I Cast Fireball! A Technical Appendix to Postblogging Technology, June 1956

[Insert some kind of PSA about pyromania not being as much fun in real life.]

This here is a hobby of mine, and I do have other hobbies, mostly of the nerdy kind, and like most nerds of a certain calibre I was brought up to sneer at Dungeons & Dragons and prefer some more niche RPG ruleset; Baldur's Gate III, besides being a fun game, has been an eye opener in terms of the incredible piece of folk art that is Fifth Edition Dungeons & Dragons. While by no means perfect, I am in awe at the sustained intellectual effort of millions of people over decades that turned the sprawling mess that was AD&D into a balanced and logical way of structuring play. Not the least of all of this was the balancing of the iconic "Fireball" spell. 

Wizards of the Coast nerfed "Fireball," is what I'm saying.  

And now we seem set on a course of discovering whether "real" fireballs have always been nerfed, by reality, as it gets more and more likely that someone will actually use them. 

I'm not going to talk about H-bombs today, not even in the sense that Sputnik was launched into orbit by a very big rocket, which came out of efforts to build a fireball-casting ICBM. ICBMs are, from a certain point of view, not particularly ambitious rockets, since they don't aim to put things into orbit. The American Vanguard program did, and to a very ambitious apogee of 3,969km, at that. (Starlink satellites orbit at less than 600km, and the ISS at 420km.) As of June 1956, PROJECT VANGUARD aims at putting a Vanguard satellite into orbit in September of 1957, but the press is reporting the possibility of delays due to engine firing failures in test runs. In the event, the first successful Vanguard launch was six months late, whereas the Russian Sputnik launch occurred on schedule on 4 October 1957. The Sputnik program was well-publicised, and the target launch date was known, and met, and it is one of the greater distortions of Twentieth Century history that 

"Privately, however, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and President Dwight D. Eisenhower were aware of progress being made by the Soviets on Sputnik from secret spy plane imagery.^[2]  [Wiki]

The point that easily gets missed here is that Vanguard was the designated American satellite and rocket, and it turned out to be mainly good at casting fireball at the launch facilities. Fire: Fickle servant, cruel master, etc. 

We can talk about the sociological dimensions of the "Sputnik Scare,"  or whatever we want to call it, at length. I am, after all, the product of Sputnik schools, as indeed is our entire modern world. Sutnik isn't the actual origin of the endless STEM educational crisis --that goes back to WWII, or even WWI-- but it is the key moment in the timeline of our collective imginarium that substitutes for the technological history of the Twentieth Century. (The reality of draft-dodging Ostdeutsch turning a traditional medicinal plant into a snake oil anti-schizophrenia drug, and then leveraging that into an Irish generic pharmaceutical giant on the backs of quasi-anonymous-but-Nazi-curious investors is not one we want to hear. 

On the other hand, Vanguard was such a complete and utter technological fiasco that had significant consequences for my life. So it deserves some muckraking, I decided. 

By Unknown, but hosted at Wiki 

If there's one thing to know about missile and rocket development in the United States in the Fifties, it is that it was a mess, and we know it because Aviation Week tells us on a weekly basis. I don't propose to write some kind of administrative history of the regular reorganisations of attempted coordinating and directing missile offices within the Truman and Eisenhower Administrations, because it would be too much work, quite frankly, but there were a lot of them. 

To sort things out into something approaching comprehensibility, the USAF had contractors working on two ICBMS. Convair, the prewar Consolidated, itself consolidated into a conglomerate by Democrat-friendly financier Floyd Odlum, was working on the Atlas, and had been since 1951 (or 1946). Atlas was somewhere around a third of the size of the Soviet R-7 that formed the basis of the Sputnik rocket, but used some innovative structural features that did not work out particularly well in practice. Concerns about the technology led to a backup contract for the Titan missile, from Martin. The Titan II, the first service Titan ICBM, was about half the size of the R-7. (Both the Atlas and Titan are fairly comparable to the Soviet Union's first viable ICBM, the R-16, deployed from 1961.) 

Grandmaster of science fiction, etc. 

Significantly, neither Atlas nor Titan drew directly from the work of the Army's Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama, where Wernher v. Braun and his (to grossly oversimplify) OPERATION PAPERCLIP group was working on an Army rocket to, uhm, do stuff. Inasmuch as Army rocket stuff started well before there even was an Air Force, tearing an extant arsenal with broad responsibilities to the Ordnance Branch away from it and giving it to the Air Force wasn't necessarily a good idea, and the Army had a colourable argument that IRBMs were an extension of the artillery role, as was the SAM, which soon enough emerged in the form of the Douglas-built Nike, a solid-fuel weapon with no association with Nazi space science. The Nazis themselves shot a lot of  Americanised V-2s off before moving on to the Redstone, the first American nuclear ballistic missile, deployed in West Germany from June 1958 and targetted at the Soviet Union and eastern Europe, which seems, uhm, ironic or something. That seems to have left them a bit underemployed, so they went on to develop the Jupiter, a small but orbit-capable rocket derived from the Redstone, and fired as the launch system of the emergency EXPLORER program that launched the first US satellite on  1 February 1958, to avoid VANGUARD embarrassing the Land of the Free even more. It's fun that the same missile has three different names, and not at all confusing. (Also, the actual missile was subcontracted to Chrysler. Frauenhof Trailers got to build Nikes.)

