CHAPTER 4

THE ROCKET AND SATELLITE RESEARCH PANEL: THE FIRST SPACE SCIENTISTS

As World War II came to a close, a group of engineers and scientists in the Communications Security Section of the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington began to cast about for new research problems to which to apply their talents. Long hours were spent on the subject, and the list of possibilities grew to sizable proportions. Milton Rosen, a competent, versatile, imaginative electronics engineer, suggested that the group might apply its wartime experience with missiles and communications, including television, to a study of the upper atmosphere. The suggestion became the eighth to go on the blackboard in the office of Ernst Krause, head of the section. Thereafter it was referred to as Project 8.

When the debate finally wound down, Project 8 was the clear winner To the many physicists in the group the project offered an attractive and important field of research. The engineers could feel the challenge of instrumenting and launching the rockets that would be needed by the scientists. And because of the importance of knowledge of atmospheric properties to communications and the design and operation of missiles, it was possible that the Navy might support the project.

The director of the laboratory approved the upper-air research proposal in December of 1945, and the section became the Rocket Sonde Research Section, a name that appropriately enough also came from the originator of the Project 8 idea. No one in the section was experienced in upper atmospheric research, so the section immediately entered a period of intensive self-education. Members lectured each other on aerodynamics, rocket propulsion, telemetering-whatever appeared to be important for the new tasks ahead. The author gave a number of talks on satellites and satellite orbits. Indeed, the possibility of going immediately to artificial satellites of the earth as research platforms was considered by the group, which assimilated carefully whatever information it could obtain from military studies of the time. The conclusion was that one could indeed begin an artificial satellite program and expect to succeed, but that the amount of new development required would be costly and time consuming. The scientists could not hope to have their instruments aloft for some years to come and, anyway, were not likely to get their hands on the necessary funds. The Rocket Sonde Research Section accordingly shelved the satellite idea and turned to sounding rockets.

As they were considering what rockets-including the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s WAC-Corporal-might be available for the research they contemplated, word came that the U.S. Army would be willing for interested scientists to conduct experiments in some of the V-2s it was planning to fire at the White Sands range in New Mexico. Because of the narrow confines of the range, the missiles would have to be fired along nearly vertical trajectories and would accordingly make ideal probes of the upper atmosphere. To explore the possibilities Krause invited a number of interested persons to meet at the Naval Research Laboratory. At the meeting, on 16 January 1946, physicists and astronomers interested in cosmic ray, solar, and atmospheric research were present. Because of the potential importance of upper-air data to military applications, the services were well represented. It was plain from the deliberations that a number of groups both in universities and in the military would be interested in taking part in a program of high-altitude rocket research.

THE V-2 PANEL

Accordingly, at an organizing meeting at Princeton University 27 February 1946, a panel was formed of members to be actually engaged in or in some way directly concerned with high-altitude rocket research.¹ The original members (see also app. A) were:

• E. H. Krause (chairman), Naval Research Laboratory
• G. K. Megerian (secretary), General Electric Co.
• W. G. Dow, University of Michigan
• M. J. E. Golay, U.S. Army Signal Corps
• C. F. Green, General Electric Co.
• K. H. Kingdon, General Electric Co.
• M. H. Nichols, Princeton University
• J. A. Van Allen, Applied Physics Laboratory, Johns Hopkins University
• F. L. Whipple, Harvard University

Because of his role in getting things started and because he would be devoting full time to upper-air research with rockets, Krause was elected chairman.

To Krause must go the-principal credit for getting the program under way. He was a physicist, with a doctorate from the University of Wisconsin in spectroscopy, and a background in communications research. Both qualifications were pertinent to the development of techniques for the investigation of the sun and upper atmosphere. Krause’s energy and drive were phenomenal, and his capacity for detail and thoroughness were ideally suited to welding all the elements needed to get a sounding rocket program off the ground. When Krause left in December 1947 to participate in nuclear bomb tests, James A. Van Allen was elected to the chair, a spot he occupied for the next decade.²

Van Allen is by far the best known of the original members of the V-2 panel. A physicist, at the time the panel was formed he was employed by the Applied Physics Laboratory of the Johns Hopkins University on the Bumblebee Project, a Navy missile research and development project. He brought to the panel an intense interest in cosmic ray physics, an interest that led in time to his discovery of the earth’s radiation belts that now bear his name.

