Army team launched Explorer I 50 years ago

Fifty years ago today, Jan. 31, 1958, an Army team from Huntsville
launched America's first scientific satellite.

Wernher von Braun and his German rocket team in Huntsville did the job.
In fact, the idea for such a launch had been on von Braun's mind for
years and in 1950 when he came to work for the U.S. Army in Huntsville,
he knew what he wanted to do.

Von Braun and his team launched the first Redstone missile from Cape
Canaveral, Fla. Then the team proposed to launch a small man-made
satellite using a modified version of the Redstone missile, known as
Jupiter-C. Unfortunately, the proposal was turned down.

\"\[President\] Eisenhower was worried about rattling the saber\"
against the Soviets, Marshall retiree Bob Schwinghamer recalled. \"He
didn\'t want to let the Army do it.\" On July 29, 1955, Eisenhower
endorsed using a Naval Research Lab proposal called \"Project Vanguard\"
for the satellite launch.

Despite their disappointment, von Braun and his Army team continued work
on plans for a rocket that could launch America's first satellite. \"In
those early days, we knew we had a satellite and could put it up,\" said
Marshall retiree Alex McCool.

But, as Schwinghamer recalled, the Huntsville group was under orders
from Washington to make sure that the top stage of the Jupiter-C was a
dummy and not a satellite. \"They had somebody in the control room from
Washington so the fourth stage would not be ignited," he said.

In addition, Secretary of Defense Charlie Wilson had decided to give the
Air Force jurisdiction over long-range missiles and the Army
responsibility for missiles with up to a 200-mile range. The editor of
the Huntsville Times spoke for many in the area when he wrote: \"Charlie
Wilson has put his foot in his mouth again --- and this time I hope he
chokes on it.\"

Despite the inter-service rivalry and the policy directives from
Washington, Huntsville continued to mark milestones in the missile and
space race, but it wasn\'t until after Oct. 4, 1957, that the nation
really turned its attention to Huntsville. That was the day the Russians
launched Sputnik, the world\'s first man-made orbiting satellite.

Just over a month later, however, on Nov. 8, 1957, spirits rose in
Huntsville when the Secretary of the Army directed Huntsville to launch
a scientific satellite on board a Jupiter-C. It was the chance von Braun
and his team had dreamed of. Even after the Nov. 8 announcement, the
Navy\'s Vanguard was still in the running to launch the first satellite.
But that changed, too, after Dec. 6, when the Vanguard erupted in a ball
of fire on the launch pad.

The nation now turned to Huntsville, and on Jan. 31, 1958, the Army, in
cooperation with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, launched a
modified Jupiter-C rocket from Cape Canaveral. The rocket carried
Explorer I, the nation\'s first Earth-orbiting satellite, developed
jointly by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the U.S. Army. Equipped
with small Geiger counters to register cosmic rays, the payload was
built by Dr. James Van Allen of the State University of Iowa.

*Huntsville celebrates*

Huntsville celebrated the Explorer I launch with fireworks in the
streets. \"There was pandemonium that night,\" said Marshall retiree Bob
Schwinghamer. Huntsville got a place on the map, and \"Missileman von
Braun\" soon appeared on the cover of Time magazine. Newsweek also
featured Huntsville and reported that Secretary of Defense Charlie
Wilson did not understand why he had been hung in effigy on the
courthouse square in Huntsville.

The Explorer I launch marked the eighth year since the von Braun rocket
team had moved to Huntsville. Much had changed in town. The cotton
traders, the mule-drawn wagons and other signs of rural life that had
been so much in evidence in the first half of the century were gone, as
were the most visible signs of grinding poverty. And the town was
bigger, having grown from 16,000 in 1950 to 48,000 by 1956.

Saturn rocket historian Roger Bilstein noted that in 1950, the
Huntsville city limits only extended about a mile from the courthouse.
Because there was no sewage treatment plant, sewer lines pumped effluent
to a creek outside the city limits and then on to the Tennessee River.
Huntsville in the 1950s, said Dave Christensen, close associate of von
Braun, was a town of contrasts. \"The downtown had the beautiful old
courthouse and all the stores. But if you went very far out ... there
were some of the worst conditions I have ever seen in my life ... One of
the big impacts of the rocket program coming to Huntsville was enough
money to clean up all these horrible places.\"

Soon, the word \"rocket\" was plastered everywhere --- the Rocket City
Café, Rocket City Motorcycle Shop and Rocket City Upholstery, to name a
few examples --- and more and more space experts were coming to town.
The journal Astronautics reported that the Army Ballistic Missile Agency
was recruiting an additional 400 civilian engineers, physicists,
mathematicians and others. The city \"draws top talented physicists from
New England, machine workers from the East Coast, electrical engineers
from the Midwest and promising young chemists from Georgia Tech and
California,\" said U.S. News and World Report.

Army Ballistic Missile Agency Commander Gen. John B. Medaris, proud of
his Army team in Huntsville, found it ironic that the city\'s growth and
Redstone\'s acclaim resulted from America\'s wake-up call from Sputnik.
\"If I could find the damned thing, I would kiss it on both cheeks,\" he
told Newsweek.

NASA created

Following the launch of Jupiter-C, the nation\'s leaders debated whether
the country\'s space program should be directed by a military or
civilian agency. Eventually, the role was assigned to a civilian agency,
the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, which was created on
Oct. 1, 1958. NASA would include experts in aeronautics as well as
scientists and engineers who could develop space-launch vehicles. In
1958, however, launch-vehicle expertise existed primarily at one site in
the United States --- Huntsville.

\"All the smarts were down here, all the engineering. There weren\'t
many other places to turn to at the time,\" recalled Marshall retiree
Jay Foster. As a result, President Dwight Eisenhower signed an executive
order saying that personnel from the Development Operations Division of
the ABMA in Huntsville would be transferred to NASA.

Foster and about 4,000 other Army civilian employees went to a transfer
ceremony on July 1, 1960. They returned the same day to the same
laboratories and offices as NASA employees. The new NASA center was
dedicated by Eisenhower on Sept. 8, 1960, and named in honor of Gen.
George C. Marshall, Eisenhower\'s World War II military colleague and
author of the famous Marshall Plan for postwar European recovery.