Satellites, Satelloons, and Golf: A Technological Prologue to Postblogging Technology, August 1955

 

"Dirk Boh-Garde"

So I discovered, while trying to re-order some of my requests from the library, that the ASRS definitely doesn't have my email address, or isn't bothering to send me, specifically, emails, by the simple expedient of noticing that the catalogue was listing my Flight retrievals as being held for pickup. I have physical copies of Flight, Newsweek, and The Economist in hand, and I may have missed the pickup windows for retrieval requests for Fortune and The Engineer, so God knows when I'm getting those. (Online subscription for the Aviation Week archives seems to be re-enabled, although I'd prefer to have physical copies for image quality and because it is cheaper.) More importantly, due to my boss getting his three-times postponed vacation this week, I worked 6-2:30, 1:30-10, 8:30-5, and 5-1:30 schedules this week, and was either washed out or lazy this weekend. 

Anyway, here is a  technological prologue instead, because between Eisenhower revisionism and post-revisionism and the announcement of a planned IGY American satellite launch on 29 July 1955, there's a pretty good reason to run one!

Source: https://www.original-political-cartoon.com/cartoon-gallery/buy/caption-displayed/385/

Historians' views of the Eisenhower Administration have . .  . evolved. Better known as a late-era Modesty Blaise-relief cartoonist, Neville Colvin, a newly-arrived refugee from the "stifling atmosphere of Fifties New Zealand," captures the contemporary view of Eisenhower for Fleet Street. Uninterested, or even lazy, but with a lashing of malice barely under control. This is a thoroughly worthless First Executive. While the Britain, having given the world a senile dotard and a meth-head in succession, is not the country to point fingers, there's a sense that the United States has lost eight years. In contrast, writing in 1986, Robert J. MacMahon reviewed a decade of "Eisenhower revisionism" as being most successful in overturning "the traditional interpretation of an inept, bewildered President overwhelmed by his formidable secretary of state." Although "it can be fairly said that the majority of case studies have not sustained Eisenhower revisionism," because the revisionists "have elevated process over policy," we can at least agreed that foreign policy, at least, was "orderly and rational." I'm a bit surprised that MacMahon never gets into the President's health, but, anyway, about that---

 Satellites. 

On 29 July 1955, President Eisenhower "announced through his press secretary" that the United States would launch an artificial satellite during the International Geophysical Year of July 1957--December 1958. If you are wondering, like cynical old me, that an eighteen-month year was a bit of weaselly wiggle room, it isn't, everyone had already agreed to it, probably to get two Antarctic exploration seasons in. The American schedule did use the full eighteen months for its stretch goal. the Soviets did not, launching Sputnik I on 4 October 1957.  My high school physics teacher was vehement that the Physical Science Study Committee's textbook, released in 1960 to remedy shortfalls in American (and Canadian) high school science instruction, was the best textbook ever, because Sputnik. And while he was sadly wrong about that, the existence of a pile of these old textbooks in the dungeon library of a new-built high school in Port McNeill, British Columbia at the turn of the 1980s, is testimony enough to the widely held belief that the Eisenhower Administration had fallen down on the job. 

So let's be clear about this: The Russians weren't "ahead." They were being quiet about their rocket programme because they correctly believed themselves to be behind, and didn't want to expose themselves to embarrassment. The genesis of the Sputnik was simply the sense that if the Americans were going to launch a satellite in the IGY, Communism needed to do so, too. Sergei Korolev had put a proposal on the table six months before, and by the end of August, it had crystallised into a half-ton satellite carrying 200 to 300 kg of scientific instruments, to be launched by a three-stage lashup of the quasi-experimental R-7 ICBM. The payload was ultimately too ambitious to fly in October and went up in April of the next year as Sputnik-3, and the simpler Sputnik-1 radio satellite went up in its place. 

Now, as for the American programme it beat, all I can say is, oh boy. As from the summer of 1955, the United States had agreed with the British to divide the task of developing atomic missile artillery between a British IRBM (Blue Streak), and an American ICBM (Atlas). Atlas, the "Inter-County Ballistic Missile," had a long and involved developmental history going back to 1946, although work officially began in 1953. It was at least technologically ambitious in being a single-state ("stage-and-a-half") design, and was skinnier than the R-7, allowing it to be deployed in silos. So here we've kind of got an argument about the American programme being overtaken by virtue of its greater ambition. 

But that emphatically does not apply to the THREE separate IRBM programmes launched by the Army, Air Force, and Navy in the mid-Fifties, one of which launched the first, much smaller, American satellite in response to Sputnik. The President's promise might have been motivated by work on "Project Orbiter," an Army project coming out of the Redstone (the All-American V2) programme. Per the Wikipedia article, v. Braun pushed it as a Trojan Horse project, getting a satellite payload to put on "his" missile by fishing for a prominent American scientist with a science package ready to go. James Van Allen was interested in a cosmic ray ping counter, and was associated with the "stellerator" fusion power plant model demonstrated at the Atoms for Peace exhibit in Geneva. 

However, the Army's programme was scuttled just four days after the press secretary statement in favour of Project Vanguard, the Navy's IRBM, which it had been fiddling with launching from ships, much like last week's Skyhook balloons.  However, after the successful Sputnik launch, the American priority shifted back to the vestiges of Orbiter that survived in the form of the newly formed army Ballistic Missile Agency, which had a launcher in the form of Juno, a lash-up of the Redstone with a second story consisting of the two-stage, solid-fuel, short range Sergeant Missile, also in development at the Redstone Arsenal. This kind of worked, although Khrushchev's description of Explorer I as the "grapefruit satellite" was not wrong, even if the builders used semiconductors to implement Van Allen's cosmic ray counter in the very limited weight they had available, and earned plaudits by discovering the Van Allen Belt by the simple expedient of noticing that the counter was overwhelmed whenever its erratic orbit made an excursion into the belt.  

It is a bit surprising that the first intimation we have of American satellite activity is yet another programme, the Echo "satellloon," but this seems to have been envisioned as a payload for the Air Force's IRBM, Thor-Delta, then just under way. Thor was another in the long line of American "interim" weapons adopted by the British as they struggled to get their own, more technologically ambitious project under way, with multiple RAF Thor squadrons (with American Lend-Leaseish warheads) operational from 1958 but due to be replaced by the Blue Streak in due time. In striking contrast to the Vanguard/Orbiter/Explorer/Sputnik projects, there was a point to Echo, even if a somewhat Heath Robinsonish one, which was to  put a radio-reflector in orbit, in the mode of Arthur C. Clarke and contemporaries.  USAF development of the Thor seems to have been as loosey-goosey as anything else in this post. "Development was initiated in 1954," the missile was ordered in November 1955, and the payload side seems to have a pretty clear idea of what they wanted by the time they leaked to Newsweek in July. The first Thor test launch was on 25 January 1957 at Canaveral, in tandem with Atlas development. Echo was launched by a two-stage development of the Thor, the Thor-Delta, which also launched Ariel ! and Telstar 1, with first partially-successful launch, in May, 1960, putting Echo 1 in orbit. That was obviously far too late for Thor-Delta to be in the IGY sweepstakes, but the programme had a pretty good success rate at finding customers! Altogether, the contracting team, including the Ramos-Woolbridge team of Hughes defectors but also AC-Delco(!) seems to have done a good job in getting this precursor to the modern communication satellite into space in good time and in good order.