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 20th
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.