The Manhattan Project: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the ICBM

At the time of this posting, this story is about 31,000 words long. It should more than double that by the time I finish writing. Normally, I try to finish a story before beginning to post it here, but I think I've advanced enough to be able to stay ahead of the posting pace.

It begins with a brief narrative, but it sticks to a strictly history book-style approach after that. Feel free to chime in with questions, comments, or concerns, and I'll do my best to answer them. Until then, sit back, relax, and enjoy The Manhattan Project.

Sources:
Countdown: A History of Space Flight, T.A. Heppenheimer
American Space Exploration: The First Decade, William Shelton
Vanguard! The Story of America’s Scientific Satellite Program, Martin Caidin
The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Richard Rhodes
http://www.braeunig.us/space
Encyclopedia Astronautica, http://www.astronautix.com/
NASA Aeronautics and Astronautics Chronology, 1915-1960: http://history.nasa.gov/timeline.html

***

Somewhere in central Utah
July 17, 1974

The highway was covered with signs. In gaps between the brightly colored pieces of cardboard lapped an ocean of humanity moving in waves back and forth. It wasn’t in unison or with a purpose — just the chop and ebb of a crowd. At least, that’s how it looked from the air. Twenty-year-old Pete Longstreet didn’t see any of that. Smashed in the middle of the crowd, all he saw was the back of a long-haired hippy who smelled at least two weeks past his due date. The oppressive desert heat didn’t help, either. If he’d known what it would be like at the protest, he probably wouldn’t have come, wouldn’t have signed up to ride on a bus for five hours from Berkley and shout slogans at a chain-link fence.

Then again, there was Rachel — if he could find her again. Her long black hair and — to be frank, her huge tits — were what made him sign his name. He’d loved every minute of being crammed next to her in the bus, and he’d hated every minute since getting off it. There had been long-haired shouting people with megaphones, but no one had listened to them — they’d all just moved en masse and blocked the highway. Looking around, he could see what looked like a million people, even though it couldn’t be that many — probably no more than crowded into California Memorial Stadium every fall Saturday to see the Bears lose.

He shielded his eyes with his hand as he scanned the crowd for Rachel. It shouldn’t have been that hard — she’d been decked out with some kind of Indian gear — feather not dot — but it seemed like half the crowd had some sort of freak-wear on. It wasn’t a protest for those chicks and dudes — it was a party. That, he hadn’t expected. There were folks dressed up like green aliens, tall bearded guys who shouldn’t have been allowed within sight of a tutu, let alone wearing one, and a whole crowd of people dressed like characters from Time Trek. All of them — at least the ones who weren’t stoned out of their gourds or tripping higher than Jesus — were waving their signs, chanting, or shouting.

He kept scanning the crowd, but didn’t have any more luck than when he’d started. God DAMN, it was hot.

“Hey, man. Hey, dude.”

He felt a tug on his short-sleeve T-shirt. But when he turned around, it wasn’t Rachel; it was the hippy dude. He looked like he’d been wearing the same olive green jacket since the Korean War, and in one outstretched hand he had a huge doobie. “Want a toke?”

“Nah,” Pete said. “I’m good.”

“You sure, man?” the dude asked. “It’s really good shit — I promise.” He grinned stupidly at Pete, who — for lack of any other response — returned the smile.

“This is pretty far-out shit, isn’t it?” the man — he had to be at least forty, Pete saw — asked. “It’s nothing like it was out in New York, though. Hadta be at least a half-a-million there. Hell of a trip. The name’s Jerome, by the way.” He extended a hand.

Pete took it, despite Jerome’s smell. “Nice to meet you,” he said. It wasn’t. He really needed to find Rachel if he wanted to score tonight. That’s why he came out here in the first goddamn place, and now he lost her. Next time — if there was a next time — he’d have to make sure they were tied together or something. He could make it out to be some kind of solidarity. She’d buy that kind of crap, and it sounded good. Maybe he could even convince that redhead he’d seen on the bus too, and wouldn’t that be something? Despite the heat, he smiled. “I’m Pete, by the way. You haven’t seen a black-haired chick, about yea-high, huge rack, with a yellow-and-black sign, have you?”

Jerome was at least six inches taller than Pete’s 5’7”, and he might’ve seen something over the heads of the crowd — if he wasn’t too stoned to realize he was in a crowd and not something like a sea of pearls. But Jerome just laughed, his blond dreadlocks flying back. “Only about a dozen or so! You lookin’ for one in particular or just shopping?”

“One in particular.”

“Well, good luck! You’re probably gonna be lookin’ all day — you sure you don’t want a toke ta help ya pass the time instead?”

“Nah, I really—” Just then, an enormous roar cut through the gabble and occasional shouts of the crowd. The crowd turned in unison, away from the gate, to watch a long, sleek object rise into the sky on a pillar of fire and smoke. It was a few miles away, but the ground shook and no noise could be heard as the rocket’s blast reverberated from the nearby hills. As the sound faded, the boos and jeers of the crowd took their place. It was the first sound they’d made in unison since gathering that morning. The booing went on long after the rocket’s roar was gone, then it segued into a chant: “Free space! Free space! Free space!”

As they chanted, the protesting crowd shook their signs. “Jobs, not Missiles” was raised to the sky alongside “Wreck the rockets,” “Don't throw Rocks!” and “Candy, NOT war”. The last was written on pink paper with silver glitter. It wasn’t the most outlandish, but it definitely was one of the most creative. A few looked like they’d been commercially printed, but they were outnumbered by the ones that showed the writer’s personality and artistic skill. Jerome had turned with the crowd, back toward the gate, and he was shaking his sign. Pete had moved up next to him and saw its slogan: “How’d we get here?”

It took Pete a few times to get through the noise and Jerome’s haze. “What’s it mean?” he shouted in Jerome’s ear.

“I’ve had it for years,” Jerome shouted back, cupping his free hand around his mouth. “Folks don’t get thinkin’ about how we got here in the first place. Like, why we’re out here shouting. You think about that, you might not do something else really stupid.”

It made sense to Pete, but he had one more question. “So how DID we get here?”

An interesting start, looking forward to seeing how this goes.

Amerigo,

Excellent as always.

One microscopic quibble: Five hours in a bus from UCl - Berkeley will put you in somewhere in the desert of northern Nevada about halfway between Reno and Winnemucca, not in central Utah, and that's assuming a bus full of university students, hippies, Jesus freaks, dopers, and other knuckleheads can average 70 mph.


Regards,
Bill

Bill Cameron said:

One microscopic quibble: Five hours in a bus from UCl - Berkeley will put you in somewhere in the desert of northern Nevada about halfway between Reno and Winnemucca, not in central Utah, and that's assuming a bus full of university students, hippies, Jesus freaks, dopers, and other knuckleheads can average 70 mph.

Click to expand...

Thanksa much!

It began with a letter. It might seem strange that the most important scientific, engineering, and military project of the 20th century began so simply, but that’s how it was. As the cliché goes, the biggest trees grow from the smallest seeds, and the Manhattan Project was no different. When three of America’s most prominent aeronautical figures came together to contribute their names to a letter to President Roosevelt, regardless of the topic, that letter was sure to be read. Charles Lindbergh, despite his opinions in regards to Nazi Germany, remained the world’s most notable aviator. Howard Hughes, though a noted eccentric, was one of America’s finest aircraft engineers and an acclaimed aviator in his own right. Winner of the Collier Trophy, among other awards, he had circumnavigated the world, set air speed records, and had extensive connections in Washington politics.

The third figure, though less well-known, was perhaps the most important member of the triumvirate who signed that letter to Roosevelt. Robert Goddard, 56 years old when he affixed his name to the paper, was America’s most-accomplished scientist in the sprouting field of rocketry. He had built the world’s first liquid-fueled rocket — in 1926 — and for the nine years before signing the letter, had spent his time in Roswell, New Mexico, building and launching rockets. By August 1939, when the letter was dispatched to Roosevelt, Goddard had launched more than 39 rockets, testing the bounds of his limited grants from the Guggenheims.

Thus, when these three men came together to push Roosevelt for government funding of rocketry development — the spark that would give birth to the Manhattan Project — they did so as the foremost American minds in their field. Of course, such a letter did not come spontaneously. It was the result of months of debate and years of thought in the mind of its most important author, Goddard.

In June 1932, Goddard was at work in Roswell when a letter arrived from Willy Lasswitz, a German who claimed to be an avid follower of Goddard’s work in furthering the science of rocketry. He detailed how he was a member of a new group called Verein fur Raumschiffahrt, the Society for Space Travel, and inquired as to the latest developments in New Mexico, as the group was working hard to develop rockets in Germany. Goddard did what he always did with people who wrote to him: he referred the writer to his published work and politely wished the writer luck. When Lasswitz wrote back, Goddard again referred the German to his journal articles, but this time included a reference to how he was pressed for spare time — as was his way when letter-writers persisted.

Rather than dissuaded by this curt dismissal, Lasswitz’ next correspondence included a film of a rocket engine test at VfR’s hardscrabble facility in a rock quarry near Berlin. Despite his impatience with outside attention, Goddard was intrigued by the idea that another group would be so much like his own small research team. Despite this small crack in his reticence, it took him several months until he dispatched a letter back to Germany asking about an element of the engine’s construction. This small bit of encouragement broke the dam of Lasswitz’ correspondence, and the German’s letters to Goddard grew in both volume and frequency. Goddard’s isolation wore away under the barrage of distant words. Though he remained isolated from American audiences, he felt he was safe with this distant German, despite his group’s fanciful name. After the scathing attacks of the newspapers in the 1920s, he had always been certain to couch his work in terms of “high-altitude research.”

In early 1935, Goddard and Lasswitz conversed about the latter’s success at launching two rockets the previous December. Goddard had much to trumpet when two of his rockets had similar successes early that year, and Lasswitz’ praise was effusive. Despite the growing connection, Goddard didn’t open up completely — to do so would go entirely against his entire life’s experience. He mentioned successes and failures only in passing, never going into detail. He would spend 50 words on the latest launch and 500 on the weather that week. The 28-year-old Lasswitz had no such compunctions. He wrote freely about how his group had been taken over by the Wehrmacht and how the funding poured in. He wrote about the big new rockets that were being developed, the problems they faced with the new regenerative cooling systems and the idea of using gyroscopes to stabilize the bigger missiles. He looked forward to moving to the big new modern test facility on the coast, and griped about managers. Goddard didn’t speak of his successes and failures with the same systems or having to make do with resources that were less than one percent of what the Germans had available. He merely read the letters and returned to work.

Then, in the summer of 1939, the letters came to an abrupt end. In one final, lengthy letter, Lasswitz explained that, sadly, he would have to stop writing to Goddard because he had been drafted into the Army to work on rockets. He was excited about the chance to build great new rockets, but he feared that the dream of exploring space would have to wait until the military was finished with its desire to build war rockets. In one final film, sent to Goddard that June, he recorded the fruits of VfR’s decade of work: the enormous test facility at Peenemünde, a rocket engine test, and the launch of a sounding rocket, which disappears into the sky before panning down to show Lasswitz holding up a sign with an inscription in English: “Thank you Dr. Goddard.”

For more than a month, Goddard worked on his latest rocket — all the time thinking about the film. He was both proud that he was able to inspire others, but anguished about the thought that his inspiration might be used by the Nazi regime. He had no qualms about his work being used for warfare — only that it was used in the service of the United States, not a fascist group. Eventually, the distraction became so great that Goddard needed to break his silence and approach someone to talk about the subject. The natural person to talk to was his wife, and she suggested talking to Charles Lindberg. To someone versed in history, this probably seems a surprising move. But given the history of the two men, it appears natural.

This is fascinating. Perhaps Theodore von Karman, Qian Xuesen, Apollo M.O. Smith, Frank Malina and John Whiteside Parsons may become household names like our OTL Manhattan Project scientists. (In OTL, some of them did have a tenuous connection. Some knew Frank Oppenheimer, Robert's brother...)

This is awesome stuff so far AV, I eagerly await your subsequent updates.

Azardin said:

This is awesome stuff so far AV, I eagerly await your subsequent updates.

Click to expand...

Amerigo is soon going to be leaving for a while, but he has given me what he has written so far and I'll be updating the thread in his absence.

Ah, Amerigo never told me when he was going away and then it slipped my mind. Never mind - here is a double measure to start us off.


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In 1929, Lindbergh had begun to speculate about the future of aviation and settled upon rocketry as the natural next step. He contacted Goddard, and the two men spent several days that year discussing the subject and what could result from further work. After the stock market crash, Goddard had difficulty finding funding for research and development. Lindbergh introduced him to Daniel Guggenheim, heir to a copper fortune, and Guggenheim provided $100,000 with which Goddard set up operations in Roswell. The two men fell out of touch for some years, but Goddard still felt comfortable enough to contact Lindbergh about the subject of Lasswitz’ final film. Also in Goddard’s mind was Lindbergh’s extensive travels in Germany and his familiarity with the German aeronautical community. He had visited several aircraft factories and flown German military aircraft under orders from the U.S. Army Air Corps, which was interested in learning more about Luftwaffe equipment.

For his part, Lindbergh was interested in what Goddard had to say. After Germany’s violation of the Munich Agreement in April 1939, he had become increasingly convinced that war in Europe was inevitable. Clearly, the United States needed to stay out of any European conflict, as it had failed to do in the Great War. But to do so would require a strong naval and air force to keep the European conflict at arm’s length. When the two men met in July 1939, Lindbergh was enthralled by Goddard’s film. It matched what little he knew of German rocketry — Lindbergh’s emphasis had been on aircraft — and he agreed with Goddard’s belief that America clearly had to match German developments, albeit for different reasons. Where Goddard believed that America needed to match rocket for rocket to defeat Germany, Lindbergh believed it needed to do so to keep Germany from attacking America in the first place.

Unfortunately, Lindbergh wasn’t in a position to promote rocketry or American defense. Because he was an officer in the U.S. Army Air Corps, there were strict limits on what he could say in public. Several weeks after speaking with Goddard, however, he visited Cleveland, Ohio, ahead of that city’s hosting of the 1939 U.S. National Air Races. There, he met famed aircraft designer and racer Howard Hughes, who listened to Lindbergh speak about rocketry and was quite impressed. In the previous decade, he had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to gain a hundred miles per hour in airspeed. Here was a proposal that could offer more than 1,000 miles per hour in a single step. Furthermore, Lindbergh’s concerns about possible German military developments mirrored those of Hughes himself. Hughes Aircraft had only four full-time employees, and thus Hughes felt the company wasn’t in a position to build any standard military aircraft. But with rocketry, the Hughes Aircraft could perhaps break into a new field unoccupied by any existing company.

But the business side of Hughes’ personality intervened in his thought process. Rocketry was a new field, and there were enormous risks attached to it. The reason no company had yet occupied the market was because there was no market — and he might be throwing money down a well if he tried to create one. That risk made Hughes hesitate. He agreed with Lindbergh that something had to be done, but government had to take the first step. Together, Hughes and Lindbergh drafted a letter to President Roosevelt. In that letter, they outlined the latest revelations about German rocketry, the state of the world, and asked him to begin a government research program to develop a scientific rocket that might also have military uses. After Lindbergh telegraphed Goddard to inform him that Hughes was interested in rocketry, Goddard arrived in Cleveland fully expecting to have to advocate funding for his own research. He was taken aback by the drafted letter, but he nevertheless agreed to sign his name to it after suggesting some revisions based upon his own experience. Goddard’s arrival also enabled Hughes to view the German film, which only confirmed his belief that rocketry was worth investigating.

On August 2, 1939, the three men signed the letter. Hughes took it and delivered it to an acquaintance, economist Alexander Sachs, who was on Roosevelt’s National Policy Committee. Sachs was slated for an early September meeting with the president, but the German invasion of Poland interrupted all regular business at the White House. Sachs’ meeting was repeatedly delayed, and it wasn’t until October 11 that he was able to see Roosevelt to deliver the letter. In the meantime, Lindbergh had resigned from his commission as a colonel in the Army Air Corps to take up full-time political campaigning against American intervention in the war. On September 15, 1939, Lindbergh made a national radio address carried on all three networks. He encouraged Americans to not “send American boys to die in a European war” and to look beyond the simple arguments of interventionism. “Arbitrary boundaries can only be maintained by strength of arms,” he declared, “Let use make no mistake about the cost of entering this war. If we take part successfully, we must throw the resources of our entire nation into the conflict. Munitions alone will not be enough. … We must develop new weapons and spend billions to not only gain a quantitative advantage, but also a qualitative one. Even then, we are likely to lose a million men, possibly several million – the best of American youth.”

