Early rocket development
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Germany
It was space exploration that motivated the members of the German VfR to build their rockets, but in the early 1930s their work came to the attention of the German military. In 1932 Wernher von Braun, at age 20, became chief engineer of a rocket-development team for the German army. After Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, Braun was named the civilian head of that team, under the military command of Walter Robert Dornberger. To give Braun’s engineers the needed space and secrecy for their work, the German government erected a development and test centre at Peenemünde on the coast of the Baltic Sea. There they developed, among other devices, the V-2 (originally designated the A-4) ballistic missile. First launched successfully in 1942, the V-2 was used on targets in Europe beginning in September 1944. Although built as a weapon of war, the V-2 later served as the predecessor of many of the rockets used in the early space programs of the United States and the Soviet Union. As World War II neared its end in early 1945, Braun and many of his associates chose to surrender to the United States, where they believed they would likely receive support for their rocket research and space exploration plans. Later in the year they were taken to the United States, as were their engineering plans and the parts needed to construct a number of V-2s. The German rocket team played a central role in the early development of space launchers for the United States.
United States
In 1936, as Braun was developing rockets for the German military, several young American engineers led by graduate student Frank Malina began working on rocketry at the Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory of the California Institute of Technology (GALCIT). Malina’s group was supported by the eminent aerodynamicist Theodore von Kármán, GALCIT’s director, and it included Chinese engineer Qian Xuesen (Ch’ien Hsüeh-sen), who in the 1950s returned home to become one of the pioneers of rocketry in China. In 1943 Malina and his associates began calling their group the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), a name that was formally adopted the following year. JPL soon became a centre for missile research and development for the U.S. Army. Following World War II, those weapons were adapted for use in early U.S. space experiments. After 1958, when it became part of the newly established National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), JPL adapted itself to being the leading U.S. centre for solar system exploration.
Soviet Union
In the U.S.S.R. the government took an interest in rockets as early as 1921 with the founding of a military facility devoted to rocket research. Over the next decade that centre was expanded and renamed the Gas Dynamics Laboratory. There in the early 1930s, Valentin Glushko carried out pioneering work on rocket engines. Meanwhile, other rocket enthusiasts in the Soviet Union organized into societies that by 1931 had consolidated into an organization known as GIRD (the abbreviation in Russian for “Group for the Study of Reactive Motion”), with branches in Moscow and Leningrad. Emerging as leaders of the Moscow branch were the aeronautical engineer Sergei Korolev, who had become interested in spaceflight at a young age, and the early space visionary Fridrikh Tsander. Korolyov and a colleague, Mikhail Tikhonravov, on August 17, 1933, launched the first Soviet liquid-fueled rocket. Later that year the Moscow and Leningrad branches of GIRD were combined with the Gas Dynamics Laboratory to form the military-controlled Rocket Propulsion Research Institute (RNII), which five years later became Scientific-Research Institute 3 (NII-3). In its early years the organization did not work directly on space technology, but ultimately it played a central role in Soviet rocket development.
Korolyov was arrested in 1937 as part of the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin’s great purges of intellectuals and was sent to a Siberian prison. After Stalin recognized the imprudence of removing the best technical people from the Soviet war effort, Korolyov was transferred to a prison-based design bureau, where he spent most of World War II working on weapons, although not on large rockets. By the end of the war, Stalin had become interested in ballistic missiles, and he sent a team, which included Korolyov, on visits to Germany to investigate the V-2 program. A number of German engineers were relocated to the Soviet Union in the aftermath of the war, but they did not play a central role in postwar Soviet rocket development; most returned to Germany in the early 1950s.
Preparing for spaceflight
Between 1946 and 1951, the U.S. Army conducted test firings of captured German V-2 rockets at White Sands, New Mexico. These sounding-rocket flights reached high altitudes (120–200 km [75–125 miles]) before falling back to Earth. Although the primary purpose of the tests was to advance rocket technology, the army invited American scientists interested in high-altitude research to put experiments aboard the V-2s. An Upper Atmosphere Research Panel, chaired by the physicist James Van Allen, was formed to coordinate the scientific use of these rocket launchings. The panel had a central role in the early years of American space science, which focused on experiments on solar and stellar ultraviolet radiation, the aurora, and the nature of the upper atmosphere. As the supply of V-2s dwindled, other U.S.-built sounding rockets such as the WAC Corporal, Aerobee, and Viking were put into use. In other countries, particularly the Soviet Union, rocket-based upper-atmosphere research also took place after World War II.
