Why It Failed to Live Up to Its Name
A wisecrack much repeated in the U.S. last week was that Project Vanguard, the U.S.'s earth-satellite program, ought to be renamed Project Rearguard. This clothed in humor the widespread feeling of resentment stirred up by the Russians' great cold-war propaganda victory. Inevitably, the question arose: Who's to blame?
In 1954, before Project Vanguard's birth, the Army and Navy jointly undertook a satellite project thought up by Engineer Wernher Von Braun, captured German V-2 expert turned U.S. Army missile brain. Von Braun planned to equip the Army's tested Redstone missile with booster rockets and use the hybrid to send a small (5 Ib.) satellite into an earth-girdling orbit.
Before Von Braun's "Project Orbiter" got off the ground, an International Geophysical Year panel, meeting in Rome in October 1954, called for earth-satellite launchings during IGY (July 1957 to December 1958). At the urging of the U.S.'s IGY committee, the Eisenhower Administration decided, in mid-1955, to undertake a satellite program as part of the nation's IGY effort. The basic top-level decision then to be made was how to run the project. The twofold decision that emerged from the National Security Council: 1) keep the satellite project separate from military ballistic-missile research, and 2) put the Navy in charge. With that, Project Orbiter died and Project Vanguard was born.
Lost Years
Last week, with post-Sputnik hindsight, Director I. M. Levitt of Philadelphia's Fels Planetarium called that 1955 decision an "astonishing piece of stupidity." Levitt's argument, echoed by Army missilemen: the Army's Jupiter intermediate ballistic missile, well along in 1955, could and should have been adapted for launching a satellite (a modified Jupiter has reached an altitude of 650 miles, higher than Sputnik's orbit). But when it was made, the National Security Council decision seemed sensible enough. The U.S. had committed itself to pass on to the rest of the world, including Russia, scientific information obtained from IGY programs, so it seemed desirable, to the NSC (and to IGY scientists too) to keep Vanguard from getting deeply involved with top-secret military programs. Also, Administration policymakers, in a fit of touchiness about neutralist opinion, wanted to avoid any appearance of using IGY undertakings for military purposes.
But the main reason for putting Vanguard into a separate, low-priority compartment was that the Pentagon wanted to keep the satellite project from interfering with the U.S.'s top-priority program of military ballistic-missile research. For eight lost years after World War II, the U.S. had spent an average of less than $1,000,000 a year on long-range ballistic-missile projects. The Eisenhower Administration decided in 1954 to push ballistic-missile development, after the physicists decided that they could make a hydrogen warhead light enough to be carried in the nose of a missile. The Russians, well along on missilery with or without an atomic warhead, had a head start that the U.S. urgently needed to narrow. In mid-1955 that need was still urgent.