This speech and others like them came before Sachs met Roosevelt. Upon being presented with the letter, the president was inclined to discard it out of hand. Lindbergh’s opposition to his desire to aid the European democracies was annoying, but it had not manifested itself into organized opposition — as it would in September 1940 with the creation of the America First Committee. In any event, his rearmament plans would only be encouraged by the isolationists’ desire to improve American defenses by expanding the U.S. Navy and Army Air Corps. To address the letter and the potential that Lindbergh might later use it as ammunition against him in public debates, Roosevelt decided to create a federal advisory committee on rocketry. He didn’t believe the topic was worth much consideration, but he hoped that creating the committee would at least defuse Lindbergh’s potential argument that the United States was not doing enough to protect America through technological means. The committee was placed under the control of Lyman Briggs, director of the National Bureau of Standards.

Despite its unassuming name, the Bureau of Standards is the nation’s physics laboratory, established by Congress in 1901 to apply science and technology for the national interest and public benefit. Briggs was a Johns Hopkins Ph.D. who had worked for the government for 43 years before being appointed to head the rocketry committee. Per the common government system for constructing such a committee, he requested and received one committee member each from the departments of the Army and Navy. The Navy sent Commander Gilbert C. Hoover, and the Army sent Lieutenant Colonel Keith F. Adamson, both of whom were ordinance experts. They had some experience with military rockets but believed them to be inferior to artillery and aircraft, respectively. At the first meeting of the Briggs Advisory Committee on Rocketry, they didn’t react enthusiastically to the explanations of MIT’s aeronautics department head, Jerome Hunsaker, who said it was possible for rockets to be a new means of transportation and potentially a weapon.

Alright! Another AV tech TL! This one on rocketry! Brilliant!!

AV, when you get back (or Thande, if you could pass on the Q), is Willy Lasswitz in any way related to Kurd Lasswitz? Is he OTL? (nothing pops up on Google).

Adamson in particular was hostile, saying, “it is naïve to believe that you could make a significant contribution to defense by creating a new weapon. If a new weapon is created, it usually takes two wars before one can know whether that weapon is any good or not. In the end, it is not the weapons which wins wars, but the morale of the troops.” Hunsaker, who didn’t become enthusiastic about rocketry until much later — that same year, he had declined a $10,000 grant to develop a solid-fueled rocket to help aircraft take off, calling it “Buck Rogers stuff” — didn’t respond. Goddard, who had been reluctant to leave his Roswell laboratory to come to Washington for the meeting, nevertheless rose to the defense of the men from the eastern universities. He stated in controlled tones that rockets could indeed become weapons for this war — not the next, but it would require a great expenditure of money and resources.

Hoover asked how much money would be needed to fund the first year of research. Goddard, not expecting to have to quote a price, simply guessed a figure: $100,000. That was the equivalent of his entire grant from the Guggenheim Foundation, and it had funded almost an entire decade of work. Adamson, who believed he had finally seen what the scientists were getting at, declaimed the “attempted raid on the public treasury.”

John Shesta, a civil engineering graduate of Columbia and a member of the American Rocket Society, had been invited to the meeting as the representative of that organization. He coldly responded: “I always thought that weapons were very important and that this is what costs money, and this is why the Army needs such a large appropriation. But I am very interested to hear that I was wrong: it’s not weapons but the morale which wins the wars. And if this is correct, perhaps one should take a second look at the budget of the Army, and maybe the budget should be cut.”

“All right, all right,” Adamson snapped, “you’ll get your money.”

After this disagreement, work moved relatively smoothly. There were disagreements about the scope of the rocketry committee and what its goals should be, but these were minor academic squabbles easily resolved with enough time and discussion. On November 1, 1939, the committee produced a report for the president. It emphasized creating a “stable, large-scale rocket motor.” This motor could then be put to use as a means of transport, surveillance, or to drive a missile carrying a large warhead. The more peaceful uses of the “large-scale” rocket were emphasized — the transport rocket could deliver supplies or people across oceans in an hour or two, while a rocket traveling at high altitude could see vast distances without threat of attack. The third option, a weapon, would allow the United States to attack distant opponents “without risking the loss of an American life.”

The report was delivered to the president, and Briggs received a reply on November 17. The president had read the report, and wanted to keep it on file. There was no other information, and there the report rested — on file. No action was taken, and the $100,000 was not immediately released by the Army and Navy. Goddard left Washington more discouraged than ever with the political process. Before returning to Roswell, he visited New York and the offices of the American Rocket Society at the behest of Shesta, normally a quiet man. In New York, Goddard was virtually worshipped as a hero by the members of the society, and the somewhat bemused Goddard could only respond in his normal, diffident manner. The enthusiasm of such men as James Wyld, a Princeton graduate who built a small liquid-fueled rocket, and Hugh Pierce, a machinist, couldn’t help but lift Goddard’s spirits. Although he had not gotten what he wanted from the Washington meeting, he returned to Roswell no worse off than he had been. Indeed, the personal foundations those rocket pioneers had begun to create were just as important as anything that could be purchased with money.