The panel had no formal charter, no specified terms of reference from an authorizing parent organization, a circumstance that left the panel free in the years ahead to pursue its destiny in keeping with its own judgment. The immediate task was to provide Col. James G. Bain of the Army Ordnance Department with advice he had requested on the allocation of V-2s to the various research groups. This the panel proceeded at once to do, and in fact until the end of the V-2 program in 1952 continued to direct its reports to Army Ordnance as principal addressee. Thereafter the reports were issued simply to the members and to observers who attended the meetings, with copies to a selected list of interested persons and agencies (see app. B).

The panel’s program, if it may be called that, consisted of the collection of activities engaged in by its members. As a forum for discussion of past results and future plans, the panel was a breeding ground for ideas; but whatever control it might bring to bear on the program was exerted purely through the scientific process of open discussion and mutual criticism.

For some time after its first session, the panel met monthly (see app. C.) There was a great deal to do, quickly; for Army Ordnance and its contractor, General Electric Company, intended to fire the rockets on a rather rapid schedule. Since the German warheads were not suitable for carrying scientific payloads, the Naval Research Laboratory undertook to provide the different groups with standard nose sections specifically designed for housing the research instrumentation. To send information to the ground from the flying rocket, NRL also furnished telemetering equipment to go into the rocket and erected ground stations at the White Sands range for receiving and recording the data-bearing signals. In short order the word telemetering, meaning the making of remote measurements by radio techniques, became a familiar part of the growing jargon of rocket sounding. To make the most of the large capacity of the V-2, NRL designed and built a large, complex telemeter. The first version supplied to the program could provide 23 channels of information; a later version provided 30. With characteristic preference for smaller, simpler instrumentation, the Applied Physics Laboratory developed and use a much smaller, 6-channel, frequency-modulated telemeter.³

Radar beacons were installed in the missile to track it, providing information on where measurements had been made. The range also required that each rocket be outfitted with a special radio receiver that could cut off the motor should the missile begin to misbehave after launch. Arrangements had to be made for building and supplying this equipment. Also, to supplement the tracking information provided by radar and radio, theodolites, precise cameras, and other optical instruments were installed at strategic locations along the firing range to furnish both visual and photographic trajectory data. It also would be essential to know the orientation of the rocket in order to interpret properly such measurements as aerodynamic pressures or cosmic ray fluxes. For this, still more instruments-including photocells to observe the direction of the sun, cameras, and magnetometers-were brought to bear.⁴

Although much, perhaps most, of the scientific data would be obtained by telemetering, some measurements would require the recovery of equipment and records from the rocket after the flight was over, such as earth and cloud pictures, photographs of the sun’s spectrum, and biological specimens exposed to the flight environment. For this purpose several techniques were developed, including the use of explosives to destroy the streamlining of the rocket, causing it to maple leaf to the ground; the deployment of parachutes to recover part or all of the spent rocket; and even the application of the kind of sound ranging techniques used in World War I to locate large guns.⁵

At first, operations at White Sands were an amorphous collection of activities. During the first year of rocket sounding the procedures and issues that would have to be dealt with in even greater detail years later in the space program emerged: safety considerations, provision for terminating propulsion of the missile in mid-flight, tracking, telemetering, timing signals, range communications, radio-frequency interference problems, weather reports, recovery of instruments and records, and all that went into assembling, instrumenting, testing, fueling, and launching the rocket. To cope with the seemingly endless detail, the range required formal written operational plans in advance that could be disseminated to the various groups. A more or less standard routine evolved with which the participants became familiar.⁶ In only a few years experimenters were harking back to the “good old days" when operations were free and easy and red tape had not yet tied everything into neat little, inviolable packages.

While the General Electric Company personnel, Army workers, and others labored to produce successful rocket firings, the scientists labored equally hard to devise and produce the instrumentation that would yield the desired scientific measurements. At first some of the instrumentation was tentative, even crude, as when Ralph Havens of NRL took an automobile headlight bulb, knocked off the tip, and used it as a Pirani pressure gauge to measure atmospheric pressure in the V-2 fired on 28 June 1946. But even before the end of 1945 spectrographs were recording the sun’s spectrum in previously unobserved ultraviolet wavelengths, special radio transmitters were measuring the electrification of the ionosphere, and a variety of cosmic-ray-counter telescopes were analyzing radiation at the edge of space. A portion of each panel meeting was devoted to reporting on experimental results, which accumulated steadily from the very first flight of 16 April 1946. Papers began to appear in the literature and attracted considerable attention as experimenters reported on measurements that hitherto were impossible to make.⁷ By the time the last V-2 was fired in the fall of 1952, a rich harvest of information on atmospheric temperatures, pressures, densities, composition, ionization, and winds, atmospheric and solar radiations, the earth’s magnetic field at high altitudes, and cosmic rays had been reaped.⁸

