Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man's First Journey to the Moon(5)

Most people in the mid-1950s expected nuclear bombs to be delivered by airplanes like the B-29 Superfortress that had dropped atomic bombs on Japan, or the new B-52 Stratofortress. But these planes suffered the same vulnerability as World War I biplanes: They could be shot down by the enemy. A better delivery system was needed. And both the American and Soviet militaries knew what it was.

The rocket.

It had been used first in combat by the Nazis, when they fired their V-2 rockets at London and other targets in September 1944. The V-2 had a range of only two hundred miles and was too little too late to change the direction of Hitler’s war. The technology, however, was full of potential. Ten years later, both the United States and the Soviet Union were working on missiles that could traverse oceans.

Now, one of those missiles had delivered Sputnik into orbit. America knew it had to answer, and fast, by getting its own rocket and satellite to the launchpad. A space race had begun.



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Less than a month after Sputnik, the Soviets launched another satellite, only this time it carried a passenger—a dog known to the world as Laika (the Russian word for “barker”). An eleven-pound Samoyed mix, Laika won hearts the world over as she circled the globe. But Laika was no publicity stunt; she was the first step toward sending a man into space, there was no other reason to do it. But there was every reason to try.

A country that could fly men into space was on its way to learning to migrate them off Earth, colonize the solar system, and station soldiers in space. If putting a satellite into orbit gave a nation an advantage on Earth, the ability to populate outer space with citizens and armies gave a nation an advantage in the universe.

And there was another reason to send human beings into space. If man could leave Earth’s atmosphere, he could reach the Moon. Forever it had hung there, beautiful and mysterious, calling to man yet always beyond his grasp. The Moon controlled tides, guided the lost, lit harvests, inspired poets and lovers, spoke to children. The nation that first sent a man to the Moon would have done more than make a giant leap in science and technology; it would have fulfilled a longing that seemed to originate not just in the mind but in the soul.



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A few days after Laika was launched, it became apparent that the Soviets hadn’t designed the satellite to return safely to Earth. Western impressions of Communist cold-heartedness only worsened as Laika waited to die.

Embarrassed again by a Soviet satellite, the United States pushed to launch its own. On December 6, 1957, two months after Sputnik, a Vanguard rocket, carrying its grapefruit-sized satellite, counted down on the launchpad at Cape Canaveral in Florida. Unlike the Soviets, who conducted space operations in secret, the United States was broadcasting this launch to the entire country on live television.

On ignition, the Vanguard’s liquid-fueled engine spat orange flames and the rocket began to rise, but just a few feet up it hesitated, tilted slightly, then sank back to the pad, incinerating in a huge explosion. About all that remained of Vanguard in the aftermath was its tiny spherical satellite, somehow thrown free from the blast and lying nearby, beeping like it had made it into orbit.

The humiliation began even before the cinders had cooled. Media around the world called the project “Flopnik,” “Kaputnik,” and “Stayputnik,” while the Soviets took the chance to revel in America’s embarrassment, offering the Americans a helping hand through a United Nations program designed to provide technological assistance to primitive countries.

On January 31, 1958, the United States tried again. This time, the rocket climbed straight up, its whiplash of flames lighting the midnight sky, witnesses yelling “Go, baby!” as the fire grew distant and the sounds fainter. In a few minutes a 30-pound satellite called Explorer was in orbit around Earth. This was a warning shot that announced how quickly things could change when a country believed its survival to be at stake.

A week later, President Eisenhower, the old general, waged his own battle on behalf of the Space Race. He created the Advanced Research Projects Agency, called ARPA, an innovation center for the military where researchers pushed the boundaries of science and technology. (In the 1960s, the agency would attempt to network computers across the United States, a project that became the Internet. In 1972, the agency would add the word “Defense” to its title and be renamed DARPA.) In September 1958, Eisenhower signed into law the National Defense Education Act, which provided billions of dollars for the education of young Americans in science and related subjects. And in October, he opened a space agency, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, known as NASA, which took on the eight thousand workers and $100 million budget of its predecessor agency, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA). Many of its employees were young scientists, engineers, and visionaries.

In December 1958, just about a year after Sputnik had launched, NASA announced Project Mercury, a program designed to put a human being into orbit around Earth and return him and the spacecraft safely. Seven brave men were chosen for the task from a pool of military test pilots. They would be known as astronauts—“star sailors”—and would explore the oceans of space.



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America elected John Fitzgerald Kennedy president in November 1960. He’d accused Republicans of being weak on defense and Communism, and Eisenhower of allowing the United States to fall behind in production of intercontinental ballistic missiles—a so-called missile gap. According to the nation’s new president, America could not afford to be second to the Russians in anything.