(2 of 2)
Once the NSC reached the decision to box off Project Vanguard, it made sense to let the Navy take charge: in experimenting with its Vikings and Aerobees, the Navy had pushed a lot farther ahead in high-altitude-missile research than either the Army or the Air Force.
Strong Warnings As far back as early 1954, U.S. Intelligence suspected that the Russians had started on a high-priority satellite program. At the IGY conference in Barcelona a year ago, Russian scientists spoke ebulliently and convincingly of their country's satellite progress. Evidence and warnings that the Russians were pressing hard to beat the U.S. in the race piled up—but seemed to make no impression on Administration policymakers. Asked at a November 1954 press conference whether he was concerned that the Russians might win the satellite race, Defense Secretary Wilson snorted: "I wouldn't care if they did." If the Administration had wanted to win the race, it could have speeded up Vanguard's schedule or got the Army going on a crash satellite program utilizing Jupiter (Army missilemen boasted last week that they could get a satellite into an orbit on a month's notice). But the Administration did neither.
Far from speeding up, in fact, Vanguard lagged behind its original plan for a late-1957 launching of a 20-odd-lb. satellite (less than one-eighth as heavy as Russia's claim for Sputnik). The stretched-out schedule calls for launching smaller test satellites late this year, orbiting the first 21½-lb. ball next spring. The satellites themselves are ready to soar, reports Vanguard's softspoken, pipe-puffing Director John P. Hagen. But the launching vehicle is still undergoing tests. Its first stage, an adaptation of the Navy's Viking, has to work perfectly to do the job: the engine's 27,000-lb. thrust is barely powerful enough to orbit a 21½-lb. ball, so any less-than-ideal performance will fail. (To send up their Sputnik the Russians apparently used a first-stage missile with a thrust of more than 200,000 Ibs.)
Weak Imagination
After the Russians got their Sputnik into its orbit, an Administration official said he felt an urge to "strangle" Budget Director Percival Brundage. But the Administration has budgeted for Vanguard all the funds that the men who run the project asked for ($110 million so far). And that stock villain, interservice rivalry, did not slow up the project, according to Vanguard scientists. In fact, the scientists, from Dr. Hagen down, insist that Vanguard has not failed, that it will reach its basic goal of orbiting a satellite before IGY's end.
But in the midst of the cold war, Vanguard's cool scientific goal proved to be disastrously modest: the Russians got there first. The post-Sputnik White House explanation that the U.S. was not in a satellite "race" with Russia was not just an after-the-fact alibi. Said Dr. Hagen ten months ago: "We are not attempting in any way to race with the Russians." But in the eyes of the world, the U.S. was in a satellite race whether it wanted to be or not, and because of the Administration's costly failure of imagination, Project Vanguard shuffled along when it should have been running. It was still shuffling when Sputnik's beeps told the world that Russia's satellite program, not the U.S.'s, was the vanguard.