THE NEED TO REPLACE THE V-2

But not all of the results had been obtained from the V-2. To be sure, the immediate availability of the V-2 as a sounding rocket was a boon to the program, for it meant that the scientists could start experimenting without delay. Its altitude performance of 160 kilometers with a metric ton of payload far exceeded that of any other rocket that the experimenters might have been able to use, making investigations well into the ionosphere possible from the outset. More significantly, the large weight-carrying capacity of the rocket meant that experimenters did not have to miniaturize and trim their equipment to shoehorn them into a very restricted payload, but could use relatively gross designs and construction. This capacity was a great help at the start, when everyone was learning, for it permitted the researcher to concentrate on the physics of his experiment without being distracted by added engineering requirements imposed by the rocket tool. Later, with some years of experience behind him, the experimenter would be able to take the outfitting of much smaller rockets in stride. And it was of advantage to go to smaller rockets as soon as possible.

Smaller rockets would be much cheaper, far simpler than the V-2 to assemble, test, and launch. Moreover, with the smaller, simpler rockets the logistics of conducting rocket soundings at places other than White Sands would be manageable. With such thoughts in mind, as panel members pressed the exploration of the upper atmosphere with the V-2 they also set out to develop a variety of single and multistage rockets specifically for atmospheric sounding.⁹ James Van Allen and his colleagues at the Applied Physics Laboratory undertook, with support from the U.S. Navy’s Bureau of Ordnance, to develop the Aerobee sounding rocket.¹⁰ At the same time NRL took on the job of developing a large rocket-first called Neptune, but later Viking when it was learned a Neptune aircraft already existed-to replace the V-2s when they were gone.¹¹ At the 28 January, 1948 meeting of the panel, Van Allen reported on a series of test firings of the Aerobee-three dummy rounds and one live round.¹² As soon as it was ready the Aerobee was put to work exploring the upper atmosphere and space, with firings not only from the original Aerobee launching tower at White Sands, but also from a second tower that the Air Force erected some 57 kilometers northeast of the Army blockhouse at the White Sands Proving Ground. The Air Force tower was located at Holloman Air Force Base near Alamogordo. Not content with the payload and altitude capabilities of the first Aerobees, both the Air Force and the Navy continued the development, producing something like a dozen different versions, one of which could carry 23 kilograms of payload to an altitude of 480 kilometers.¹³ In its various versions Aerobee was used continuously in the high-altitude rocket research program through the 1950s and 1960s and was still in use in the mid-1970s.

In contrast, the Viking, although of a marvelous design-Milton Rosen, who directed the Viking development program, used to point out that in its time Viking was the most efficiently designed rocket in existence-found very little use. The dozen rockets bought for the development program were, of course, instrumented for high-altitude research. But Viking was too expensive. The groups engaged in rocket sounding each had perhaps a few hundred thousand dollars a year to expend on the research, and a single Viking would have eaten up the whole budget. When the supply of German V-2s began to run low, consideration was given to building new ones; but estimates placed the price per copy at around half a million dollars, which was prohibitive. It had been hoped that Viking would be much less expensive, but before the end of the development these rockets became almost as expensive as new V-2s. So Viking found no takers among the atmospheric sounding groups and would probably have been shelved had it not been chosen as the starting point for the Vanguard IGY satellite launching vehicle.¹⁴

The contrast between Viking and Aerobee typified a situation that has recurred in the space science program. One group of scientists would favor developing large new rockets, spacecraft, or other equipment that would greatly extend the research capability. Another group would prefer to keep things as small and simple as possible, devoting its funds to scientific experiments that could be done with available rockets and equipment. The former group could always point to research not possible with existing tools, thus justifying the proposed development. In rebuttal the latter could always point to an ample collection of important problems that could be attacked with existing means. There was right on both sides of the argument, and it was usually a standoff. As far as upper atmospheric research was concerned, however, Viking was too far ahead of its time. While in the next decade researchers would be able to buy $1-million Scouts (chap. 10), in the early years of rocket sounding Viking cost too much.

