William Sittig:
Good morning, everyone.  Thank you so much for coming on such a beautiful day.  But I'm sure that this program will be well worth your time spent here.  I'm Bill Sittig, Chief of the Library, Science, Technology, and Business Division.  And this event is one in our series in which we learn from important writers and practitioners in the various fields of science, technology, and business.  

Before I introduce today's speaker, I'd like to mention just a few of our upcoming programs.  On September 28th, Holly Shimizu, Executive Director of the U.S. Botanic Garden, who spoke here last May when we were interrupted by an evacuation, is going to continue her talk on herbs in the garden.  This time will be fall-planting herbs rather than spring herbs.  On October 13th, John Beck, who is President of North Star Leadership Group, will speak on his recent book, Got Game:  How the Gamer Generation Is Reshaping Business Forever.  And October 25th, writer Robert Slater will talk about his book, No Such Thing as Overexposure:  Inside the Life and Celebrity of Donald Trump.

[ laughter ]

I trust that you will find each of these programs of interest, and that you will be able to attend all or some of them.  I'd also like to take this opportunity to thank Tomoko Steen, a Science Research Specialist in my division, for suggesting this program today, and doing all those things to prepare and make this program a success.  

It is now my great pleasure to introduce today's speaker, Dr. Jonathan McDowell.  Dr. McDowell is an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics -- there he is -- in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  As a staff member of the Chandra X-Ray Center, he studies black holes, quasars, and x-ray sources in galaxies, among other areas of interest to the astronomy community.  In addition to serving as Group Leader of the Center's Science Data System Group, Dr. McDowell is Chair of the Data Models Working Group for the International Virtual Observatory Alliance, in which role he leads efforts to define international standards for astronomy metadata.  Before arriving at Harvard, he earned his B.A. in mathematics and a Ph.D. in astronomy at Cambridge University in England, where he spent a good part of his early life.  He then worked at the Royal Greenwich Observatory, the radio observatory at Jodrell Bank, which is part of the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom, and at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.  

In addition to contributing to a number of scientific publications on a wide range of astronomical subjects, he is the Editor of Jonathan's Space Report, a free Internet newsletter founded in 1989, which provide technical details of satellite launches.  He maintains a Web site, which provides the most comprehensive historical list of satellite launch information.  And he is a regular contributing editor to Sky & Telescope magazine.  He has been carrying out research on space history topics using original sources, which have recently been declassified by the U.S. Department of Defense and various Russian agencies.  

In his presentation today, Dr. McDowell will retell the story of the first five years of the Space Age, from the launch of Sputnik to the flight of Yuri Gagarin and President Kennedy's declaration of the Moon Race, including this information, which has only recently come to light.  It is my honor to introduce Dr. Jonathan McDowell.

[ applause ]

Dr. Jonathan McDowell:
Thank you, Bill.  

William Sittig:
Thank you.

Dr. Jonathan McDowell:
So I want to take you back today before the time when we were all blasˇ about the amazing results from space exploration, pictures of alien worlds, commercial space flights, space stations, space telescopes, space shuttles, the Moon Race.  I want to take you back before even John Glenn's pioneering flight, the first American astronaut to orbit the earth.  On May the 25th, 1961, John Kennedy started off the Moon Race with his speech in which he said that this country should commit itself, within that decade, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.  But, by then, the Space Age was already in full flow.  The first artificial earth satellite was launched almost 50 years ago in 1957.  And so, it's a good time now to revisit what those exciting pioneering and primitive early years were like because in the past few years, as Bill said, there's a lot of new material became available.  The story I can tell today is not the story I would have been able to tell 20 years ago, before the fall of the Soviet Union, and before the declassification of the early American space program.  

So that's my goal.  I want to digress at the beginning, and say, "Well, how can we say when the Space Age began?  You actually have to understand what space is, to decide when you're in it."  

