Spaceflight before nasa
the famous US agency has shaped space exploration for more than 60 years –but what led to NaSa’s formation, and what came before it?
What were the first primitive steps in leaving Earth orbit?
today NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, is a byword for the exploration of outer space, ranging from crewed flights to Earth orbit and groundbreaking scientific satellites and robotic exploration of distant worlds. Even when commercial companies or academic institutions take the publicity for new breakthroughs, it’s often NASA funding that lies behind them.
The agency was established some 60 years ago, and after winning the Space Race with the Soviet Union in the 1960s, became the undisputed leader in world spaceflight – dwarfing the efforts of other regional agencies such as those of Europe, China and Russia itself. But the story of spaceflight before NASA is far from an all-American triumph – the agency was born in a time of national crisis and owed much of its success to advances made in earlier decades and other countries.
The story begins in the fraught political stalemate at the end of the Second World War. While a wartime alliance between democratic Western powers and the communist Soviet Union had been vital to defeating Nazi Germany, the last days of the war saw newly liberated Europe carved into two major spheres of influence from west and east. The prospect of a new long-term confrontation between former allies was clear, and both sides were keen to seize the spoils of war, including advanced German rocket technology.
While the early 20th century had seen rocket enthusiasts in several countries carrying out experiments and forming societies, the rocket’s appeal had been greatest in Germany. Here, scientists and dreamers had been inspired by the writings of early spaceflight advocate Hermann Oberth and their depiction in early science-fiction movies. When the Nazi party seized power in the early 1930s, they too saw the rocket’s potential as
a weapon of war. Some German rocket engineers refused to join the military effort, but others found it hard to resist the lure of funding and political support. Most were more interested in spaceflight than warfare, but the engineering problems were the same – reaching space would require a rocket far bigger than anything built so far, and the same rocket would have the potential to deliver a deadly explosive payload across hundreds of miles.
But progress was slow, and by the time the
V-2 rocket, masterminded by engineering genius Wernher von Braun, was ready for production, Germany had already been mired in the Second World War for several years. The first rockets to fall on London in September 1944 brought sudden and terrifying death from the skies, but came too late to affect the outcome of the war as a whole.
As Germany’s defeat became inevitable, the various allied powers were keen to obtain information on the V-2 programme. Von Braun’s research centre at Peenemünde lay in the path of the advancing Red Army, but when Soviet soldiers arrived, they found the site stripped and the majority of its staff gone. The German ‘rocket team’ later surrendered, as they had hoped, to the Americans, while US soldiers also captured the main V-2 factory – a subterranean complex known as Mittelwerk, where inmates of the nearby Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp laboured, and often died, in appalling conditions.
The US Army rapidly began a wholesale relocation of equipment, documents, rocket parts and German engineers to American soil.
The recruitment of the V-2 scientists, known as Operation Paperclip, remains controversial to this day, but they would play a key role in the early US space programme and the eventual success of NASA.
The Soviets, meanwhile, were left to gather what fragments were left at
Peenemünde and elsewhere, and to sweep up lower-level workers from the area around the V-2 sites. The US therefore had a clear post-war advantage in the race for new longrange missiles, with the potential to fly on ballistic trajectories above Earth’s atmosphere – its shock defeat in the early days of the Space Race was due in part to the genius of Soviet ‘chief designer’ Sergei Korolev, but also to mismanagement and political disinterest at home.
After arriving in the US, von Braun’s team were first tasked with reassembling and launching captured V-2 rockets at New Mexico’s
White Sands Proving Ground. Several earlier V-2 tests had already achieved altitudes of more than 100 kilometres (62 miles), making them the first artificial objects to reach outer space, but the White Sands launches saw the first steps in scientific space exploration. Here, engineers began to work on ways of reaching higher speeds and altitudes, launching scientific instruments on short suborbital ‘hops’ into space and returning data from orbit.
A landmark came in February 1949 with the launch of ‘Bumper 5’, which used a modified V-2 to carry a WAC Corporal ‘sounding rocket’ to a high altitude before releasing it. The Corporal’s own engine then took it much higher, reaching an altitude of almost 400 kilometres (249 miles) and returning data about space temperatures and solar radiation via radio signals.
Staying in space, however, was another matter. Boosting a payload to the high speeds necessary to achieve a stable orbit was far beyond even a modified V-2, and although studies carried out around this time concluded that launching a satellite into orbit was technically feasible, they cast doubt on whether the benefits could ever outweigh
“Some german rocket engineers found it hard to resist the lure of funding and political support”
the costs. President Harry S. Truman was famously dismissive of the concept of space travel – as late as 1956 he dismissed the concept as “hooey!” – and so rocket research efforts remained focused purely on missiles.
But at just this point, internal rivalries would deal a significant blow to US missile dominance.
The Army, Navy and US Air Force (USAF) were each jostling to attract attention and funding to their own missile projects, and the end result was a fudge. The USAF was assigned to build a long-range intercontinental missile called Atlas, and the Army to concentrate on a shorter-range missile, while the Navy would develop a research rocket called Viking.
As Army employees, von Braun and his team were left to look on as the USAF absorbed most of rocket funding, while dawdling over development of Atlas – a vehicle capable of achieving their dreams of spaceflight. Their own ‘Redstone’ project, named after the Army arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama, where they were now based, presented relatively few new challenges, and was ready for flight by 1953.
