Asteroid Threat : Defending Our Planet from Deadly Near-earth Objects (9781616149147) (17 page)

C. Turner Catledge, the managing editor of the
New York Times
, and his colleagues, in common with their opposite number at the
Washington Post
and other good-morning newspapers, knew a very big story when they saw one and therefore ran a headline across the top of page one that proclaimed:

SOVIET FIRES EARTH SATELLITE INTO SPACE;
IT IS CIRCLING THE GLOBE AT 18,000 M.P.H.;
SPHERE TRACKED IN 4 CROSSINGS OVER U.S.

Most everyone who was paying attention was impressed. Rear Admiral Rawson Bennett was a notable exception, or so he claimed in public. Bennett was the chief of naval operations and was therefore the nominal head of the Vanguard Program, which was supposed to orbit an American satellite in the IGY. He dismissed
Sputnik
as “a hunk of iron almost anybody could launch.”
⁵
That was the kind of disingenuous statement that quickly gave rise to what was called the
Sputnik
cocktail: equal parts vodka and sour grapes. As the nominal head of the Vanguard Program, Bennett presided over eight launch failures and only three successes. From 1957 to 1959 evening television-news audiences grew accustomed to seeing the pencil-shaped rockets either blow up on the launchpad without moving or rise a few feet and then come slowly, agonizingly, down, their motors firing to no avail, and disappear in a growing black-and-white fireball.

The
Sputnik
cocktail was savored by MIT undergraduates, too. The institute's humor magazine,
Voo Doo
, ran a cartoon in the November 1957 issue showing a dopey-looking Cossack huddled inside a cutaway
Sputnik
, microphone in hand, saying “…beep—beep—beep—beep—beep—beep—beep…”

Sputnik
's taking to space was broken in a routine Radio Moscow announcement three hours after its launch, when its achieving orbit was a certainty. It flew over the United States twice, racing smoothly past a starry background, before anyone
realized it was there. But then, when it sank in that a Soviet spacecraft was flying imperviously over their country, there was a storm of self-flagellation and recrimination, much of it directed at President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who was widely perceived as being an amiable man who was not intellectually up to serious statecraft; who was more interested in golf than in national security. That was manifestly wrong, as his advocacy of the Open Skies program and strong support of the nation's ballistic-missile program showed. His authorization of U-2 flights over the Soviet Union that began in 1956 and his approval of the
Corona
satellite reconnaissance program that immediately followed them showed that he was well aware of the Soviet threat and was acting aggressively to counter it. He gamely answered his critics by insisting—correctly—that the United States did not trail the Reds in science and technology. It was not
Sputnik
that troubled Ike, the National Security Council, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but the R-7 that sent it to orbit. They knew that a rocket that could send an 83.6-kilogram satellite all the way to space could also send a much heavier nuclear warhead to the United States over the Arctic at a much lower altitude.

On October 1, 1958, almost a year to the day after
Sputnik
took to the sky and caused a lingering trauma, the NACA was transformed into the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) as a tacit acknowledgment that the Space Age had indeed dawned and that a permanent organization on the order of the Department of Defense and other federal departments was needed to run all US civilian space activities, manned and unmanned. (The armed services and the CIA would start their own, often competitive, space programs.) And in recognition of the air-space continuum, NASA was mandated to be responsible for both sectors. Less than three years later, the Russkies struck again.

On April 12, 1961, an R-7 roared out of Baikonur, carrying
Yuri Gagarin in
Vostok 1
on a complete orbit around Earth, making him the first mortal to reach space. “
Poyekhali!
” (“Here we go!”) said the exhilarated cosmonaut as the modified R-7 lifted slowly off the launchpad and began its climb to orbit at a little after nine o'clock on the morning, as Sergei Pavlovich Korolev, the space program's ingenious chief designer (its Wernher von Braun, and the man who conceived
Sputnik
), and Valentin Glushko and Mstislav Keldysh (two colleagues), watched through periscopes in a nearby bunker. The twenty-seven-year-old test pilot made one complete orbit of the planet before climbing out of the capsule and parachuting separately to earth. To their other firsts, the Russians now added getting the first man to space.

