Breaking the Chains of Gravity: The Story of Spaceflight before NASA

278 Pages·2015·3.07 MB·English

by  Amy Shira Teitel

A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR
Amy Shira Teitel is a lifelong space-history nerd who has turned her schoolgirl
fascination with the Apollo missions into a career researching the minutiae of
spaceflight’s history.
Amy started writing for the public with her blog, Vintage Space. She has also
written for a number of other online and print publications including Discovery
News Space, Al-Jazeera, the Guardian and Universe Today. She runs a thriving
YouTube channel (also called Vintage Space), and has appeared on the
Discovery channel, the Military channel, SyFy, and the Science channel, and she
is a host on DNews, Discovery Channel’s online daily news show. Amy was also
an embedded journalist on the New Horizons team, bringing the excitement of
humanity’s first mission to Pluto to the space-loving public.
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For spaceflight’s pioneers who continue to inspire,
and for Mark who believed in me at the start
BREAKING THE CHAINS OF
GRAVITY
THE STORY OF SPACEFLIGHT BEFORE
NASA
Amy Shira Teitel
Contents
Preface
Chapter 1: Hobby Rocketeers
Chapter 2: The Rocket Loophole
Chapter 3: The Turning Tide of War
Chapter 4: Escape and Surrender
Chapter 5: Nazi Rockets in New Mexico
Chapter 6: Rockets Meet Airplanes
Chapter 7: A New War, a New Missile, and a New Leader
Chapter 8: Higher and Faster
Chapter 9: Edging into Hypersonics
Chapter 10: The Floating Astronaut
Chapter 11: Space Becomes an Option
Chapter 12: The First Satellite Race
Chapter 13: One Little Ball’s Big Impact
Chapter 14: The Fight to Control Space
Epilogue: America Finds Its Footing in Space
Glossary of People
Glossary of Places and Organizations
Glossary of Rockets
Selected Notes
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Index
Preface
Popular retellings of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s
history typically follow the same narrative: In 1961, President John F. Kennedy
pledged the nation would land a man on the Moon by the end of the decade and
return him safely to the Earth. In July of 1969, Neil Armstrong took one small
step on the Sea of Tranquillity, fulfilling the fallen president’s dream and
completing a technologically daunting task in the name of restoring America’s
national prestige. It was, by all accounts, a remarkable achievement given
spaceflight’s embryonic state in the 1960s and the short time frame. The story
becomes even more incredible in light of the fact that NASA was just three years
old and hadn’t yet put a man in orbit when Kennedy promised America the
Moon. Though common, this version of the story creates the illusion that NASA
invented a lunar landing program in response to a presidential decree.
NASA wasn’t created in a vacuum and suddenly tasked with the Moon landing.
The agency might have been incepted in 1958, but it was assembled from
preexisting parts, drawing off decades of research in rocketry, human tolerances,
hypersonic flight, and the bureaucracy needed to oversee a major undertaking
like a lunar landing program. NASA has technological and bureaucratic roots
stretching back decades before it formally opened for business that made the
Apollo program possible, and these roots are what this book is about.
The incredible rockets that launched America’s first astronauts reached the
nation by way of German engineers imported after the Second World War and
employed by the U.S. military. The knowledge of human survival in space came
from early air force programs, some done with primates and some with humans.
Knowledge of how a vehicle could return safely from orbit was largely the
product of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, the agency that
was also versed in bridging the gap between military and civilian partners in
cutting-edge aeronautics programs.
But it must be said that this book only tells part of the story. Almost every
rocket, aircraft, person, organization, and research laboratory in this book merits
a work dedicated to its history. In fact, most of them do have dedicated volumes.
In simplifying the story to bring it to a broader audience, I decided to focus on
certain people and follow certain narratives to the exclusion of some notable
figures like American engineer Robert Goddard and Russian scientist Konstantin
Tsiolkovsky, two fathers of rocketry whose contributions to the field were
invaluable. The complete, unedited story would be a tome that only die-hard
space fans would have the patience to sift through. Spaceflight is part of our
shared human history and shouldn’t be an opus accessible only to initiates. It
should be available to everyone interested in exploring this rich history.
Among other decisions I made in writing this book was the decision to use
male pronouns. With a handful of exceptions, everyone working in aviation and
aeronautics between 1930 and 1958 was male, and most forward thinkers
assumed that the first person in space would be a man. It is a thought process
indicative of the era. I also chose to keep center names and dollar amounts
consistent with the time frame of the book. Names are not reflective of current
monikers, and values have not been adjusted for inflation.
My hope is that this book opens up NASA’s prehistory to those who might not
realize that America’s national space agency has such a fascinating backstory,
and that it inspires a few to dig into this history a little further. Humanity’s
exploration of space is wonderful. Having a deeper understanding of how it all
started is not only interesting, having a sense of the context makes everything we
have achieved in the last half century of space exploration that much more
incredible.
CHAPTER ONE
Hobby Rocketeers
On May 17, 1930, dusk fell just before nine o’clock at the end of a warm, clear
Saturday in Britz, Berlin, but Max Valier showed no signs of leaving his
workbench for an evening of leisure. He remained in his seat, focused on a
simple combustion chamber bolted to the table in front of him. It was a simple
setup. At the center was a combustion chamber, a simple steel tube with an
upward-facing exhaust nozzle. On the other end were a series of small bore holes
through which the fuel and oxidizer were introduced. The whole apparatus was
set up on a grocery scale. His assistants Arthur Rudolph and Walter Riedel sat
some distance away at two tanks, one of kerosene mixed with water and the
other of liquid oxygen. The two men manually opened the valves as Valier
dictated, sending the fuel and oxidizer into the combustion chamber where they
mixed. Once the combustion chamber was adequately pressurized, Valier lit the
mixture with a blowtorch. As the jet of flaming gases roared upward from the
combustion chamber, directed by the nozzle, the resulting reaction was a
downward force onto the scale. While the engine burned, Valier added weights
to the other side of the scale until it was properly balanced, giving him a crude
measure of the engine’s efficiency.
That day, Valier had made two successful tests with the same setup. Two good
burns in the combustion chamber had yielded good data. A third test had failed,
the accompanying jolting motions deforming the test hardware at the same time.
At that point Riedel had pushed for the skeleton crew to end their day and start
fresh the next day, but Valier’s enthusiasm had been indomitable. He was so
encouraged by the afternoon’s successes that he pushed for one final test to end
the day on a high note. The combustion chamber was reassembled, the fuel and
liquid oxygen tanks were hooked up.
As he had done dozens of times before, Valier moved the flame toward the
pressurized combustion chamber, but instead of the slow, steady burn he was
expecting, the space was rocked by an earsplitting explosion. Unbeknownst to
Valier, part of the emulsified mix of kerosene and water had combined with
liquid oxygen to form a jellylike substance that stuck to the sides of the chamber
where it burned with explosive, deadly force. Riedel instinctively closed the
valves on the tanks and rushed to Valier’s side, barely catching the man before