October 4, 1957... reminiscences of a dream (DBWI)

October 4, 1957 was a Friday. I remember it only because dad took us all out for ice cream, and it was the day I read my first article on rockets, the one that got me hooked. It was a half-page spread in a newspaper about Project Vanguard, the Navy's satellite project. Their first test of the three-stage rocket was set for late October, and an orbital shot was planned to fly before the end of the year.

I remember being unable to sleep that night, my mind filled with visions of space ships and moon bases. Instead, I read the third installment of Heinlein's latest serial, Citizen of the Galaxy, in that month's Astounding. I must have stayed up until 3 am. But it was a weekend, so I could afford a sleepless night. And what are such things to a twelve-year old?

The launch of Vanguard's TV-2 on October 23 earned a three column insert in the "big" local paper. The top two stages were inert, but that was when I got to see pictures of a real space rocket. It didn't look anything like the V-2s everyone associated with space ships back then. It was more delicate.. somehow fragile-looking. It was hard to believe such a thing could hurtle anything into space...

...but it did. I don't know how many people remember December 6, 1957 these days, but it was a big day for me, the day the Space Age truly began. The Vanguard satellite may not have been particularly impressive, but it was the first, and it was American.

I picked up my first copy of Aviation Weekly right after that launch. That's when I first discovered that the Soviets also had a space program in the works. Of course, it was expected that we would beat the Russians into space, but I remember an editorial in that issue; apparently, the Soviets had announced in September that a satellite launch was imminent. I don't know what happened, but there wasn't a Russian orbital flight until early in 1958 (trivia: They called it "Sputnik").

There was not much fanfare associated with the Russian launch, and I was more interested in subsequent Vanguard flights (of which two out of the following seven launches were successes). Then there were the Air Force launches--Discoverer, Pioneer and Trailblazer. I followed every one with eagerness. My friends called me "Space Case" since I was about the only kid in school who'd caught rocket fever. This passion never waned. I graduated from college with a degree in aerodynamic engineering right around the time of the first manned space mission, and I did work on some of the first communications satellites for RW in the late 70s.

Now I'm an old man of 67. I retired two years ago, but I still follow the aerospace news. It's hard to believe how much our lives have been changed by the services satellites offer us: Live international broadcasts, navigational guidance for ships with 1km accuracy, 24-hour military surveillance, real-time broadcasts from moon probes... What an amazing time we live in, at least it is to me. I just hope I live to see the day one of Mankind's oldest dreams is fulfilled, immortalized in the works of people like Verne and Burroughs: the day a person flies to the Moon. Except, I don't know how likely that is. It seems so few people ever really caught the space bug.

Am I really alone? Does anyone else remember the Fall of '57? Are there any other oddballs who followed humanity's forays beyond the atmosphere? Post your reminiscences here, if you please.

(Moderators, please don't move this thread. I know it's not AH, but who knows? Maybe the topic will stimulate contemplation of "might-have-beens")

Up here in Massachusetts we had a Senator for a lot of years, John Kennedy (you history buffs probably know him as the guy who lost to Nixon back in 1960). Well Senator Kennedy was one of the biggest proponents of the Manned Missions back in the 1970's. I'm sure you know him, neiopeius. Anyhow, he was forever saying that "We can get a man on the moon in this decade if we really want to." My dad always used to laugh at him for that. He said it in the 60's and 70's and even the 80's just before he retired from the Senate. "We can do it this decade."

I don't know. I'm sure if he was still alive, he'd be disappointed that Moon Fever never really got off the ground, pun intended, but I think we're doing alright even without it. Like you said, look what satellites are doing for us. I think that's far, far more meaningful than a moon shot in the long run.