Through the winter of 1939-1940, the Phony War continued in Europe, and the “Phony development” of rocketry continued in the United States. Goddard returned to his work on his P-series rockets, which he anticipated would be a great advance over his previous work. He regretted the time lost in the trip to Washington and New York, as his continual fear was that his health would continue to decline and he would die before his work was complete. This fear drove his perceived impatience and unwillingness to work with others interested in rocketry — if he spent the time to answer all his mail, he said, he would not have time left over to do real work.

The members of the American Rocket Society were less patient with the pace of government. They contacted various rocketry groups across the country, most notably in southern California, where a group of aeronautics students under the direction of Theodore von Karman were already working on a project for the federal government. In May 1938, Gen. Henry “Hap” Arnold visited Caltech shortly after becoming head of the Army Air Corps. He believed that research was one important way the United States could stay competitive in the air against foreign air forces. Late that year, he distributed a list of research projects to various universities and companies to work on. Von Karman picked the most ambitious project on the list — to develop rockets to help aircraft make shorter takeoff runs. Hunsaker at MIT, who would later attend the meetings of the advisory committee on rocketry, picked a project to de-ice aircraft windshields. He didn’t believe the rocketry project was worth it.

By the first months of 1940, when they were contacted by Shesta and Wyld, the Caltech team had endured several experimental failures. The rockets they had designed burned with enough force, but cracks in the dried propellant caused explosions that destroyed the rockets. Because von Karman’s background was in mathematics, he and Frank Malina — von Karman’s best graduate assistant — returned to the drawing board to devise a set of equations to figure out the next step. When they heard about the money promised Goddard to develop rockets, they contacted Briggs to see if any funds could be made available for their separate project. Unfortunately, Briggs told them, that money had already been pledged and could not be diverted. He vowed that in the event any further money became available, he would contact them first.

In early February 1940, a Roosevelt aide contacted Briggs to ask if any new developments had been made. Briggs reported that he had finally arranged for the $100,000 transfer to Goddard, and Briggs proposed to wait for results to come from that funding. When informed of this, Wyld, who was still young enough to be impetuous, traveled to Roswell to see if he could assist Goddard. In other cases, Goddard had dismissed similar journeyman racketeers without a thought. With $100,000 newly available to him, he made the magnanimous gesture to allow Wyld to stay — but only if he paid his own way. Wyld took a job in Roswell and spent all his free time with Goddard, preparing the new series of rockets the scientist had designed. A second rocketry committee meeting was scheduled for April 27, and rather than go east himself, Goddard sent Wyld to report the latest developments. This time, Caltech also sent a representative — in the form of Frank Malina, who took a break from mathematical manipulation with von Karman. At the meeting, both men outlined the latest developments in solid-fueled and liquid-fueled rocketry. Each thought their means of thrust was superior, but each admitted that they had problems to work out before any sort of progress could said to have been made. Wyld stated that the test-firing of Goddard’s P-series engine, which incorporated some of Wyld’s work, would determine a great deal about the feasibility of pursuing liquid-fueled rockets.

With the new funding, Goddard was able to hire more machinists, purchase new equipment, and upgrade the resources available to him. Instead of waiting to purchase components off the shelf, he could have them made specifically for him at the pace his work dictated, not as money allowed. In April, the work was finished, and on April 20, the latest version of the engine fired for the first time. The P-series was so named because it incorporated special propellant pumps that Goddard himself invented, improving efficiency. When tested, the engine produced 700 pounds of thrust for 40 seconds, a great improvement over his previous L-series rockets, which boasted less than 500 pounds of thrust. The engine also incorporated other advancements: vanes thrust into the flow of exhaust provided steering control, a gasoline and liquid-oxygen mix provided fuel, and high-speed turbine pumps fed fuel as needed.

