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For about two seconds TV3 had followed its programing perfectly. Ponderously it lifted itself off the pad—one foot, two feet, three feet. For one blink of an eye it seemed to stand still. A tongue of orange flame shot out from beneath the rocket, darted downwind, then billowed up the right side of TV3 into a fireball 150 feet high. "There it goes! There is an explosion!" an observation pilot cried into his radio. "Black smoke is now over the entire area—We do not see the satellite rocket—We do not see the rocket that is carrying our satellite—The rocket may not have gotten off—There is a very large black smoke cloud—a very large black area around the location that the explosion occurred." By then the Vanguard had dropped dismally back on its tail, its nose section askew; it had burst into varicolored fire and flame.
After water and carbon dioxide from automatic extinguishers had put out the fire, the worn-out and heartsick missilemen found the sole survivor: the U.S.'s tiny satellite, intact, thrown out of the nose section of the rocket, broadcasting the signals that were meant to be sent down from space. The U.S. Sputnik sending from the ground was right on frequency: 108 megacycles.
"Worst Since Custer." News of the failure of TV3 was flashed out around the nation and the world. Impact: shock, scorn, derision. Almost instantly the U.S.'s tiny, grounded satellite got rechristened stallnik, flopnik, dudnik, puffnik, phutnik, oopsnik, goofnik, kaputnik and—closer to the Soviet original—sputternik. At the U.N., Soviet diplomats laughingly suggested that the U.S. ought to try for Soviet technical assistance to backward nations. An office worker in Washington burst into tears; a calypso singer on the BBC in London strummed a ditty about Oh, from America comes the significant thought/Their own little Sputnik won't go off. Said a university professor in Pittsburgh: "It's our worst humiliation since Custer's last stand." Said Dr. John P. Hagen, director of Project Vanguard, as he got ready to face a doleful press conference in Washington: "Nuts."
In the uproar of frustration there was a rush to find a scapegoat. First in line were the scientists and Pentagon press-agents who had yielded to press clamor for information on this nonsecret project. Even Vanguard's Boss, Dr. Hagen, handed out some afterthoughts. "This program," he said, "has had unprecedented publicity in the development stage, which is not usually the case, and in many respects I think it is unfortunate. In this case, I think the enthusiasm of the country carried people beyond the point where the fact that this is a test phase was lost sight of."
He was right: somewhere between accurate reporting and scientific enthusiasm the U.S. and the world lost sight of the fact that the complete Martin rocket had never before been test-fired, and first firings of test missiles are remarkably uncertain affairs.
"The Space Frontier." Out of the uproar at week's end some sort of perspective was forming on the TV3 fiasco. Items: