From NACA to NASA

(November 1957 - September 1958)

SPUTNIK II, carrying its canine passenger into orbit on November 3, 1957, made clear what the first Sputnik had only implied: the U.S.S.R. would eventually try to put a man in orbit. Americans read of this latest Soviet achievement and wondered how soon the West might be able to restore the technological and ideological balance. Throughout the United States, individuals and organizations were doing an uncommon amount of introspection. It was time for some rethinking and reexamination, for an inquiry into the nature, meaning, and direction of American government and society in the Space Age.

One of the most introspective Government agencies in the post-Sputnik period was the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. To most people in NACA it was obvious that the organization had reached a crisis in its proud but rather obscure history; unless NACA moved rapidly and adroitly it might very well be overwhelmed in the national clamor for radical departures. New guidelines for its future clearly were in order. On November 18, 19, and 20, 1957, aboard the carrier Forrestal off the eastern coast of Florida, NACA's key Committee on Aerodynamics held another of its periodic meetings. Carried on in a mood of patriotic concern and challenge created by the Sputniks, these discussions reinforced the growing conviction that NACA should do more in astronautics. Among the 22 representatives of industry, the military, and academic aeronautics making up the committee, a consensus emerged that "NACA should act now to avoid being ruled out of the field of space flight research," and that "increased emphasis should be placed on research on the problems of true space flight over extended periods of time." The committee then adopted a resolution calling for "an aggressive program … for increased NACA participation in upper atmosphere and space flight research."¹

Two days after the Committee on Aerodynamics adjourned, the Main Committee of NACA met and voted to establish a Special Committee on Space Technology. H. Guyford Stever, a physicist and dean of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, took charge of the heterogeneous group. The special committee was the first established by NACA to concern itself expressly and exclusively with space matters. It was "to survey the whole problem of space technology from the point of view of needed research and development and advise the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics with respect to actions which the NACA should take."² Appointed to the new committee were such diverse leaders in space science and technology as James A. Van Allen, Wernher von Braun, William H. Pickering, and W. Randolph Lovelace II.³

As apprehensive Americans watched the failure of the Vanguard test vehicle in December and the successful Jupiter-C launch of Explorer I in January, NACA continued to assess its potential role in the Space Age. Shortly after the Sputniks, NACA Director Hugh L. Dryden; Chairman James H. Doolittle; John F. Victory, the venerable executive secretary of NACA; and others at Headquarters in Washington had decided on the course NACA should follow in succeeding months. Assuming that now a unified space program would come into being, the NACA leaders wanted to ensure their organization a place in such a national enterprise. To Dryden, who largely guided the formulation of its strategy, NACA should proceed cautiously toward its minimum and yet most important objective - extension of its traditional preeminence as an aeronautical research organization into the higher realm of astronautics. This would involve a continuation of NACA's traditional function as planner, innovator, tester, and data-gatherer for the Defense Department and the missile and aircraft industry. While a larger role, entailing responsibilities for development, management, and flight operations in addition to research, very possibly could come to NACA in a national astronautics effort, publicly NACA should play down whatever ambitions for such a role individuals and groups within the agency might have.⁴

In keeping with this "soft-sell" philosophy and plan of attack, the Main Committee, at its regular meeting of January 16, 1958, resolved that any national undertaking in astronautics should combine the talents and facilities of the Defense Department, NACA, the National Academy of Sciences, and the National Science Foundation. In other words, national space activities should follow roughly the pattern of Project Vanguard. NACA, while taking part in the launching of space vehicles and acquiring more authority to let research contracts, should continue to function primarily as a research institution.⁵ Dryden essentially reiterated this viewpoint in a speech which Victory read for him nine days later before the Institute of the Aeronautical Sciences in New York. The NACA Director proposed that the current division of labor among the military, industry, and NACA be perpetuated in a national space program, with NACA doing research and providing technical assistance and the military contracting with industry for hardware development.⁶

Then, the next month, the Main Committee considered and circulated a prospectus inspired by Abe Silverstein, Associate Director of the Lewis Aeronautical Laboratory, and written mainly by his senior engineers. Entitled "A Program for Expansion of NACA Research in Space Flight Technology," it called for a "major expansion" of NACA activity to "provide basic research in support of the development of manned satellites and the travel of man to the moon and nearby planets." The Lewis group proposed an enlargement of NACA's existing laboratories and a new, separate installation for nuclear powerplant research. The cost of the expansion of the program, including the expense of contracted research, was estimated at $200 million. Nothing was said about giving NACA added development, management, and operational tasks in manned space flight programs.⁷

So by early February 1958, as the Eisenhower administration began wrestling with the complexities of formulating a national program for space exploration, NACA had taken the official position that with regard to space it neither wanted nor expected more than its historic niche in Government-financed science and engineering. While NACA should become a substantially bigger instrument for research, it should remain essentially a producer of data for use by others.

Missiles to Manned Ballistic Satellites

The circumspect approach of NACA Headquarters to a national space program was only one of several being suggested formally in the winter of 1957-1958. Various other proposals came from the scientific community. In mid-October the American Rocket Society had called for a civilian space research and development agency. In November the National Academy of Sciences endorsed an idea for a National Space Establishment under civilian leadership. By April 1958 a total of 29 bills and resolutions relating to the organization of the Nation's space efforts would be introduced by members of the Congress. Almost everyone assumed that some sort of thorough-going reform legislation, probably creating an entirely new agency, was needed if the United States was to overcome the Soviet lead in space technology. On January 23, 1958, the Senate Preparedness Investigating Committee under Senator Lyndon B. Johnson had summarized its findings in 17 specific recommendations, including the establishment of an independent space agency.⁸ During these months of debate and indecision, the military services continued their planning of space programs, both in hope of achieving a special role for themselves in space and in knowledge that U.S. planning could not simply stop during the months it took to settle the organizational problem.

Of the three military services the Air Force moved most rapidly with plans for advanced projects and programs. Responding to a request sent by the Office of the Secretary of Defense to the three military services, Headquarters USAF by mid-January 1958 had completed its review of the comprehensive five-year astronautics program submitted the previous month by the Air Research and Development Command. On January 24 the Air Force submitted the plan to William M. Holaday, Director of Guided Missiles in the Department of Defense. The five-year outline envisaged the development of reconnaissance, communications, and weather satellites; recoverable data capsules; a "manned capsule test system"; then manned space stations; and an eventual manned base on the Moon. The Air Force estimated that funding requirements for beginning such a long-range program in fiscal year 1959 would total more than $1.7 billion.⁹

The ambitious five-year plan, with its astronomical estimate of costs for the coming fiscal year, had remained in Holaday's office. The Air Force pressed ahead with its astronautics plans, including the placing of a manned capsule in orbit. On January 29, 30, and 31, 1958, ARDC held a closed conference at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, Ohio, where 11 aircraft and missile firms outlined for Air Force and NACA observers the various classified proposals for a manned satellite vehicle that they had submitted to ARDC during November and December 1957. The industry presentations appear to have varied considerably in thoroughness and complexity. The Northrop Corporation, for example, simply reviewed the boost-glide concept suggested by NACA at the Round Three Conference the previous October and already adopted by the Air Force for its Dyna-Soar project. By contrast, the Avco Manufacturing Corporation, the McDonnell Aircraft Corporation, Republic Aviation, and North American Aviation made detailed presentations, including estimates of the minimum amount of time required to put a man in orbit. Like Avco and other firms, McDonnell of St. Louis had been working on designs for a "minimum" satellite vehicle, employing a pure ballistic shape, since the spring of 1956, when the Air Force had first briefed industry representatives on its original Manned Ballistic Rocket Research proposal. Republic sketched a triangular planform arrangement modeled on the vehicle suggested the previous year by Antonio Ferri and others at the Gruen Applied Science Laboratories.¹⁰ The "Ferri sled," as the Republic device was called, was one of two approaches wherein the pilot would parachute after being ejected from the spacecraft, the vehicle itself not being recovered. The other company advocating an expendable spacecraft was North American; an X-15, although designed to land conventionally on skids as a rocket research aircraft, would orbit and then impact minus its parachuting pilot.¹¹

After the Wright-Patterson conference, the Air Force stepped up the pace of its manned-satellite studies. On January 31, ARDC directed the Wright Air Development Center to focus on the quickest means of getting a man in orbit. The center was to receive advice from the Air Force Ballistic Missile Division in Los Angeles on selection of a booster system. A few weeks later the center issued a purchase request, valued at nearly $445,000, for a study of an internal ecological system that could sustain a man for 24 hours in an orbiting capsule.¹²