In the early 1950s scientists began planning a coordinated international investigation of Earth, to be called the International Geophysical Year (IGY), that would be held in 1957–58 under the auspices of the International Council of Scientific Unions. By this time, progress in rocket development had advanced such that orbiting of an artificial Earth satellite by 1957 seemed feasible. At the urging of American scientists, IGY planners in 1954 called for scientifically instrumented satellites to be launched as part of IGY activities. Soon thereafter, the governments of the Soviet Union and the United States each announced plans to do so.
In the years following World War II, the United States and the U.S.S.R. became political and military competitors in what soon was being called the Cold War. Because the Soviet Union was a closed society, U.S. leaders gave high priority to developing technology that could help gather intelligence on military preparations within the Soviet borders. As orbiting satellites neared realization, the idea of equipping such satellites with cameras and flying them over Soviet territory became more attractive to U.S. planners, and the U.S. Air Force began work on a reconnaissance satellite project. Still unresolved, however, was the question of whether it would violate national sovereignty to fly over a country’s territory in orbit, above most of the atmosphere. One reason the U.S. government had committed itself to the IGY satellite program was that it wanted to establish the principle that outer space was not subject to claims of territorial sovereignty and thus that an orbiting satellite could pass freely over any point on Earth. Such overflights were essential if reconnaissance satellites were to have intelligence value.
As scientific and military planners contemplated initial space projects and engineers worked on developing the needed launch vehicles, the idea that humans would soon begin the exploration of space entered popular imagination. In Europe since the 1930s, the British Interplanetary Society had been actively promoting the idea that human space travel was soon to happen. American movies such as The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), Destination Moon (1950), and When Worlds Collide (1951) contained vivid images of such journeys. Reports were widespread of sightings of unidentified flying objects (UFOs), which were thought by some to be spacecraft from alien worlds.
Authors such as Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, and Arthur C. Clarke both discussed the reality of space technology in popular writings and constructed believable science-fiction stories based on its use. A central figure in popularization efforts within the United States was Wernher von Braun. A charismatic spokesman for the idea of space travel, Braun, in a series of talks, books, magazine articles, and television appearances during the 1950s, reached millions of people with his ideas for establishing orbiting space stations and human travel to the Moon and Mars. The efforts of Braun and other popularizers helped create a receptive climate for initial government proposals to undertake space activities and, particularly, to put humans in space.
From Sputnik to Apollo
The first satellites
Although Soviet plans to orbit a satellite during the IGY had been discussed extensively in technical circles, the October 4, 1957, launch of Sputnik 1 came as a surprise, and even a shock, to most people. Prior to the launch, skepticism had been widespread about the U.S.S.R.’s technical capabilities to develop both a sophisticated scientific satellite and a rocket powerful enough to put it into orbit. Under Korolyov’s direction, however, the Soviet Union had been building an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), with engines designed by Glushko, that was capable of delivering a heavy nuclear warhead to American targets. That ICBM, called the R-7 or Semyorka (“Number 7”), was first successfully tested on August 21, 1957, which cleared the way for its use to launch a satellite. Fearing that development of the elaborate scientific satellite intended as the Soviet IGY contribution would keep the U.S.S.R. from being the first into space, Korolyov and his associates, particularly Tikhonravov, designed a much simpler 83.6-kg (184.3-pound) sphere carrying only two radio transmitters and four antennas. After the success of the R-7 in August, that satellite was rushed into production and became Sputnik 1. A second, larger satellite carrying scientific instruments and the dog Laika, the first living creature in orbit, was launched November 3. The even larger, instrumented spacecraft originally intended to be the first Soviet satellite went into orbit in May 1958 as Sputnik 3. (For additional information on Korolyov’s contribution to the Soviet space program, see Energia.)
