Neil Armstrong: A Life of Flight Read Online Free PDF Page B

away beneath the falling satellite moving at a speed of 18,000 miles per hour in its orbit around Earth.
    Some hour-and-a-half later it came back. Accounting for the movement of Earth beneath its orbital track in the time it took to circle the globe, Sputnik’s path now took it fifteen hundred miles north of its still-steaming launchpad. It swept across Asia transmitting its incessant lusty beep. The loudspeakers of Baikonur blared its voice. Its launch team broke into cheers and shouts of joy. Korolev turned to them and spoke with deep feeling, “Today, the dreams of the best sons of mankind have come true. The assault on space has begun.”
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    Neil Armstrong was in nearby Los Angeles at a symposium held by the Society of Experimental Test Pilots when Sputnik reached orbit.
    He was disappointed Sputnik didn’t belong to America, but found the Russian launch encouraging. “It changed the world,” Neil said. “It absolutely changed our country’s view of what was happening, the potential of space. I’m not sure how many people realized at that point just where this would lead.
    “President Eisenhower was saying, ‘What’s the worry? It’s just one small ball.’ But I’m sure that was a facade behind which he had substantial concerns,” Neil explained. “Because if they could put something into orbit, they could put a nuclear weapon on a target in the United States. The navigation requirements,” he added, “were quite similar.”
    That said, in Neil’s judgment the Soviet Union was without question technologically inferior. Someone had dropped the ball and it gnawed at him. He knew that Dr. Wernher von Braun and his Huntsville, Alabama, group were better. He knew von Braun’s seasoned engineers had built rockets that were already reaching space, and America could have been in orbit with one of von Braun’s Redstone rockets and a couple of upper stages long before now. Why weren’t they? Secretary of Defense Charles E. Wilson.
    Neil, as did many at the High Speed Flight Station knew Wernher and his group had been trying to get official approval to punch a satellite into Earth orbit for more than a year. But Wilson thought it was just so much nonsense and he and President Eisenhower were perfectly willing to put America’s prestige on a larger version of the Navy’s Viking RTV-N-12A sounding rocket. The Navy had tested about ten. About half had failed and the final launcher to carry a satellite was to have a larger engine and additional upper stages. In a sense the United States was putting its reputation on a yet-to-be built paper rocket named Vanguard.
    Eisenhower and Wilson undressed it from its Navy whites and hung a sign around its neck that read “Civilian.” It was now part of an international science project, the IGY (International Geophysical Year), which had a membership of sixty-seven nations. No one was sure the pencil-shaped thing would fly but it was the politically correct thing to do.
    In 1956, Wilson ordered von Braun to remove Redstone 29 from its launchpad. It could have been a year ahead of the Russians in launching a satellite. But it wasn’t. Neil and others on the front line of research wanted to go to Washington and ride Wilson out of town on a rail. Instead Neil went outside with the others from the test pilots’ group to look for what was now orbiting Earth.
    According to some, Sputnik could be seen sweeping over an early evening Los Angeles, but Neil knew better. There was too much reflected light in the metropolis’s night sky for that. It might be possible to see the large trailing rocket stage glinting from the sun that was still lighting it above Earth’s early darkness. The conditions would have to be just right. Neil and others looked for a while but, as he had expected, there simply was too much reflected glow. They gave up and went back inside.
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    Only a month after Sputnik 1 , the Russians did it again. Sputnik 2 raced more than a