On February 27, ARDC officers briefed General Curtis E. LeMay, Air Force Vice Chief of Staff, on three alternative approaches to manned orbital flight: developing an advanced version of the X-15 that could reach orbital velocity; speeding up the Dyna-Soar project, which eventually was supposed to put a hypersonic glider in orbit; or boosting a relatively simple, nonlifting ballistic capsule into orbit with an existing missile system, as proposed by Avco, McDonnell, and other companies. LeMay instructed ARDC to make a choice and submit a detailed plan for an Air Force man-in-space program as soon as possible.¹³

While the Air Force pushed its manned satellite investigations and its development work on the Thor, Atlas, and Titan, the Army and the Navy initiated manned space studies of their own in addition to accelerating their ballistic missile efforts with the Jupiter and the Polaris, respectively. Flushed with the success of the Explorer I satellite launching in January, the Army reached the apex of its astronautical prestige. Proud of the prowess of von Braun's rocket team at its Army Ballistic Missile Agency, Huntsville, Alabama, the Army sought a major role in military space technology. Since the Army already had lost operational responsibility for its Jupiter intermediate-range ballistic missile to the Air Force, a space mission was vitally important to its future in astronautics. Central to the Army's space plans was securing authorization, priority, and abundant financing from the Defense Department for one of von Braun's pet ideas, a clustered-engine booster vehicle with more than a million pounds of thrust.¹⁴

On February 7, 1958, Secretary of Defense Neil H. McElroy, acting on President Eisenhower's instructions, ordered the creation of an Advanced Research Project Agency (ARPA) to manage all existing space projects. Roy W. Johnson, a vice-president of General Electric, took over the directorship of this new office; Director of Guided Missiles Holaday transferred some of his responsibilities to the agency.¹⁵

Three weeks after the establishment of ARPA, Johnson acknowledged publicly that "the Air Force has a long term development responsibility for manned space flight capability with the primary objective of accomplishing satellite flight as soon as technology permits." The statement was reiterated on March 5 by a spokesman for McElroy. The Defense Department also authorized the Air Force to develop its "117L" system - an Atlas or Thor topped by a liquid-propellant upper stage (later named Agena) as a booster combination, together with an instrumented nose cone - "under the highest national priority in order to attain an initial operational capability at the earliest possible date." The 117L system, designed originally to orbit reconnaissance satellites, would now also be used for orbiting recoverable biological payloads, including primates.¹⁶

In response to Vice Chief of Staff LeMay's instructions of February 27 and the apparent receptiveness of Defense Department officials to the Air Force's astronautical plans, the Air Research and Development Command moved to "firm up" its plans for manned space flight. On March 8, the Ballistic Missile Division proposed an 11-step program aimed at the ultimate objective of "Manned Space Flight to the Moon and Return." The steps included instrumented and animal-carrying orbital missions, a manned orbit of Earth, circumnavigation of the Moon with instruments and then animals, instrumented hard and soft landings on the Moon, an animal landing on the Moon, manned lunar circumnavigation, and a manned landing on the lunar surface. Then, on March 10, 11, and 12, ARDC staged a large conference at the offices of its Ballistic Missile Division in Los Angeles. On hand were more than 80 rocket, aircraft, and human-factors specialists from the Air Force, industry, and NACA. Although the space sights of the Ballistic Missile Division, under Major General Bernard A. Schriever, were set on the distant "man on the Moon" goal, the basic objective of the Los Angeles man-in-space working conference was to hammer out an "abbreviated development plan" for getting a man in Earth orbit as quickly and as easily as possible.¹⁷

The conference focused on what some Air Force speakers called a "quick and dirty" approach - orbital flight and recovery using a simple ballistic capsule and parachutes for a water landing in the vicinity of the Bahamas. The ballistic vehicle would weigh between 2,700 and 3,000 pounds, and would be about six feet in diameter and eight feet long. Its "life support," or internal ecological, system would be designed to sustain a man in orbit for as long as 48 hours. Because there was no real certainty that man could function under the various stresses of space flight, all systems in the capsule would be fully automatic.¹⁸

The human passenger would be essentially a rider rather than a pilot, although for experimental purposes he would try to perform certain tasks. The body support arrangement - showing the influence of Harold J. von Beckh of ARDC's Aeromedical Field Laboratory - would have the spaceman supine on a couch that could be rotated according to the direction of the g forces building up during launch and reentry. The rotatable couch was regarded as necessary because the capsule would both exit and enter the atmosphere front-end forward. Maximum reentry loads on the occupant of the Air Force machine were expected to be about 9 g; the interior temperature during reentry was not supposed to exceed 150 degrees. An ablative nose cone would provide thermal protection. Small retrograde rockets would brake the vehicle enough to allow the pull of gravity to effect a reentry.¹⁹

Among the most fervent Air Force champions of a man-in-space project at the Los Angeles conference were the human-factors experts, some of whom had been studying the medical problems of upper- and extra-atmospheric flight for more than a decade. But predictably they were also the most cautious people in assessing the psychophysiological limits of human tolerance under the conditions of flight into space. Air Force medical personnel generally agreed that 15 or more launches of primates and smaller biological payloads should precede the first manned orbital shot. Colonel John P. Stapp of the Aeromedical Field Laboratory felt that the first human space passengers should have both engineering and medical training, that they should go through at least six months of selection, testing, and preparation, and that from a medical standpoint a television camera was an essential piece of equipment in the manned capsule. Major David G. Simons, Stapp's colleague, believed that continuous medical monitoring of the man, including voice contact throughout the orbital mission, should be mandatory.²⁰

The Air Force flight physicians knew that German centrifuge experiments during the Second World War had proved that men could withstand as much as 17 g for as long as 2 minutes without losing consciousness.²¹ Nevertheless, numerous centrifuge runs at Wright-Patterson and at Johnsville, Pennsylvania, and calculations of the angle of entry from an orbital altitude of about 170 miles had convinced them that a 12-g maximum was a good ground rule for designing the capsule body-support system. With a continuously accelerating single-stage booster following a steep launch trajectory, an aborted flight and subsequent reentry might subject the rider to as much as 20 g. Consequently the Air Force specialists assumed that a two-stage launch rocket would be necessary to provide a shallower reentry path and lower forces.²²

In retrospect, there were two striking aspects of the Los Angeles man-in-space presentation. The first was that the Air Force, historically devoted to piloted, fully controllable aircraft, was thinking in terms of a completely automatic orbital capsule, virtually without aerodynamic controls, whose passenger would do little more than observe and carry out physiological exercises. The other was that no attention was given to using the Atlas, alone as a booster system for a manned satellite. Indeed hardly anyone advocated putting an upper stage on the Atlas to constitute the desired two-stage launch vehicle. Spokesmen for Space Technology Laboratories, technical overseer of the Air Force ballistic missile program, went so far as to declare that a more dependable booster than the Atlas would have to be developed. They favored adapting the intermediate-range Thor and combining it with a second stage powered by a new fluorine-hydrazine engine developing some 15,000 pounds of thrust. By the time the conference adjourned on March 12, the conferees were in fairly general agreement that about 30 Thors and 20 fluorine-hydrazine second-stage rockets would be needed for a manned satellite project. Some 8 to 12 Vanguard second stages would also be needed, to be mated with Thors for orbiting smaller, animal-bearing capsules.²³

While the "abbreviated development plan" was emerging from the Los Angeles gathering, a NACA steering committee met at the Ames laboratory. Its members were Hartley A. Soulé and John V. Becker of Langley, Alfred J. Eggers of Ames and Walter C. Williams of the High Speed Flight Station. They had been appointed by NACA Assistant Director Ira H. Abbott to suggest a course of action on the January 31 proposal by Lieutenant General Donald L. Putt, Air Force Deputy Chief of Staff, Development, to NACA Director Dryden for formal NACA-Air Force cooperation in a manned satellite venture.²⁴ The steering committee agreed that the zero-lift approach - the ballistic capsule - offered the best promise for an early orbital mission. Soulé, Becker Eggers, and Williams recommended that "NACA accept the Air Force invitation to participate in a joint development of a manned orbital vehicle on an expedited basis," and that "the ballistic type of vehicle should be developed."²⁵

On March 14, a month and a half after Putt's letter to Dryden, NACA officially informed Headquarters USAF that it would cooperate in drawing up a detailed manned satellite development plan. On April 11, Dryden sent to General Thomas D. White, Chief of Staff of the Air Force, a proposed memorandum of understanding declaring an intention to set up a "joint project for a recoverable manned satellite test vehicle." Before a final agreement was actually signed, however, NACA Assistant Director for Research Management Clotaire Wood, at Dryden's direction, suggested to Colonel Donald H. Heaton of Headquarters USAF that the NACA-Air Force arrangement "should be put aside for the time being." Heaton agreed, and in mid-May the joint Air Force-NACA manned space undertaking was tabled indefinitely.²⁶

NACA's Metamorphosis Begins

The explanation for Wood's action and for the general prudence of NACA in dealing with the Air Force on space matters in the spring of 1958 lay in the contents of the space bill sent by the Eisenhower administration to Capitol Hill on April 14 and then being debated in Congress. This proposal appeared likely to transform NACA into the focal point of the nation's efforts in space.

