Laika, Sputnik, and the Space Race that might have been...

Recently I read a really good graphic novel by Nick Abadzis called Laika about the dog sent as a passenger on Sputnik 2, our world’s second man-made satellite.

It reminded me of a story my dad once told me. My dad worked for NASA for 33 years. He started out as a technician building components for simulators during the Mercury program and retired as an engineer and manager working on the International Space Station. The story, which had been handed down to him by the other engineers there, was this:

Before NASA, before Sputnik, the Germans that worked in the space program started out in the army. In the early 50s, they were launching captured V-2s. The Redstone rocket that later carried Alan Shepard on his suborbital flight was based in a large part on this technology.

So, they’re launching rockets with some success and some failures along the way. Slowly, but surely the rockets are getting better and they’re getting progressively higher and higher in altitude.

One day the German rocket engineers get an idea: Why don’t we “make a mistake”, let the rocket burn a little longer than usual, and “accidentally” put one in orbit? They decide to do it and start working towards their goal in secret.

But, somehow, somewhere along the way, someone lets it slip and the army reacts in the way you’d expect any good, myopic bureaucracy to react when it finds out about a potentially embarrassing situation that is not 100% under its control (more on this later): they find the highest ranking, middle management guy they can find and make an example out of him.

So some officer gets court martialed and they end his career, our German scientists go back to work with a good deal more supervision, and, a few months later Sputnik goes up and everybody in the nation, and all our allies, convinced that the U.S. is asleep and way behind, goes absolutely crazy.

I never knew whether this story was real or not, but went looking today for some evidence and found some truly fascinating stuff in all of 10 minutes. First up: a Wikipedia article on the Army’s Ballistic Missile Agency.

Von Braun, disobeying orders, continued work on the design for what became the Jupiter-C IRBM. This was a three-stage rocket, which, by coincidence, could be used to launch a satellite in the Juno I configuration. In September 1956, the Jupiter-C was launched with a 30 lb (14 kg) dummy satellite. It is generally believed that, at this time, the ABMA could have put a satellite into orbit had the US government allowed ABMA to do so.

Then, a Google query of “Army Ballistic Missile Agency” and “court martial” turns up an article describing the court martial of one Colonel Nickerson (article here). The article dated Monday, Jul. 08, 1957 and ironically titled “The Nation Can Relax” reads:

“West Pointer John C. Nickerson Jr. … field coordinator of the Army Ballistic Missile Agency at Redstone Arsenal, Ala… faced Army court-martial charges ranging in effect from laxity through perjury to espionage…. Nickerson pleaded guilty in effect to charges of laxity, whereupon the Army dropped the tough specifications about espionage and perjury…”

The article does not even mention the word “satellite” but does offer the following possible explanation for why anyone in the U.S. Army would get court martialed for trying to launch a satellite in America in 1957: A turf war with the U.S. Air Force.

“Nickerson was making a hero's fight on behalf of the Army missile program (‘I was trying anonymously to influence certain key people’) against the Air Force's assigned task of operating all the null 1,500-mile missiles,”

“…Nickerson's commanding officer, Major General John B. Medaris... told how he had ordered Nickerson not to get involved in Army v. Air Force bickering —Nickerson had disobeyed these orders ‘absolutely and diametrically,’ said General Medaris.”

For anyone who thinks that maybe Nickerson really had done something wrong and that I’m making too much of this, look who was defending him:

“…Nickerson's civilian counsel Ray H. Jenkins (of Army-McCarthy fame) produced, one by one, a galaxy of star witnesses including the creator of Hitler's V2, Wernher von Braun, to deliver what he called ‘mitigating’ evidence.”

All in all no smoking gun and the story is still for now just that: a story. But consider for a moment if it really is true. Think what it would have meant if they had pulled it off and the U.S. had put a satellite into orbit in the summer of 1957. A few months later, the Russians launch Sputnik and, so what, America already did that.

Aside from there being no reason to launch (and kill) Laika, it may have toned the space race down. There’s a big difference between thinking you are behind and trying as hard as you can to catch up and thinking you simply need to stay ahead.