On May 10, the same day that the German army invaded the Low Countries and France, the P-series engine was tested again. This time, it ran for 45 seconds on a static test, and Goddard pronounced himself satisfied enough to attempt a launch the next time. On June 11, the first P-series rocket cleared the launching tower. It didn’t rise much further, however, as the 22-foot long, 161-pound rocket climbed barely 200 feet before veering off and crashing to Earth. In Washington the next day, the rocketry committee was formally absorbed by Vannevar Bush’s new National Research Defense Council, which was intended to marshal the scientific talent of the United States toward military goals. In handing over the rocketry committee, Briggs made an appeal for additional funds from the new council. He asked for $140,000 — half for Goddard’s work, half for the Caltech solid-fuel experiments. He received just $40,000, which was split $35,000/$5,000 between Caltech and Goddard.

The Caltech group also received a boost in funding from the Air Corps, which found its work to be promising. Hap Arnold doubled the group’s funding to $22,000 for fiscal 1941. The group spent the sudden largesse by obtaining a lease on several acres of land near the city of Pasadena, California. Several wood and tin shacks were erected, and crude pits were dug to contain rocket blast and fuel. In New Mexico, California, New York, and Maryland — where the Naval Research Laboratory was engaging in rocket work — small teams worked in isolation to advance rocketry. On July 4, Goddard tested his second P-series rocket, and where the first had failed, the second succeeded. Upon a pillar of fire and smoke, it climbed to an altitude calculated to be 4,500 feet before the rocket’s parachute deployed and it descended to Earth. Further static testing of the P-series engines improved their efficiency to almost 1,000 pounds of thrust, and Goddard and Wyld butted heads when it came to publishing the results. When Goddard wrote a monograph detailing the latest success of his rocket and engine, Wyld told him it probably should not be published. Goddard was greatly angered by this and ordered Wyld off of the ranch. A few days later, Vannevar Bush called Goddard and asked him to restrain from publishing. Goddard relented and allowed Wyld to return to work, but remained disgruntled. As Wyld later said, “From that point, the secrecy was on.”

Great story !

Nice job. Will Malina become OTL's Oppenheimer, or will Parsons's shenanigans steal the spotlight?

Thande,

What a fantastic beginning! I hope you're passing our raves along to Amerigo!

Finally, a technology TL that features rocketry. This time line is going to be everything Three Seconds Late wanted and utterly failed to be.


Bill

That move toward secrecy came at a critical moment. In October 1939, Germany had the first successful launch of the A-5, which was used as a platform to test much of the equipment later used on the A-4 rocket, better-known as the V-2. The outbreak of war slowed the development of rockets, as resources were diverted toward weapons with greater likelihood of generating a quick return. It was predicted that the war would soon be over, and there would be time after Germany had won to develop rockets. Thus, work slowed until early 1942, when it became apparent that the war would last much longer.

After the argument with Goddard, Wyld became an “apostle of secrecy,” as a historian later wrote. He wrote to von Karman at Caltech, to Hunsaker at MIT, Shesta, and others across the country, asking them to cease publishing their rocketry results for fear that the work would aid German efforts in that area of science. Some humored the strange young man in the desert, while others simply ignored someone they saw as a simple crank. Nevertheless, the flow of scientific information slowed out of the United States during 1940 and 1941 — not so much out of Wyld’s effort as the simple collective realization by Americans that they likely would find themselves at war with Germany before too long.

In late summer, the first fruits of that war began arriving on American soil. British scientist Henry Tizard arrived in Boston with a cavity magnetron, the key component behind the effective British radar system. Radar work was suddenly the new hot scientific frontier in the United States, and the NRDC created the Radiation Laboratory at MIT to explore what this new breakthrough might develop. The best minds in physics and electrical engineering came from across the United States to throw their brain power at how to improve the performance of this new technology and to discover all its weaknesses and strengths. The effort to develop American radar and improve British radar still further foreshadowed the enormous effort that would come later as the United States began to develop the missiles that would bring the war to an end.

One aspect of the American-British cooperation was the increased development of advanced metallurgical techniques — a byproduct of the desire to improve armor plating for aircraft and vehicles. In late 1940, a committee of the National Academy of Sciences reported that as a side effect of improved metallurgy, it might soon become possible to operate turbines at temperatures of more than 1,500 degrees Celsius. While this paper was not directly tied to rocketry, it was among the metallurgical advances that would have a great impact on the Manhattan project.