From the initial discussions in 1954 of a United States International Geophysical Year satellite project, President Eisenhower's position had been that space activities should be conducted solely for peaceful purposes. The nature and objectives of Project Vanguard had reflected this policy. He summed up his feelings in a letter to Soviet Premier Nikolai Bulganin, dated January 12, 1958. Describing the demilitarization of space as "the most important problem which faces the world today," he proposed that —

… outer space should be used only for peaceful purposes… . can we not stop the production of such weapons which would use or, more accurately, misuse, outer space, now for the first time opening up as a field for man's exploration? Should not outer space be dedicated to the peaceful uses of mankind and denied to the purposes of war? …²⁷

Consistent with this "space for peace" policy, the concentration on February 7, 1958, of Federal space activities in the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Defense Department had been only an interim measure pending establishment of a new, civilian-controlled space management organization. Shortly before the creation of ARPA, Eisenhower had turned to his newly appointed, 18-member President's Scientific Advisory Committee (PSAC), chaired by President James R. Killian, Jr., of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and including among its members NACA Chairman Doolittle. Eisenhower instructed the Committee to draw up two documents: a broad policy statement familiarizing Americans with space and justifying Government-financed astronautical ventures, and a recommendation for organizing a national program in space science. The "Killian committee," as the early PSAC was called, chose two subcommittees. One, on policy, was headed by Edward H. Purcell, a physicist and executive vice-president of Bell Telephone Laboratories; the other, on organization, was led by Harvard University physicist James B. Fisk.

The Fisk subcommittee on organization finished its work first. After talking with Doolittle and NACA Director Dryden, Fisk and his colleagues made a crucial report to PSAC late in February. A new agency built around NACA should be created to carry out a comprehensive national program in astronautics, emphasizing peaceful, civilian-controlled research and development. The White House Advisory Committee on Government Organization, consisting of Nelson B. Rockefeller, Killian, and Maurice H. Stans, Director of the Bureau of the Budget, used this PSAC subcommittee report as the basis for a formal recommendation on a national space organization, which Eisenhower received and approved on March 5. Five months after Sputnik I, the administration began drawing up proposed legislation for consideration by the Congress. As Dryden later observed, NACA's cautious post-Sputnik strategy had "paid off, in the long run."

PSAC's rationale for space exploration, entitled "Introduction to Outer Space," was issued on March 26. This statement proclaimed that "the compelling urge of man to explore and to discover," "the defense objective," "national prestige," and "new opportunities for scientific observation and experiment" were "four factors which give importance, urgency, and inevitability to the advancement of space technology."²⁸

On April 2, Eisenhower sent his formal message on space matters to Congress. The document again indicated the President's intense conviction that space should be primarily reserved for scientific exploration, not military exploitation. It called for the establishment of a "National Aeronautical and Space Agency," which would absorb NACA and assume responsibility for all "space activities … except … those projects primarily associated with military requirements." The executive authority in the new organization would be exercised by one person, a director, who would be advised by a 17-member "National Aeronautical and Space Board." The proposal for a loose advisory board represented little more than an extension of the NACA Main Committee. The idea for a single executive, however, stemmed mainly from the opinions of Eisenhower's legislative experts and the officials of the Bureau of the Budget. They wanted authority in the new agency to be centralized, not diffused in a committee as was the case with NACA and the Atomic Energy Commission. The second and more critical departure from NACA history was Eisenhower's stipulation that the proposed organization would have not only research but development, managerial, and flight operational responsibilities. Unlike NACA, then, it would possess extensive authority for contracting research and development projects.²⁹

Twelve days later, on April 14, the Eisenhower administration sent to the Democratic-controlled Congress its bill to create such an agency, drafted largely by the Bureau of the Budget.³⁰ In the House of Representatives and the Senate, special committees began hearings on the bill. The measure would undergo extensive amendment and reworking at the hands of the legislators. But it soon was apparent that a new agency would come into being, that NACA would constitute its nucleus, and that it would undertake large-scale development and operational activities in addition to research. The odds were better than good that a manned satellite project would fall within the domain of the civilian organization.

Proceeding on this assumption, engineers working at all of the NACA installations - at the ranges and wind tunnels at Langley and Ames, in the high-temperature jet facilities and rocket-test chambers at Lewis and Langley, at the rocket launch pads and control panels on Wallops Island, and in the flight hangars at the High Speed Flight Station - stepped up their research in materials, aerodynamics, and control.³¹ By early 1958, according to Preston R. Bassett, chairman of NACA's renamed Committee on Aircraft, Missile, and Spacecraft Aerodynamics, approximately 55 percent of all NACA activity was already applicable to space flight.³² According to another set of NACA statistics, the Pilotless Aircraft Research Division (PARD) was expending 90 percent of its effort on space and missile research; the rest of the Langley laboratory, 40 percent; Ames, 29 percent; and Lewis, 36 percent.³³ Virtually every member of NACA's technical staff eagerly anticipated a national program of space exploration. Since the raison d'étre of NACA always had been to improve the performance of piloted aircraft, most NACA engineers viewed manned space flight as an even more challenging and rewarding form of activity.

Not everyone in the NACA laboratories, however, was convinced that the agency's destiny lay in developing hardware, managing programs, and carrying out satellite launchings. Many scientist-engineers subscribed wholeheartedly to the official NACA position enunciated by Headquarters in January and February: While NACA ought to labor mightily in the furtherance of space science, it should continue to solve problems posed by other agencies engaged in development and operations, not handle programs itself. The "research-minded" element within the NACA technical staff probably was strongest at Ames. Most of the Ames complement had gone to work for NACA because of the nature of the organization. Its quasi-academic focus on research, its receptiveness to new and sometimes radical concepts, its relative obscurity and freedom from politics appealed to them. At the California institution the prospect of managing programs, which entailed fighting for appropriations, wrangling with industrial contractors, and perhaps competing with the military, seemed exceedingly distasteful.³⁴

This attitude was not so prevalent at the two other laboratories or at the High Speed Flight Station. The years of direct participation with Air Force, Navy, and contract personnel in the research aircraft projects had given Walter Williams and his staff at the Flight Station a rather clear operational orientation, albeit with airplanes and not with space rockets and satellites. The Lewis and Langley staffs included a sizable number of research workers who, while enjoying the intellectual liberty of NACA, felt it would be quite a challenge to carry out a program of their own instead of simply providing advice for the military and industry. They looked on approvingly as the Eisenhower administration sent to Congress a measure substantially embodying their ideas.

The academic approach to aeronautics and astronautics pervaded much of Langley, the oldest and in some ways the most tradition-minded of the NACA laboratories. The commitment to basic research and the devotion to theoretical calculations and wind tunnels as the most efficacious means of gathering aerodynamic data were as strong among some Langley engineers as among the Ames investigators. But in the Flight Research, Instrument Research, and Pilotless Aircraft Research Divisions at Langley; at the semiautonomous Pilotless Aircraft Research Station on Wallops Island, 70 miles away across Chesapeake Bay; and in the Flight Research Division at Lewis, there were people who had gained the bulk of their experience by working with airfoils mounted on the wings of airplanes in flight and from air-launched and ground-launched scale models propelled by rockets. For years they had been close to "development" and "operations" in their research activities, but they had turned their telemetered findings over to someone else for practical application. Now it seemed that the Soviet artificial moons might have given these ambitious aeronautical engineers a chance to put their imagination and technical experience to use in a manned space flight program. As Paul E. Purser, then head of the High Temperature Branch of PARD, put it, "In early 1958 we simply assumed we would get the manned satellite project. So we started to work."³⁵

Over the years the PARD specialists had perfected their techniques of launch, guidance, automatic control, and telemetry on small rockets, and had steadily added to the mountain of experimental data on hypervelocity performance and aerodynamic heating. Their rockets, while remaining small in thrust and payload, had become more and more sophisticated. During 1957, by firing five-stage research rockets, they had been able to achieve a final-stage velocity of mach 16.³⁶ And they already were doing conceptual work on a new and larger multistage research rocket, designed to boost scale models in their own stability and heat-transfer studies and to send up small instrumented satellites and space probes for the Air Force. Later called the Scout, this four- or five-stage, solid-propellant configuration could fire its stages sequentially to place either a 150-pound payload in a 300-mile orbit, 100 pounds in a 5,000-to-10,000-mile orbit, or 30 pounds in an orbit more than 22,000 miles from Earth.`³⁷

In the hectic weeks and months following the Soviet satellite launchings, the advocates of manned space flight at Langley, realizing that their experience in nose-cone research was directly transferable to the design of manned satellite vehicles, turned their attention to spacecraft design as never before. NACA's initial agreement of March 14, 1958, to collaborate with the Air Force in drawing up plans for a manned orbital project gave official sanction to research they already had been doing largely on their own time. Theoretically this work still was in support of the Air Force and industrial manned-satellite studies. As it turned out, the Langley engineers were doing the early development work for their own enterprise, later to become Project Mercury.

