American History Hit - Start of the Space Race

Episode Date: December 5, 2022

Space historian Jay Gallentine tells Don how World War 2 weapons paved the way for space rockets, igniting a space race between the USA and the USSR that would see the first projectiles, satellites and people leave Earth’s atmosphere.Produced by Benjie Guy. Mixed by Aidan Lonergan. Senior Producer: Charlotte Long.For more History Hit content, subscribe to our newsletters here.If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts, and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. It's 7.28 p.m. on the evening of October 4, 1957, in the middle of the desert of Kazakhstan. We are at site number one, the Soviet Union's first rocket launch site.

The rocket Sputnik roars into the skies and beyond. 139 miles above Earth, it will deploy the first man-made satellite, Sputnik 1. A huge achievement. And one which immediately sends shock waves across America. In launching Sputnik 1, the Soviets have won a scientific victory at the height of the Cold War and increased their technological and military threat to the United States. In space, the U.S. would now have to equal, if not surpass the Soviets. It was the beginning of the space race.

Welcome to another episode of American History Hit. I'm Don Wildman. Great that you could listen. When NASA's Artemis 1 rocket successfully blasted off from Cape Canaveral and roared into the night skies over Florida, it marked a new. and historic milestone in the continuing human effort to explore the deep reaches of space. Of course, this new project, which incidentally cost an estimated $23 billion, is only the latest in a long series of very expensive and challenging efforts.

Most triumphant, a few tragic, that have been hauling mankind into the cosmos for decades. First it was Mercury, then Gemini, Apollo, the Space Shuttle. now it's Artemis and Orion, but by all indications we've only just begun with many more mythological names yet to come. But here on American History Hit, we're all about understanding where it started. And when you consider the American space program, those origins are fascinating and legion. In so many ways, you can consider the whole exploration effort a rocket ship in itself, standing on its launch pad, gradually filling up. Its fuel, human destiny. The determination nation to see us rise from the surface of the earth and travel beyond the limits of our atmosphere

to infinity and you know that. Anyway, that rocket fuel, those humans working tirelessly towards countdown, is a complex chemistry indeed, a history that deserves a capable guide and lucky we have one today. The writer Jay Galentine has been publishing award-winning histories of American space for a long time now. Welcome, Jay. Nice to have you. Thanks for having me on, Don. You know, I just want to be sure that the audience understands the books that you've written. Ambassadors from Earth is the one we're going to be talking about today. But there are others born to explore at the solar system's distant horizons. Infinity beckoned.

Adventuring through the inner solar system. You have been writing about this human endeavor for a long time. I'm curious what drew you to this, first of all. Oh, gosh. Well, the joke I make is that everything is my dad's fault. He is the one who brought me a book on the Apollo missions when I was 10, and it was nothing that I had asked for specifically. Dad was the kind of guy who would just notice things and then act on them. He would give you the Christmas present that you would swear you had never spoken about verbally, and he'd show up with it.

And he just brought me this book one day about Apollo. I still have it here in my collection. And I said, what's this? And he said, I think you might be interested in this. And he was right. This is what I found so exciting the other night when I watched that rocket takeoff was to imagine that kids today are going to be like the kids we were when we were young, anticipating this ongoing journey that's going to be happening, you know, over a period of years

throughout their lifetime, really. And Artemis really marks a new stage in that process, no pun intended. It all begins really in the 19th century. I mean, I'm going all the way back here. I hope you're ready. Technology had equipped man with the ability to envision the means to see the stars. And there are the great science fiction writers such as Jules Verne and so forth begin writing these books about going to the moon. And the scientists, the physicists, start to imagine how. It all begins with Robert Goddard here in the United States. That's right. And Goddard, I think, should be credited first and foremost with cementing the idea that the way to get up there was with a rocket. You can go back a few decades to Tzikovsky in Russia, who was working on the theories of staged rockets and liquid fuels and whatnot. But even Goddard, I mean, he was looking at different methods of reaching these extreme altitudes. And nothing. was really off the table. I mean, people were looking at going up with balloons to take them part of the way. People were looking at giant bullets inside of giant guns. There were all these different possibilities. And Goddard really in the early 20s was like, you know what? You want to go to space. You're going to need a rocket.

