now eight minutes overdue. Satellites simply weren’t late. They were governed by immutable laws. Something must have gone wrong.
“Wernher,” Secretary Brucker’s tone turned suddenly icy, “what’s happened?” Von Braun, for once, was at a loss for words. Just then, a message clattered off the Teletype. “They hear her, they hear her,” a jubilant Pickering shouted. It was the Earthquake Valley station. “Goldstone has the bird!”
The United States of America had just entered the space age.
EPILOGUE
When told that Explorer was in orbit, Nikita Khrushchev reportedly shrugged. The race, he well knew, would no longer be so one-sided, now that a sleeping giant had been roused; and for the Soviet Union, it would be a contest of diminishing returns. But it did not matter.
Moscow had already scored its biggest gains by the time Juno soared into space, and those all-important early victories could never be pushed aside. In the eyes of the world, Sputnik made the Soviet Union a genuine superpower and America’s equal, and this new status would persist regardless of whose future rockets flew farther, faster, or higher. The triumph was psychological and irreversible, and would endure until the Soviet Union itself disappeared into the dustbin of history one wintry day in 1991. Then, just as swiftly, Moscow’s international image would revert to its pre-Sputnik reputation as a brutish and backward land.
Russia’s dominance of the space race did not peak in 1958. Moscow was able to hold its lead for another three years, culminating with cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin’s ride into orbit atop an R-7 on April 12, 1961. But by then the element of surprise was gone. America had learned not to underestimate its Communist adversary, and Washington had embarked on its own ambitious and long-term space program. The shock value was therefore not the same as with Sputnik, though the historical significance of Gagarin’s flight was probably far greater and did indeed resonate throughout the rest of the world, particularly in developing countries.
The Soviet Union and Khrushchev, however, paid a steep military price for the early space triumphs. The R-7, for all its success as a heavy-lift vehicle and propaganda tool, was a failure as an ICBM. “It represented only a symbolic counter threat to the United