The sparkplug behind much of this activity was Maxime A. Faget, head of the Performance Aerodynamics Branch in PARD. Thirty-seven years old in 1958, Faget had been born in British Honduras, the son of an honored physician in the United States Public Health Service. In 1943, when his father was developing sulfone drugs for the National Leprosarium in Carville, Louisiana, the diminutive Faget received a bachelor of science degree in mechanical engineering from Louisiana State University. After his discharge from the Navy's submarine service in 1946, he joined the staff at Langley. He soon devised choking inlets for ramjets, a flight mach number meter, and several mathematical formulas for deriving data from Richard T. Whitcomb's area rule.³⁸ Like Robert R. Gilruth and others before him at Langley, Faget preferred to enlarge his knowledge in aerodynamics and thermodynamics not in wind tunnels but by observing and telemetering data from vehicles in free flight.

In mid-March, less than a week after the conclusion of the Air Force man-in-space working conference in Los Angeles, Gilruth, as Assistant Director of Langley, called Faget and his other top engineers together to determine what should be the "Langley position" on optimum spacecraft configurations at the NACA Conference on High-Speed Aerodynamics, to be held at the Ames laboratory beginning March 18. The consensus of the meeting was that the Langley-PARD representatives should present a united front at Ames behind a ballistic concept.³⁹

The Conference on High-Speed Aerodynamics, the last in a long line of full-dress symposiums held by NACA, attracted most of the luminaries in the organization, including Dryden, Silverstein, Eggers, H. Julian Allen, Walter Williams, and the members of the Committee on Aircraft, Missile, and Spacecraft Aerodynamics. Military personnel and representatives of most of the aircraft and missile firms also attended this forum. The 46 papers read at the conference, dealing with hypersonic, satellite, and interplanetary flight, represented the most advanced thinking in aerodynamics within NACA. Taken together, the papers demonstrated how far some NACA engineers trained in aeronautics had pushed their research into the new discipline of astronautics.⁴⁰

Much interest centered around three presentations proposing alternative configurations for manned orbital flight. The first of these papers was authored by Faget, Benjamine J. Garland, and James J. Buglia. Faget presented it as the orbital configuration regarded most favorably by PARD personnel - the wingless, nonlifting vehicle. Faget and his associates pointed out several advantages of this simple ballistic approach. In the first place, ballistic missile research, development, and production experience was directly applicable to the design and construction of such a vehicle. The fact that it would be fired along a ballistic path meant that automatic stabilization, guidance, and control equipment could be kept at a minimum, thus saving weight and diminishing the likelihood of a malfunction.

The nonlifting vehicle simplified return from orbit because the only necessary maneuver was the firing of retrograde rockets - "retrorockets" - to decelerate the spacecraft, deflecting it from orbit and subjecting it to atmospheric drag. And even that maneuver need not be too precise for the accomplishment of a safe recovery. After retrofire, successful entry depended solely on the inherent stability and structural soundness of the ballistic vehicle. Faget, Garland, and Buglia acknowledged that the pure-drag device necessitated landing in a large and imprecisely defined area, using a parachute, and dispensing with lifting and braking controls to correct the rate of descent, the direction, or the impact force. Rather severe oscillations might occur during descent. But Faget and his associates noted that tests with model ballistic capsules in the 20-foot-diameter, free-spinning tunnel at Langley had shown that attitude control jets, such as those used on the X-1B, X-2, and X-15 rocketplanes, could provide rate damping and help correct the oscillations, while a small drogue parachute should give still more stability.

The three Langley engineers went so far as to propose a specific, if rudimentary, ballistic configuration - a nearly flat-faced cone angled about 15 degrees from the vertical, 11 feet long and 7 feet in diameter, using a heat sink rather than an ablative covering for thermal protection. Although the space passenger would lie supine against the heatshield at all times, during orbital flight the capsule would reverse its attitude so that the deceleration loads of reentry would be imposed from front to back through the man's body, the same as under acceleration. The authors concluded that "as far as reentry and recovery is concerned [sic], the state-of-the-art is sufficiently advanced so that it is possible to proceed confidently with a manned satellite project based upon the ballistic reentry type of vehicle."⁴¹

One dissenter from the Langley consensus favoring a manned projectile was John Becker, of the Langley Compressibility Research Division and a veteran of X-15 development, who read a paper at the conference on possible winged satellite configurations. Becker's main concern was the reentry heating problem in conjunction with some maneuverability within the atmosphere. Combining his theoretical findings with those of Charles W. Mathews of Langley, Becker suggested a glider-like configuration. Instead of entering the atmosphere at a low angle of attack and using lift to return to Earth, it would deliberately come in at a high angle of attack, employing its lower wing surface as a heatshield. Deceleration loads still could be held at a little over 1 g in this fashion. The gross weight of such a low-lift, high-drag vehicle would be only about 3,060 pounds. "Thus … the minimum winged satellite vehicle is not prohibitively heavier than the drag type," concluded Becker. "The weight is sufficiently low to permit launching by booster systems similar to that for the drag vehicle described in a previous paper by Maxime A. Faget, Benjamine J. Garland, and James J. Buglia."⁴²

What some Langley researchers had come to regard as the "Ames position" on manned satellites was described in a paper by Thomas J. Wong, Charles A. Hermach, John O. Reller, and Bruce E. Tinling, four aeronautical engineers who had worked with Eggers. They presented a polished, more detailed version of the blunt, semilifting M-1 configuration conceived by Eggers the previous summer. For such a vehicle a lift/drag ratio of 1/2 could be effected simply by removing the upper portion of a pure ballistic shape, making the body somewhat deeper than that of a half-cone, and adding trailing edge flaps for longitudinal and lateral control. Maximum deceleration forces would be only 2 g, low enough to permit a pilot to remain in control of his vehicle. Blunting would reduce heat conduction; the vehicle would be stable and controllable down to subsonic speeds and would provide substantial maneuverability; and structural weight would remain relatively low. Thus "it appears that a high-lift, high-drag configuration of the type discussed has attractive possibilities for the reentry of a satellite vehicle."⁴³

The Ames engineers' presentation was not in the form of a spacecraft design challenge to the Langley-PARD aerodynamicists. Eggers and various others at Ames remained convinced of the overall superiority of the lifting body for manned satellite missions. But as Eggers explained, "Ames was not enthusiastic in 1958 to participate in an operational program for building and launching spacecraft of any kind, manned or unmanned."⁴⁴ While some Ames people were rather avidly pushing the M-1 concept, their avidity did not stem from any desire for operational dominance in a civilian space program. The California NACA scientists were quite willing to leave the business of building prototypes, carrying out full-scale tests, and then managing a program to their more "hardware-oriented" colleagues across the continent.

To Faget, Purser, and Gilruth the choice between the semilifting configuration favored by the Ames group and their nonlifting device really was an academic one. Given the assumption that a manned satellite should be fired into orbit as quickly as possible, then the Atlas ICBM, not the still untested Titan or a Thor-fluorine combination, should serve as the launch vehicle for a one-ton spacecraft. The Atlas was following a tortuous route toward status as a reliable operational rocket, but it was still the only ICBM anywhere near being ready. The criterion already adopted by Faget and his associates, that an attempt to orbit a man should follow the simplest, quickest, and most dependable approach, negated a heavier, semilifting vehicle; this would have required adding an extra stage to the Atlas or some other rocket. The same criterion even ruled out Becker's low-lift, high-drag proposal. If the first manned orbital project was to adhere to and profit from ballistic missile experience, then the capabilities of the Atlas should be the first consideration. Faget himself did not have detailed data on the Atlas' design performance before, during, or for some time after the Ames conference; such information was highly classified and he lacked an official "need to know." About two months after he delivered his paper he learned through conversations with Frank J. Dore, an engineer-executive of Convair, what he needed to design a manned ballistic payload.⁴⁵ In the weeks following the Ames conference, Faget's and other Langley-PARD research teams, centering their efforts on the basic ballistic shape, started working out the details of hurling a man-carrying projectile around the world.⁴⁶

While the engineers at the NACA Virginia installations hurried their designs, tests, and plans, and while Congress received Eisenhower's space bill, the organizational transformation of NACA began. After the White House Advisory Committee on Government Organization recommended that a national civilian space program be built around NACA, Director Dryden and his subordinates in Washington began planning the revamping that would have to accompany the reorientation of NACA functions. Dryden called Abe Silverstein of Lewis to Washington to begin organizing a spaceflight development program. On April 2, as part of his space message to Congress, Eisenhower instructed NACA and the Defense Department to review the projects then under ARPA to determine which should be transferred to the new civilian space agency. NACA and Defense Department representatives, in consultation with Bureau of the Budget officials, reached tentative agreements on the disposition of practically all the projects and facilities in question, with the notable exception of manned space flight. In accordance with Eisenhower's directive that NACA "describe the internal organization, management structure, staff, facilities, and funds which will be required," NACA set up an ad hoc committee on organization under the chairmanship of Assistant Director Ira Abbott.⁴⁷

Man In Space Soonest?