In early 1941, Harvard president James Conant visited England as a liason between the NRDC and the British government. His pro-British attitude and willingness to help won over many scientists and government leaders who had been skeptical about the potential for American help. For many Britons, their only experience with American attitudes toward the war came from the vocal America First Committee, which received much greater coverage in Britain than did interventionist sentiment. Conant’s mission ran the gamut from radar to poison gas, but on rocketry he held back. As late as March 1941, he remained ignorant of British and German progress in the field. He assumed that if Vannevar Bush wanted to pursue the topic, he would do so through Briggs.

Conant returned to the United States in March and traveled west to give a speech in California. There, he was confronted by Caltech president Robert Andrews Millikan, who grilled him on why more was not being done to further rocket development. He had been coached by his son, Clark, who was a professor of aeronautics in his own right. Von Karman also prepared Millikan to pressure Conant, who readily agreed that something had to be done. “What if the Germans succeed in making a long-range rocket before we even investigate possibilities?” he asked Conant. Von Karman followed this attack with one of his own. On March 17, he met with MIT president Karl Compton and professor Hunsaker in Boston. Von Karman complained that not enough funding was being devoted to rocketry and that the federal government was not taking events seriously. “One day,” von Karman said, “we might find ourselves under sudden attack by missiles fired from Europe and with no means to respond.”

Conant, whose previous experience with rocketry had come through Hunsaker, who was less than convinced by the immediate potential of the field, was impressed by the fervor of the Hungarian-turned-Californian. Even Hunsaker was infected by von Karman’s enthusiastic pleas for a united front to convince the government of the potential of rocketry research. Conant called Bush the next day, and drafted a follow-up letter immediately afterward. He wrote, “Briggs by nature is slow, conservative, methodical and accustomed to operating at peacetime bureau tempo.” He has been operating at this speed and “is still further inhibited by the requirement of secrecy.” Briggs had not brought in the majority of American aeronautic talent, even though America “America had the most in number and best in quality of the aeronautical engineers of the world.”

Bush took the implicit complaints against the NRDC — of whom Briggs now was a member — poorly. He met von Karman in New York two weeks later and unloaded on him: “I am running this show,” he said. “We have established a procedure for handling it, and you can either conform to that as a member of the NRDC or you can work as an outside individual in any way you see fit. Briggs has conducted a series of excellent conferences, and I propose to back up Briggs and his committee in their decisions unless there is some decidedly strong case otherwise. I consider this matter thoroughly straightened out.” Throroughly upbraided, von Karman returned to California. Bush had brought peace to rocketry research in the U.S. — for a month.

Great work Amerigo and Thande, as usual. As per my user title, this subject is one in which I have a great personal interest, so I am eagerly following!

Great story, looking forward to reading more of it.

Lovely stuff...

As anybody who has read my posts will probably groan on hearing - again - the British effoert into serious rocketry in 1942 was Isaac Lubbock of Shell Petroleum succeeding in static firing a one-ton thrust rocket engine fed by pressurised tanks of lox and petrol. Bear in mind that Lord Cherwell/Professor von Lindemann had declared rocketry a 'Mare's Nest' and so Professor R.V. Jones and Duncan Sandys consulted a wide range of scientific advice. A lot depended on a turbo-driven fuel pump, the power of which was eventually assessed by Frank Whittle.

Aside from that, British interest was in cordite rocketry (well, I am known as corditeman) and so-called 'Unrotated Projectiles' that were solid fuel rockets towing lengths of piano wire to foul aircraft and doodlebugs.

Britain did acquire two V2 rockets - one the remains that crashed in Sweden, the other a production version flown out of Blizna by a Free Polish pilot. That gave them details of steering vanes, regenerative cooling and engine capability on a plate. Cherwell apparently thought Hitler to have been crazy to authorise so expensive a project; the V1 did the same thing for 300 GBP, that the V2 did for 10,000 GBP (1940s costs). I have to admit that Cherwell was right.

corditeman said:

Cherwell apparently thought Hitler to have been crazy to authorise so expensive a project; the V1 did the same thing for 300 GBP, that the V2 did for 10,000 GBP (1940s costs). I have to admit that Cherwell was right.

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Ja, basically until you can get an Abomb that can fit on a rocket (US tactic) or a rocket that will fit under an Abomb (Russian Soyuz), ICBMs are pretty useless.

JATO units, etc, katyushas (sp?) and Bazookas all make sense. ICBMs, not so much.