But those early rockets that he built were, in fact, powered by gunpowder, weren't they? They were, yeah. So he had experimented with solid fuel for, a period of years and finally got to the point where he decided that that just wasn't going to cut it. He actually had this sort of machine gun paradigm for some of his solid fuel experiments where you'd have this chamber and you'd like inject a big pellet of solid fuel into it, light it, that takes you up part of the way. While it's burning, there is another pellet that's being injected above it. And so after the first one burns out, it passes on to the second and so on. So all these paradigms that you would just immediately dismiss today, you know, he was a guy who,

unlike Sealkovsky, was actually building these things and experimenting with them to the point where he kind of got kicked out of Massachusetts and had to go to New Mexico. It really is. I mean, the whole story of space is a combination of science and military, really. I mean, I guess it does really begin with ballistics. The idea of shooting a gun up in the air probably gave the first thoughts of, hey, maybe we could ride a rocket like that. The military is obviously involved in creating weaponry and so forth, but it all sort of intersects in a big way around World War II. This is when science has advanced to a point where they can really start imagining this in a different, new and different way. And the military is thinking big thoughts about using this for their own purposes.

Absolutely. And the Germans were really ahead of everyone else. And if you look at history from a high vantage point, you can see that the V2 rocket is sort of a holy father for both America and the Soviet Union. I mean, America's first post-war rockets were V-2s with a different paint job. Same thing going on in the Soviet Union as well. It kind of all starts with the V2. I mean, Goddard was influential on the Germans who were researching and designing and building and testing their V2s. But his lineage sort of reaches a stopping point and the V2 takes over and it all derives from the V2. Why were the Germans so ahead of the crowd in this regard? Wow, that's a great question. I think, number one, they had the brain power. they had this to some natural concept of working together as a team. So Goddard was criticized by many for

working not completely on his own, but kind of keeping to himself and not interacting with colleagues the way that he should. And the Germans, I think, realized early on that we are going to need a team. We are going to need people to specialize. We are going to need specialists in the fuel, in the guidance system, in the structure, in the radios, all of these things. Another thing that the Germans had going on for them was the military interest, no question, a major source of their funding as the V2 transitioned from sort of this research phase, you know, these German amateur rocketeers with this A4 and their little club almost into the government coming along and saying, hey, we will give you money to build these, put them into production.

And yes, we're going to use them to try and kill people into submission, but you'll have this money to conduct your rocket experiments. And there are a lot of folks who say that the Germans sort of made a deal with the devil, almost in that that's how they got their money. They made this Faustian bargain with the Nazi government. I would not disagree with that. So it's tricky because it advanced rocketry so much. So I like to see the good and all that bad. It was called the vengeance. That was the V in the V2. And it really comes along at the last part of the war when the Germans are growing rather desperate. You know, the conventional warfare hasn't been going very well for them in 43, 44. And suddenly Hitler and

Ilk are all saying, well, maybe this thing that we've been hearing about, this rocket idea that these kind of advanced scientists are proposing is a good idea. They would have been waiting because it was still experimental. It was still sort of pie in the sky. And yet in no time flat, it seems, these scientists now working for the Nazis come together to create this fairly accurate thing. I mean, they still sort of couldn't point it exactly where they wanted it to go. But they were hit in London. And that's where they wanted it. it to go. And it did a great deal of damage and killed a lot of people. That's right. Yes, and Antwerp too. Antwerp really took a brunt of a number of V2 shots. It was never as reliable,

of course, as they wanted it to be. I would be remiss if I didn't address the slave labor that was forced to create the V2. And certainly there had to be countless instances of sabotage sabotage shoddy work on the part of the forced laborers on that. Von Braun certainly knew about the forced labor on that. I think that contributed to the poor reliability in general of the machine, but also just the state of the technology at the time. Tell me about the work of James Van Allen, because he's going to become very, very important very soon after the war. I just want to sort of bring these two teams along together. Van Allen was a man who was not a rocket engineer. He was a scientist. He was a guy who loved problems. He told me a story once about how when he would be in math class

in school and there would be 20 problems in the workbook and the teacher would assign the first five. He would work all 20 because he just loved to see how they came out. He really got into physics, and in particular this sort of unresolved question of cosmic radiation. It fascinated him. I wouldn't say that it drove him mad or whatever, but he was just insanely curious about where cosmic radiation was coming from, these little particles. A few were hitting his body every minute just sitting there thinking about it.

