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By Root 531 0

A lot of people had been complicit in the scheme, but the unauthorized misplacement of millions of dollars of Pentagon property was not something one necessarily wanted to spring on the secretary of defense before he was even sworn in. (“It was imprudent to admit we had retained those rockets,” Medaris would later confess to congressional investigators.) Mc-Elroy, though, made no comment, perhaps because von Braun did not pause for breath. “Vanguard will fail,” he went on, with a certainty that verged on arrogance. “We can put up a satellite in sixty days, Mr. Mc-Elroy. Just give us the green light and sixty days.”

“Ninety days,” Medaris quickly interjected. Two months was pushing it. Von Braun, though, kept repeating his original figure. “Just sixty days.”

“No, Wernher.” Medaris finally pulled rank. “Ninety days.”

But McElroy was in no position to make any spot decisions. He still had to be confirmed by the Senate, which was controlled by the Democrats, who were likely to develop a sudden and intense interest in the subject of space.

Reports on the Soviet satellite now began trickling out on the radio and television at the Officers’ Club. Harris, the harried PR officer, announced that ABMA’s communications team had also captured its signal. “It beeped derisively over our heads,” he said. Western news agencies in Moscow had by now hastily translated the official TASS press release, which included technical details of the orbiting craft. The Soviets were referring to it as Iskustvenniy Sputnik Zemli, or Artificial Satellite of the Earth. American broadcasts were simply calling it Sputnik, the generic Russian term for satellite. ABMA’s scientists now clustered around Harris, bombarding him with questions. What were Sputnik’s parameters? What was its orbit? How big was it? When word spread that it weighed 184 pounds, people shook their heads in disbelief. Must be a mistake, they said. Someone must have misplaced a decimal point. Vanguard’s satellite payload was only 3.5 pounds because the navy’s slim booster produced a mere 27,000 pounds of thrust. Even von Braun had never proposed anything larger than 17 pounds as the payload for his 78,000-pound-thrust Jupiter C. How could the Soviets put up a satellite ten times heavier? Plainly the media had got it wrong. But if the press reports were accurate, the military implications of a missile powerful enough to orbit such a weighty cargo were frightening. It would have to generate hundreds of thousands of pounds of thrust, possibly as much as half a million, some of the scientists ventured. (Not even their wildest guesses, however, approximated the R-7’s 1.1 million pounds of lift.)

Throughout all the frenzied speculation, Medaris and von Braun kept hammering away at McElroy, who must have felt as if he were being baptized by fire. “Missile number 27 proved our capabilities,” Medaris pressed, referring to the Jupiter C shot that had reached approximately the same altitude as Sputnik was currently circling overhead. “It would have gone into orbit without question if we had used a loaded fourth stage. The hardware is in hand, and so the amount of money needed to make the effort is very small,” Medaris said, continuing his hard sell. “I believe we have a 99% probability of success.”

Give us $12.7 million and the go-ahead, Medaris pleaded. “We felt like football players begging to be allowed to get off the bench and go into the game to restore some measure of the Free World’s damaged pride,” he recalled later.

Sputnik, as Medaris and von Braun had almost immediately grasped, was ABMA’s ticket out of the doldrums, an opportunity to be seized. Surely the administration would have no choice but to respond to the Soviet challenge, and ABMA was the nation’s best bet to even the score. “When you get back to Washington, and all hell breaks loose,” von Braun told the secretary in one last sales pitch as McElroy was boarding his plane the next morning, “tell them we’ve got the hardware down here to put up a satellite any time.”

Medaris, in fact, had already ordered von Braun to secretly