[January 27th
marks the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 1 tragedy,
one of many setbacks and challenges that didn’t deter from the US manned space program from
making history. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy five moments or contexts for
NASA’s early years. I’d love your responses and thoughts in comments, as
always!]
On the more
overt and more subtle ways that wartime adversaries drove the US space program.
It’s a truism,
but nonetheless a necessary one with which to begin a series on the early years
of the US space program, that our Cold
War rivalry with the Soviet Union provided a great deal of the impetus for
and motivation behind the development of that program. Calling this element of
the rivalry the “space race” (as that hyperlinked article does) links it to the
“arms race” a bit more fully than might be warranted—that is, while both
competitions did pit the two superpowers against one another in a race to
develop new programs and technologies first, the arms race was explicitly
focused on weapons that could be used to threaten and (if necessary) destroy
the other nation; the space race occasionally included such military
technologies (most famously, Reagan’s
proposed “Star Wars” program) but also and most consistently represented a
scientific undertaking with its own significant, global benefits that extended
well beyond the Cold War. Yet while it thus may not be accurate to limit our
understanding of the space race and the US space program overall to our
adversarial relationship with a foreign power, it remains vital to consider
just how fully such wartime relationships influenced and directed the space
program’s historical origins.
By far the most
overt such wartime influence was the Soviet Union’s October 4th, 1957 launch of
Sputnik I, the world’s first artificial satellite. Both nations had been
working on such satellites over the prior few years, but when the Soviet Union
got there first—and then did so again less than a month later, with the
November 3 launch of the even
more substantial and groundbreaking Sputnik II—the resulting global
attention and US political outcry galvanized American public and governmental
support for a robust space program. The US would launch its own first
artificial satellite, Explorer
I, on January 31st, 1958; even more significantly, in late July
Congress would pass the National
Aeronautics and Space Act, setting a date of October 1, 1958 (not
coincidentally, almost exactly a year after Sputnik I’s launch) for the creation
of a new governmental agency known as NASA. As I’ve written about numerous
times in this space, and despite our fondness for images of national
exceptionalism and isolation, virtually all elements
of America’s government and culture
have been informed and influenced by international relationships and
factors in one way or another—yet few have been produced in such immediate and direct
response to a single international action as were these originating space program
steps. I’m sure our space program would have developed eventually in any case,
but it’s entirely accurate to say that it did so when and how it did because of
Sputnik and the Soviet Union.
What’s perhaps less
well known is just how fully those originating US space program steps likewise
depended on the presence and role of another wartime adversary and technology.
The Explorer I project
featured a number of distinct teams led by prominent scientists, with Dr.
William Pickering’s team (at Cal Tech) designing and building the satellite
itself and Dr.
James Van Allen’s (at Iowa State) designing the instrumentation. Yet
Explorer never would have made it into orbit—never would have made it off the
ground at all—were it not for the Jupiter-C rocket, a modification of the Redstone
ballistic missile that was produced by former Nazi scientist Dr. Wernher von
Braun and based directly on the German V-2 rocket that von Braun had helped
develop for the Nazis. Von Braun not only directed the army’s ballistic
missile program at Redstone Arsenal for a decade, he would then go on to
direct NASA’s Marshall
Space Flight Center and develop the Saturn V launch vehicle that would make
NASA’s moon voyages possible. While the US space program’s starting points were
heavily influenced by the Soviet Union, they were directly dependent on von
Braun, and thus on science and technologies that had originated with our World
War II adversary the Nazis. Just one more complex and unavoidable layer to the
international influences on NASA and the space program.
Next NASA post
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other NASA takes you’d share?
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