Where did they originally come from? How did they get such high energy levels that they were able to come through the atmosphere. This is what drove him to rocketry because it was already known at the point where he started researching it that the higher you went in the atmosphere, the stronger the cosmic radiation levels were. And so his goal was to get as high as he could, potentially into orbit, but just in the very beginning, in the early 50s, it was just to get up high and study the cosmic radiation at that level. And he employed a number of different ways of doing this. And in the beginning, it was with V2s. He had gotten in well with the military because he had revolutionized

artillery with something called the proximity fuse and increased its reliability and ruggedness and all these things. And so after the war, he kind of had a blank check and indicated that he wanted to study cosmic radiation using what then promised to be this highly available stockpile of these captured V2 rockets. And so he told me the story of riding a train for days to get down to the American Southwest, and he's got his one little cosmic ray experiment with him in his lap. He's been carrying the whole way. And they put it into the nose of the V2 and shoot it off, and it starts climbing up into the sky,

and then it blew up. And they were all like, well, dang. Didn't bring a second Cosmic Ray experiment with me. Not sure when the next V2 is going to be available. So guess I'm getting on a train to go back to Iowa City. That kind of set him about looking for different options, as could be imagined. And he eventually joined forces with this company, Aerojet, California Company, derived from a bunch of people who ultimately started the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

and he had a rocket called the Aerobee that was kind of custom designed for him, and he would actually take these rockets, they were like a foot in diameter, 25 feet long. I mean, this was not a toy. And he was able to scrape the funding together to buy a couple of these, get on a ship, and go out in the ocean, the idea being to study the cosmic radiation from different altitudes. But over a months-long voyage at sea, he would only get a couple of aerobee flights in.

And so that set him looking around again for options for rockets. You know, once again, he's just trying to get up high. He is not a rocket engineer, but he sort of became one involuntarily, realized that he could get his hands on all of these leftover Loki anti-aircraft rockets that were left over from World War II and used balloons to lift them up to altitude. and then there would be a simple wind-up timer, almost like a kitchen or a washing machine timer, that would go off, light up the rocket,

and take his cosmic radiation experiment up to altitude, you know, way over 100,000 feet. And up there, the radiation levels were higher, stronger, and so he kept looking for a way to sort of go all the way into orbit, once again so he could study the cosmic radiation. I love how your book, and I'm talking about ambassadors from Earth, starts out basically with the two different efforts, both on the United States side and the German side, coming along kind of together in the first half of the 20th century, these two teams, one being

motivated primarily by war, the Nazi effort to take over there, the other being driven a lot by science, by the physics and the challenges involved here. Little do they know, both arriving and arrive at the same place together. When the Allies are moving on Germany, in 1944 or something. V2s have been going over to London and Antwerp, as you say, for some time now. They are very interested in this technology. At what point do the Allies,

particularly the United States, begin to imagine acquiring this technology and the scientists who come along with it? That's a good question. I don't know at what point they started thinking about it seriously. There was definitely the intelligence aspect of it. Theodore von Kerman, who went on to begin the jet propulsion laboratory, he recalls being

approached in confidence by an individual from U.S. intelligence who had three photographs that had been secretly taken of V2 launching facilities and brought all the way to the states for Von Karmann's review. What do you think about this? And von Kerman, who at that time was working with a small team on solid fuel rockets that were, you know, something you could hold in your hand, they couldn't believe it. They honestly couldn't believe that the German military would have a rocket in production that ran on liquid fuel and had a guidance system and could send a thousand pounds of screaming hot death up over the English Channel and into London. it was almost too much to believe.

And I think as the end became obvious for the war in Europe, the U.S. military, they just slowly spun up the gears of knowing where this equipment is, where the people are, who the people are, and how are we going to get this stuff to the United States. I'll be back with more from Jay Galentine in just a second. An individual becomes very well known, very quickly. named Werner von Braun. He is the head of that program in Germany. He is a member of the Nazi party.

He's even an officer in the SS by the end of this war. This is how controversial this gets. I mean, many, well, obviously all of these scientists were working for the Nazis in this effort with the V2, but some willingly, some not. And it becomes kind of a catch-all effort by the American military after the surrender to sort of grab a whole bunch of these guys

and bring them over to the United States because they hold the key to a brand new technology that we're very interested in acquiring. It's called Operation Paperclip. It was actually a military mission that was embarked upon in 44-45. That's right.

And Vaughn Brown had a decision to make. He certainly saw the end was coming. And he had to make a decision as to whether they would surrender to the United States or to the Soviet Union. Now, that was a very good. pretty easy decision for them to make. They just figured that they would be treated better. They

would probably have more resources. And they had a much more likely shot at being able to continue the research in the manner that they wanted to do. And Von Braun, just to be clear, he was so much more of a manager and a promoter than an engineer per se. He was the kind of guy who was smart enough to know that he needed to surround himself with engineers. You absolutely needed someone like him to sort of sell this, be it to the Nazi government or to the Americans or whomever. I think Von Braun, at his heart, he just wanted to shoot off rockets and he frankly didn't care what was in the nose. I mean, I didn't know him. I'm quite sure that he would have preferred to launch science experiments than warheads.