Once the ball had started rolling with Aerobee and Viking, other rocket combinations began to appear. The experimenters sought less cost, greater simplicity, higher altitudes, more payload, and especially a capability to conduct firings at different geographic locations. Great ingenuity was displayed in putting together new combinations. Sounding rockets were taken to the California coast, to Florida, to the Virginia coast, out to sea, and to the shores of Hudson’s Bay in Canada.¹⁵ They were even launched in the stratosphere from balloons, a combination that the inventor, Van Allen, called a Rockoon.¹⁶ In the panel meeting of 9 September 1954, Van Allen reported that Rockoon flights in the Arctic had established the existence of a soft radiation in the aurora zone above 50 kilometers height, which proved to be one of the milestones along the investigative track that ultimately led to the discovery of the earth’s radiation belt.

SCOPE OF PANEL ACTIVITY

One of the most notable aspects of the panel record is the steadily increasing scope of activity. In the minutes of the organizing meeting, the secretary referred to the group simply as “the panel.” By the third meeting Megerian was calling the group the “V-2 Upper Atmosphere Panel.” This name continued for the next two meetings; but the appellation “V-2 Upper Atmosphere Research Panel" appeared at the sixth meeting, in September 1946, and stuck for the next year and a half. These first titles reflected the panel’s participation in the V-2 program, but the group’s primary business was high-altitude research, not V-2s. The panel, well aware that the supply of V-2s would be exhausted in the not too distant future, gave early attention to finding alternative sounding rockets. Prodded by the Office of the Chief of Ordnance, at its March 1948 meeting the panel dropped the V-2 from its title and began calling itself the “Upper Atmosphere Rocket Research Panel" (UARRP). This sufficed to describe activities until members had become so thoroughly involved in the International Geophysical Year scientific satellite program that another name change seemed appropriate. At an executive session, 29 April 1957, the panel adopted its final name: “Rocket and Satellite Research Panel.”¹⁷

Throughout most of its active life, the panel remained quite small. By restricting its rolls to working members only, and also by limiting the number of representatives from any one agency, the panel kept its size down--which made for more manageable meetings. Yet there was no desire to limit interest or participation in the meetings. A loyal cadre of observers attended the sessions throughout the years and joined in the discussions. From the first, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics was represented among the observers-an interesting fact in retrospect, although at the time there was no reason to suspect that one day NACA might play a central role in a suddenly emerging space program. Increasing interest in high-altitude rocket research over the years is also shown by the steady growth in the list of addressees to whom panel reports were sent. The minutes of the organizing meeting went to only about 30 persons; 10 years later some 118 copies were being distributed among 73 addressees.¹⁸ The composition of the distribution lists is illuminating (see app. B). The military was obviously interested. So, too, were other government agencies such as NACA and the U.S. Weather Bureau. The large number of university names on the list no doubt resulted from the pure-science nature of much of the panel’s research.

For more than a decade the panel occupied a unique position in scientific research. In the United States its members represented all the institutions engaged in sounding rocket research. Attendees at meetings-members plus observers-comprised a substantial number of the individuals in the country who were involved. As one consequence of this unique position, the panel came to be regarded as the prime source of expertise in the field. In spite of the lack of any official charter, the panel soon acquired a quasi-official status. The National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics used data from the panel program in compiling and updating its tables of a standard atmosphere.¹⁹ The Defense Department’s Research and Development Board made a practice of turning to the panel for recommendations regarding sounding rockets and high-altitude rocket research. The board-called the Joint Research and Development Board before the establishment of the Department of Defense in 1947-boasted a sprawling, complex structure intended to correspond in one way or another to the military research and development programs.²⁰ From time to time its Committee on Guided Missiles took an interest in the rockets being used by the panel. When, in the spring of 1949, the Navy’s Viking and the Air Force’s MX774 rockets came into competition-it was not considered reasonable for the country to support two large, expensive sounding-rockets-UARRP was informed that a panel of the Committee on Guided Missiles endorsed Viking. The R&D board’s Committee on Geophysical Sciences, and its subsidiary group for study of the upper atmosphere, took a continuing interest in what UARRP was up to. The subsidiary group endorsed the UARRP’s research program and in November 1947, responding to a request for support, unanimously recognized “the importance of all phases of the well-coordinated V-2 rocket firings program and the grave consequences of any failure to give adequate financial support to all agencies involved in this program, since the lack of support of the program in any one agency would jeopardize the program as a whole.” ²¹ At its April 1950 meeting, one finds the UARRP responding to a request of the R&D board for views on requirements for upper-air research vehicles.²²

But, while the endorsement was of help, association with the military also brought problems. At its 7 May 1947 meeting, the UARRP learned that the R&D board’s upper-atmosphere group was considering assigning primary responsibility to different agencies for different kinds of upper-atmosphere research. Although nothing ever came of this, the thought of dividing the research into assigned parcels conflicted with the basic research instincts of UARRP members.