Officially NACA still was acting as consultant and tester for the Air Force and industry on spacecraft design and development. ARDC had sent its abbreviated development plan for a manned orbital capsule, based on conclusions reached at the Ballistic Missile Division conference, to Headquarters USAF on March 14. Five days later Air Force Under Secretary Marvin A. MacIntyre requested $133 million from ARPA for manned satellite development during fiscal year 1959. On the same day that Eisenhower proposed the civilian agency to Congress, General White, Air Force Chief of Staff, secured approval for a man-in-space project from the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Despite the introduction of the administration bill in Congress and the resultant tabling the next month of the proposed agreement between White and Hugh Dryden for a joint Air Force-NACA manned satellite project, NACA continued to furnish advice and information to the Air Force.⁴⁸

Throughout most of April, representatives from the various offices within ARDC, forming a "Man-in-Space Task Force" at the Ballistic Missile Division, worked on an "Air Force Manned Military Space System Development Plan." The final goal was to "achieve an early capability to land a man on the moon and return him safely to earth." The first of four phases, called "Man-in-Space-Soonest," involved orbiting a ballistic capsule, first carrying instruments, then primates, and finally a man. In the second phase, "Man-in-Space-Sophisticated," a heavier capsule, capable of a 14-day flight, would be put in orbit. "Lunar Reconnaissance," the third phase, would soft-land on the Moon with instruments, including a television camera. The last phase was "Manned Lunar Landing and Return," wherein primates, then men, would be orbited around the Moon, landed on its surface, and returned safely. The whole undertaking was supposed to cost $1.5 billion, a level of financial support that should complete the program by the end of 1965. The Thor-Vanguard, the Thor with a fluorine upper stage, and a "Super Titan" topped by fluorine second and third stages would be the launch vehicles.⁴⁹

The detailed designs and procedures for the Man-in-Space-Soonest portion of the long-range program went to Headquarters USAF on May 2. Based on Thor-117L, Thor-Vanguard, and Thor-fluorine booster combinations, the "Soonest" concept posited a manned orbit of Earth on the tenth launch of the Thor-fluorine system, in October 1960.⁵⁰

Meanwhile, on April 30, the contractor team of Avco and Convair, which, since the Sputniks, had spent more time and money on manned satellite design than other industrial firms, presented to the Air Force a highly detailed proposal for development of a "minimum" vehicle. Featuring the "bare" Atlas, the basic "one and one-half stage" ICBM with no second stage, the Avco-Convair approach would orbit a man inside a sphere weighing 1500-2000 pounds. The steel-mesh drag brake, a metallic, inverted parachute, would be used for atmospheric entry.⁵¹ Specialists at the Ballistic Missile Division concluded that using the "bare" Atlas would save only three or four months of development time, that it would necessitate an undesirably low orbital altitude, that it ignored the prospect of dangerously high reentry g forces following an "abort" with what was essentially a single-stage booster, and that it presented little "growth potential," in contrast to the Thor fluorine system.⁵² As early as March, moreover, ARDC's advisers in NACA, led by Maxime Faget, had criticized the complex drag-brake apparatus as "poor policy that might interfere with the early completion of the program as well as being a totally unnecessary device."⁵³

However, Air Force Vice Chief of Staff LeMay, whose directive back in February had accelerated the proposed military manned satellite project, now ordered a reevaluation of the Avco-Convair scheme. LeMay felt this was possibly a cheaper way to get a man into space than Man-in-Space-Soonest, which called for an expenditure of more than $100 million for fiscal 1959. On May 20, Lieutenant General Samuel E. Anderson, Commander of ARDC, replied that in view of a general lack of confidence within ARDC in the Avco metal shuttlecock device, the Air Force should pursue the Man-in-Space-Soonest approach. LeMay accepted this recommendation.⁵⁴ Henceforth, although there would be significant amendments to Man-in-Space-Soonest, the Air Force's own plan would encounter diminishing competition from would-be contractors' alternatives.

While Anderson was discouraging LeMay's interest in the Avco-Convair proposal, General Schriever, Commander of the Ballistic Missile Division, wrote Anderson that his office was ready to proceed with a manned orbital project; the selection of a capsule contractor awaited only allocation of sufficient funds. But ARDC still could not secure full authorization from the Advanced Research Projects Agency, under which the Air Force would have to fund a project to put a man in orbit. ARPA had sketched the Soonest plan before the National Security Council Planning Board, which supposedly had a "feeling of great urgency to achieve … Man-in-Space-Soonest at the earliest possible date." But ARPA Director Johnson still shrank from the initial $100-million-plus request contained in the program outline.⁵⁵

The main trouble was the high cost of mating the intermediate-range Thor with 117L and Vanguard second stages, developing an entirely new rocket with a fluorine powerplant, and carrying out perhaps as many as 30 development flights before trying to orbit a manned capsule.⁵⁶ Late in May, Air Force Under Secretary MacIntyre and Assistant Secretary Richard E. Horner suggested that making the Atlas a carrier for manned flight might cut program costs below the $100 million mark. ARDC then had its Ballistic Missile Division prepare an alternative approach for Man-in-Space-Soonest. The BMD answer was that using the Atlas would mean reducing the orbital altitude of the 2,000-3,000-pound capsule from about 170 miles to about 115 miles. This in turn would mean that voice contact would be lost for long periods unless more orbital tracking stations were built around the globe. Despite these reservations, on June 15, the Ballistic Missile Division sent to Washington a revised development plan for orbiting a man in an Atlas-boosted ballistic capsule by April 1960 at a total cost of $99.3 million. The next day ARPA gave its approval to the revised "Soonest" plan and authorized the Air Force to proceed with study contracts on the life support system of the proposed manned capsule. The Wright Air Development Center let two concurrent three-month study contracts, at $370,000 each, to North American Aviation and General Electric, which were to design the space cabin and ecological mechanisms and build "mockups" - full-scale working models - of the capsule interior.⁵⁷

By late June, with the reworked version of the space bill proposed by the Eisenhower administration almost ready to be voted on in Congress, it was apparent that the Air Force was in much more of a hurry to hurl a man into orbit than was ARPA. The new Defense Department agency remained reluctant to commit heavy financing to a project that might well be abandoned or transferred when the civilian space organization proposed by Eisenhower came into existence. Throughout June and into July, an ARPA Man in Space Panel, headed by Samuel B. Batdorf, received briefings and proposals from the Air Force and in turn reported to Herbert F. York, chief scientist in ARPA. But during these weeks Faget, serving as the regular NACA representative on the ARPA panel, began to detect a definite change in the attitude of ARPA personnel toward NACA. The essence of this change, according to Faget, was the growing belief that now perhaps ARPA should give more advice to NACA on space technology than vice versa, as had been the case. For example, York recommended to Johnson that NACA Director Dryden's "personal concurrence" be obtained before any Air Force man-in-space program was formally approved by ARPA.⁵⁸

On June 25 and 26, the ARPA Man in Space Panel sponsored a meeting in Washington for representatives from Headquarters ARDC, the Ballistic Missile Division, Convair, Lockheed, Space Technology Laboratories, and NACA. The meeting was called to resolve such outstanding questions as the relationship between payload weight and the lifting capabilities of various booster systems, booster reliability, and ablation versus heat sink thermal protection techniques. The gathering produced little specific technical agreement. Into July, ARPA continued to hold back adequate "go-ahead" funds for a full-fledged Air Force effort to send a manned vehicle into orbit.⁵⁹

NACA Makes Ready

Throughout the spring and into the summer of 1958, as the administration bill made its way through Congress, NACA had given its full participation and support to the man-in-space planning sessions of ARPA and the Air Force. But at the same time the research engineers at Langley and on Wallops Island were pushing their own studies. They could see the opportunity to carry out a manned satellite project coming their way. By early spring all NACA laboratories were urgently engaged in basic studies in such areas as propulsion, spacecraft configuration, orbit and recovery, guidance and control, structures and materials, instrumentation, and aerodynamic heating. Ames and Langley researchers were conducting wind tunnel experiments and rocket launches with models of orbital vehicles.⁶⁰