[ laughter ]

Then I want to give you a little bit of a deep view into the early Soviet space program, the different missions that the Soviet Union carried out in this period, and to a lesser extent, because I won't have time, the details of the early American space program.  I'll tell you a few anecdotes about the early satellite technology that we still use today.  And I want to then bring it together, and ask the question from our new viewpoint, "Who was really winning the Space Race in 1961?"  At the time that Kennedy made his speech, I'm going to argue that the seeds of the eventual United States victory in the Space Race had already been laid very firmly.  And I won't have time for the later developments, I'm sure, but you can ask me later.  

So let's begin by asking the question, "What is space and where does it start?" because I'm a little heretical on this issue.  

[ laughter ]

It'd be nice if there was a nice little boundary, a custom zone, where you went up, and the atmosphere stopped.  Below it you could breath, and, above, it's a vacuum of space.  But, really, the atmosphere just kind of peters out.  So you have to use a number of different arguments, to say where should we stop saying this is flight in the atmosphere, and where should we say you're in space.  And people have used different definitions.  There are some people who put it as low as about 20 miles.  A very popular rule right now is to use 60 miles, a hundred kilometers, nice round metric number.  That's what the X PRIZE folks used with the SpaceShipOne flight last year.  I actually think that's a little high.  And I would argue for about 50 miles, 80 kilometers.  And I'll just say, there's a couple of different reasons.  I think you can argue on historical grounds, you can make arguments on technological grounds, and on physical grounds.  

So if you just look from the technology point of view, how high do things, that need the air to fly, fly?  The highest airplanes go up to about 38 kilometers.  The highest balloons -- I was actually surprised to discover that the height record is higher for balloons than for airplanes.  The scientific balloons, without any people on, they just fly scientific experiments way up to the edge of the stratosphere, they go as high as 51 kilometers.  See, these regions of the atmosphere here that you see, normally you're flying in the troposphere when you are going across the Atlantic, or maybe in the lower stratosphere.  But right up the top of the stratosphere, at 50 kilometers, is as high as anything, that needs the air, can go.  

If you come from the top down, there are lots of satellites and spaceships flying at maybe 200 kilometers above the surface of the earth.  And some, if you're in elliptical orbit, will dip down much lower.  And it turns out that you can make many orbits of the earth, dipping down to 90 or even 80 kilometers.  But if you try and dip down to 70 kilometers, pretty soon you explode and burn up.  And, in fact, when you're trying to get rid of something in space -- when the Russians get rid of a cargo ship from the International Space Station, they send it into an orbit.  They just fire their engines just enough to go into an orbit that dips down to about 70 kilometers.  And that's enough to dip it into the atmosphere, to make it burn up, and reenter.  So, I think, clearly, by then, you're no longer in space.  So that's a technological reason, always a little dangerous to use technological reasons to define a boundary because the technology might change.  

There's also a historical reason the Air Force gave astronaut wings to the brave X-15 rocket pilots, who flew above 50 miles, which happens to be this 80-kilometer boundary.  And there's a physics reason, which is, the last real physical boundary in the earth's neutral atmosphere is at the mesopause at 80 kilometers.  What happens in the atmosphere is, as you go up through the atmosphere, it gets hotter and then there's a -- or it gets colder, there's a discontinuity, gets hotter, another discontinuity, gets colder again.  The last such transition layer in the atmosphere is at that 80-kilometer, roughly, boundary.  It depends, on the weather, exactly how high.  And after that, the atmosphere just peters out, the neutral atmosphere.  So I'm going to use 80 kilometers as my metric for where you start saying you're in space.  It doesn't really matter that much, 80, a hundred.  It doesn't change the story a great deal.  But I was trained as a mathematician, so I'm appetent.  

So, when did we first go into space, with that definition?  Earlier than you might think.  The very first flight, the very first time that human beings put something above the earth's atmosphere was as early as 1942.  And we have Mike Neufeld here, who's written the definitive book on the history of the V-2 rocket program.  The German rocket engineer, Wernher von Braun, as part of the Nazi war effort, flew this V-2 rocket on a test flight up to about a hundred kilometers, and down into the Baltic.  It was only in space for a few minutes.  It wasn't in orbit, but it did get into space.  