After President Eisenhower, in May 1955, had committed the United States to an IGY satellite, the army, navy, and air force competed for the assignment. (No civilian organization existed that was capable of developing the launch vehicle needed.) The mission was assigned to the Naval Research Laboratory rather than to the army’s Redstone Arsenal, where Braun worked, so that the work would not interfere with Redstone’s higher-priority development of ballistic missiles. The navy project, called Vanguard, would use a new launch vehicle based on modified Viking and Aerobee sounding rockets to orbit a small scientific satellite. Vanguard made slow progress over the subsequent two years, but, after Sputnik’s success, the White House pressed to have the satellite launched as quickly as possible. On December 6, 1957, the Vanguard rocket rose only slightly off its launch pad before exploding and sending the satellite not into orbit but onto a Florida beach.
Braun and his army superiors had not agreed with the decision to assign the satellite mission to the navy. After the launches of the first two Sputniks, they secured permission to attempt their own satellite launch. In anticipation of such a situation, they had kept in touch with JPL and Van Allen and so were able to prepare a satellite quickly. On January 31, 1958, Braun’s Jupiter-C launch vehicle, a modified Redstone ballistic missile, carried into orbit Explorer 1, the first U.S. satellite. Designed at JPL, Explorer 1 carried Van Allen’s experiment to measure cosmic rays. The results from this experiment and similar ones aboard other U.S. and Soviet satellites launched that same year revealed that Earth is surrounded by two zones of radiation, now known as the Van Allen radiation belts, comprising energetic particles trapped by Earth’s magnetic field.
Initial satellite launches were scientific in character, but U.S. government interest in reconnaissance satellites persisted. In February 1958, President Eisenhower authorized the development, under conditions of great secrecy, of such a spacecraft. The project, which came to be called Corona, would take pictures over the Soviet Union and return them to Earth by dropping the exposed film in a capsule that would be snatched out of the air as it parachuted back from space. After 12 failures, the first successful Corona mission took place on August 18, 1960; the returned film contained images of many previously unknown Soviet airfields and missile sites.
Development of space organizations
United States
As part of its response to the first Sputnik launches, the United States government debated how best to organize itself for its space activities. At the time, the military services, particularly the air force and the army, hoped that they would have a leading role in space. As an alternative to this rivalry between the services, President Eisenhower in February 1958 created within the Department of Defense the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA, later the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency [DARPA]) and assigned it responsibility for all U.S. space projects. Soon afterward, he decided to separate civilian from military space efforts and proposed the creation of a National Aeronautics and Space Administration to manage the civilian segment. After approval by Congress, NASA began operation on October 1, 1958. DARPA was not successful in establishing itself as a military space agency. By 1960, after the army had been obliged to relinquish control of JPL and Braun’s rocket team to NASA management, the air force had emerged as the leading military service for space.
Eisenhower also decided to create a separate organization to manage the secret reconnaissance satellite program. This effort resulted in the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), jointly directed by the Department of Defense and the Central Intelligence Agency. The very existence of this organization was kept secret until 1992. The NRO operated the initial Corona program until 1972. It continued to manage the development of successor photointelligence satellite systems of increasing technological sophistication and also developed radar-surveillance and electronic-signals-collection satellites. All were operated under conditions of the highest secrecy.
After it received its mandate to send Americans to the Moon, NASA grew into a large organization. From its headquarters in Washington, D.C., it operated 10 field centres established throughout the United States to carry out research and technology development and to manage the various universities and industrial contractors involved in the U.S. civilian space program. At the peak of the Apollo program, NASA had 34,000 employees; by the second decade of the 21st century, this labour force had shrunk to just over 17,000, but NASA remained by far the largest space agency in the world.
The air force had no separate organization for space until 1982, when the U.S. Air Force Space Command was created to manage its military space operations, which involved the use of satellites for meteorology, communication, navigation, and early warning of missile attack. The other U.S. military services soon created similar organizations to administer their smaller space activities. In 1985 these organizations were brought under a unified U.S. Space Command, dominated by the air force, which was responsible for 85 percent of military space activities. Research and development efforts related to military space programs were managed by various government laboratories and carried out primarily by American industry.
