Word: missilemen
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Fume & Smoke. At 9 o'clock one night last week the Explorer was ready. Lox vapors (liquid oxygen) waved in the floodlights' glow. In Central Control, scientific and technical missilemen tended their network of instruments. In the Pentagon at that moment, Army Secretary Wilber Brucker and the Jupiter's top Scientist Wernher von Braun joined a score of other military and civilian officials in the Army's telecommunications room, seated themselves at a table before two huge screens, one enlarging teletype messages from the Cape, the other carrying Pentagon messages back to the site. Elaborately...
...Cape, the cheers had long since faded. But the unself-conscious awe that swept over the missilemen and other observers hung on from the first moment of the rocket's majestic birth and the first wild dance of flame that fired it. Said one man: "There was something about the way it went up. No nonsense. It seemed to know what...
...months, recalls Major General John Medaris, the U.S. Army and its missilemen "were in the position of a patient that has been given a death sentence by the doctor -but we kind of refused to die." How the Army patient survived to launch the first successful U.S. satellite is a history of groans, gall-and grit...
Then Came Termites. Jupiter was put into blazing competition with the Air Force's Thor IRBM, and the race more than occupied the energies of the Huntsville scientists. Even so, says Von Braun, the Army missilemen "had clear sailing for about a year." And then: "The termites got into the system again." Ironically, some of the termites were hatched by the Army itself...
...Jupiter itself. But while other services hooted at its "brute-force approach" to space, Jupiter-C once flew 3,500 miles, once carried the test Jupiter nose cone into space and back again; President Eisenhower displayed the recovered nose cone in his first television speech after Sputnik. The Army missilemen never for an instant lost sight of Jupiter-C as a satellite vehicle in case Vanguard failed-as they were convinced it would. All told, the Army made ten official pleas on behalf of Jupiter-C as a satellite vehicle...