So this rocket is the ancestor of very much the rocket technology we still have today.  And it's important for those of us who are enthusiastic about the history of the space program, and the great opportunities for our future that space technology provides, that we not be silent about the murky morality of the origins of this technology because, of course, Wernher von Braun, who was a great hero in this country for building the rockets that got us to the moon, was also, we believe, must have been aware of the deaths in the labor camps that were used for the production of the factories of the thousands of these rockets that were fired against London and Paris.  So, the space program began on a murky note, a controversial note.  

But after the end of the war, very quickly, this technology spread around the world, mostly the V-2 technology.  It then synergized with groups already working on this technology in the United States and in the Soviet Union.  And indeed, within a couple years of the end of the war, 1946 in the United States in New Mexico, 1947 near Volgograd in Russia, we used captured V-2 rockets to make the first American and Russian probes above the atmosphere.  But the French also got into the act.  They used the same technology as early as 1954 in their base in Algeria, and the Brits developed their own rocket in their Australian base at Woomera by 1957.  And very soon after, Japan, Australia, all these other countries joined in the game.  

So one thing I want to get across to you is that, if you just want to get into space, and come back down again a few minutes later, it's really not that hard.  And it's not just the story of the two superpowers.  The space exploration began on a very international note, particularly in 1957, with the International Geophysical Year, whose anniversary is now approaching, when many scientists all across the world began the serious scientific exploration of deep space.  But just getting into space for a few minutes isn't the game.  

Male Speaker:
Right.

Dr. Jonathan McDowell:
You want to be able to stay there.  And this is what we call being in orbit with the satellite.  What's "being in orbit?"  Douglas Adams famously said, in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, that "the secret to flying is to throw yourself at the ground and miss."  

[ laughter ]

And this is exactly what being in orbit is.  If you are in orbit, you punch up through the atmosphere in a few minutes.  And then, you fly sideways, burning your rocket engine for about five more minutes, until you've built up so much speed, a magic speed of 18,000 miles an hour, so that by the time you've fallen a mile towards the earth, you've gone so far sideways, that the earth is curved away from you by a mile, and you haven't gotten any closer.  And this way, you can fall all around the earth.  This is how the moon stays up.  This is how satellites and space stations stay up.  It's a lot harder, that extra 18,000 miles an hour, sideways.  

If you look at the energy you need -- and this is, like, my only technical slide, so don't panic -- the little red bar here says how much energy the V-2 needed to go on its trajectory into space.  In the units, I'm using one and a half megajoules per kilogram of total energy.  In comparison, a satellite at the same height, but going all the way around the earth, because it needs the sideways velocity, needs 20 times as much energy, 31.6 megajoules per kilogram.  So it's much harder.  It took 15 more years after the first V-2 flight, to get to the first satellite.  And this is why -- you know, Burt Rutan's amazing SpaceShipOne, which flew last year to win the X PRIZE, great achievement, no question, but you have to understand, it's doing the V-2 thing, not the satellite thing.  It's going to be awhile before we have the orbital tourist flights because the technology involved is much harder by this factor of 20.  

So we did get that technology in 1957.  The Soviet Union launched the first satellite, Sputnik.  And so, what I'm going to do now, is talk a little bit about that early Soviet program, what we knew then, and what we know now.  And you can't talk about the early Soviet program without talking about Sergey Pavlovich Korolyov, hero of the Soviet Union, the mysterious chief designer of Soviet spaceships whose identity was kept secret until his death in 1966.  And Korolyov is the guy who really was behind all of the early Soviet space programs in a big way.  There were, in fact, five early Soviet space programs that I'm going to talk about:  the Sputnik, the first satellite; the "D" scientific satellite, which was meant to be the first satellite, it was originally planned to go up first; the lunar moon probes; probes to Mars and Venus; and the Vostok spaceship, which put Yuri Gagarin, the first astronaut, in orbit.  

There were a couple of other important folks in the early Soviet space program.  As well as Korolyov, there was a guy called Mikhail Yangel, who had a base in the Ukraine, or a rocket base where he designed the R-12 rocket, famous for putting the missile in the Cuban Missile Crisis, and Vladimir Chelomei, who worked on military space programs.  But at the time they were working on military missiles, their space programs didn't really get going until after the cutoff date that I'm considering in the early '60s.  And so, really, all the early ones were Korolyov.  I should mention, though, that it's important to understand that, Korolyov, Yangel, and Chelomei had these three design bureaus, which you could kind of think of like different NASA centers, like Goddard, and Kennedy Space Center, and so on.  But they were almost more, in their behavior, like independent armed services.  They got on with each other about as well as the Air Force gets on with the Navy.

