Supersonic Thunder: A Novel of the Jet Age (6 page)

Korolev forced his way down and out of the room, hurrying to his private office to make two telephone calls. The first was to the State Commission for the R-7 ICBM. As he expected at this early hour, there was only a duty officer on hand. He took Korolev’s message that “the USSR has placed the world’s first artificial satellite in orbit” with gruff, uncomprehending condescension.

His second call was to his former prison-mate Andrei Tupolev, who was waiting for his call. There was a long delay before Tupolev’s voice crackled through the phone. The connection, like those of most Soviet long-distance calls, was terrible.

“Andrei Nikolaevich, my friend, my mentor. I wanted to tell you personally. Today we have placed an artificial satellite into orbit.”

“Congratulations, Sergei Pavlovich! You have sent the world a message about Soviet science! And what an immense amount of work you have put into this triumph.”

Korolev filled him in quickly on the size of the
Sputnik,
its orbit, its equipment. Even as the heartfelt congratulations tumbled from his mouth, Tupolev remembered their gulag days together, condemned as spies and traitors by Stalin. All aeronautical engineers were suspect during the mid-1930s, and a system of s
harashkas
—prison design bureaus—was set up to exploit the jailed talent.

“This would never have happened if you had not saved my life.”

Tupolev certainly had done just that when he requested Korolev to serve with him in the TsKB-39
sharashka
in Moscow.

“Nonsense. You would have survived; we are both survivors; we will prevail. It is our stubborn Russian nature.”

Stalin’s death in March 1953 gave them a new lease on life and now they were relatively secure in their positions. Strangely, like most
sharaska
survivors, the two men were not bitter. Just being alive was an incredible stroke of luck—being alive and able to work at their professions was a miracle.

“Andrei Nikolaevich, I will have a flood of newsmen here tomorrow. May I ask them to have their colleagues call on you for comment?”

“Of course you may, but why? I had no part at all in this grand experiment.”

“I want them to ask you what effect this will have on aviation.”

“Let me think about it until tomorrow, and I’ll have a fine story for them.”

“May I suggest something, to start your giant brain turning?”

“My giant brain is already working, but you go ahead.”

“Tell them that someday, not too far in the future, satellites far bigger than this first one will be used for communications, for meteorology, for navigation.”

“And how about for intelligence work? Shall I tell them that?”

Laughing, Korolev joked back, “Yes, tell them that there will be no more U-2s in the future, that Soviet satellites will cover the world with an all-seeing eye.”

Tupolev laughed and said, “I think I’ll stick with communications, meteorology, and navigation. Then the KGB won’t come after me for mentioning the U-2.”

They talked briefly, asking about each other’s families, then made their good-byes, Tupolev closing with, “Take care of yourself, Sergei Pavlovich; you know that it is always the tallest nail that gets hammered. I worry about your health.”

Before going back to the festivities, Korolev went outside to gaze upward where his precious satellite was hurtling around the Earth. He considered Tupolev’s warning carefully. Korolev’s health was precarious, but glancing upward to the moon, he knew that there was so much more to be done and little time in which to do it. He also knew how much he owed his staff, particularly Mikhail Tikhonravov, who had pushed the artificial Earth satellite concept from the beginning. It had taken years, but when Korolev finally became intoxicated by Tikhonravov’s idea, he managed to keep his enthusiasm hidden behind his work on the R-7 missile. Either the satellite or the missile could shape the destiny of the world—and Korolev hoped it would be the satellite.

CHAPTER SIX

October 4, 1957

Redstone Arsenal, Huntsville, Alabama

O
ctober was a blessed time in Huntsville, with the temperature dropping twenty degrees from the scorching high nineties of the summer and the humidity declining from a steaming hot-towel embrace to a healthy 40 percent. The weather more than anything else had shocked the German scientists brought over by Operation Paperclip, that great capture of German scientific talent at the end of World War II. The enervating humid heat of summer was unlike anything they had ever experienced, even the very few who had served in the North African campaigns. It overshadowed the other discomforts such as the strange food, the sense of alienation from German culture, and the longing for family. But all of these things were minor. No one was bombing them now, they were safely out of Germany, and if they had a Nazi past, it was ignored, if not forgotten. And just not to be working for the Russians was an inconceivable blessing. Best of all, the opportunities at Huntsville to go into space exceeded by a thousand fold those they had left behind in the ruins of Peenemünde.