More serious, however, was the question of security classification that arose periodically. In defense of the research program, panel members were pointing out the many practical benefits to be gained from data and knowledge obtained. Over the years the list of potential benefits to the military grew, until a report issued at the start of the International Geophysical Year by a number of the panel members cited a dozen important applications:

• Design of missiles, high-altitude craft, and space vehicles.
• Determination of the reentry behavior of long-range ballistic missiles.
• Special techniques of high-altitude navigation.
• Evaluation of hazards to personnel and equipment in the high atmosphere and space.
• Improvement of weather forecasting.
• Study of climate.
• Prediction of the trajectories of biological, chemical, or radiological agents.
• Development of reliable point-to-point communications.
• Development of reliable and accurate methods of guidance, control, and delivery of missiles to their targets.
• Development of reliable and accurate methods of detection of enemy missiles and high-altitude craft.
• Development of countermeasures against enemy missile
• Remote detection of nuclear explosions.²³

But to the extent the salesmanship succeeded, it also raised the question of why the sounding rocket results shouldn’t be classified if they were so valuable to the military, which was paying for them.

From the outset the panel had assumed that its program, being basic research, would be unclassified. In a memorandum to the White Sands Proving Ground, Col. H. N. Toftoy of the Army Ordnance Department had written that V-2 firing schedules, rocket design, and flight information would be unclassified.²⁴ This decision was important to the program, since the flight information was intimately related to the high-altitude data obtained from the rocket, and since design data were needed for interpreting measurements-for example, aerodynamic pressure curves were required in obtaining atmospheric densities from pressure measurements along the surface of the flying rocket. A serious threat arose when, at the October 1952 meeting of the panel, Earl Droessler of the R&D board announced that the military had again raised the question of classification of upper atmospheric data. The panel unanimously agreed to fight classification, citing the importance of the scientific process, in particular open publication and free exchange of information, to a basic research activity. While there was something to be gained by classifying certain specific uses of scientific information, there was much to be lost by classifying the purely scientific data. In these efforts the panel was successful, and the program remained unclassified.

The program called for a lot of work, but it was exciting. Panel meetings were enjoyable, with none of the tedium that so often weighs oppressively on committee meetings. For most of the members, after a period of preparation at home base-in Washington, Silver Spring, Cambridge, Ann Arbor, or elsewhere-there would be a period of some weeks or a couple of months working in the lonely beauty of the New Mexico desert. How exhilarating it was send a rocket roaring into the clear blue sky, watch the missile trace a brilliant white vapor trail against the azure background, a trail the stratospheric winds soon blew into complicated twists and knots, and then to jump into a jeep and race northward to retrieve cameras and instruments! On one such day in March 1957, with the sky as bright a blue as it ever had been, V-2 no. 21 landed in the heart of the White Sands National Monument. What a glorious hunt riding up and down over the snow-white dunes of gypsum sand that stretched as far as the eye could see! At the end of the day, with a solar spectrograph, cameras, and other instruments safely stowed aboard the jeeps, the impact party, as it was called, slowly worked its way out of the barren wilderness. As the group approached the edge of the monument, where the gypsum deposit has acquired a pinkish tint from the surrounding red sands of the Tula Rosa Basin, the sun was setting. An occasional yucca growing amid the pinkwhite dunes provided a display of incomparable beauty, which the glowing sun transformed into a fairyland. When the white sands were finally left behind, one could feel the emotional release.

The routine was frequently broken by bits of humor. Early in the program, before the range was properly instrumented for tracking the V-2s, von Braun often watched the flying rocket as it rose above the desert, judging by eye whether it was on course. If the missile strayed, von Braun called for stopping the engines by radio. On one occasion, the eye failed to detect a tipping toward the south, and the missile landed in a cemetery in Juarez, Mexico, causing something of an international incident. Rumor had it that von Braun’s lapse might have been related to his having some instruments riding on the rocket. At any rate preparations to track the missiles by instrument were accelerated.