[ laughter ]

And they had their own patrons in the Politburo.  And their fortunes rose and fell with that.  If you want to read more about that, I highly recommend a book by Asif Siddiqi, The Soviet Space Challenge, which the folks at the NASA History Office published a few years ago.  

So I'm going to talk about the Korolyov programs in '57 to '61.  Of course, the very first orbital launch came about from the first intercontinental ballistic missile, again, the tight coupling between the military and space exploration technologies.  The first intercontinental ballistic missile was called the R7.  American rockets had great names like "Atlas" and "Thor" and "Jupiter."  And the Russians had boring alphanumeric designations.  So you'll have to bear with me.  

The first launch was in May 1957.  And, of course, it blew up.  But of course, the Russians weren't using the same publicity as the United States did, so they kept it quiet.  But they crowed about the success of the first successful flight of an intercontinental missile in August 1957, an achievement that was greeted with some skepticism by some circles in the West.  And they were soon to get a big shock.  

Korolyov had already planned to convert his missile into a satellite launcher.  He was going to take the R7, give it beefier engines, better electronics, and put a one-ton scientific satellite on top.  But then he read in the papers that the Americans were going to launch a satellite for the International Geophysical Year, called Vanguard.  And it was going to happen soon.  So they rushed, and in just a few weeks, they made a small little satellite, small for them, bigger than the ones we were working on, here, the Sputnik, the Prosteishiy Sputnik [ unintelligible ], the Simplest Satellite, 80 kilograms.  And they just put it on top of the missile they already had, shot it into orbit on October the 4th, 1957.  And a few weeks later, they had, lying around the lab, this cabin for putting dogs on suborbital trajectories on rockets like the V-2.  So they took that, they put a husky dog called "Laika" and stuffed it on top of the rocket, and put that into orbit, which was briefly a propaganda coup, and then, I think, turned against them somewhat when people realized that there was no way to get Laika back down.  And sadly, she died after a few hours in space.  

This fly seems to really like my talk.

[ laughter ]

We're just going to pretend it's not there.  

So after the success of Sputnik, Korolyov carried on with the original satellite rocket he had meant to launch.  And it was finally ready in February 1958, by which time Wernher von Braun's Explorer-I satellite had got America back in the game.  And here is the D satellite, the one-ton scientific satellite launched in February 1958, and immediately blew up.  But they had a backup, which they launched in May of 1958.  And it was known in the West as Sputnik 3, the third Soviet satellite, which studied the Van Allen Belts, the radiation belts discovered by Jim Van Allen's experiment on the first American satellite explorer, so much more impressive in some ways than Explorer-I, but really scooped by the United States, from a scientific point of view.  And then, nothing happens apparently in the Russian program, for the rest of that year, silence until January of 1959, when they announce their first attempt to go to the moon.  They launched the Luna 1 Probe, which missed the moon, but became the first artificial planet going around the sun.  And in September of that year, they launched another one.  This upper right picture here is -- can you see the pointer?  

Audience:
Yes.

Dr. Jonathan McDowell:
This is Luna 2, which was the first probe that hit the moon, and delivered a very important cargo of metal pennants with Lenin's face stamped on them, that got scattered all over the lunar surface.  The next month they did something a bit more scientifically useful.  They flew a probe around the back of moon, and took the very first photos of the far side, which had never been seen before; that side of the moon is pointed away from the earth.  And so, all in all, that program was, again, a big propaganda triumph, especially as the United States was not having a lot of luck with its pioneer lunar probes at the time.  

