Pioneers in Love with the Frontier

By Hugh Sidey

Things (CIRCA 1541)

Of course, we Americans knew that, felt it in our marrow as we marched raucously across a continent. Historian Frederick Jackson Turner explained it to us in 1893, when he wrote of the closing of our Western frontier. "What the Mediterranean Sea was to the Greeks, breaking the bond of custom, offering new experiences, calling out new institutions and activities, that, and more, the ever retreating frontier has been to the United States."

At about the same time, Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan explained, without saying it in so many words, that this nation's new frontier had to be the task of becoming a great world power. We were, of course, that and more by the time World War II ended. Presidential Science Adviser Vannevar Bush described the logical progression in a report to Harry Truman, "Science--The Endless Frontier." The U.S., through research and its rapid application to the lives of people, would conquer other realms. There were those stars that the quirky European philosopher Paracelsus had dreamed of dominating. Going into space was the obligation of America, an absolute writ of being--and staying--free.

Melvin Kranzberg, a professor of the history of technology at Georgia Tech, believes that the space triumphs of the past 25 years have sustained us when our wars and social experiments faltered and failed. Even the tragedies have intensified the experience. "We've got to go on," says Kranzberg. "Man's most abiding quest is the effort to understand himself in relation to the cosmos."

Fear, as well as the hand of God, has propelled us. If we did not go first, somebody else would. Somebody else almost did.

Washington was comfortable and smug on the night of Oct. 5, 1957, as its scientists gathered in planning sessions for the International Geophysical Year. They were certain they would dominate the global experiments. Along with experts from a dozen other nations, the Americans assembled at the Soviet embassy on 16th Street, sipping vodka. Walter Sullivan of the New York Times was called to the phone, and the news he heard changed the world. Sullivan hurried back to the party and whispered in the ear of Physicist Lloyd Berkner, who rapped on the table for quiet. "I am informed that a satellite is in orbit at an elevation of 900 kilometers. I wish to congratulate our Soviet colleagues on their achievement."

Old Washington hands can tell you that Sputnik changed the capital for good that night. There were suggestions that the U.S. declare a national emergency and conduct an all-out effort to catch up. "Know thine enemy" became the slogan of the day, and schools began offering courses in Russian. The race to conquer the heavens predated even the cold war; when Soviet and American troops entered Germany, they scanned their lists of prisoners for rocket scientists they could trundle home. But Sputnik launched the race right into the heart of the superpower rivalry, where it has remained ever since.

John Hagen, the gentle astronomer who was heading the American space probe, Project Vanguard, puffed his pipe in his dingy corner of the Naval Research Laboratory and foresaw the coming competition. But his soul was geared to an earlier age, and his rocket remained rooted to its Cape Canaveral pad. Hagen's men were perfectionists; they were searching for data, not power. And that's where they erred. By then, politics was taking over. The Vanguard was hurried, and when its engine was finally ignited in December 1957, the slender missile lurched and exploded. John Hagen's kindly eyes wept with no tears. Senator Lyndon Johnson raged, "How long, how long, O God, how long will it take us to catch up with Russia's satellites?"

Out of the Army's Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Ala., came Wernher von Braun, 45, the exuberant Prussian who had fathered the German V-2 rockets. He had been among those who rushed into American hands when the Third Reich collapsed. Von Braun souped up his Redstone missile, put a tiny satellite dubbed Explorer on top and sent it into orbit. There was no turning back.

It was still no piece of cake. The Soviets orbited Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, in April 1961, when a new young President was getting ready to prove what a tough guy he was at Cuba's Bay of Pigs. Adding insult to injury, the news began to trickle out when John Kennedy had just tossed the first baseball of the season in Griffith Stadium, and he was eating a good old American hot dog. In the perverse ways of a frontier, the discouraging news would goad Kennedy and the country to achievements beyond their dreams.

"If somebody can just tell me how to catch up," Kennedy complained one < night to his staff. "Let's find somebody--anybody, I don't care if it's the janitor, if he knows how." Kennedy fidgeted, ran his hand through his hair, grimaced at the news that it would take $40 billion and ten years to get a man on the moon--and then he might be greeted by a Soviet cosmonaut. But frontiers are not conquered by cost accountants. Kennedy left the meeting and went into the Oval Office. In a few minutes his aide Ted Sorensen came out and told a friend, "We are going to the moon." It was a goal that suddenly gave real meaning to Kennedy's slogan of a "New Frontier."

Kennedy's call brought out the dreamers, the tinkerers, the organizers, the suppliers. Lyndon Johnson never tired of telling the story of how Americans had found Teflon "for your old fryin' pan" on the way to the moon. But there was heavy counterpoint to this melody of invention. Nikita Khrushchev raged at Kennedy in Vienna in 1961. The Berlin Wall went up. The Soviets tested their huge hydrogen bomb, the one U.S. scientists had said they would not have for years.

The space race had become more than a poetic dream. It was now a military imperative. While the Soviets were pushing ahead with their missile program, American strategists had clung to the notion that manned bombers rather than rockets were the most suitable, and somehow the most romantic, way to fight wars in the Atomic Age. With alliances and airfields that ringed the globe, the U.S. had seen no reason to bring the nuclear race into space. Now it was necessary.