The Naval Research Laboratory used radio signals from the flying rocket to measure the electrification of the ionosphere. For this purpose the laboratory installed ground stations uprange from the launching area. One day as the men were preparing one of the stations for an approaching flight, an Army jeep drove up, and a soldier got out and began driving a stake into the ground not more than a stone’s throw from the station. Curious, the men asked what that meant. That, they were told, was the aiming point for some planned Honest John rocket tests. The men let it be known they didn’t fully appreciate being made the target of rocket firings. “Not to worry,” was the answer, “we never hit the target, anyway!"

Often there was frustration to struggle with. During the countdown for the firing of V-2 no. 16, something in the tail switch, which was supposed to turn the experimental equipment on after takeoff, was wrong. An effort was made to reconnect the switch there on the launch stand with the fully loaded rocket waiting to take off. After launch, however, instead of turning instruments on, the rewired switch proceeded to turn everything off. A postflight review showed that there were several ways in which the switch could have been connected to do the intended job, and only one way in which it would fail. The one and only wrong way had been chosen-an important object lesson regarding hasty, last-minute changes in the field. It turned out, however, that this rocket tumbled end over end in flight, which would have made the reduction of data an exceedingly complex matter. The scientist in charge later said it was probably a good thing that the equipment had been turned off, for otherwise the experimenters would surely have been unable to resist the temptation to try to interpret the measurements and probably would have wasted a lot of time on a futile exercise.

On another occasion, as a physicist watched a rocket carry aloft the cloud chamber over which he had labored long and hard, he remembered that he had forgotten to remove the lens cap from the recording camera. To add to the feeling of despair, the telemetering record indicated that the cloud chamber had worked perfectly during the flight.

Of course, it was always heartbreaking when the rocket failed to perform. It was difficult enough for some experimenters to reconcile themselves to the thought that the equipment they had struggled to perfect would often be destroyed on a single flight. There was consolation when the flight produced the data sought, but not when the rocket failed. After the program had been under way for some time, it was noted that the rockets bearing the simplest payloads seemed to have the best success. The Applied Physics Laboratory group, which never attempted to load rockets to full capacity, had acquired an image of almost perfect success. In contrast, the Air Force Cambridge Research Center, which tried to conduct dozens of complicated experiments on a single flight-and even lengthened the V-2 by a whole diameter to make additional instrument space had developed an image of almost complete failure. The Naval Research Laboratory, which flew payloads intermediate between those of APL and AFCRL in complexity, succeeded about two-thirds of the time. There seemed to be an interaction between the experimenting and the launching operations, the more complex experiments tending to induce more problems with the rocket itself. The suspicion that this was actually happening was widely held, but never proved. On closer look, the evidence is not as clear as it seemed at the time, for the Princeton experiments were as simple as any, and yet all their rockets failed, which was no doubt the main reason for Princeton’s early withdrawal from the program.

One cannot work with rockets without a certain amount of danger. Although the missiles were aimed away from them, the stations uprange were nevertheless exposed to some risk that the rocket might land on one of them. No direct hit ever did occur, but on a few occasions the wreckage from a failing rocket landed uncomfortably close. The greatest danger existed when the rocket was being loaded with propellants and people were still working around it, completing last minute preparations. When a spurt of hydrogen peroxide set a jeep afire, the industrial supplier was moved to assert publicly that the liquid was perfectly safe if only it were handled properly. Most distressing were accidents to personnel, as when a fuming sulfuric acid mixture being loaded into a V-2 prematurely ejected, spraying the face of a worker and endangering his eyesight. The acid mixture was used to generate visible clouds in the stratosphere, which were then tracked to measure stratospheric winds.

The author vividly remembers working with a companion on a platform 10 to 15 meters above ground, inserting live JATO^* rockets into receptacles in the midsection of a fully loaded V-2. Tests had shown that JATO would ignite from the slightest applied voltage, and care had to be exercised not to generate any static electricity or to permit current to flow through the JATO igniter from the ohmmeter being used to check the circuits. Other workers had retired to a respectful distance. Slanting cables had been drawn between the work platform and the ground, down which-if things went wrong-one could slide and then run like hell to safety. The JATOs, which were intended to impart a spin to the rocket in the upper atmosphere, did not ignite during the loading. But, then, neither did they spin the V-2 in flight.

