Unfortunately, they failed to uncover a problem with faulty circuitry in the tail section of the rocket. Between April 1959 and July 1960 von Braun's engineers in Huntsville ground-tested the Redstone's propulsion systems more than two hundred times. Von Braun's group in Huntsville was asked to modify and test the Army Redstone missile, which NASA would use to launch the capsule into pace. Project Mercury was directed by NASA's Space Task Group at Langley, Virginia whose engineers would design the capsule. Then they set about selecting seven candidates for the job.
A week after NASA opened, the agency authorized "Project Mercury," a program to put a man in orbit. Others worried that international prestige rather than scientific knowledge now represented the nation's major goal in space, but the drive to launch a human was on and nothing could stop it. Some critics called the idea little more than a "circus stunt," something akin to shooting a lady out of a cannon. Marshall Space Flight Center, which opened July 1, 1960, at Redstone Arsenal.īoth the Soviet Union and the United States now staked everything on being the first to put a human into orbit. Eventually, the government transferred four thousand U.S. Eisenhower and Congress created the National Aeronautic and Space Administration, which opened for business on October 1, 1958.
The United States, it seemed, had finally caught up with the Russians in the space race.Įxplorer's success threw von Braun and Huntsville into the national spotlight and put the space race into high gear. Following the launch, von Braun and most of Huntsville danced in the streets. Von Braun's team responded quickly and on January 31, 1958, launched America's first satellite, Explorer 1, on a modified Jupiter-C.
Eisenhower, fearing the appearance of "saber rattling," said no, but he changed his mind after October 1957 when the Soviets stunned the world by launching Sputnik, the world's first orbiting satellite. Eisenhower' permission to modify a Redstone missile with the goal of launching America's first satellite. To buttress America's Cold War arsenal, the team developed the Redstone and Jupiter missiles, but von Braun pushed for more. Thousands of U.S.-born rocket specialists poured into Huntsville in the years that followed as the city moved from a sleepy cotton town to "Rocket City, U.SA." In 1950, as Cold War tensions rose, the army expanded its missile program and moved the von Braun team to Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville. Army rocket research using V-Zs rounded up at the end of the war. Sent to Fort Bliss, Texas, they worked on U.S. In 1945 von Braun and more than one hundred fellow German rocket experts-builders of the famous V-2 rocket that had terrorized London during World War II-had surrendered to the Americans at the war's end. Huntsville already had more than ten years of rocket-building experience behind it when Kennedy announced the lunar landing goal in 1961. Kennedy in 1961- "landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth." Before the end of the decade, the goal would be reached, and on July 16, 1969, a mammoth rocket, standing taller than the Statue of Liberty, would leave the launch pad in Florida carrying three human beings toward the surface of the moon. Throughout the 1960s, Huntsvillians would hear and feel that roar many times as ASA scientists aimed for the goal set by President John F. The sound and fury generated that day resulted from the test-firing of the first stage of the Saturn moon rocket. Alabama has become, as writer Bob Lionel lacer wrote, "the land of the Earth-shakers." As von Braun and the engineers watch, a continuous plume of flame biases from the base of a mammoth concrete structure several hundred yards from the bunker. Two miles away, sealed in a concrete bunker with sixteeninch-thick walls, a group of engineers peers through periscopes meanwhile, other team members push buttons on the bunker's steel-gray consoles. Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, and looks south coward the Tennessee River. Wernher von Braun, the world's most famous rocket expert, stands on the roof of a ten-story building at NASA's George C.
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