But if he was being funded, that was the biggest thing that he cared about. So in the closing days of the war, sensing that if anybody was going to turn on him, it would probably be the German government to start trying to cover up evidence of his program. They started destroying things. Von Braun got his hands on a bunch of railroad train cars, and he made up an acronym VZBV, which he painted all up and down on the sides of the box cars. It meant nothing, but he literally risked his life in assuming that the German military would be so paranoid about everything in general that they wouldn't stop to ask him. They started moving out. Von

Brown was actually in this car crash that nearly killed him, and he was in this half upper body cast, and his brother, Magnus von Braun, is the one who spoke better English. and actually surrendered the entire group to the Americans. What was in those cars were assemblies of the V2, fin assemblies, fuel pumps, jigs, documentation. They didn't get it all. The Soviets, they kind of were late to the party and rolled in and kind of got the leftovers.

They still got plenty, but basically, Von Braun was like, the ship is sinking, I need to evacuate, piled the box cars with everything that made sense. sense, you start with the big pieces first. This becomes very quickly a Cold War story. It moves from World War II to Cold War very quickly. We are in hot competition with the Soviets, obviously in many different areas, but we do not want them to get the advantage in rocketry, wherever that may be headed.

And of course, that turns out to be quite a story. How soon is it before these Operation Paperclip ex-Nazis end up in the United States formally and working for the U.S. military? because it starts as an army. You know, NASA is not a civilian agency. It doesn't even exist until 1958. First, it's an army effort. Absolutely, it's an army effort.

The transition is almost immediate. The people came over first, and then obviously it's much slower to transport all of these materials and whatnot. And there wasn't a huge sense in the very beginning of exactly what they were going to do with these people and this equipment and these missiles. the Army just knew that they wanted it. They wanted all of it. They wanted everything they could get their hands on.

And so that transition was very quick in terms of evacuating the personnel and the material to the United States. What point do they start thinking about James Van Allen's desires to do satellites and so forth? Is it always an idea of putting man in orbit or is it more of a science-driven notion? In the beginning, I think it was just trying to get the very. V2 running again. And there was a lot less thought about what are we going to do with this. It was more, this is a busted up Lego set that we don't have all of the instruction pages for. We don't have all of the people who know how to put it back together. So we're just going to try and reconstitute the rocket and shoot it off and prove that we've

been able to do that. the link between the army and the emigrated Germans and Van Allen really comes down to a man on von Braun's team named Ernst Stulinger. Stulinger came over as part of Operation Paperclip. I mean, he was right in there, one of the most significant people, no question. And Stulinger was much more of a scientist and was doing his own studies of cosmic radiation and was one of the people who was able to have these frank discussions with von Brown about what are we going to do with these V2s once we're in America.

It would be great to extend the invitation to people such as Van Allen to please build something, bring it down to the Southwest, and let's launch it, and let's help each other. We'll learn something about our rocket when it has this actual mission. We learn something every time we launch. We might as well have it do something. And Van Allen could potentially continue his experiments with cosmic radiation, studying them at high altitudes. Had the word satellite even been used yet?

It had. And at one point, Van Allen, he was doing some sabbatical work at the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University. at Johns Hopkins University in this post-war period. And that's where Stuellinger visited him. And Van Allen had written a paper. I forget the exact year, but it was before 1950, talking about his progress with his cosmic radiation experiments and suggesting that in the future,

it might be possible to put such cosmic ray instruments on a device that would fly above the atmosphere of the Earth in orbit. And it was one of these deals where he sends the draft of the paper out and then his boss, this guy, Ralph Gibson, like, comes in, Jim, we got to talk, closes the door behind him, sits down and says, you know, this part in your paper about going into orbit, that's too speculative. We need to take that out. And Van Allen groaned. He's like, I really think this is the future. We're going to get up there at some point. Yeah, well, you know what? It's just too speculative. I just can't in good conscience allow you to leave that in.

So absolutely that was in people's minds. And it had been in people's minds 100 years before, of course, but now Van Allen can see the writing on the wall that, you know what, this is coming. We are absolutely going to get here. Meanwhile, in the USSR, they're thinking the same thing. There's a man named Khorov. Tell me about this scientist. Korylov was the von Braun of the Soviet Union. He was a man who, like Vaughn Brown, almost in parallel with Vaughn Brown, had been part of a youth experimental rocket society, building and flying their own creations.

