Red Moon Rising Sputnik and the Rivalries That Ignited the Space Age - Matthew Brzezinski [76]
Wernher von Braun, for his part, bypassed the reluctant administration altogether, taking his calls for greater action directly to what he thought might be a more sympathetic audience: the Democratic Congress. Employing the same tactic that Korolev had used to such effect on Khrushchev, he warned a Senate subcommittee that the Soviet Union was in the advanced stages of developing a satellite. But far from taking the bait, Senator Allen Ellender of Louisiana almost burst out laughing. “Ellender said that we must be out of our minds,” recalled General James M. Gavin. “He had just come from a visit to the Soviet Union, and after seeing the ancient automobiles, and very few of them on the streets, was convinced we were entirely wrong.”
“The Soviets,” the senator scoffed, “couldn’t possibly launch a satellite.”
And yet, after the R-7’s successful test flight, the official Soviet press became uncharacteristically voluble on the subject of satellites. Sergei Korolev himself made a rare public appearance on September 17 to celebrate the one hundredth anniversary of the birth of Konstantin Tsiolkowsky, Russia’s first rocket scientist and space visionary. Speaking in the ornate Hall of Columns in Moscow, Korolev told a packed house of the Soviet Union’s most senior academics of the R-7’s triumph and promised that “in the nearest future, the USSR will send a satellite into space.” The speech was reprinted in the following day’s edition of Pravda under the pseudonym S. Sergiev. Pravda also ran a story by Dr. A. N. Nesmeyanov, the president of the USSR Academy of Sciences, which boasted, “The creation and launching of the Soviet artificial satellite for scientific purposes during the International Geophysical Year will play an exceptional role in unifying the efforts of scientists of various countries in the struggle to conquer the forces of nature.”
Radio magazine in Moscow went a step farther, providing detailed instructions for amateur radio enthusiasts to receive the frequencies on which the future Soviet satellite would broadcast. Another trade publication, Astronomer’s Circular, advised its readers, “The Astronomical Council of the USSR Academy of Sciences requests all astronomical organizations, all astronomers of the Soviet Union, and all members of the All-Union Astronomical and Geodetic Society to participate actively in preparations for the visual observation of artificial satellites.”
The message from Moscow was loud and clear: a Soviet satellite would soon be orbiting the earth, and ordinary citizens would be able to see and hear it.
The warning signals did not fall completely on deaf ears in America. The New York Times started researching a story about an impending Soviet launch. The RAND Corporation also carefully clipped all the Soviet press briefs and forwarded them to the Pentagon with an appended note concluding that the Soviets must be serious. But in Washington, no one had time for talk of satellites. The country was in the throes of a looming crisis that had begun with the opening of the school year and was quickly escalating into a major challenge to President Eisenhower’s authority.
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Like Khrushchev during the R-7’s string of failures, Dwight Eisenhower was preoccupied in the waning weeks of September 1957 by unfolding events that had nothing to do with rockets or the conquest of space, and everything to do with cleaning up a political mess that was largely of his own making.
The trouble had started with the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, which invalidated the “separate but equal” racial guidelines that had governed segregated schools. The decision had sparked a political rebellion in the heavily Democratic