What we know now is that long-rumored earlier attempts of the Russians to get to the moon, in 1958, have now been confirmed.  They first tried in September of '58, only a month after the first American launch failure on the subject.  And, in fact, from '58 to '59, their E1 Lunar Probe was launched 6 times with only 2 successes.  And even more interesting to me, after that success of the far side photos, they launched another two lunar photo probes that were meant to take better pictures because, although the Lunar 3 pictures were historic and great, they were pretty fuzzy.  And so in April 1960, they launched a couple more probes, both of which failed, but one of which got out to 200,000 kilometers, halfway to the moon, and as far as I can tell, seems to have been completely missed by American tracking.  So we had no clue until it was declassified in the 1990s.

[ laughter ]

This is the Sputnik rocket with an extra rocket stage and a little moon probe nestled inside the nosecone.  They also had a spectacularly unsuccessful series of attempts to get to Mars and Venus, the other planets.  They launched four, two to Mars in 1960, two to Venus in 1961, and none of them got to their targets.  But the U.S. hadn't even tried to launch a probe in that direction yet.  The first American Venus probe was in 1962.  So at least we can give them marks for effort.  

Much more successful was the Vostok probe launched in April 1961, the very first human spaceflight by Yuri Gagarin -- you see him on the right, here -- launched on this rocket, went around the earth once in this spherical pressurized cabin.  Here's Yuri sitting on the ejection seat, and a big retrorocket to boost him down back out of orbit where he could land in a field in Kazakhstan, or in Russia, actually.  And he gets out and he ejects and lands separately on a parachute in his bright orange spacesuit, and a farm worker comes up and goes, "Wow, are you really from outer space?"  

[ laughter ]

And as far as I can translate his reply, it goes, "No.  I'm from Smolensk.  I just work in outer space."

[ laughter ]

But, you know, a few months earlier, in fact, even a month and a half earlier, in March of 1961, if I had been Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin, I would have been real worried because up until that point, they'd had five launches in the Vostok program, of only one of which had been successful.  The first launch, the retrorocket fired in the wrong direction, the cabin went up into a higher orbit.  The second one crashed near the launch site.  The third one, these cute little dogs, Belka and Strelka, was a success.  They became the first living beings to come back from orbit.  But the next two also failed.  And it was only in March of 1961, just about a month before Gagarin's flight, where they had the operated version of the spacecraft.  They flew it twice that month successfully, and then shot Gagarin off.  So it came from a very ropey program to a very successful one, very quickly.  And after that, they flew five more astronauts in the '61 to '63 period, all successfully.  So in the end, a triumph, but by December 1960, they must have been getting pretty nervous.  

And the Vostok satellite is still in use today, a derivative of it, to fly microgravity experiments.  Once they get something that works, they like to keep using it.  So that's an overview of the Russian program.  All of these projects were done by the Korolyov team.  And there were just these five programs at the time.  On the American side -- here, this is a great photo.  This is the moment of the first big American success, Explorer-I, February the 1st, 1958.  We have Bill Pickering, the Director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, James Van Allen, who discovered the Van Allen Belts, did the science experiment, and Wernher von Braun, the German rocket engineer, holding America's first satellite, or actually a model of it because they had launched the real thing the previous day.  

[ laughter ]

And what Wernher von Braun did was, he took the V-2 rocket and stretched it a little, and made the Redstone rocket, and stuck a bunch of extra motors on top, so that when the rocket's at apogee, at its highest point of its trajectory, you fire these motors quickly in succession, and accelerate the satellite to the magic 18,000 miles an hour that you need to stay in orbit.  Here it is, the first American satellite launch vehicle, on the pad, see, venting fuel on the night of January 31st, '58.  Here are the extra rockets on top.  And this little thing, right at the top, here, is the satellite.  

During this program, I'll just tell a little bit about some of the technology they did.  One of the early pieces of technology that they came up with was a thing called the apogee kick motor.  This is something I've been looking into.  Once you get into orbit, this little dashed line is the rocket coming up and falling back down.  The upper stage fires to speed it up and get it into this orbit around the earth.  And for most of the early rockets, you ended up in an orbit where the closest point was actually not that far above the atmosphere even though the highest point was pretty nice and high.  And that meant that friction with the atmosphere made you reenter quicker than you would like.  So what you really want to do is fire another rocket half an orbit later to speed you up and get into a nice circular orbit that won't return.  This technique was called, by a JPL guy, Pickering, he invented it as the "giving the satellite a kick in the apogee."  