In the middle of it, he was plucked from his bed literally in the middle of the night by the secret police, sent to prison. It was all part of these demons in Joseph Stalin's brain about people trying to subvert him and rest control from him. completely trumped up charges. The dude spent years in a prison camp, almost died, got released, got put into another prison camp where he actually stayed voluntarily, working with aviation grates like Andre Tupolev and whatnot. And then he became part of a group that at the close of World War II was advised of the existence of this Herodafor secret German vengeance weapon number two, and get your took us down to Germany and we need to figure out what's going on there

and bring back some of this stuff. And it was the same kind of reaction from the Soviets as had happened when Theodore von Kerman looked at the pictures of the V2 facilities in his office that were brought to him. It was like, this can't be. We can't believe that this actually exists. How have they solved all of these problems

of handling liquid fuels, of creating rocket nozzles that don't burn through when we light them. All of these issues, one after the other. And the Soviets didn't get the great stuff that the Americans did or the great people. They got a lot of both of those. And they spent more time in Germany than their American counterparts did. finally trucked everything up, brought it back to the Soviet Union, and went through a very similar process of trying to reconstitute a V2 and make it work again. There are all these stories about people combing through junkyards and dismantling their grandfather clocks and trying to get

their hands on all these little like valves and springs and fittings so they could bring these things back to life. But it was a very similar process. And Krolyov very quickly realized, not only the military application of this, certainly recognized by the Soviet government, but the scientific application as well and started integrating himself with the scientific community and saying, look, we have this technology that's coming online. Let's work together. I think we could really do some great things. As it happens, they must have had a much more streamlined idea of what to do with the technology than the United States did, because they get there faster, very famously. In 1957, the Russians launch what becomes Sputnik, Sputnik, the first.

And suddenly, the world, a shockwave goes around the world on so many levels. The Cold War level, obviously. They got their first. Oh, my God, what a threat. Suddenly the Russians are in the skies looking at us above our heads, terrifying to so many Americans. But also for those people in Huntsville, Alabama, the von Braun's and all the rest, they must have had a shockwave themselves, like, oh, well, They've been ahead of us the whole time.

The Americans knew the Russians were close. They didn't think they were anywhere near as close as they were. And it wasn't a complete surprise. You really have to separate the science and the engineering communities. Because when you look at something like the scientific community studying cosmic radiation, they were very open with each other on both sides of the Iron Curtain, about the state of their research and whatnot. and comments would slip at conferences and other gatherings about, oh, yes, we are being told that in the very near future, we will have something that can take our experiments up into orbit.

Like, oh, really? There had to have been a lot of debate about gravitational pull and so forth. I mean, just the very dynamics of how can something be kept at a certain level that's not being propelled by its own jets and so forth. It was quite a leap to get to that place, right? Well, people knew what they would have to do to get into orbit. I mean, the math of that had really been worked out in advance, that we know in which direction we should launch to take advantage of the Earth's rotation. We know at what latitudes we should launch. Once again, to take advantage of the movement of the Earth. The problem was, how are we going to build something that can get us up that far? And so on, both sides, more so on the American side, I would argue, was more of a hodgepodge. Well, what if we take a V2 and we kind of stretch its fuel tanks and make it a little taller? And then we start stacking stuff on the top.

Oh, JPL, you have these solid fuel rockets. Well, you know, what if we like held a bunch of those together like a bunch of pencils and snapped a rubber band around them and stuck those on the V2's nose and then let them off and we got at altitude? that would probably get us up into orbit, right? And so there was a lot of, again, working the math of that, how are we going to stack things together so that we can go up into orbit? But they knew what the answer was.

They knew how fast they had to be going and in what direction they needed to be going. Sputnik is one of those, it's one of my favorite artifacts in the landscape of human technology. I mean, it just looks cool. But what was it actually doing? It was beeping. Yes.

So just so we're clear, Sputnik was not the original plan. Early Soviet spaceflight, be it robotic satellites or crude spaceflight, there was no real plan. It's not like with Intel where you can go to a website and look at the roadmap of their chip designs or whatever. There was no roadmap. It was like, hey, what can we do now as a sort of technological, spectacular. Really? I just got to stop you there.