On April 13, under a “hed” that spanned four of the newspaper's eight columns—“RUSSIAN ORBITED THE EARTH ONCE, OBSERVING IT THROUGH PORTHOLES; SPACE FLIGHT LASTED 108 MINUTES”—the
New York Times
ran a photo of jubilant youngsters outside the Moscow Planetarium and another of their hero with the barest trace of a smile, like a cosmic Mona Lisa in a leather flight cap (he had worn a helmet to space).

The “newspaper of record” ran a hastily assembled spate of sidebars that described the flight with maps and diagrams, provided background on the preparations for the mission, and even included a transcript of some of the hero's radio chatter with his controllers at the space facility at Kaliningrad. It also carried congratulations from President John F. Kennedy. NASA's chief designer, Wernher von Braun, also offered congratulations. The
Times
ran man-in-the-news profiles that were supposed to provide depth—the human “angle”—about newsmakers. Gagarin's showed a photograph of him beside his wife, Valentina, who was reading to their two-year-old daughter. In a reference that was to too good to ignore, the writer of the piece noted that “Gagarin” derived from “wild duck.” And there was a cartoon from the
Baltimore Sun
that showed Premier
Nikita Khrushchev holding a red star in space with one hand and, in the other, a shoe, with which he was banging a likeness of Kennedy over the head.
⁶
(The shoe banging was a reference to Khrushchev's banging his shoe on his desk at a UN General Assembly meeting in the autumn of 1960 to protest the Philippine delegate's public reference to Eastern Europeans and others as having been deprived of their civil and political rights and “swallowed up” by the Soviet Union. It was widely used to portray Khrushchev as an obstreperous Slavic lout who lacked the poise that was necessary to be a statesman.)

“Bourgeois statesmen used to poke fun at us, saying that we Russians were running around in bark sandals and lapping up cabbage soup with those sandals,” Khrushchev told a Polish audience two years after Gagarin's flight. “They used to make fun of our culture, the culture of people considered, so to say, to be the last among the civilized Western countries. Then suddenly, you understand, those who they thought lapped up the cabbage soup with bark sandals got into outer space earlier than the so-called civilized ones.”
⁷

Gagarin's feat, like
Sputnik
, made page-one headlines around the world. The hero was duly photographed in uniform with Nikita Khrushchev, Leonid Brezhnev, and other dignitaries on Lenin's Tomb two days after his flight and separately with an obviously respectful Korolev. The Motherland was so proud of Korolev that it turned his home into a museum, and so proud was it of the other designers and cosmonauts—and the fact that their nation had started the Space Age—that the Memorial Museum of Cosmonautics was opened at the intersection of Mir Avenue and Academician S. P. Korolev Street in Moscow on April 10, 1981, two days short of the twentieth anniversary of Gagarin's flight.
Mir
, which means “peace,” was the name of the Soviet space station. The large museum was filled with artifacts from that glorious time, including a
Sputnik
, complete with antennas; large models of the giant rockets that launched the manned and
unmanned spacecraft; the
Vostok
spacecraft in which Gagarin made his epic flight; Veneras and other deep-space probes that represented the missions to Venus; spacesuits and other clothing; and art that depicted
Sputnik
, Gagarin in an orange flight suit surrounded by fluttering white doves, and cosmonaut Aleksei Leonov floating over the Black Sea; commemorative coins and pennants; tubes of space food; and posters that paid clear tribute to the space program. A typical poster by cosmonaut-artist Alexei Sokolov, titled
Glory to the Conquerors of Space
, showed Alexei Leonov, the first man to float outside a spacecraft (and the eventual vice president of Alpha Bank) heading for the Mir space station in a
Soyuz
capsule.

