The US Orbited Its First Satellite 66 Years Ago Today

Cape Canaveral Every four or five days, Space Coast residents hear or see a rocket taking flight from the Cape, often carrying thirty or more satellites to low-Earth orbit. It happens so often that people will shrug and say something like, “It’s just another Starlink flight,” and not think twice about it.

That was not the case in 1958, when the Space Race was just getting started. Three years earlier, in 1955, the Soviet Union responded to the US announcement of its intent to launch artificial satellites by starting its own program. That program progressed faster than the American one; the Soviets launched Sputnik 1 on October 4, 1957, at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Soviet Kazakhstan. Then they repeated their success by flying Sputnik 2, this time with a live passenger: Sputnik-2 had a pressurized cabin with environmental controls, and inside was a dog named Laika.

The US was caught flat-footed and was woefully behind the Soviets. On December 6, 1957, Vanguard TV-3 (Test Vehicle 3) lifted off from Cape Canaveral, rose a few feet, and then settled back onto its launch pad, where it exploded. The press of the day eviscerated the attempt, referring to Vanguard as Flopnik,” and “Kaputnik,” among other derisory nicknames. The failure was humiliating for the US on the international stage, and to add insult to injury, several days after the failure, the Soviets inquired whether the US needed Soviet funding that Moscow had earmarked for “underdeveloped countries.”

Enter ABMA

Enter Werhner Von Braun and the Army Ballistic Missile Agency — the group tasked with developing rocketry for weaponry. Due to political concerns, then-President Eisenhower had excluded the Von Braun team from making the first US attempt at orbit, despite ABMA having much more experience and success than the Vanguard team led by the Naval Research Laboratory. Von Braun had of course been the scientist who created Germany’s V2 ballistic missile in World War II, and Eisenhower believed that if the Von Braun team had been the first to launch, it would be seen as a military threat by the rest of the world.

The ABMA team was ordered late in 1957 to prepare two Jupiter-C missiles for orbital attempts. The Jupiter-C was similar to the Army’s Redstone missile, also developed by ABMA, but according to Kurt Debus “this version of Redstone carried longer propellant tanks for Hydyne, which yielded 15 percent higher specific impulse than alcohol, and liquid oxygen.

“These changes boosted Redstone’s thrust from 334,000 to 370,000 newtons (75,000 to 83,000 pounds) and extended burning time from 121 to 155 seconds. In turn, that required adding another hydrogen peroxide tank to keep the turbopump operating longer. The elongated booster was made possible because the upper Jupiter C high-speed stages weighed much less than the 3.130 kilograms (6,900 pounds) warhead of the tactical Redstone,” said ABMA Missile Firing Laboratory director Dr. Kurt Debus in his memoirs.

According to Debus, the rocket to be used already existed: “RS 29, as the booster was identified, was taken out of storage. It had been static tested the last week of October 1956.” This was the best rocket the US had to try to match the Soviets.

The Satellite

Meanwhile, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory was assigned to design, build, and operate the artificial satellite that would serve as the rocket’s payload. JPL completed this job in less than three months.

Science instruments aboard Explorer 1 were temperature gauges, micrometeorite sensors and a cosmic-ray detector. The cosmic ray detector made scientific history by detecting the radiation belts that surrounded Earth.

Launch of Explorer 1

On January 31, 2024, the stakes could not have been higher: the US was behind the Soviets, it had lost a great deal of prestige internationally, and it being the leading technological country in the world, was being questioned. That, in turn, led to questions about the ideologies of democracy in the West being superior to communism behind the Iron Curtain. In short, the US needed the Explorer launch to succeed.

At 10:47:56 PM Eastern Timefrom LC-26A at the Cape Canaveral Missile Test Center of the Atlantic Missile Range (AMR), in Florida. The rocket flew flawlessly and achieved orbit. One hundred eight minutes after launch, JPL’s Frank Goddard confirmed Explorer I’s successful orbit, saying, “We’ve got the bird.”

At 2:00am, von Braun, Pickering, and van Allen attended the press conference and photo event at the National Academy of Science where they announced the success of the mission. The US was now the second country to successfully orbit an “artificial moon” — a satellite — and it had restored much of its prestige on the world stage. While the US had yet to equal Sputnik 2’s feat of carrying a living organism to orbit, it had at least shown that it could orbit a satellite…something that we take for granted today.

Reaction

When Explorer 1 launched, the country was ecstatic. Space became fashionable; after all, America was living in the “Space Age” — a moniker for a modern technological society.

With the success of Explorer 1 and other satellites that soon followed in 1958, the political popularity of spaceflight was at an all-time. Weapons development of rockets continued, but soon afterward, Congress passed the National Aeronautics and Space Act that summer. It was signed into law by President Eisenhower on July 29, 1958. On Oct. 1, 1958, NASA opened for business.

Personal Note

The author’s grandfather was a part of the Explorer 1 launch team. V. L. Pinson Sr. was the Telemetry Chief for ABMA and reported to Dr. Kurt Debus, the Director of the Missile Firing Laboratory at Cape Canaveral. Debus later supervised the construction of launch sites at the Atlantic Missile Range, later known as the Eastern Test Range. He also led the acquisition of land for what became Kennedy Space Center, oversaw its construction and was the first director of KSC from July 1962 until November 1974.

Pinson led the telemetry efforts at ABMA, and was merged into NASA when ABMA was transferred to the space agency on July 1, 1960. He retired in the late 1960s and passed away in 1988.