At the Langley laboratory, proponents and would-be managers of a manned space flight program studied the nonlifting approach to orbital circumnavigation, refined this concept, tested it, restudied it, and invented new ways to prove hardware feasibility and reliability. Floyd L. Thompson, Associate Director of Langley and Acting Director most of the time, gave Robert Gilruth the go-ahead for manned satellite work. In turn, Gilruth gave a free hand to PARD Chief Joseph A. Shortal, Faget, Purser, Charles Mathews, Alan B. Kehlet, Willard S. Blanchard, Jr., Carl A. Sandahl, and others at the Virginia laboratory.⁶¹

The search for better experimental methods in manned satellite research produced a concept by Purser and Faget for a new test rocket which would employ a cluster of four solid-propellant Sergeant rockets to provide a high initial thrust. Fired almost vertically and unguided except for large stabilizing aerodynamic fins, the rocket would be an inexpensive means of testing full-scale models of spacecraft in the most critical phases of an orbital mission - launch, abort, and escape at different speeds and under different stresses, parachute deployment, and recovery. Such a vehicle could also "toss" a man in a ballistic capsule to an altitude of perhaps 100 miles. Late in February, Purser and Faget received a job order and authorization to proceed with design work on the test rocket, which at that time they called "High Ride."⁶²

Another experimental technique devised by the PARD engineers was a full-scale "capsule simulator." It was designed to test the practicability of controlling the attitude of a ballistic vehicle manually by activating air jets mounted on its body, similar to the method that would be used to control the X-15 at the peak of its trajectory. In March, Purser and several others in PARD put into operation a crude simulator rig featuring a small bed covered by a tent and attached to a pendulum. The pendulum permitted an oscillation period of two to four seconds, during which the "pilot" attempted to realign the simulator by firing the air jets. Throughout the spring Langley test pilot Robert A. Champine, Purser, and others took turns riding the simulator. Frequently modified and improved, it provided useful data on spacecraft reaction controls.⁶³

Meanwhile Faget and his coworkers were steadily modifying the manned ballistic satellite design itself. Almost from the beginning of their design studies and tests, late in 1957, they had assumed that a ballistic vehicle should enter the atmosphere at an attitude 180 degrees from that of launch, so the g forces would be imposed on the front of the body under both acceleration and deceleration. The "tail" of the capsule when it went into orbit would become its "nose" during reentry. Their original capsule configuration - a squat, domed body with a nearly flat heatshield - resembled the Mark II missile warhead. The body was recessed slightly from the perimeter of the heatshield, leaving a narrow lip that theoretically would deflect the airflow in such a way as to minimize heat transfer to the after portion. But models of this configuration tested in the Langley free-spinning tunnel proved dynamically unstable at subsonic speeds. The Faget group then lengthened the capsule fuselage and eliminated the heatshield lip. By March 1958, the Langley ballistic vehicle, as described by Faget, Garland, and Buglia at the Ames Conference on High-Speed Aerodynamics, was an elongated cone. This design contrasted sharply with the configuration sketched earlier that month at the ARDC working conference in Los Angeles - a rather deep dome, the rounded front end of which was the heatshield.⁶⁴

The elongated cone provided dynamic stability during the blazing period of reentry, but tests in the 11-inch hypersonic tunnel and other tunnels at Langley showed that too much heat would be transferred by turbulent convection to its afterbody. Besides thermodynamic considerations, the NACA planners could not figure out how to fit into the top part of the cone the two parachutes necessary for its recovery. The Virginia designers next tried a conical nose shape, then a rounded one with a short cylinder attached to it, but the problems of heat transfer from the heatshield and insufficient space for parachute packaging remained for both of these configurations. It was late summer 1958 before the Langley-PARD researchers had settled on a capsule design combining the advantages of maximum stability in a nonlifting body, relatively low afterbody heating, and a suitable parachute compartment. This was the shape that became the basis of the Mercury spacecraft - a blunt face, a frustum, or truncated cone, and a cylinder mounted atop the frustum. The completely flat heatshield had been discarded because it trapped too much heat, while a rounded face only increased heat transfer. The design ultimately chosen featured a heatshield with a diameter of 80 inches, a radius of curvature of 120 inches, and a ratio of 1.5 between the radius of the curve and the diameter of the shield.⁶⁵ This heatshield design, as worked out by William E. Stoney, Jr., of PARD at Langley, and confirmed by Alvin Seiff, Thomas N. Canning, and other members of the Vehicle Environment Division at Ames, got rid of a maximum amount of heat during reentry.⁶⁶

Materials research continued at Langley throughout the spring and summer. In their man-in-space development plans, the Air Force experts initially had favored an ablation heatshield, but their NACA advisers generally felt that the ablation technique was not yet reliable enough for manned reentry. In March, two of the most respected engineers in the NACA establishment, Gilruth and Soulé o Langley, assisted by Clotaire Wood of Headquarters, had presented to the Air Research and Development Command NACA's design concepts for manned orbital flight, including use of the heat sink on a blunt body as the best thermal protection procedure. The question remained open, however. In June, the Wright Air Development Center, the Ballistic Missile Division, and NACA agreed to undertake joint investigation of heatshield materials, the objective being to compile a sufficient quantity of data for ARDC to make a decision between heat sink and ablation methods within three months.⁶⁷

Considering the unreliability common in early ballistic missiles, and especially the widespread lack of confidence in the hard-pushed Atlas, some fast and almost foolproof means of escape would be essential to any launch system for manned space flight. The Air Force man-in-space designs had included an escape mechanism with many moving parts and a degree of complexity unacceptable to the NACA engineers. The Air Force plans envisioned a pusher rocket escape system, meaning that a rocket or rockets would fire at the base of the capsule to hurl it clear of the booster. The PARD rocket experts, again led by Faget, rejected this approach and began working on a solid-fueled tractor escape rocket. This would be mounted above the capsule and would pull it upward and away from a faulty launch vehicle. By the end of August 1958, Willard Blanchard and Sherwood Hoffman of PARD, working on plans and suggestions hurriedly made by Faget and Andre J. Meyer, Jr., had drawn designs for the escape rocket and tower, consisting of a slender rocket case and nozzle and three thin struts fastened to the cylinder of the capsule. The Wallops Island engineers already were planning a series of test firings of the awkward-looking escape mechanism, using "boilerplate" capsules, or full-scale metal models.⁶⁸

The solid-fueled tractor rocket with a minimum of components reflected the Langley-PARD preoccupation with the easiest, most dependable way to get a manned spacecraft into orbit. There were certain interlocking aspects of the approach. The "bare" Atlas, the regular ICBM without an upper stage, should be the booster. With the ballistic capsule, acceleration forces during launch would be about 5 or 6 g; on a shallow reentry trajectory, deceleration loads should not exceed 8 or 9 g. But an abort and reentry after a launch following the steep trajectory and unbroken acceleration of a single-stage booster could impose as much as 20 times the force of gravity on the capsule passenger. Air Force planners had considered a two-stage booster and a flight profile with a more shallow trajectory, or a variable-drag device like the Avco metal parachute, to lessen the abort-reentry g loads - although by midsummer cost considerations were pushing the Air Force toward the bare Atlas.⁶⁹ For body support, the Air Force had thought in terms of some kind of rotational apparatus to maintain continuously optimum positioning in relation to the direction of acceleration.⁷⁰ This procedure, the NACA engineers felt, was too complicated and probably entailed too much weight.

As Man-in-Space-Soonest was taking shape in late spring, featuring a two-stage booster and either a rotatable interior cabin or a rotatable couch Faget had another idea. Why not build a lightweight, stationary couch that a man would lie not on but in? This was the fundamental principle behind the contour couch designed by Faget, fabricated out of fiber glass at Langley, and tested on the big Navy centrifuge at Johnsville late in July.^7l There, in what Faget called "the only technical 'break-through' of the summer," Carter C. Collins and R. Flanagan Gray of the Navy endured more than 20 g while riding in the contour couch. Then, said Faget, "we were able to disregard the USAF 'ground rule' (and a rather firmly established one in their minds) that 12 g was the reentry design limit." The bare Atlas could be used to hurl a man into orbit, and an abort need not impair his safety.⁷²

Birth of NASA

Even before the contour couch was demonstrated, the Air Force research and development planners also had about accepted the bare Atlas as a manned satellite booster, although they retained serious misgivings regarding abort and reentry g loads, orbital altitude, lifting ability, and reliability. But by early July 1958, there actually seemed to be an inverse relationship between the Air Force's progress on Man-in-Space-Soonest and the progress of the space bill through Congress. On July 10, Brigadier General Homer A. Boushey of Headquarters USAF informed the Air Research and Development Command that the Bureau of the Budget was firmly in favor of placing the space exploration program, including manned space flight, in the proposed civilian space organization. Nothing could be done to release further go-ahead funds from the Advanced Research Projects Agency.⁷³