INTERNATIONAL CONTACTS

From the panel’s labors gradually accumulated an array of answers to important questions that had previously been intractable. As noted earlier, published results began to attract attention in the United States. The sounding rocket program also aroused interest abroad. At the panel’s 13 June 1950 meeting, Sydney Chapman, renowned geomagnetician from the United Kingdom, joined the discussions. From that time international contacts gradually broadened, as Chapman became a frequent participant and visitors from Belgium, Australia, Japan, and Canada came. In the fall of 1952 the Royal Society’s Gassiot Committee-a committee concerned with upper atmospheric research-proposed an international meeting on that subject, to be held at Oxford the following August. At the conference the Europeans heard the U.S. program and results discussed in detail, while the Americans became aware of a growing interest among scientists from other countries. By publishing the proceedings in book form, the British stole something of a march, giving panel members occasion to reassess their own publication program.²⁵

At this very period early plans for a “Third Polar Year"-a worldwide cooperative program of geophysical investigations-were taking shape (chap. 5). Van Allen and other panel members had already been considering the possibility of conducting rocket soundings in the vicinity of Fort Churchill, Canada. The author proposed at the panel’s January 1953 meeting that a “full fledged operation of Northern latitude firings be organized for the Third Polar Year 1957-1958" and presented objectives and requirements for such a program at the following meeting.²⁶ In October 1953, Joseph Kaplan, chairman of the U.S. National Committee for the International Geophysical Year (the new name for the Third Polar Year), and Sydney Chapman, chairman of the International Committee for the IGY, both approved the idea of an IGY rocket program. Kaplan reported that the panel would be asked to serve as advisory committee to the National Academy of Sciences’ National Research Council for the rocket phases of the IGY program, but very shortly thereafter the academy established its own Technical Panel on Rocketry.²⁷ To coordinate planning and preparations for firings at Fort Churchill-after some negotiations Canada formally extended an invitation to the United States to set up a rocket launching range there-the panel formed a Special Committee for the IGY (SCIGY). Hearing of the Research Council’s Technical Panel on Rocketry, the panel transferred SCIGY to the academy’s technical group.²⁸ SCIGY’s membership was then expanded slightly to the following:

• H E. Newell, Naval Research Laboratory, Chairman
• J. W. Townsend Jr. Naval Research Laboratory, Executive Secretary John Hanessian, Jr., National Academy of Sciences, Recording Secretary
• K. A. Anderson, State University of Iowa
• Warren Berning, Ballistic Research Laboratories
• L. M. Jones, University of Michigan
• R. M. Slavin, Air Force Cambridge Research Center
• N. W. Spencer, University of Michigan
• W. G. Stroud, Signal Engineering Laboratories ²⁹

The military services permitted their employees to take part in the IGY program and undertook to provide logistic support for shipboard operations and for setting up an Aerobee tower and a Nike-Cajun launcher at Fort Churchill. The Army was in overall charge of the U.S. rocket contingent at Fort Churchill, while the three services shared the expenses. But additional funds were needed. Accordingly, Van Allen submitted on behalf of panel members a budget, request to the IGY committee for more than one and a half million dollars, about 15 percent of America’s total planned budget for the IGY.³⁰ The costs of the program were defrayed by both the military services and the IGY budget.

THE IGY SATELLITE PROGRAM

Although individual members had long been interested in the use of artificial satellites for scientific research, the panel up to this point had recommended only a sounding rocket program for IGY. But simultaneously with the planning for rocket firings, enthusiastic advocates were pressing for the launching of scientific satellites. Inevitably-the panel was caught up in these proposals. To explore at length the usefulness of satellites for scientific research, the panel sponsored a symposium at the University of Michigan 26-27 January 1956. The proceedings were published in a book, ³¹ the sale of which generated a small treasury for the panel.^**

Once aroused, interest in scientific satellites grew rapidly. Most members took part one way or another in the IGY satellite program. Gradually the idea emerged that the United States should go further and establish some kind of permanent space agency. In the summer of 1957, the author jotted down some brief notes outlining a “National Space Establishment" to be organized and funded to conduct unmanned space research and applications and manned exploration of outer space. Shortly thereafter the panel-which the preceding April had changed its name to Rocket and Satellite Research Panel-took steps to explore formally its potential interest in earth satellites and outer space. Report 47, 19-20 September 1957, records the creation of a Committee on the Occupation of Space, chaired by the author. When Sputnik I went into orbit, the panel intensified its efforts on behalf of a civilian National Space Establishment. ³²

