In April of 1958, an ARTV Thor-Able exploded over the Atlantic. The missile was a new three stage booster--a marriage of the Thor IRBM, a Vanguard 2nd Stage, and a new solid rocket. ARTV was a series of launches designed to test a new ablative nose cone for use on ICBMs. Upon intensive analysis, the explosion's culprit was found to be the turbopump assembly--and it had killed before on a test flight the previous October.
It was an error in manufacture which affected every single Thor missile. While it could be fixed in upcoming production runs, the Thors which had been made already, including the ones earmarked for the Air Force's "Able" lunar missions, had the flawed turbopump. Engineers figured a 1 in 7 chance of explosion for every flight.
General Bernard Schriever, commanding officer of Florida's missile range, decided to use the bad boosters rather than delay the program several months.
His gamble paid off.
On the morning of August 17, Able-1 seemed to launch perfectly. Telemetry indicated that all stages fired properly. Something was wrong with the orbit, however. The wayward probe shifted laterally and did not have enough velocity to escape Earth's gravity. Though the probe reached a record 70,000 miles in altitude and returned an unprecedented slew of data, Able-1 ultimately crashed into its mother planet.
What had caused the probe to go astray? As it turned out, a support beam at the front of the stage had been intentionally mounted asymmetrically as part of the design. When the third stage fired against the second, this asymmetry deflected the thrust and sent the booster careening off course.
There was no time to redesign the second to third-stage interface before the next planned launch in October. Instead, to ensure that Able 2 (to be christened Pioneer 2 now that NASA was taking over executive management) did not suffer the same fatal course deviations as Able 1, a one-second delay between second-stage cutoff and third-stage ignition was introduced.
That caused its own problems, as it turned out. On October 11, Pioneer 2 left the launch pad. Schriever's luck held again as the Thor performed properly. The second-stage did as well, too. But the third stage never fired which left America with another failed lunar probe whose orbit rapidly decayed.
This one was easy to diagnose. The message simply hadn't gotten through to the third stage to fire.
With two strikes and the last Thor-Able booster at bat, the Air Force and the probe's builders, Space Technology Laboratories, were understandably nervous. Still, if Schriever's luck held out, Pioneer 3 had a good chance, it was felt.
Of course, as even the most cursory history books will tell you, Pioneer 3 launched on November 7, 1958 and became the first artificial satellite of the moon. The probe returned unprecedented, if very low resolution, photos of Earth's neighbor including the first of the moon's unseen Far Side. It was an important American victory. Just over one year since the Soviet Union had caught the United States napping with Sputnik, America had seized the higher ground.
It was also a valuable feather in the caps of both the Air Force and STL who went on to have a profound influence over the shape of American space policy. With the success of STL's follow-on "Atlas Able" program, the company assured itself a spot as NASA's prime contractor with JPL something of an also-ran. Its stable of engineers, largely plucked from nearby Cal Tech, enjoyed relative freedom of action. The initial hue and cry from America's scientific community over for-private mercenaries building the nation's probes largely died out.
Ironically, the initial victory in the Space Race almost caused the United States to lose entirely. A sense of complacency settled over the country in 1959, and the Air Force had a lot of clout to push a variety of ill-starred programs including an orbital X-15 variant and a minimal capsule proposal called M.an I.n S.pace S.oonest. America did a focused manned program to respond with when Yuri Gagarin became the first man to orbit the Earth in 1961.
Still, there is nothing to beat a huge industrial base and a national reluctance to suffer an egged face thrice. The Arsenal of Democracy retooled and by 1970, Artemis 12 was on the moon. That they were sooned joined by a Soviet counterpart put a damper on American jubilation, however. The famous Moon Treaty of 1972 which rendered the moon unclaimable, like Antarctica, did much to ensure that outer space did not become a battleground.
The moon is now home to 30 full-time scientists. They come from all over the world--from Japan, France, Honduras, even Afghanistan. They come on the most sophisticated vessels yet made by man all of which owe their existence to the humble little probes that started the Moon Race, the Pioneers.