Only a little more than three months after the Eisenhower administration's draft legislation went to the Capitol, both houses of Congress on July 16 passed the National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958, creating the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Despite this long-expected action, there still seemed to be a chance for Man-in-Space-Soonest, provided it could be carried out at a relatively modest cost. So Roy Johnson and his subordinates in ARPA continued to admonish the Air Force to scale down its funding requests. The Ballistic Missile Division replied that a fiscal 1959 budgetary allotment of only $50 million, the latest figure suggested by ARPA, would delay the first manned orbital launch until late 1961 or early 1962. In its sixth development plan for Man-in-Space-Soonest, issued on July 24, BMD proposed orbiting a man by June 1960 with the bare Atlas, at a cost of $106.6 million. This was an increase of $7.3 million over the project cost estimate contained in the fifth development plan on June 15. Schriever personally wrote Anderson, Commander of ARDC, that the Ballistic Missile Division was already studying requirements for a worldwide tracking network, that the heat sink versus ablation question was under examination, that three companies were designing the 117L and the Vanguard second stage as possible backup systems for the bare Atlas, and that invitations for a briefing for prospective capsule contractors could be mailed within 24 hours. Schriever asked for immediate approval for Man-in-Space-Soonest at the $106.6 million level.⁷⁴

In Washington, on July 24 and 25, Ballistic Missile Division specialists gave a series of briefings for ARDC, Secretary of the Air Force Douglas, the Air Staff, and ARPA. The ARPA briefing featured urgent appeals for full, immediate program approval to give the United States a real chance to be "soonest" with a man in space. ARPA Director Johnson flatly refused to give his go-ahead at that time. President Eisenhower and his advisers, he explained, were convinced there was then no valid role for the military in manned space flight. NACA, the nucleus of the civilian space program to be organized under the terms of the recently passed Space Act, already was planning its own manned satellite project, perhaps to be executed in conjunction with ARPA, at a cost of about $40 million for fiscal 1959. Consequently, said Johnson, it was futile for the Air Force to expect more than $50 million for the current fiscal year for Man-in-Space-Soonest. The implication was the Air Force would be lucky to receive even that.⁷⁵

Eisenhower signed the National Aeronautics and Space Act into law on July 29, 1958. His action brought into being an organization to "plan, direct, and conduct aeronautical and space activities," to "arrange for participation by the scientific community in planning scientific measurements and observations," and to "provide for the widest practicable and appropriate dissemination of information concerning its activities and the results thereof" - in short, to guide the Nation into the Space Age.⁷⁶ Space activities related to defense were to continue in the DOD.

There were certain basic differences between the final act and the bill that representatives of NACA, the Bureau of the Budget, and Eisenhower's other advisers had drafted and sent to Congress in April. These changes were the product especially of the activities and influence of three men: Lyndon B. Johnson, Senate majority leader and chairman of the Preparedness Subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Armed Services and the Senate Special Committee on Space and Astronautics; John W. McCormack, House majority leader and chairman of the House Select Committee on Astronautics and Space Exploration; and Senate minority leader Styles Bridges of New Hampshire, ranking Republican on the Senate space committee.⁷⁷

The large Space Board proposed by the administration to advise the head of the civilian agency gave way to a five-to-nine-member National Aeronautics and Space Council, charged with advising the President, who was to be its chairman. The provision for a National Aeronautics and Space Administration, headed by an administrator and a deputy administrator, rather than a "Space Agency" headed by a single director was, according to two staff members of the House space committee, "a mighty promotion in Washington bureaucratic terms."⁷⁸ Reflecting general concern in Congress over the relationship between space technology and national defense, the Space Act added a Civilian-Military Liaison Committee, appointed by the President, to ensure full interchange of information and data acquired in NASA and Defense Department programs. Other significant amendments pertained to patent procedures, authority to hire some 260 persons excepted from the civil service rating system, and NASA's obligation to cooperate with "other nations and groups of nations."⁷⁹

Eisenhower, acting mainly on the advice of Killian, his chief scientific adviser, passed over the respected, apolitical Dryden, Director of NACA since 1949, and named T. Keith Glennan, president of the Case Institute of Technology in Cleveland, former member of the Atomic Energy Commission, and a staunch Republican, as the first Administrator of NASA. Dryden was appointed to the post of Deputy Administrator. Glennan would furnish the administrative leadership for the new entity, while Dryden would function as NASA's scientific and technical overseer. On August 15 the Senate voted its confirmation of Glennan and Dryden, and four days later the new Administrator met with the Abbott organization committee to review the proposed organization of NASA.⁸⁰

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration, absorbing more than 8000 employees and an appropriation of over $100 million from NACA, was beginning to take shape. Under the terms of the Space Act, accompanying White House directives, and later agreements with the Defense Department, the fledgling agency acquired the Vanguard project from the Naval Research Laboratory; the Explorer project and other space activities at the Army Ballistic Missile Agency (but not the von Braun rocket group); the services of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, hitherto an Army contractor; and an Air Force study contract with North American for a million-pound-thrust engine, plus other Air Force rocket engine projects and instrumented satellite studies. In addition, NASA was to receive $117 million in appropriations for space ventures from the Defense Department.⁸¹ But the Space Act was silent regarding organizational responsibility for manned space flight.

Other Means to the Same End

Besides Man-in-Space-Soonest of the Air Force, there were two other manned military space ventures seeking approval from ARPA in the summer of 1958. A rather heated competition was underway among the three armed services in the area of manned space flight. The Army's entry, much simpler than the Air Force approach, was supposed to lift a man into the space region "sooner" than Soonest. After the Sputniks, von Braun and his colleagues at Redstone Arsenal had had great success resuscitating their instrumented satellite project. Now they had unearthed one of their old proposals for using a modified Redstone to launch a man in a sealed capsule along a steep ballistic, or suborbital, trajectory. The manned capsule would reach an altitude of approximately 150 miles before splashing into the Atlantic about the same distance downrange from Cape Canaveral. The passive passenger would be housed in an ejectable cylindrical compartment about four feet wide by six feet long, which in turn would be housed in an inverted version of the kind of nose cone used on the Jupiter IRBM.⁸²

The Army tried to justify the proposal partly as a step toward improving techniques of troop transportation. But, more important, such a ballistic shot supposedly could be carried out during 1959; this would recoup some of the prestige captured by the Soviet satellite launchings as well as furnish some much-needed medical information, especially regarding high g loading and the effect of about six minutes of weightlessness. Initially called "Man Very High," the project called for the support of all three services. The sealed compartment would be modeled closely on the Air Force Manhigh balloon gondola then being used in a series of record-breaking ascents. In April the Air Force, already overloaded with plans for its own Dyna-Soar and manned satellite projects, had decided not to participate. So the Army had renamed the plan "Project Adam" and had begun pushing it as an Army project, with Navy cooperation expected in the medical and recovery phases.⁸³

The Adam proposal began the formal climb from the Army Ballistic Missile Agency through the Pentagon hierarchy to the office of the Secretary of the Army, then to ARPA. It came under very heavy criticism from sources both inside and outside the Defense Department. The ARPA Man in Space Panel unequivocally recommended that the proposal be turned down. Hugh Dryden of NACA told the House Space Committee that "tossing a man up in the air and letting him come back … is about the same technical value as the circus stunt of shooting a young lady from a cannon… ." And Arthur Kantrowitz of Avco, whose company was still trying to get the Air Force manned satellite contract, termed Adam "another project which is off the main track because I feel that weightlessness is not that great a problem."⁸⁴

On July 11, ARPA Director Johnson notified Secretary of the Army Wilbur M. Brucker that ARPA did not consider Project Adam a practical proposal for manned space flight. Consequently the Army could not expect to receive the $10-12 million it requested for the "up-and-down" project. Early in August, Brucker, mentioning that the Central Intelligence Agency had expressed an interest in Adam, defended the approach as a potential "national political psychological demonstration." Deputy Secretary of Defense Donald A. Quarles replied that in light of the Soviet achievement of orbiting an animal, the Air Force man-in-space project, and the creation of NASA, a decision on Project Adam would have to await "further study." In succeeding months the controversial "lady from a cannon" plan slipped quietly into the inactive category at Redstone Arsenal.⁸⁵

Still a third military proposal for manned space flight came forth during the contentious first half of 1958. In April the Navy Bureau of Aeronautics presented to ARPA the results of its manned satellite study, cleverly acronymized "MER I" (for "Manned Earth Reconnaissance"). This approach called for an orbital mission in a novel vehicle - a cylinder with spherical ends. After being fired into orbit by a two-stage booster system, the ends would expand laterally along two structural, telescoping beams to make a delta-wing, inflated glider with a rigid nose section. The configuration met the principal MER I requirement: the vehicle would be controllable from booster burnout to landing on water. Fabric construction obviously implied a new departure in the design of reentry vehicles. At ARPA's direction the Bureau of Aeronautics undertook a second study (MER II), this one to be done jointly on contract by Convair, manufacturer of the Atlas, and the Goodyear Aircraft Corporation. The Convair-Goodyear study group did not make its report until December. At that time it reasserted the feasibility of the lifting pneumatic vehicle but relegated the inflation of the craft to the postentry portion of the mission.⁸⁶ By December, however, Project Mercury already was moving ahead steadily under NASA. Funds for a MER III phase (model studies) were not forthcoming from the Defense Department, and the intriguing MER concept became a little-known aspect of the prehistory of manned orbital flight.