On August 6, 1961, Gherman Titov flew in
Vostok 2
, accomplishing the first manned mission that lasted a full day. Almost exactly a year later, Andriyan Nikolayev and Pavel Popovich became the first to fly in formation in
Vostoks 3
and
4
. On June 14, 1963, cosmonaut Valery Bykovsky made the longest solo orbital flight in
Vostok 5
, and, two days later, Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman and the first civilian to get to space when she was carried there in
Vostok 6
. She not only orbited the world forty-eight times, which was more than the total for Alan Shepard, Gus Grissom, John Glenn, and Scott Carpenter, America's first four Mercury astronauts, combined, but she and Bykovsky were connected by radio and flew in a virtual formation, which was planned to be as impressive as it was. Airplanes flew in formation and now, thanks to Soviet innovative leadership, so did spacecraft. And to make matters slightly worse for the Americans, the fact that Tereshkova was a woman subtly suggested—however incorrectly—that the social as well as economic equality that Marxism-Leninism promised was obviously true in “the people's paradise.” Sally Ride, America's first woman astronaut—and the holder of a doctorate in physics from Stanford University—got to space on the shuttle
Challenger
on June 18, 1983, almost exactly two decades later.

First
quickly became the buzzword in the United States and elsewhere in the West as Korolev and his compatriots racked up one after another. The unstated but widely accepted implication was that a nation that was first in performing all of those feats had an energetic and robust space program with skilled personnel and excellent facilities. R-7s and other giant lifters were not fired from slingshots. The infrastructure, let alone the science and engineering, that was required to get people to space was formidable and reflected a basic strength that necessarily had to be extensive. Being able to stage such spectacular performances, in other words, was the sure mark of strength that extended to relations with the rest of the world. It made the difference between being a mere power and being a superpower.

John F. Kennedy, who was so notoriously competitive that he even hated losing at touch football, knew that. The consecutive, daring Soviet achievements got the rapt attention of the American news media and briefly seemed to cast doubt on his country's leading the world in science and technology. It seemed to betray Edison, Morse, Ford, Lindbergh, Perry, Byrd, and the other inventors, adventurers, and explorers. It rankled. Space, as the Caltech geologist and space scientist Bruce Murray has said, is a reflection of Earth.
⁸
The prospect of the “greatest nation on Earth” (as the United States called itself) being repeatedly beaten in space and therefore seeming to be a second-rate power, at least in that realm, was not acceptable to JFK. Nor were things much better on terra firma. The civil-rights situation in the south had turned explosive; the Communist Pathet Lao were dangerously close to toppling the pro-American government in Laos; the Communist-led Vietcong, aided by North Vietnam, was waging a war against the pro–West South Vietnamese government; and the CIA-backed invasion of Cuba to remove Fidel Castro from power turned into a fiasco when the invading force of Cuban exiles, lacking the air cover they expected, was almost massacred at the Bay of Pigs. Then space
began to turn red, or so it seemed in the White House, with an impressionable Third World watching. The Underdeveloped World, as it had been called until recently, was taken—incorrectly—to be up for grabs in terms of Eastern or Western “influence.” Its leaders tended to play both sides against each other while steadfastly maintaining their independence.

“The President was more convinced than any of his advisers that a second-rate, second-place space effort was inconsistent with the country's security, with its role as world leader and with the New Frontier spirit of discovery,” Theodore C. Sorensen, Kennedy's special counsel, recalled years later.
⁹

On the basis of advice Kennedy got from his inner circle, including Sorensen, he therefore made what he later called one of the most important decisions of his presidency: “to shift our efforts in space from low to high gear.”

On May 25, 1961, in a speech to Congress that addressed “urgent national needs,” Kennedy mentioned several dangers that faced the United States, including Communist subversion. He then used the
Sputnik
and Gagarin flights, and their impact on “the minds of men everywhere,” to call for the United States to land a man on the Moon and return him safely to Earth before the end of the decade. “While we cannot guarantee that we shall one day be first,” he warned, “we can guarantee that any failure to make this effort will find us last.” He repeated the plan in an address at Rice University in Texas on September 12, 1962, and that was the one that got the news media's attention and put him all over page one.

We choose to go to the Moon. We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too. It is for these reasons that I regard the decision last year to shift our efforts in space from low to high gear as among the most important decisions
that will be made during my incumbency in the office of the Presidency.
¹⁰