Red Moon Rising Sputnik and the Rivalries That Ignited the Space Age - Matthew Brzezinski [94]
“Damn bastards” was all Medaris said, and it was unclear whether he was referring to the Soviets or his own government overseers. Whichever the case, he was stunned. How could the Russians have done it? It was impossible. Only the week before, he had laughed when Ernst Stuhlinger, one of von Braun’s top engineers, had pleaded for him to approach Quarles because he was “convinced” that the Soviets were planning a launch. “Now look,” Medaris had replied, “don’t get tense. You know how complicated it is to build and launch a satellite. Those people will never be able to do it. Go back to your laboratory and relax.”
Medaris had always presumed that he was in a race with the air force and the navy, not with the USSR. Like most Americans, he thought the Russians were boors: primitive, simple, crude. How could they pull off something like this? Medaris, for once, was speechless. Yet in underestimating the Soviet Union’s technical potential, he had made the same mistake as Senator Ellender and all the others who had laughed at Moscow’s crummy cars and shoes. What Medaris, like most Americans, failed to understand was that conditions that made communism wholly unsuited as a producer of quality consumer goods made it an ideal system for promoting major scientific breakthroughs. The state could never compete with private businesses making sneakers, tennis racquets, or transistor radios. But no corporation could muster the vast resources, strict discipline, and unlimited patience that were required of huge scientific undertakings like the Manhattan Project, or the creation of a satellite-bearing ICBM. Stuhlinger and von Braun, as veterans of the state-run V-2 program, understood this and knew that science thrived under totalitarian regimes, even if free speech and commerce did not.
Medaris had never grasped the dichotomy, and now, as the shock settled in, he didn’t look the least bit relaxed. But it was the usually unflappable von Braun who appeared most emotional. “Von Braun started to talk as if he had suddenly been vaccinated by a Victrola needle,” Medaris later recalled. “In his driving urgency to unburden his feelings, the words tumbled over one another.”
“We knew they would do it!” von Braun exclaimed, his Teutonic Texas twang rising to a fevered pitch. “We could have done it two years ago,” he cursed, launching into the story of how Wilson had been so suspicious that the army might “accidentally” launch a satellite ahead of the navy, igniting an interservice war, that he had ordered Medaris to personally inspect the Jupiter C booster to ensure that the top stage was a dud. (The precaution, as it turned out, had been unnecessary. “There was no chance of an unauthorized attempt,” Stuhlinger later recalled. “We had our orders, and von Braun was very strict about following orders.”)
Office politics had denied von Braun his lifelong dream. Unlike Korolev, he had been obsessed with the conquest of space since early childhood. He had sold his soul—first to the Werhmacht, then to the Nazis, and finally to the U.S. Army—to pursue his quest. He had endured Hitler, Himmler, five long years of purgatory in the hot Texas sun. All so that he could pursue his dream. And now, because of some idiotic bureaucratic imperatives, someone else had beaten him to it. Von Braun very nearly exploded with anger and frustration. “For God’s sake cut us loose and let us do something,” he implored McElroy. “We have the hardware on the shelf.”
Medaris must have swallowed hard. In his overexcited state, von Braun had let it slip that ABMA had quietly diverted two Jupiter C rockets from the nose cone testing program and put them in cold storage in anticipation of the navy not delivering Vanguard.