Red Moon Rising Sputnik and the Rivalries That Ignited the Space Age - Matthew Brzezinski [74]
Nonsense, scoffed his fellow panelist Donald Quarles, puffing up his small frame in a swell of indignation to challenge the tall and imposing senator. The United States “is probably well ahead of Russia in the guided missile race,” he countered, with equal confidence.
The argument had spilled over onto the pages of national newspapers, where Symington accused the Eisenhower administration of misleading the American people. Threatening that Congress would launch a “searching inquiry,” he asserted that the air force’s missile budget needed to be doubled to keep pace with Russia. “Every day we don’t reverse our policy is a bad day for the Free World,” he thundered. By late summer, when Charlie Wilson announced his $200 million missile cuts, Symington had emerged as the administration’s leading critic on matters of national security, the Democratic Party’s preeminent cold warrior. Eisenhower, he groused, was engaging in “unilateral disarmament,” endangering the nation with his obsession for balanced budgets. The Soviets were going to overtake America, he warned, and then all those new highways Ike was pouring billions into would serve only as evacuation routes.
Unbeknownst to Symington, he had a covert ally in Richard Bissell, who understood that it was only a matter of time before the U-2’s luck ran out. The intelligence data it produced were invaluable, but the political costs were simply too high. Sooner or later a less risky means of collecting intelligence would need to be found. And Bissell already knew what that was.
The same 1954 Land report that had urged the creation of the U-2 had also made a recommendation for the development of another type of high-altitude reconnaissance craft, a satellite. The idea, at the time, had been met with skepticism by the National Security Council, owing to its technological complexity, though it was hardly revolutionary.
The notion of using the cosmos as a surveillance platform had long stirred the imagination of rocket scientists and spies on both sides of the cold war divide. As early as 1946, a West Coast military think tank, the RAND Corporation, had envisioned successors of von Braun’s V-2 rockets one day carrying cameras beyond the stratosphere. Von Braun himself had made a similar pitch to the army brass in 1954. “Gone was the folksy fellow with rolled-up sleeves and Disneyesque props,” wrote the historian William Burrows of the meeting. “He was replaced by a grim-faced individual with a dark suit who puffed on cigarettes from behind a desk. This von Braun explained that a satellite in polar orbit would pass over every place on Earth every twenty-four hours, a perfect route for robotic espionage. He noted that maps of Eurasia were five hundred yards off, and added that the error could be reduced to twenty-five yards. The implication was wasted on no one in the room: taking photographs of Earth from space not only would create an intelligence bonanza but would vastly improve targeting accuracy.”
Neither von Braun’s pitch nor Land’s recommendation to the NSC had received much traction in 1954 because American rockets were still too small and underpowered to contemplate sending up heavy spy satellites. By 1957, however, missile development had progressed sufficiently that the notion no longer seemed far-fetched. Though Bissell was working on a successor to the U-2—a new plane made entirely of titanium that could fly at 80,000 feet at a speed of 2,600 miles per hour, nearly five times faster than the U-2—he was also thinking that satellites might offer a simpler long-term solution. The SR-71 Blackbird supersonic spy jet that he was developing with Kelly Johnson might prolong America’s ability to sneak into Soviet airspace, but its invulnerability would also be only temporary. Eventually the Soviets would find a way of bringing