[ laughter ]

And that's the origin of the phrase "apogee kick motor" that aerospace people use today.  And the trick about it was they didn't have any fancy GPS or computers or anything.  So what they did was, the problem was, you've got this rocket that you have to make sure is pointing in the right direction when you fire it, or you won't get the result you want.  So how do you make sure it's pointing in the right direction?  What they did was they mounted the rocket upside-down, so that the nozzle's pointing up when you launch it.  You get into orbit.  At the bottom of the picture, the nozzle's pointing in the direction you're flying.  But as it goes around the earth, it doesn't keep pointing the same direction toward the earth.  It keeps pointing the same direction in space, so that half an orbit later, it's now pointing the other direction, in the direction of travel.  And you can fire it.  So all you need is to mount the thing upside-down and use a stopwatch for the half orbit it's going to take before you can fire it, very low technology.  

They first tried this in the late 1950s, a satellite launched on the Redstone.  And it's this tiny little motor inside the nosecone that was only two pounds weight.  Unfortunately, it didn't get to do its stuff.  The rocket fell in the ocean.  And they didn't use this technique until the '60s.  But this was a kind of the low tech, what I'm trying to get here is, the low tech approaches that really did some quite sophisticated things, or not so sophisticated, as in the case of this, America's first satellite launch attempt, the Vanguard, which blew up just as it was on the pad in December 1957.  It got about a few inches off the pad, huge publicity, not very good.  Vanguard has a horrible reputation, but it's very important, historically.  

The early launches, they used this tiny little test satellite weighing only four pounds.  They launched three of them to try and get them into orbit, and they had success on the third try.  And then they went to this lower satellite, a 20-inch polished sphere containing scientific experiments, the Vanguard Sphere.  And they launched eight of those, and two of them got into orbit.  So this, even at the time, was considered not a good success record.  And the Vanguard program was wrapped up.  Some of the Vanguard team went to NASA Goddard to do science satellites, what was then called the Beltsville Space Center, now NASA Goddard.  And some stayed at the Naval Research Lab.  And in most history books, that's the end of the Vanguard story, except for the note that parts of the rocket were used in the Delta, that's still flying today as a very, very successful rocket.  

But I came across the fact that actually the spherical satellite developed by the Naval Research Lab, the 20-inch sphere, had a later interesting history.  Although Vanguard was billed as, "Yeah, it's a Navy program, but it's for purely scientific purposes for the International Geophysical Year.  This is why we're better than those guys in the Army down in Huntsville, Alabama," in fact, immediately after the Vanguard program ended, the 20-inch sphere was pressed into service as a secret Navy satellite series launched on other rockets.  The first one was the GRAB satellite, which was launched in 1960 as a solar physics experiment.  It was studying solar radiation.  But unknown to the solar physicist who'd put their experiment in, some other guys at NRL had crept into the hangar in the dead of night and put in their experiment, which was not studying solar radiation; it was studying Soviet radiation.  And it was the First Signals Intelligence Satellite, and studied Soviet radars.  And the Vanguard Sphere went on as late as 1967.  A version of it was being used to test out the technology to orient a satellite using the gradient of the earth's gravity, and to do formation flight tests, which led on to some of the Navy surveillance satellites in use today.  So the Vanguard legacy, in terms of satellites, was actually much longer than is usually talked about.  

How am I doing for time?  I'm going to briefly mention NOTSNIK, another Navy program that wasn't known at the time, but became more declassified in the 1990s.  Here's a little airplane with this little green cute rocket underneath.  And they flew this plane off the California coast into a steep climb, and fired it in an attempt to get into orbit.  They tried six times.  There are no confirmed successes.  The guy who was involved in the program is convinced that one of them did get into an orbit later.  He thinks he heard the signal from the satellite.  But, as we've seen more recently, often, when you're really searching for a faint radio signal in the noise, you think you hear it.  And I'm pretty convinced that this thing didn't ever work.  And so, attempts to launch satellites from airplanes didn't really get going until the 1990s with the Pegasus rocket that's very successful today.  Here is the track that they used off the California coast.  