So, in 1951, the sidelined advocates of spaceflight began a concerted PR offensive. Willy Ley, a wellknown science writer who had fled Germany for the US before the war, organised a symposium on space travel in New York. This led to a series of wildly popular articles in Collier’s magazine, outlining von Braun’s vision for the colonisation of the Solar System. Walt Disney soon adapted the articles into a three-part television series, and astronaut suits began to outsell cowboy outfits as America went space-crazy.
The political winds were shifting, too. 1952 saw the announcement of a forthcoming International Geophysical Year (IGY) in 1957 to 1958 – an opportunity for scientific cooperation across the Cold War barriers, and an ideal time, many argued, to launch the first satellites. It also saw the election
of Dwight D. Eisenhower, a new president who was far more open to the potential of space travel.
In mid-1954, von Braun was asked to join a top-level conference discussing possible satellite launch options. His solution was ‘Project Orbiter’, a modified Redstone missile topped with smaller solid-fuel rockets that would fire in clusters to act as two upper stages. Von
Braun and his colleagues approached respected scientist James Van Allen to design the instruments for the satellite.
But when the US revealed its plans for a satellite launch during the IGY in December 1955, Project Orbiter was no longer in the frame. Rival scientists had launched a concerted attack, sniping at von Braun’s design as awkward and risky, and arguing that taint of the V-2 and use of a military missile would diminish what should be an all-American triumph. Eisenhower, who had his own concerns about the potential militarisation of space, was persuaded to abandon Project Orbiter in favour of the Navy’s Viking-based Project Vanguard. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union announced plans of their own to launch a satellite during the IGY, though few in the west took them seriously.
Von Braun’s consolation prize was a contract to carry out limited sub-orbital space launches using the lower stages of Project Orbiter to investigate the effects of atmospheric re-entry. It was this project, known as Jupiter-C, that successfully returned the first object from space, a modified missile nose cone, in August 1957.
In the following months, the long prelude to the Space Race neared its endgame. While the Navy rushed to test the stages of its Vanguard rocket, the Soviet Union was secretly preparing a spaceshot of its own. From a weak starting position, Sergei Korolev and his engineers had accomplished a remarkable feat in building the R-7 missile – a monster rocket whose first stage consisted of four boosters, each larger than a V-2, clustered around a central core. An upper rocket stage gave the R-7 the capacity to put a satellite in orbit – one much larger than the grapefruit-sized objects being prepared for launch by Vanguard.
The Soviets played their hand with immaculate timing on 4 October, just as an IGY conference was meeting in New York. The launch of Sputnik 1 sent shockwaves around the world, and the media rushed to print stories about just what the new artificial moon could mean for the balance of global power.
As stunned Americans looked to their government for a response, Eisenhower coolly congratulated the Soviets on their launch of a
‘small ball’ into space, and indicated that a Vanguard satellite launch would go ahead as planned in early December. This was somewhat deceptive as no definite launch date had yet been set, and the routine response concealed surprise behind the scenes.
One person who remained calm, however, was Wernher von Braun. Questioned by the secretary of
defense, he insisted that a restarted Project Orbiter could launch a satellite in 90 days. But it was not until November – after the Soviets had launched the larger and far more sophisticated Sputnik 2, carrying space dog Laika – that Eisenhower overcame his qualms and gave the go-ahead.
The wisdom of this ‘insurance policy’ became clear in early December when the first fully assembled Vanguard rocket blew up moments after launch. The press and other media, who had gathered in huge numbers expecting to see the first US satellite launch, nicknamed it ‘Flopnik’.
Despite the groundwork laid, von Braun’s team still had to race to meet their launch target of lateJanuary 1958. Cosmetic changes to the rocket, including renaming it ‘Juno’, helped distance it from its military origins, but a satellite had to be built from scratch. The eventual design, dubbed ‘Explorer 1’, was a modified solid rocket casing with the top half allocated to Van Allen’s scientific instruments – the bottom remained a functional rocket, turning Juno into a four-stage launch vehicle.
The successful launch of Explorer 1 on 31
January 1958 restored some honour to the US space program, but America was still clearly lagging behind Soviet achievements. As the Space Race began in earnest, ideas flew around for everything from spy satellites to manned spacecraft. The
USAF, eager to make up for the Army and Navy’s dominance in space so far, developed several options for a ‘Man in Space Soonest’ Project.
These included rocket-powered ‘X-planes’, experimental aircraft designed in conjunction with NACA, the National Advisory Council on Aeronautics, and a manned capsule launched by a converted Atlas missile.
Anxious to avoid further damaging rivalry, President Eisenhower ordered that all space projects should be temporarily brought under the control of the Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). At the same time he asked a committee of scientific advisors to draw up longterm plans for a national space science programme.
A few weeks later the committee delivered its recommendation for a new civilian space agency that would succeed NACA and control all US space projects, except for those with explicitly military applications. On 2 April, Eisenhower gave the idea his formal backing, calling for the establishment of a ‘National Aeronautical and Space Agency’ with wide-ranging powers and responsibilities. With legislation passed by both houses of Congress, NASA came into being on 29 July 1958.
In the years that followed the new agency would absorb many of the pre-existing US space efforts. Von Braun’s team at Huntsville, for example, would form the core of the new Marshall Space Flight Center, while research for ‘Man in Space Soonest’ would prove useful in designing the Mercury capsule that eventually carried the first Americans into space. NASA’s creation may have ended a fascinating period in space history, but it brought much-needed focus to the US space effort – and while there would be plenty of other setbacks along the way, without NASA the race to put astronauts on the Moon and seal victory in the Space Race might have played out very differently.
“the successful launch of explorer 1 restored some honour to the US space program”