Anybody reminds Lyndon Johnson, that senator that collapsed from a heart attack as he fought for a civilian agency to control the space program ? his death in spring 1958 ensured the military won the day.
Of course the military did started Man-In-Space-Soonest (MISS, how about that) but then they got bogged down in the money-pit DynaSoar space plane. Worse, soon they found man-in-space was of little interest to them; robots were doing the spying job much better.
As for the National Space Foundation - the closest thing from a civilian space agency our country ever boasted - James Van Allen long chairmanship ensured no astronaut would ever fly in orbit for any science purpose. Robots (them again !) were doing a better job.

If only Johnson had lived and been president in 1960... things might have been quite different.

(PS does anyone reminds those cheesy sci-fi novels by that german writer we recently learned he had been a nazi rocket scientist, how was he called ? he even worked for Collier and Disney at some point... he died of cancer ten years ago, aged 90...)

(boy, that post was depressing and fun to write altogether)

I do think it made sense to have each agency do what it did best and leave the rest to the private sector. NOAA has the weather sats, NSF has the science sats (did you see the pics from the recent Mars orbiter? Beautiful!), the Air Force has the spy sats, and privates (like RW and Hughes) do the commsats.

I do think we could have gotten earlier commsats had there been some government investment in the 60s, but AT&T wasn't interested, and they had a big lobby at the time.

BTW, Van Allen died recently, but I got a chance to meet him a few years back. He was a good guy. I admire his dedication to pure science. I later had lunch with one of his protoges, Carl McIlwain. He worked on aurora research in the late 50s/early 60s with sounding rockets, and he's still designing magnetospheric satellites for NSF to this day (in his 80s! he also can probably out-bike any of you whippersnappers). Sometimes I think the grass is greener on the non-profit side of things, but that's all academic now.

Fair enough, Johnson was a brave man, but the idea of a civilian agency trying to cover everything ? Gimme a break. Imagine... a federal agency tasked with comsats / meteosats / planetary orbiters AND manned flight leading to a man on the Moon AND aeronautics (yes, Johnson aparently wanted the NACA to be the basis for that... but the NACA is aeronautics, not space !)
As if NACA was not busy enough in the decade of the 60's and 70's !
They helped with the development of DynaSoar, the 800 passengers giants, the abortive supersonic transport, the tilt-rotors and tilt-wings fast commuters CL-84 and XV-15... no, really, NACA had already too much on its plates with aeronautics. Let's be serious !
And yes, Van allen contribution to space science made his 1969 Nobel Prize perfectly justified.
As for the private sector - I have mixed feelings about them. The bastards had zero interest in DynaSoar, letting it died at the pre-production stage when the military disengaged, in 1967. To their discharge, perhaps the technology was not mature enough for a space or hypersonic passenger transport... we are still waiting for it four decades later, anyway. That's frustrating.

I think in the absence of a Soviet counterpart, a spaceplane doesn't make a lot of sense. Maybe I'm just biased toward Van Allen's view...

There actually was a soviet spaceplane, or at least an atempt. It was called the PKA, and all that survives is a drawing.
(OOC http://www.astronautix.com/craft/pka.htm)

the soviets aparently had their own manned spaceflight champion, think it was Serguey Koroliov. After the Soviet Union barely lost the satellite race, Krushtchev aparently briefly considered the propaganda value of sending a men into space.
The legend said Koroliov jumped the bandwagon and in spring 1958 he presented the Soviet leader with two projects. One was a Soviet MISS - Man In space Soonest, a human cannonball.
The other was the PKA, pretty much a Soviet DynaSoar. Eager to beat the Americans, the Soviet leader picked up the PKA and ordered Koroliov to have it fly by 1962. Needless to say the project went nowhere; it in fact consumed Koroliov health with its final death putting an end to the project, aparently in spring 1961.

Sure enough, the PKA and DynaSoar looks like stranded relics of a lost future**; although they were nowhere leading to a manned lunar program as you dreamed, Neopeius.

**OOC the expression is straight from Stephen Baxter novel Voyage, where in 1980 a future Mars astronaut training in Houston is shown a small model of... the (lost) space shuttle.