Much more successful, very important in history, is the Corona satellite program run by the CIA.  The Corona was very important in the history of the Cold War, in making the SALT Treaties possible, in reducing tensions because we knew exactly how many missiles the other side had.  It's also very important in the history of space technology: the first satellite to orbit around the poles; the first satellite to be three-axis stabilized, which means you can point it anywhere you like, like at the ground, or, if you're like me, an astronomer, at a particular star; and the first satellite to be recovered from space, using this very funky technique you see in this bottom right picture.  A plane goes along, dragging a little hook behind it, and they snag the descending satellite's parachute out of the air in midair, and bring it back to get its film developed.  But getting Corona to work was very tricky.  The very first attempt to get Discoverer II back, the timer was wrong.  It landed half an orbit off.  And instead of coming down over Hawaii, it came down over the Arctic.  And if you've seen the movie "Ice Station Zebra," it's based on this.  Some of them went, they fired their retrorocket that went wrong way and went into the higher orbits, their power supplies failed, their parachutes failed, their rockets failed.  Finally in Discoverer-13, a test flight, they didn't manage to snatch it out of the air, but they did get it back from the sea.  And on the very next mission, they flew a camera-carrying satellite, which took the very first spy satellite picture.  Here it is, runways of a Soviet airbase, taken on the 18th of August 1960.  

But let's just think about this a minute.  Here are the first 14 Discoverer launches, thanks to the photos from the History Archives at Vandenberg Air Force Base.  In only a year and a half, they launched 14 missions in this one program.  That would never happen today.  But even more amazing, the first 13 of them didn't work!  Can you imagine getting funding today, when the first 13 flights fail?  So this really tells you the benefits when you have priority funding and political support, this tolerance of failure.  And Richard Bissell at the CIA had very strong support from Eisenhower to get this thing working.  They knew that the U-2 spy plane was vulnerable.  They had to get a replacement for it.  

So let me just step back a second.  I went out of order here.  

What I want to point out, having talked about some of these early programs, is that the early American space program -- this was before NASA -- it was run by the military and by the CIA: the Army in Huntsville, Alabama; the Navy in Washington, and the China Lake; and the Air Force, out at a place just south of LAX Airport in Los Angeles, as well as the CIA.  NASA was formed in 1958, to cover the civilian space programs, but didn't really take over -- it was pretty much an umbrella for the first couple of years.  It wasn't really until 1961 that NASA was really taking the lead in all of its scientific programs, having taken over the old ones.  

And in 1961, a new space agency, the National Reconnaissance Office, was formed to take the CIA and the Air Force spy satellite programs and deal with those.  And that agency wasn't even admitted to exist until the 1990s.  

So I want to now contrast the American and Russian programs.  At the time, there was this big perception, right, that we were behind and the Russians were ahead, and the headlines certainly say that: first intercontinental ballistic missile, Soviet Union; first earth satellite, the Soviet Sputnik; the first living being in orbit, the Soviet dog, Laika; the first thing to go into solar orbit, and to hit the moon, and to take the first far side photos of the moon, the Soviet Luna 1, 2, and 3 probes; the first thing to be recovered from space, the American Discoverer-13 capsule, just a couple weeks before its Soviet rival -- actually, you know, I think one day before its Soviet rival, if I remember rightly.  The Belka and Strelka dogs came down the next day.  But we did at least get that one, but then the first human in space, one of the big prizes, Yuri Gagarin, hero of the Soviet Union.  So, not looking so good for our side if you just look at the newspapers.  

But it's important to understand, there were a lot of different programs going on in the U.S., both in NASA and outside.  We talked about the Explorer, and the Vanguard, and the Navy NOTS satellite, and the Corona.  There was also lunar probes by the Air Force and the Army, communications, navigation, and early warning satellites for the military, the Air Force Samos spy satellite, three separate NASA programs under the Explorer umbrella to understand the science of outer space, as well as the first weather satellites, the echo balloon for communications, and of course, the Mercury Program that hadn't had an orbital flight at the time I'm talking about, but was gearing up to put Alan Shepard on a suborbital flight, and John Glenn in orbit the next year.  