No one was more aware of this than Wernher von Braun as he dressed to attend a reception at Redstone Arsenal. There Major General John Medaris, commandant of the Army Ballistic Missile Agency, was hosting Neil McElroy, who in a few days would be succeeding the current Secretary of Defense, the cantankerous “Engine Charlie” Wilson. In American parlance, the red carpet was rolled out.

The phone rang in von Braun’s bedroom, and as he reached for it he marveled at another of the seemingly endless series of luxurious American conveniences—a bath every day with plenty of soap, wonderful cars, freezers, television, and, just imagine, two telephones in the house.

“Von Braun here.” He had not yet adopted the simple American “hello.”

“Dr. von Braun, this is Lieutenant Allen, duty officer at Redstone. We tried to reach General Medaris, but he must be en route to the reception. We thought you would like to know that the Soviet Union has launched an artificial satellite. It is in orbit around the Earth, and apparently sending radio signals, although we have not picked them up as yet.”

Von Braun sat down on the bed, speechless.

“Dr. von Braun? Are you there?”

“Yes, sorry, I was stunned. Do you have any more details?”

“No, sir, but I’ll feed them to you as soon as they come in.”

Von Braun dropped the phone without even thanking Allen and rushed out of the house, his tie still untied, shoes unlaced, coat slung over his shoulder, heading for the reception and a word with Medaris. On the way, von Braun thought of all the rebuffs he had received since 1954, when he had tried to convince the government to use the Jupiter missile to place a satellite in orbit. Instead, the Navy’s proposed Vanguard launch vehicle was chosen to launch a small satellite, one that was to serve as the United States’ contribution to the International Geophysical Year to be observed in 1957-58. The Vanguard was still not ready, but his Jupiter C rocket had proved itself. With a few modifications, it could place a satellite in orbit.

His tie tied, shoes laced, and coat safely tucked around his shoulders, von Braun paused outside the austere Redstone Arsenal’s Officers’ Club to gaze upward at the skies now ruled by Soviet hardware, the first man-made satellite ever to orbit Earth. Five minutes later he had the swarthy, mustachioed Medaris bent over a table, sipping a Coca-Cola, listening intently. Von Braun often joked to his wife that he seemed destined to work for men with mustaches, but Medaris was a totally different boss from Hitler. Distinguished-looking, soft-spoken, and a devout Episcopalian, he had literally created the Army Ballistic Missile Agency out of whole cloth. Medaris had induced the sleepy town of Huntsville, with its seventeen-thousand population, to annex the land around Redstone Arsenal and then provide it with the services it needed but the Army would not provide. Medaris had told an unbelieving city council that in ten years Huntsville’s population would exceed one hundred thousand, and now it looked as if he had been conservative in his estimate.

An imposing figure, Medaris valued von Braun, and recognized all that he had done for the Army’s ballistic missile program. Nonetheless, Medaris was reluctant to let him speak to the next Secretary of Defense without formal preparation and without clearing the talk through the Secretary of the Army. Von Braun was insistent. The two men had arrived at an easy understanding: von Braun was a genius who was to be given a virtual free hand—but ultimately, Medaris was boss.

“General Medaris, we have no time. If we allow Secretary McElroy to go back to Washington and face an army of reporters with no answers about an American satellite, he will never forgive us.”

Medaris finally agreed, and the two men sequestered the bewildered, somewhat apprehensive McElroy in a small office away from the ballroom.

“Tell me again, Dr. von Braun, what the Russians have done.”

Medaris nodded and von Braun said “Mr. Secretary, the Russians have placed a small satellite into orbit around Earth. This is the first time this has ever been done. We do not yet know for sure the size of the satellite, or what instrumentation it has, but if it is just a bowling ball, it is an incredible achievement. And its implications are frightening.”

“What are the frightening implications?” McElroy was not skeptical, just bewildered and a bit embarrassed at his own lack of knowledge.

