National Affairs: PROJECT VANGUARD

Why It Failed to Live Up to Its Name

A wisecrack much repeated in the U.S. last week was that Project Vanguard, the U.S.’s earth-satellite program, ought to be renamed Project Rearguard. This clothed in humor the widespread feeling of resentment stirred up by the Russians’ great cold-war propaganda victory. Inevitably, the question arose: Who’s to blame?

In 1954, before Project Vanguard’s birth, the Army and Navy jointly undertook a satellite project thought up by Engineer Wernher Von Braun, captured German V-2 expert turned U.S. Army missile brain. Von Braun planned to equip the Army’s tested Redstone missile with booster rockets and use the hybrid to send a small (5 Ib.) satellite into an earth-girdling orbit.

Before Von Braun’s “Project Orbiter” got off the ground, an International Geophysical Year panel, meeting in Rome in October 1954, called for earth-satellite launchings during IGY (July 1957 to December 1958). At the urging of the U.S.’s IGY committee, the Eisenhower Administration decided, in mid-1955, to undertake a satellite program as part of the nation’s IGY effort. The basic top-level decision then to be made was how to run the project. The twofold decision that emerged from the National Security Council: 1) keep the satellite project separate from military ballistic-missile research, and 2) put the Navy in charge. With that, Project Orbiter died and Project Vanguard was born.

Lost Years

Last week, with post-Sputnik hindsight, Director I. M. Levitt of Philadelphia’s Fels Planetarium called that 1955 decision an “astonishing piece of stupidity.” Levitt’s argument, echoed by Army missilemen: the Army’s Jupiter intermediate ballistic missile, well along in 1955, could and should have been adapted for launching a satellite (a modified Jupiter has reached an altitude of 650 miles, higher than Sputnik’s orbit). But when it was made, the National Security Council decision seemed sensible enough. The U.S. had committed itself to pass on to the rest of the world, including Russia, scientific information obtained from IGY programs, so it seemed desirable, to the NSC (and to IGY scientists too) to keep Vanguard from getting deeply involved with top-secret military programs. Also, Administration policymakers, in a fit of touchiness about neutralist opinion, wanted to avoid any appearance of using IGY undertakings for military purposes.

But the main reason for putting Vanguard into a separate, low-priority compartment was that the Pentagon wanted to keep the satellite project from interfering with the U.S.’s top-priority program of military ballistic-missile research. For eight lost years after World War II, the U.S. had spent an average of less than $1,000,000 a year on long-range ballistic-missile projects. The Eisenhower Administration decided in 1954 to push ballistic-missile development, after the physicists decided that they could make a hydrogen warhead light enough to be carried in the nose of a missile. The Russians, well along on missilery with or without an atomic warhead, had a head start that the U.S. urgently needed to narrow. In mid-1955 that need was still urgent.

Once the NSC reached the decision to box off Project Vanguard, it made sense to let the Navy take charge: in experimenting with its Vikings and Aerobees, the Navy had pushed a lot farther ahead in high-altitude-missile research than either the Army or the Air Force.

Strong Warnings As far back as early 1954, U.S. Intelligence suspected that the Russians had started on a high-priority satellite program. At the IGY conference in Barcelona a year ago, Russian scientists spoke ebulliently and convincingly of their country’s satellite progress. Evidence and warnings that the Russians were pressing hard to beat the U.S. in the race piled up—but seemed to make no impression on Administration policymakers. Asked at a November 1954 press conference whether he was concerned that the Russians might win the satellite race, Defense Secretary Wilson snorted: “I wouldn’t care if they did.” If the Administration had wanted to win the race, it could have speeded up Vanguard’s schedule or got the Army going on a crash satellite program utilizing Jupiter (Army missilemen boasted last week that they could get a satellite into an orbit on a month’s notice). But the Administration did neither.

Far from speeding up, in fact, Vanguard lagged behind its original plan for a late-1957 launching of a 20-odd-lb. satellite (less than one-eighth as heavy as Russia’s claim for Sputnik). The stretched-out schedule calls for launching smaller test satellites late this year, orbiting the first 21½-lb. ball next spring. The satellites themselves are ready to soar, reports Vanguard’s softspoken, pipe-puffing Director John P. Hagen. But the launching vehicle is still undergoing tests. Its first stage, an adaptation of the Navy’s Viking, has to work perfectly to do the job: the engine’s 27,000-lb. thrust is barely powerful enough to orbit a 21½-lb. ball, so any less-than-ideal performance will fail. (To send up their Sputnik the Russians apparently used a first-stage missile with a thrust of more than 200,000 Ibs.)

Weak Imagination

After the Russians got their Sputnik into its orbit, an Administration official said he felt an urge to “strangle” Budget Director Percival Brundage. But the Administration has budgeted for Vanguard all the funds that the men who run the project asked for ($110 million so far). And that stock villain, interservice rivalry, did not slow up the project, according to Vanguard scientists. In fact, the scientists, from Dr. Hagen down, insist that Vanguard has not failed, that it will reach its basic goal of orbiting a satellite before IGY’s end.

But in the midst of the cold war, Vanguard’s cool scientific goal proved to be disastrously modest: the Russians got there first. The post-Sputnik White House explanation that the U.S. was not in a satellite “race” with Russia was not just an after-the-fact alibi. Said Dr. Hagen ten months ago: “We are not attempting in any way to race with the Russians.” But in the eyes of the world, the U.S. was in a satellite race whether it wanted to be or not, and because of the Administration’s costly failure of imagination, Project Vanguard shuffled along when it should have been running. It was still shuffling when Sputnik’s beeps told the world that Russia’s satellite program, not the U.S.’s, was the vanguard.