MER, sometimes referred to as "Project MER," was by far the most ambitious of the manned space flight proposals made by the military in 1958. Its emphasis on new hardware and new techniques meant it really had little chance for approval then. Conversely, Project Adam was not ambitious enough for the time and money involved. Of the three military proposals, Man-in-Space-Soonest came closest to full program approval. But by August the Air Force's hopes for putting a man into orbit sooner than the Soviet Union, or than any other agency in this country, were fading rapidly before the growing consensus that manned space flight should be the province of the civilian space administration.

NASA Gets The Job

After the passage of the Space Act on July 16, Killian had requested from Dryden a formal memorandum placing on record NACA's views regarding a manned satellite project. Two days later, a week and a half before Eisenhower signed the act, Dryden sent his memorandum to Killian. The NACA director sketched his organization's extensive research background in such pertinent areas as control systems for hypersonic vehicles, thermodynamics, heat-resistant structural materials, and the current X-15 project. Then, in his strongest official statement up to that time on development, operations, and managerial responsibilities, Dryden concluded, "The assignment of the direction of the manned satellite program to NASA would be consistent with the President's message to Congress and with the pertinent extracts from the National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958… ."⁸⁷

Like everyone else, including Air Force leaders, Dryden wanted to avert a potential conflict between NASA and the Air Force regarding manned space flight. On the same day that Eisenhower signed the Space Act, July 29, Dryden met with Roy Johnson and Secretary of Defense Neil H. McElroy to discuss the future management of manned space programs, but no agreement was reached. The conferees adjourned to await action from the White House.⁸⁸

Some time between then and August 20, probably on August 18 ,Eisenhower made his decision. Again apparently acting on Killian's advice, he assigned to NASA specific responsibility for developing and carrying out the mission of manned space flight. This decision provided the coup de grace to the Air Force's plans for Man-in-Space-Soonest. Deputy Secretary of Defense Quarles decided the $53.8 million that had been set aside for various Air Force space projects, including Man-in-Space-Soonest (but not Dyna-Soar), would constitute part of the $117 million to be transferred from the Defense Department to NASA. LeMay, Air Force Vice Chief of Staff, then notified the Air Research and Development Command that he was transferring $10 million previously earmarked for the Soonest project. He added that Eisenhower's action obviously made impossible the immediate project approval Schriever had urged on July 24. A seventh and final manned satellite development plan, which the Ballistic Missile Division submitted to ARDC on September 11, significantly dropped the term "Soonest" from its descriptive title.⁸⁹

The Air Force would proceed with its Dyna-Soar project in conjunction with NASA and later would inaugurate a "Discoverer biosatellite program" based on the 117L system. After August 1958, however, the project to rocket into orbit a man in a ballistic capsule was under undisputed civilian management, although it would draw heavily on all three services as well as industry and universities.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration received authorization to carry out this primitive manned venture into lower space mainly because Eisenhower was wedded to a "space for peace" policy. He was joined by his closest advisers, most members of Congress, and perhaps a majority of politically conscious Americans. In 1958 there simply was no clear military justification for putting a man in orbit.⁹⁰ And while there is little evidence on this point, it may be assumed that the very ambitiousness of the Air Force planners, to whom the orbiting of a manned ballistic vehicle was only the first phase of a costly program aimed at putting a man on the Moon, discouraged the budget-conscious Eisenhower administration. Already enormous sums were being spent on ballistic missiles and other forms of advanced weapons technology.

Also helping to influence the President and his advisers, however, was the fact that NACA, around which NASA would be built, already had gone far in designing, testing, planning, and generally making itself ready for the execution of a manned satellite project. For months representatives from NACA Headquarters had conferred periodically with prospective contractors like Avco, Lockheed, and General Electric on such subjects as heatshield technology, environmental control systems, and communications requirements.⁹¹ As early as March 1958, both before and after the Ames conference, Maxime Faget and Caldwell C. Johnson, working in PARD, together with Charles Mathews of the Langley Flight Research Division, had drawn up basic outlines for the manned ballistic satellite mission, the capsule configuration and internal equipment, heating loads and structural considerations, and weight limitations for a manned payload lifted into orbit by an Atlas. Throughout the spring and summer, Johnson, a self-made engineer attached to PARD from the Langley Engineering Services Division, continually modified his designs and specifications for the "can" to be mounted on the Atlas ICBM.⁹²

By the end of the summer, experimenters operating in the 2,000-foot towing tank at the Virginia laboratory already were using Langley-made scale models and dummies of the ballistic capsule in water impact trials, while other engineers were carrying out air-drop tests of a boilerplate capsule parachute system over Chesapeake Bay. And a group from the Lewis laboratory was commuting regularly to Langley to participate in design discussions on all the orbital spacecraft systems, especially on thermal protection techniques and on the attitude control, separation (posigrade), and reentry (retrograde) rockets.⁹³

Meanwhile Faget's and Paul Purser's proposal made early in the year for a clustered-rocket test booster to be used in payload design research and in manned vertical flights had undergone a politic modification. After Dryden publicly drew his analogy between the Army's Project Adam and the circus lady shot from a cannon, the PARD research team leaders dropped the name "High Ride" and shelved their ideas for using the rocket to fire a man into space. In August, Faget asked William M. Bland, Jr., and Ronald Kolenkiewicz of PARD to prepare precise specifications for a vehicle to launch full-scale and full-weight capsules to a maximum altitude of 100 miles. Only a year would pass before the experimental rocket went into operation. When it did, the former "High Ride" would have acquired the new nickname "Little Joe."⁹⁴

Only three days after Eisenhower signed the Space Act and more than two weeks before he formally gave the manned satellite job to NASA, Dryden and several other representatives of the disappearing NACA had testified before the House space committee on their budget request for $30 million for fiscal 1959. Assistant Director Gilruth of Langley gave a hurriedly prepared presentation on plans for a manned ballistic satellite; his remarks amounted to the first open discussion of the technical aspects of what was soon to become Project Mercury. After exhibiting models of the contour couch and an outdated cone-shaped capsule, Gilruth turned to the proposed launch vehicle. Here he revealed the fears and hopes about the Atlas that would characterize NASA's efforts to orbit a man:

The Atlas … has enough performance to put this in orbit and the guidance system is accurate enough, but there is the matter of reliability. You don't want to put a man in a device unless it has a very good chance of working every time.
There are scheduled many Atlas firings in the next year and a half. Reliability is something that comes with practice. It is to be anticipated that this degree of reliability will occur as a result of just carrying out the national ballistic missile program.⁹⁵

The Main Committee of NACA held its last meeting on August 21 and formally extended best wishes to NASA and Administrator Glennan, who attended the meeting.⁹⁶ In mid-September, Glennan and Roy Johnson of ARPA agreed that their two agencies should join in a "Man-in-Space program based on the 'capsule' technique."⁹⁷ They then established a joint NASA-ARPA Manned Satellite Panel to draw up specific recommendations and a basic procedural plan for the manned satellite project. Composed of Gilruth, who served as chairman, and Faget of Langley, Eggers of Ames, Williams of the Flight Station, and George M. Low and Warren J. North of Lewis, representing NASA, together with Robertson C. Youngquist and Samuel Batdorf of ARPA, the panel began holding meetings during the last week of September.⁹⁸

On September 25, Glennan issued a proclamation declaring that "as of the close of business September 30, 1958, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration has been organized and is prepared to discharge the duties and exercise the powers conferred upon it."⁹⁹ In a message to all NACA personnel he added:

One way of saying what will happen would be to quote from the legalistic language of the Space Act… . My preference is to state it in a quite different way - that what will happen … is a sign of metamorphosis. It is an indication of the changes that will occur as we develop our capacities to handle the bigger job that is ahead. We have one of the most challenging assignments that has ever been given to modern man.¹⁰⁰

On Tuesday afternoon, September 30, more than 8,000 people left work as employees of the 43-year-old NACA. The next morning almost all of them returned to their same jobs with NASA.