Red Moon Rising Sputnik and the Rivalries That Ignited the Space Age - Matthew Brzezinski [29]
With so much common ground, and ample stores of the salted nuts the defense secretary was said to adore, Medaris thought ABMA well prepared for the inspection tour. And the visit started out promisingly enough. Arriving in Huntsville, Wilson was accompanied by the secretaries of the army and navy, and by General James Gavin, the chief of Army Research and Development, along with several other two- and three-star generals. No air force officials were present in the delegation, owing to the archrivalry that had sprung up as a result of the New Look doctrine, though both ABMA and the Air Force Ballistic Missile Division in Los Angeles had recently exchanged liaison officers—“ambassadors to unfriendly nations,” as Medaris wryly described the envoys.
Wilson asked few questions as he toured ABMA facilities at the Redstone Arsenal, viewing the metallurgical and chemical laboratories in buildings 111 and 112; the new static firing stands, where rocket engines were strapped to twin towers and fired at full blast; and the supersonic wind tunnels. Everything had been built for less than $40 million, and Medaris was proud of what von Braun had achieved on a shoestring budget. Inside the main production plant, a hangar where rockets were assembled, von Braun himself showed off the latest batch of his Redstones, America’s biggest operational missiles.
Work on the Redstones had begun under the Truman administration, when another automotive industry giant, K. T. Keller, simultaneously served as chairman of the board of the Chrysler Corporation and the Defense Department’s director of the Office for Guided Missiles. The Redstone was a heavy-lift tactical missile capable of flinging a 3,500-pound nuclear warhead 200 miles downrange. Essentially a more powerful and advanced version of the V-2, it incorporated a slew of innovations such as the expanded use of lightweight aluminum alloys, transistors, signal-activated flight steering, and a Rocketdyne engine with 50 percent more thrust. Thirty-seven of the rockets had been built: sixteen in-house at Huntsville and the rest outsourced to Chrysler to “speed production.”
Chrysler was also slated to be the prime assembly contractor on the Redstone’s successor, the 1,500-mile-range Jupiter missile. Jupiter was the army’s bold gamble, the reason ABMA had been created and Medaris dispatched to Huntsville. The air force was already developing a nearly identical midrange missile, the Thor, and had been given sole jurisdiction over the intercontinental arena, with the proposed Atlas ICBM. The programs, fortunately for Medaris, were still in their infancy because America had entered the missile sweepstakes so late in the game. The Pentagon brass had felt no need to rush ahead with expensive big rockets because of America’s overwhelming advantage in bombers and the overseas bases that placed the Soviet Union within easy reach. As Eisenhower himself noted, the United States already had the proven capacity “to inflict very great, even decisive, damage” on Russia. “The guided missile is, therefore, merely another, or auxiliary, method of delivering the kind of destruction” that Washington already possessed. Besides, Eisenhower argued, he wanted no part in a costly new arms race that would only raise the destructive stakes and plunge the treasury into further debt. “The world in arms is not spending money alone,” he had said in 1953, in what was probably the most eloquent speech of his entire presidency.
It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than sixty cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of sixty thousand population. It is two fine, fully