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All of Huntsville, apparently, was of the same mind. The town had more than doubled in size since von Braun and his German engineers had moved into their brick ramblers in new suburbs with nicknames like “Sour Kraut Hill,” and Huntsville’s fate was now inextricably linked to ABMA and its high-tech marvels. The jobs of five thousand skilled workers and much of the local economy had hung in limbo since Wilson’s November 1956 edict had effectively robbed the army of the big missile brief, and the uncertainty had devastated morale and depressed the once-booming real estate market. Huntsville, which had dubbed itself “Rocket City, USA,” was learning the harsh reality of the military-industrial complex: with the stroke of a pen in Washington, entire communities could be wiped out as quickly as they were created.

To keep his company town afloat and his rocket team intact, Medaris had waged increasingly inventive bureaucratic guerrilla campaigns that were beginning to take their toll on his standing with the power brokers at the Pentagon. The embarrassing disclosures of alleged favoritism at the Nickerson court-martial had won the Jupiter intermediate-range ballistic missile program a temporary stay of execution; ABMA could continue doing limited research on the missile while the Pentagon decided whether to cancel the project entirely. Unfortunately, ABMA had few friends at the defense secretary’s office, and the army IRBM was still on Charlie Wilson’s chopping block.

Medaris’s tireless lobbying to land a role for the army in satellites was also becoming an irritant. He had loudly and repeatedly questioned the selection of an inexperienced civilian team to launch the navy’s Vanguard satellite, the official U.S. entry in the IGY competition, and hinted darkly at conspiracies in high places. He had also pushed his boss, James Gavin, a hard-nosed former paratrooper in charge of Army Research and Development, to lodge formal but futile appeals with Quarles and Wilson on ABMA’s behalf.

Like Korolev, Medaris had simply refused to take no for an answer, and like the Chief Designer, he had not been above using a little subterfuge. The similarities were not that surprising, given that the two men had been raised in almost identical circumstances by strong-willed, single women who had challenged the chauvinism of their times. Medaris’s mother had also divorced young and left her son with her parents while she pursued a career, eventually becoming the comptroller of a midsize manufacturing company and one of the most senior female executives in Ohio. It was in his grandmother’s home that Medaris first displayed his resistance to authority, “timing his comings and goings so that Grandmother LeSourd didn’t ask hard questions.” From his industrious mother, Jessie, he learned the value of entrepreneurship, taking a part-time job at the age of eleven sorting mail at the local railway station. By twelve, he was driving a cab on weekends (driver’s licenses were not yet required in Ohio), and at fourteen he was working full-time as a uniformed conductor on the Springfield Street Railway System on the 3:30-to-midnight shift. By the time the stock market collapsed in 1929, Medaris had accumulated over one hundred thousand dollars in his trading account. Left with sixty-nine dollars after the crash, he bought himself a new suit and started all over again.

Medaris was no stranger to adversity, and he was not a quitter. Regardless of what the Pentagon said, he would not abandon his satellite quest. And so, with Gavin’s tacit compliance, he had “bootlegged” the Jupiter C. Ostensibly an experimental vehicle to develop a new form of ablative nose cone whose heat shield peeled off in layers, the C in reality was a souped-up Redstone whose added upper stages were suspiciously similar to the army’s rejected satellite booster design. “We must make it perfectly clear,” Medaris instructed von Braun and his staff, “that we did not carry forward a