Okay, that was fun, but so far we haven't got to VANGUARD. For that, we'd rather be in Philadelphia, specifically the Philadelphia Naval Yards, where we can be at the heart of one of those industrial-research complexes such as existed before the Military Industrial Complex so as to keep the boaties at sea. One might recall Galileo on the Venetian Arsenal, me on Woolwich (at some point), or me pointing to Mare Island's proximity to Silicon Valley and winking and nudging. Specifically, it was the home of the Naval Research Laboratory, whose misadventures in high pressure steam have come up around here before, even though I choose to decorate this post with a picture of Robert Heinlein, who was well-enough placed in the Navy Aircraft Materials Center (a department within he Naval Aircraft Factory, which, I don't know, sounds socialist to me) to hire Isaac Asimov and L. Sprague de Camp. 

Bureau of Aircraft Accidents Archives, but the photo seems to be hosted
on a mirror site because the original page is gone. 
https://www.baaa-acro.com/crash/crash-martin-202-mt-mihara-37-killed

From the sounds of things, NRL had a somewhat spicy approach to HR, and soon it hired Miton Rosen to develop an indigenous American space rocket capability with an all-American V2 copy. I suppose I'd be some kind of wild-eyed anti-Semite if I made something of "Rosen," but, come on, "Mr. Milton Rosen, B.S. (Penn)" versus "Freiherr v. Braun"!   Which brings us to the Viking, a half-sized V2 in its original design, built by Martin with engines by Reaction Motors, with twelve flights between 1949 and 1955. I have also decorated this post with pictures of the SeaMaster, the gooniest of Martin's goony Fifties ships, in way of suggesting that Martin was not a company that you wanted to have a strategic partnership with back in the day. And, sure, the SeaMaster came out of a Navy specification and the 2-0-2 seemed like a good bet when it seemed like the ICAO was about to sunset the DC3, and while Martin was the only aerospace company to go bankrupt in the Fifties, with even Howard Hughes avoiding it, the fluctuations in the US defence budget made it hard for the entire sector. On the other hand, the cynical rap against Martin is that you build up your aviation business in the nation's capital for greater ease of lobbying. On the third hand, it isn't like the Viking was a world historical disaster, with twelve flights over 1949--55, with seven successes and only 1 complete failure on the pad. This is no big deal compared with the Army's V-2 launch program, but they'd run out of V2s by the time the Vikings started, so the Navy's project was a continuation rather than a rival effort. There was a lot to learn by shooting rockets into the stratosphere, not least how to keep them from turning into a fireball on the pad, or shortly after. The Army seems to have thought that it  had learned enough to proceed with an IRBM, and the first Redstone was launched in 1953.

At this point it was a common notion that ICBMs were on the way, but hydrogen bombs were still aspirational and far too big to be a plausible stratospheric rocket payload, with pure fission bombs too small for the accuracy of the day. A bit of development removed the difficulty, but what with all the atomic secrecy, the Redstone was perhaps a delicate subject. In any event, when a scientific research satellite launch for International Geophysical Year became a national objective, Rosen was able to win the project for a Viking successor (VANGUARD), over a proposal for a Redstone development (EXPLORER). 

This is where the story gets murky, since to this point the NRL had been cooperating successfully with Reaction Motors. "After an extensive bidding war," Reaction Motors won a contract for th eir proposed XLR30 motor to power the X-15 and, per Wikipedia, "eventually pursue crewed spaceflight." The X-15 was one of a  number of fiasco-adjacent later X-planes, although it did eventually get into the air. The XLR30 did not. Rocketdyne was brought in, the XLR30 was redesigned as the XLR99-RM-1, and Thiokol took the company over in 1958. Meanwhile, VANGUARD turned to GE for the XLR50, which was adopted over the proposed XLR30 in October, 1955.  Martin's technical summary of the Vanguard spaceship as a whole is up at the Internet Archive, but is conspicuously silent about the XLR50.
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I mean, I wouldn't be publicising this either, if I were a multinational aerospace conglomerate! It seems like two years wasn't long enough to get the thing working? Rocketdyne had a motor, of course. It was going into Redstone proving rockets. Since it was also making motors for Atlas and Thor missiles, and the latter was to be used to launch the top-secret CORONA spy satellites, maybe there was some concern about turning to the proven manufacturer for yet another motor.

 In any case,  this turns out to be a story of overreach, rather than incompetence. The US was working on building lots of rockets at the same time. It ended up with a lot of rockets, but there were some delays at the launch gate. The Rosen-Reaction Motors connection smells, but Rosen was not allowed to place his engine order with his buddies in New Jersey. Perhaps the GE order could have been placed earlier? It does not seem as though much of the blame attached to Rosen, however. 

After all, much goofier and ill-managed projects have been salvaged with enough time and effort, and Fireball still does have a decent area of effect, even if I still prefer Ice Storm.