"Live From Cape Canaveral": Covering the Space Race, From Sputnik to Today Read Online Free PDF Page A

people who never had much meet, well, there’s instant trust.
    Mostly, when Marty came down, we would go flying. He had bought a German World War II ME–108 fighter, and I remember one particular night when we were upstairs in calm air and the old Messerschmitt was rock steady, and we could see the Cape spread out before us; we could see where brilliant searchlights converged on an Atlas missile. It was too far away to make out details at first, but we could see the plume of escaping liquid-oxygen vapor flashing in the light.
    America’s new spaceport was an enchanted land of lights and colors, and as we flew closer, we could see along the northeast beach the fourmassive gantry towers for Atlas, including the missile undergoing a fueling test on its pad, and the dark shapes where engineers and construction workers were rushing the completion of four complexes and their towers for the mighty Titan. And south of the Cape’s point, there were the gantries for the family of intermediate-range ballistic missiles; Thor, Jupiter, Redstone, and Jupiter-C; and the new launch pads for Polaris.
    I smiled. Before the week was finished, I would be covering the Polaris launch, the solid-fueled missile that would soon go to sea aboard nuclear submarines.
    There were other areas too dark to identify, but from the air, I realized I was seeing the Cape as I had never seen it before. This was not merely a site where buttons were pushed and missiles screamed into the sky. It was a vast assembly, the workshop of a laboratory that stretched more than five thousand miles across the Atlantic. It was vibrant, expensive, terribly complicated, and dangerous, but most of all, vital to all of us.

    Martin Caidin and Jay Barbree could often be seen flying this German World War II Messerschmitt ME–108 fighter over Florida. The German fighter with its original markings raised many eyebrows at local airports, and once Caidin had to make an emergency landing on U.S. 1, coming to a stop in front of a motel. He grinned and asked, “You have a room?” (Caidin Collection).
    I rolled the Messerschmitt westward, cutting power and trimming the World War II fighter for a rapid descent. Three brilliant lights flashed and disappeared, first white, then green. They were the flasher beacons from Titusville’s executive airport. I made a long, straight-in approach to the runway and the aircraft settled easily on the concrete.
     
    I t was a beautiful Florida day for the first full-scale Polaris launch.
    We reporters and photographers were taken to the roof of a vacated radar building overlooking the missile’s launch pad.
    The Polaris was a white-and-black stubby thing. Both of its stages were packed full of solid fuel—something like candle wax instead of liquid. That was because the fifteen-hundred-mile-range missiles, with more destructive power than all the bombs dropped in World War II, were to ride inside silos on board nuclear submarines.
    The safety people had placed a standard, liquid-fuel missile’s destruct package on board. The explosives were there to blow the Polaris to shreds if it acted up, but this was unknown to the experts; this destruct package couldn’t get the job done. It needed about four times the explosives to blow the solid-fuel Polaris into harmless debris.
    The countdown moved through its final seconds, and Polaris leapt from its pad, racing skyward much faster than its liquid-fuel brethren. Cheering onlookers were hooting and hollering as Polaris, unlike the liquid-fuel rockets, climbed on a solid stack of white smoke. It was a joy to see until—you guessed it—Polaris decided to go its own way.
    Instantly, the range safety officer sent a radio signal to destroy the missile, to stop it from threatening life or property, but instead of blowing it into harmless burning trash, the underpowered destruct package simply separated the Polaris’s two stages.
    The first stage, the one that had been ignited at launch, continued to burn,