Red Moon Rising Sputnik and the Rivalries That Ignited the Space Age - Matthew Brzezinski [52]
Until 1954, cumulative federal spending on satellite research in the United States amounted to $88,000. And even this sum was thought excessive. When von Braun that same year offered to launch a satellite using a modified Redstone missile for less than $100,000, his request for the additional funding was flatly denied. If money was any indication of political interest, satellite and space exploration did not even register on radar screens in the nation’s capital until 1955, when the Soviet Academy of Sciences announced that it would try to send a craft into orbit as part of the planned International Geophysical Year. (The pledge was meaningless, however, until Khrushchev and the Presidium got on board the following year.)
The IGY was a science Olympics of sorts that had its origins in the nineteenth-century Arctic exploration races. Held every fifty years to encourage scientific exchange on the physical properties of the polar regions, it had expanded its brief to cover the planet’s skies, oceans, and ice caps. A few weeks prior to the IGY’s 1955 convention in Rome, which set July 1, 1957, as the start of the next Geophysical Year, Radio Moscow announced that the Soviet Union would launch scientific instruments into space to measure such phenomena as solar radiation and cosmic rays. In response, the National Academy of Sciences promptly declared that the United States would also send up a satellite to study the earth’s protective cocoon. “The atmosphere of the earth acts as a huge shield against many types of radiation and objects that are found in outer space,” the academy press release stated, somewhat dryly. “In order to acquire data that are presently unavailable, it is most important that scientists be able to place instruments outside the earth’s atmosphere in such a way that they can make continuing records about the various properties about which information is desired.”
Behind the seemingly benign facade of the announcements, both the United States and the Soviet Union had ulterior motives for participating in the IGY. Each was looking for a peaceful, civilian excuse to test the military potential of its hardware—how air drag, gravitational fields, and ion content could affect missile trajectories; how the ionosphere affected communications; how orbital decay worked; and so on. There was another, equally important consideration: a research satellite blessed by the international scientific community would set the precedent for an “open skies” policy where sovereign airspace did extend beyond the stratosphere. This, more than anything, argued James Killian at the Office of Defense Mobilization, justified the military’s support for the IGY program.
Killian was among only a handful of people in Washington in 1955 who grasped the true significance of a satellite. Engine Charlie Wilson was not one of them. Killian said that the secretary of defense displayed a “narrowly limited understanding” of the new technology and balked at backing the project. Eventually a compromise was struck in which Congress allocated $13 million—roughly the cost of two B-52 bombers—for America’s entry into the space race. The funding was hopelessly inadequate, and Nelson A. Rockefeller, another Eisenhower adviser, urged that the administration take satellites more seriously. “I am impressed,” he wrote in a widely circulated memorandum, “by the costly consequences of allowing the Russian initiative to outrun ours through an achievement that will symbolize scientific and technological advancement to people everywhere. The stake of prestige that is involved makes this a race we cannot afford to lose.” The “unmistakable relationship,” Rockefeller added ominously, “to intercontinental ballistic missile technology might have important repercussions on the political determination of free world countries to resist communist threats.”
But Eisenhower didn’t bite. For him, nuclear bombers were a sufficient stick to