I can't believe it. I mean, you're telling me something I've wondered about all my life because I imagine the chess game that was being played by these geniuses of science, that they could see it. They could play this out 20 years ahead. They knew that there was going to be a man

in a space suit on the face of the moon. You're saying that's not the case back in 1950s. That's right. That's exactly what I'm saying. So the original plan was that once the Soviets built a rocket that could take something into orbit, they wanted to launch this really a scientific tour to force. It was this machine that weighed thousands of pounds. It was this giant cone that was literally going to be filled with all sorts of science instruments

for studying of cosmic radiation and auroras and magnetism, all these things. And, and the rocket couldn't lift it. What is really setting the pace here in the late 1950s was a worldwide coordinated program of science research called the International Geophysical Year. It had derived from something that had happened in the past called the International Polar Year, where all of these Earth scientists had gotten together

for programs of research at Earth's poles. And so the idea here was, let's have this special year. It ended up being 1957 where we are going to have all of these scientists from all over the world coming together to study all processes going on in the earth.

And it will be good for science. It'll be good for us, good for our careers. And as part of it, there was the idea of, hey, maybe if we can get our act together, we could actually launch a small scientific satellite as part of the International Geophysical Year. And this was something that was recognized on both sides of the Iron Curtain as sort of winning the International Geophysical Year, I guess is how I'd put it. Wow, if we could be the country that launches a satellite during the IGY, we will have everyone's

jaws on the floor. And that's what was really driving the pace. So in the run-up to the IGI, the Soviets had their V2 derivative, now called the R-7, and they were just trying to tweak the performance of it enough that they could launch this, this big cone of science instruments that they called Object D, which is not really the most majestic name in the world, but that's what they called it. So as the IGY begins to happen, like the events are underway, the attitude of the Soviet space engineers is, oh no, we still don't have a rocket that can carry object D into orbit. And so Korylov had this engineer working for him named Mikhail Tikhail de Karnarov. And he approached this friend and said, what if we made the satellite a little lighter? What if we made something

just really simple? And there ensued a crash program. And that is what resulted in Sputnik 1. So I hope I'm answering your question with that. It's like, look, let's forget about the cone, let's forget about all these grandiose science instruments and ion counters and Geiger tubes and all this, we are going to put something in orbit for the express purpose of proving that we can put something in orbit. So a sphere was chosen because it was easy in terms of fabrication, in terms of temperature control, which is a huge thing in space. So inside the Sputnik was basically a battery and some radio transmitters.

and the Soviets did something super clever with Sputnik in that they designed the radio transmitters to work at higher power on very common frequencies that radio hobbyists could tune in. And this would be a really easy way to prove that they're in orbit. Because it's not like the Artemis that just launched this week where there's all these cameras on the side that show it going into orbit, right? How are we going to prove this thing is up there? Well, if we have something that is broadcasting on a radio signal and I can receive that in my garage and measure the Doppler shift as the frequencies change,

boom, that's going to prove it's in orbit. And it scared the heck out of Americans everywhere. It did, yeah. Americans thought that the Russians were going to sail up the Potomac with machine guns. And it jolted the American politicians and the American politicians and the American military into suddenly funding, I'm sure, is what it boiled down to. Everybody suddenly had to get behind this brand new effort to match the Soviets, which would become the theme of the next 15 years of American space technology, really.

Let's get there before they do. And we did. It starts with Explorer 1, which is the answer to Sputnik. That's exactly right. And it should be pointed out, Don, that the Americans and their now American Germans did have a rocket capable of reaching orbit prior to the launch of Sputnik. But largely for political reasons, the tests were not allowed to inject anything into orbit, even an empty upper stage, because there was this concern about airspace.

How high up does airspace really go? And if we fly an aircraft over the Soviet Union, we can get into a lot of trouble. But if we fly a spacecraft in orbit 200 miles above the Soviet Union, is that okay? And so in many respects, the American military was relieved on one hand because the Soviets had gone first and sent up to orbit because they were like, well, this resolves the question of airspace. I guess the coast is clear for us to launch. Following Explorer 1 is the creation of a civilian agency,

the National Aeronautic and Space Administration in 1958 under Eisenhower. And this is when we start to move towards the next stage in our rocket. Jay, you've allowed us to lift off. The first stage is ignited in this ongoing story. We will now tell, hopefully to America's youngsters. You're listening out there as we lift this rocket ship off and explain how we get to where we are today. Jay Gallantan, thanks for joining us in American History. Don, thank you so much for having me on.

This is really enjoyable. Thanks for listening to this episode of American History Hit. I hope you enjoyed it. Please don't forget to like, review, and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. I'll see you next time. This podcast includes music from Epidemic Sound.