There were 16 different American satellite programs compared to only 5 Soviet ones.  There were eight different American groups that I've just mentioned compared to only one, the Korolyov group, in the Soviet Union, which was getting stretched very thin.  And there were six different main types of orbital rocket.  We had the Thor, and the Atlas, the Jupiter, the Vanguard, and so on.  The Russians just had their R7 missile, and they stuck different stages on top of it.  But all those early Russian programs that I told you about were all using the same basic rocket.  So our space effort at the time was much broader.  We had a much bigger depth of field.  And on this light, I try and compare in a mathematical way, who was more successful?  

Let me skip to the nonmathematical slide, to give you the visual.  
So here's all the weasel words about, do you count this one, do you count that one, within the Parson [ spelled phonetically ] error statistics, they're the same.  Here's the answer.  Both of us had a 50 percent success rate in the first 5 years of the space program.  You had a 50/50 chance of getting something into orbit.  The other thing you notice on this slide is we were launching a lot more rockets than they were.  They were the first to do almost everything, and we were the second and the third and the fourth and the fifth.  And we learned in depth how to do these things.  And they just moved on to the next spectacular, and didn't have that deeper experience.  So in total, of 109 launches, 84 of them were ours.  And I think that is one of the big clues as to why, within a few years, we were really leading the pack in the Space Race.  

Another thing that's kind of interesting, these are details of the particular rockets, but really, the key thing is we had a 50/50 success rate on average.  Within 5 years, we were getting in the mid-90s, and so were the Russians.  So we figured out how to do it.  And what's interesting to me is that whenever some other country has learned how to build their own space rockets, about the same thing has happened.  The first few years they lose about half of them.  And then, within about 5 years, if they're launching enough of them, they get up into the mid-90s.  And so far, no one has figured out how to get to the 99, 99.9 percent, and we're still waiting for that one.  We want it to be as safe as air travel, and we're a long way from that at the moment.  So it seems like, you know, the French, the Japanese, the Chinese had all the same experience, that you start off at 50/50, but it's relatively easy if you stick at it to get to 95 percent.  

So I still have a couple minutes.  I want to mention a few things that pressed on after this 1961 Kennedy speech.  The Air Force had its own spy satellites, the Samos series, of which my favorite is this one, the E-5.  You see this Atlas rocket with a kind of hammerhead nosecone.  And this was a pressurized spy satellite capsule that brought the whole camera back, and not just the film.  It was launched several times, never worked.  One of them reentered, and is thought to be crashed somewhere in northern Canada, never been found.  Apparently, what was really going on was, the Air Force in Lockheed wanted to compete for their own Mercury capsule that could carry an astronaut.  So they built a spy satellite that was pressurized, that had air in it, so it could easily be converted to carry an astronaut, even though it was actually a pretty "sucky" design for an intelligence satellite --

[ laughter ]

-- but they didn't really care, as far as I can tell.  Things that happen in our government.  

There was a secret weather satellite that was used to see whether Russia was cloudy, so you shouldn't bother wasting your spy satellite film.  It later supported operations in Vietnam, and is the ancestor of the modern Air Force weather satellites.  Commercial satellites started happening in 1962 at the AT&T's Telstar.  And navigation satellites, the ancestors of GPS, started happening, as well, with the operational system coming online in 1964.  

And I have to finish with this great show of 1960s fashions --  

[ laughter ]

-- and the point that, although the suborbital exploration of space had been very international, as I showed very early on, the orbital exploration of space had been the superpowers up until this point.  But that started changing as early as 1962, with the British aerial satellite, British-owned, launched in 1962 to study space research, and a Canadian satellite called "Alouette."  And very soon, a lot of other nations started buying their own satellites, initially launched on American rockets.  Bu, later, other countries developed their own orbital capability.  And that led us on the way to the modern space era, which is extremely international, where America is still the most powerful space power, but certainly one among many, rather than the only game in town.  

So, thank you very much.  I hope that's given you an overview of the early space program in a little more depth than usually you get in the history --  

[ end of transcript ]



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LOC - 050913mcdowell	2/18/08