When they tucked Alan Shepard into Freedom 7 down at Cape Canaveral, Kennedy gratefully broke up a grim National Security Council meeting and led the group to a television set in Secretary Evelyn Lincoln's office. The President, a skeptic about military hardware, expected the worst. He watched in silence, hands thrust deep in his pockets. Von Braun's rocket belched flame, rose steadily out of sight. Shepard's capsule drifted up through space and down again in 15 minutes, but that was enough to lift Kennedy's heart. An aide stuck his head in the office door and announced, "The astronaut is in the helicopter." Only then did Kennedy seem to believe. A smile crept slowly across his face, and he murmured, "It's a success."

When he tried to pin a medal on Shepard, the President dropped it and joked that it had come from the ground up, just like the astronaut. But he had another point, one that echoes loudly this week. "This flight was made out in the open with all the possibilities of failure," he said. "Because great risks were taken, it seems to me that we have some right to claim that this open society of ours, which risked much, gained much."

With that charge--risk much, gain much--the heavenly parade was on. In February 1962 John Glenn became the first American in orbit. He lapped the earth three times in five hours and splashed down happy and a huge hero. "We have a long way to go in the space race," Kennedy said. "We started late. But this is the new ocean, and I believe the United States must sail on it and be in a position second to none."

They came one by one--Carpenter, Schirra, Cooper, Young, McDivitt, White, Conrad--counterweights to Bull Connor with his dogs in Birmingham and Lester Maddox and the ax handles in Georgia. When the Viet Cong began to move through the jungle shadows in Southeast Asia, American spacemen were taller and more visible than ever. They became the one secure thread binding a nation becoming more divided.

A week before his death, Kennedy visited the Cape, where the first stage of the Saturn rocket, the moon launcher, was in place. He stood beneath the monster, rocking back on his heels, and fell silent for a long minute. Even then, off to the side, his aides were arguing about how to land on the moon. But Kennedy was beyond the engineers and accountants. And he put his vision in words just the day before he died. "Frank O'Connor, the Irish writer, tells in one of his books how, as a boy, he and his friends would make their way across the countryside, and when they came to an orchard wall that seemed too high and too doubtful to try and too difficult to permit their voyage to continue, they took off their hats and tossed them over the wall--and then they had no choice but to follow them. This nation has tossed its cap over the wall of space, and we have no choice but to follow it."

What a joy it was. As Lyndon Johnson waded deeper and deeper into the disaster that was Viet Nam, he clung more and more to the contrails of his space explorers. "Thank God," he muttered once, "I've still got my astronauts."

Richard Nixon claimed his part just as soon as he became President. He eagerly plugged into the moon landing, talking by phone to Neil Armstrong and Edwin ("Buzz") Aldrin on the lunar surface. "This certainly has to be the most historic phone call ever made." It was even more, and Nixon knew it. He launched a global diplomatic odyssey timed to take advantage of the Apollo 11 success. His itinerary placed him on the aircraft carrier Hornet just as the moon crew was fished out of the ocean and lifted onto the TV screens of people all over the globe. Without the continuing spectaculars in space, Nixon's demise because of Watergate would have produced even more of a national trauma than it did.

There was, at the apex of detente during Gerald Ford's Administration, a brief hope that space could become a bridge rather than a barrier between the superpowers. In 1975 astronauts and cosmonauts aboard an Apollo and a Soyuz spacecraft linked in a display of heavenly symbolism. But such episodes proved to be merely minor exceptions to the rule that space was inevitably where the superpowers would extend their rivalry.

Ronald Reagan has never been a space buff, the kind of fellow who loves to talk gadgetry and hankers to go weightless. He does not know that much about the byways of the solar system. But his sense of American pride has been almost faultless. He has understood intuitively that people must have a challenge that takes them out of the despair that crowds every day. There must be a new frontier beckoning, promising some new hope. He even sees space as a way, in his words, "to render nuclear weapons obsolete." But his proposal to build and perhaps share satellite-based missile defense shields failed to produce the superpower cooperation he says he envisioned. Indeed, it provoked one of the deepest disputes between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R.

When the debate over whether to build a manned space station came to the Cabinet Room in late 1983, James Beggs, NASA administrator, heard argument after argument against the project. He studied Reagan's face throughout the meeting. Walking out the door, a colleague remarked gloomily, "I guess we lost that one." Replied Beggs: "No, we won it. I could tell from the President's eyes." Beggs was right. Reagan felt the challenge of the hat over the wall. And last week, at the memorial service for Challenger's crew, he proclaimed yet again his determination to build the manned space station as planned.

John Logsdon, George Washington University's space policy expert, has studied the program and its relationship to the American people. After last week's disaster, he noted that in many sports arenas, when they play the national anthem, among the images flashed on the big screens is that of the shuttle. "It's one of our most common national symbols now," he said. "Right after the bald eagle." Along with its predecessors, stretching back to the first Redstone rockets, it remains even now a symbol of America's common bond as a nation, in times of both triumph and tragedy.