“Well, if the Soviets can put a satellite into space, it means they have rockets that can power an intercontinental ballistic missile. And that means they can put a nuclear weapon on a U.S. target in thirty minutes. It is an incredible capability.”

“Do we have a similar capability?”

“No. We do not have an intercontinental ballistic missile. We can put a satellite in orbit, however, if we modify the Jupiter C with another stage.”

McElroy stroked his chin, distressed at being forced to make an important decision before he was even sworn in. It was not good form.

Von Braun was unrelenting. “Mr. Secretary, when you get back to Washington, you’ll find that all hell has broken loose. We can put up a satellite in sixty days—once you give us the go-ahead.”

Medaris interjected, “Make it ninety days, Wernher.”

“OK, make it ninety days,” said von Braun.

McElroy snapped his head up, extended his hand, and said, “Agreed.”

Von Braun started for the door, but Medaris stopped him. “We’ll start tomorrow, Wernher. Tonight we have a guest.”

Impatience flooded von Braun’s face, but he understood and flashed the smile that would soon become famous.

CHAPTER SEVEN

October 5, 1957

Seattle, Washington

A
depressed and weary group of Boeing engineers sat staring at the television set, brought into the conference room to show them the firestorm of interest that the
beep-beep-beep
of the
Sputnik
had generated around the world. Daphne Perry, George Schairer’s new secretary, came in pushing a cart laden with coffee and rolls. Usually she had something bright and saucy to say, but this Saturday morning she sensed the deep emotion of the room and moved quietly to serve the men.

Schairer was not sitting at his usual position, deferring to the chief engineer, Wellwood Beall, but had called the meeting and was running it with his customary crisp efficiency. As always, Schairer was wearing a well-fit off-the-rack suit and white shirt, but today his tie was undone, his sparse hair in disarray, and his glasses smudged. Around the table, showing similar signs of fatigue, sat eleven of Boeing’s finest engineers and Vance Shannon. All were equally dismayed by the Soviet triumph.

“Talk about getting caught with your pants down. It is incredible that they could have pulled this off with so little warning.”

Ed Wells, older, shorter, and with considerably more hair than Schairer, nodded in agreement. “There were some hints. The Soviets had said that they had intended to put a small satellite into orbit soon. But the problem is that we just don’t have any worthwhile intelligence sources in Russia. We keep getting fed garbage, and I don’t think that even our newest sources could have picked this out.”

Shannon, a longtime intimate of both Schairer and Wells—he didn’t know Beall as well—had been a consultant to Boeing for more than thirty years. He picked up his ears at Wells’s comment, assuming that he was referring to the covert U-2 flights over the Soviet Union. It surprised Shannon. A few, a very few, people were aware of the U-2 and its capabilities, and none of them ever talked about it in an open forum like this.

Wells went on, “Well, they’ve got a new term for it—‘humint,’ short for ‘human intelligence.’ We must have a few people on the ground over there, but they are not giving us much help.”

Shannon was relieved and troubled at the same time. He was glad that Wells had not slipped up and talked about the U-2 in front of his engineers, many of whom had no knowledge of the program. But the reference to human intelligence—jargon for “spying”—made him squirm, reminding him of what had happened with Madeline eight years earlier.

Beall turned wearily to Shannon and said, “Vance, what does it mean to you? Is this as big a threat as some of the newspapers are making it out to be?”

Shannon waited for a moment before speaking, deliberately taking a swallow of coffee.

“Well, it shows they have rockets big enough to use intercontinental missiles to deliver a nuclear warhead. It doesn’t show how many they have or how reliable they are, but it is a definite threat. But I also think it is the biggest and best thing that ever happened to the American aviation industry.”

Almost as a man, the Boeing engineers straightened up in their chairs and stared at him, waiting for him to go on. Shannon did, saying, “President Eisenhower cannot take this lying down, and the American people won’t let him. You can expect to see funding for experiments with satellites and missiles to explode, pardon the pun. There will be a requirement for us to get our own satellites into the air as soon as possible. It will have an impact on aircraft production, too. The Strategic Air Command will be built up. General LeMay will want to have his own fleet of ICBMs—that’s what they call the long-range missiles—as soon as we have any.”