On 21 November the group issued a paper entitled “A National Mission to Explore Outer Space.” A different version, “National Space Establishment,” appeared on 27 December 1957 (see app. D). The minutes of the 6 December panel meeting record that the earlier paper had been discussed with Detlev Bronk, president of the National Academy of Sciences. Copies had also been given to James Killian, the president’s science adviser, and to Lee DuBridge, president of the California Institute of Technology. Dr. Killian referred the panel report to Herbert York, Emanuel Piore, and George Kistiakowsky, members of the President’s Science Advisory Committee who were also exploring the question of the United States role in space.³³

To this point the panel’s policy of restricting membership to those working in the upper-atmosphere program had made good sense. But now the panel felt the need for additional weight behind its recommendations. During December 1957 the membership about doubled, adding key persons in the military research establishment, industry, the rocket development field, and the American Rocket Society (app. A). The society was also agitating at the time for the creation of a civilian space agency.³⁴ The two groups agreed to join forces in promoting the idea, and on 4 January 1958 issued a summary paper supporting their joint proposal for a “National Space Establishment" to have responsibility for investigating and exploring space.

In addition to preparing that paper, the Rocket and Satellite Research Panel mapped out a plan to bring its recommendations to the attention of persons who might be in a position to do something. Members visited congressmen and officials in the administration and sought help from the Academy of Sciences. A small group, chaired by the author and including Wernher von Braun and William Pickering, called on Vice President Nixon, who seemed most receptive. Through his good offices a number of meetings were arranged for the group on Capitol Hill and in the executive branch: with the commissioners and general manager of the Atomic Energy Commission, with George Allen and key figures in the U.S. Information Agency, and with the staffs of the House and Senate committees that were considering how to respond to the Soviet challenge in space. William Stroud, von Braun and the author appeared before the joint Committee on Atomic Energy and shocked members by asserting that the proposed space program could very likely require as much as a billion dollars a year and could become comparable to the atomic energy program once it got going.³⁵

Panel members of course seized on whatever news they could acquire about what was going on. They heard that the space program could go a number of ways: a new agency might be created, which the panel had naively recommended; or responsibility might be assigned to an existing agency like the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics; or the Department of Defense might get the job.³⁶

Among panel members the NACA had an image of gross conservatism. In talking to Hugh Dryden, director of NACA, Whipple received the impression that NACA was “not prepared to undertake space research on the scale considered essential by the RSRP and by the American Rocket Society.” Whipple had also talked with General Doolittle, NACA chairman, who declared his intense feeling that it would be a great error to set up any such organization outside of the Defense Department’s jurisdiction.³⁷ His opinion was disturbing to panel members, who had felt the pinch of budgets for sounding rocket research competing with budgets for purely military purposes and who would like to remove the periodic vexation of the classification battle. Although members recognized that the new agency would have to depend on the military for a great deal of hardware and logistical support, to a man-including those employed by the services-the panel was determined that the nation’s space agency ought to be civilian

Doubts about the NACA did not lessen the feeling of satisfaction with the National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958. Members were prepared to give whole-hearted support to the new National Aeronautics and Space Administration, which was to absorb NACA as its nucleus. Indeed, many joined the new agency. But the panel itself was now at loose ends. The purposes it had served for more than a decade would now be NASA’s. For the next two years the panel devoted itself to colloquia on topics related to atmospheric and space research, but such colloquia could hardly serve the now explosively expanding field the way sessions of the scientific societies could. Members experienced a growing dissatisfaction where before a feeling of pioneering excitement had suffused the discussions. William Pickering submitted his resignation with a statement that he felt that the panel

no longer served any real purpose.³⁸

Having existed for so long without any formal charter, the panel now found time to compose a constitution, which was declared adopted by a three-fourths vote at the meeting of 17 February 1960.³⁹ After one more meeting, the panel suspended operations.

Thus, the panel’s success in helping bring about the creation of a new agency devoted to the investigation and exploration of space also brought the demise of the panel. In contrast, the National Academy of Sciences, which the Rocket a Satellite Research Panel had drawn into the rocket research field, expanded its role in the program after the creation of NASA. The Space Science Board, which grew out of the academy’s IGY panels on rocketry and earth satellites, was an immediate source of advice to NASA in its formative years, taking over the advisory role that the Rocket and Satellite Research Panel had once played. As a committee of the nation’s prestigious Academy of Sciences, the Space Science Board enjoyed a vantage point that the panel never had commanded. How the academy went into space science and events leading to the establishment of the Space Science Board as one of the prime sources of advice to NASA are dealt with in the next chapter.