Space: Possibilities and Ambitions Unlimited: Part II—Dirty Origins

 

Space: Possibilities and Ambitions Unlimited: Part II—Dirty Origins

By Tim Krenz

April 13, 2023

The early effort to get humanity off the planet and into orbit took the aspect of a competition, the Space Race: A vigorous and hostile, win or lose challenge between the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. More so, the military of both countries drove the early competition, pushing the technical agendas and developing the equipment to win the prize. That prize, merely one dimension of the Cold War between the West and the East, held the stakes as the champion of the world as achieved by the winners system of civilization.

In the eyes of that world, the reward of prestige would go to which country, the USA or the USSR, won the minds and imaginations of the rest of humanity. Everything about the early Space Race, though, had a dual dynamic, of either one for launching objects and people into orbital space, or the other for delivering nuclear weapons against its adversary.

Both the American and the Soviet military captured two valuable assets at the end of the Second World War. Into their hands, these presumed allies obtained both the records, materials, instruments, and models of the German rocket program, the program that Germany’s Adolf Hitler hoped would become his wonder weapons of magic to reverse his ailing fortunes in his lost war. And, secondly, and more importantly, both the emerging Cold War rivals in the immediate post-war period captured numerous German scientists, some of them bona fide Nazi Party devotees. Some histories may say that one side or the other got more of or the better of one German asset as opposed to the other. Allowing this as only immaterial propaganda, both the Americans and the Soviets captured, and put to work, plenty of all the confiscated German scientist, engineers, documents, and equipment.

Among the most famous of the German scientists, Wernher von Braun, the genius behind Hitler;’s rocket program, found refuge with his invaluable skills in the service to the United States. Hitler’s most successful rocket, designated the A-4, also known as the V-2 (V stood for “Vengeance Weapon,” or “Vergeltungswaffen”), a true guided ballistic missile, produced von Braun’s penultimate tribute for Nazi power. Once they got into the possession of the Americans and the Soviets they became the basis for nearly all early post-war research and experiments. For the rest of his life, as an American space program designer, von Braun received deserved questions and suspicions by the press and human rights advocates for his wartime help to Hitler and the Nazis. In the last years of the war, especially as Germany produced A-4/V-2 systems on an industrial scale, the German rocket program functioned and achieved tactical success by the benefit of slave labor, particularly by Jewish concentration camp inmates.

Many of the details of the Soviet rocket program remained cloaked, but it also benefited from scientist with similar stripes as von Braun. Due to the closed, police-state nature of the Soviet Union’s social system, the Soviets did not voice or allow qualms about their German scientists. They probably just did not care, in light of their need for technical achievements.

If American rocketry had its prime author and spirit in the early 20^th Century work of Robert Goddard, it compromised the naivete of rocket politics with von Braun and his war refugee associates.. And in the politics of the matter, the birth of the bigger rockets following the A-4/V-2 gave animated life to the larger Cold War. In the 1950s, with the US Army, the US Navy, and the US Air Force all developing rocket systems for the first truly Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs, or the SLBMs, for the Submarine-launched variety), rockets became fashionable language in the vocabulary of both the professional military and the civilian defense intellectuals.

Along with programs like the US Air Force’s under General Bernard Schriever, mirroring similar Soviet efforts, to build the big missiles capable of carrying the big nuclear weapons, a Cold War language and logic foreign to the ways of peace developed. The new words and arguments, syllogisms for doomsday or avoiding it, took the form of: “Throw-weight,” for how many megatons of destruction could the missile deliver; “circular error of probability” (CEP), or how close can the warhead hit the target(?); “deterrence,” what stops each side from starting the final Armageddon; “Counter-force strategy,” attacking the enemy nuclear weapons in a first, devastating surprise strike, to disable them; “City Busting,” hitting the enemy cities, since no useful military targets remain, as retaliation for a surprise attack’s success. And the final delusive definition in the logic of hopeless futures: “MAD,” meaning “mutual assured destruction”--if anyone started a nuclear war, it would destroy both the attacker and the defender completely, in the finale.

Multitudes of rockets became vogue, more glamorous than the lakes of fire and brimstone they carried as nuclear weapons. At least rockets could have a scientific, peaceful use, even if in a competitive aspect of the Cold War. From the Jupiter missiles, and the Thor and the Titan missiles/rockets, to the purely military variety of missile weapons like the Minuteman series (I-III), and the Polaris (an SLBM variety)--all of the late 1950s design and development—the next levels in the science of the Space Race advanced. But space, not war, appealed to the world public. For Americans, it first, though, had to scare them into intelligent action.

On October 4, 1957, and building on their own military and related research, the Soviets surpassed their early experiments and successes (like the SS-1, designated “Scud A”) in the post-war race. On that autumn day, the Soviet Union successfully launched and placed into a low elliptical Earth orbit the first known human-made satellite. They called it Sputnik (a name inferred as meaning “Fellow Traveler,” in rough translation, or “Co-wayfarer”). This satellite flew overhead, over any nations in its trajectory, ignoring the rights of sovereign territory or protected airspace. It accidentally set a new legal precedent in international law, by incidentally orbiting anywhere. Sputnik emitted a radio signal, and its “beep-beep” galvanized a Soviet psychological victory in the eyes of the world.

For a well-deserved and tremendous achievement in engineering applications, the Soviet civilization took the credit, rightly, and espoused their belief in the tenets of Marxist-Leninist science. Sputnik impressed the world, and gave Soviet Premier Nikita Krushchev posh and credibility when he told the world that Soviet-led block would conquer humanity’s future. Besides the purely propaganda advantages for the Soviet Union, Sputnik proved to US President Dwight D. Eisenhower and everyone else that if the Soviets could put a small satellite into orbit, they could also drop nuclear weapons the same way. Time in the Space Race and in the Cold War, to develop ballistic missiles carrying weapons, became absolutely a critical factor.

US satellites followed, including military intelligence and communications space vehicles. Yet, while the entire world worried about Soviet war-making rocket policies and threats with “missile diplomacy,” Eisenhower took two more discrete, and more important moves on the solar system game board. First, Eisenhower got the US Congress to fund a budget for a revolutionary education program, one that focused on building the nation’s abilities to produce graduates in the areas of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM). That policy became a game changer in every way for the duration of the Cold War, even as soon as the next decade, and especially for the Space Race.

Secondly, except for the unified military space programs, almost largely unknown and secret still six decades later, Eisenhower consolidated the rest of the US space effort in a part-civilian, AND a part-military National Aeronautics & Space Administration. At least for both the pure research and the purely practical aspects of America’s public space program, Eisenhower put a less war-like moniker on the history books. While the dual purpose programs ran, and still run, dividing the military and the civilian programs put a human face on the latter. The secret military programs continued, and still operate, mostly with a mask, a veil, and a blindfold all at once.

Moving from the Army payroll to head a section of NASA’s rocket research and development, Wernher von Braun became a very public face for the American space programs. Despite his denials of his sketchy history working either FOR or AS a Nazi (NO one really knows, only the US Government), Braun’s vision for space reflected the other contemporary visionaries or the ones that came before him—whether American, British, or Russian, etc. To prove humanity’s worth, it needed to conquer space, and do so with a resounding achievement. Whether of dreams, nightmares, reality, or chimera, the future of humanity in space, like this narrative, continues to unfold.