More on America's race to space

In the earliest days of the space race, the United States was getting its butt kicked. That's just the plain truth. Russia put the first satellite into orbit. When the U.S. tried to respond, the Navy's Vanguard rocket exploded on the pad. By the time Dr. Werner von Braun and the Army launched America's first satellite, Russia had sent Laika the dog into space. The main reason our country fell behind is that we really didn't have a space program. We had independent agencies doing research, but there was no unified effort. Scattered across the country were things like the National Advisory Council on Aeronautics in Langley, Virginia, or the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology along with the rocketry programs of the Army, Navy and Air Force. President Dwight D. Eisenhower recognized the problem and acted. On July 29, 1958, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration was formed, uniting all the various agencies under a single umbrella. Von Braun soon found himself in charge of the new Marshall Space Flight Center, located at the Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama, where he had worked for the Army developing the Redstone rocket. It was obvious to everyone that Russia, having flown the first animal in space, was aiming to fly the first man in space. It was the job of newly formed NASA to beat them to the punch. But there was a problem. The U.S. rocket with enough power to get an astronaut into orbit, the Atlas, had developed a bad habit of exploding either on the pad, at liftoff, or in flight. It simply could not be trusted to send a man into space at that time. So, NASA turned to von Braun and his team with the Redstone rocket to get the job done. The Redstone didn't have enough power to put a man in orbit, but it could reach space on a ballistic flight and secure that first-in-space honor. On Nov. 21, 1960, the first uncrewed test flight of the Redstone rocket with the new Mercury capsule took place at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. It was a comedy of errors. The Redstone rocket's engines shut down just as it was about to lift off. The Mercury capsule's escape tower then jettisoned itself, leaving the capsule on the rocket. With the engines shut down and the tower jettisoned, the onboard flight systems decided it was time to deploy the parachutes. The rocket had flown a total of 4 inches and now sat on the launch pad, nearly fully fueled with parachutes fluttering around in the breeze. On the bright side, the escape tower reached an altitude of 4,000 feet, so at least something was launched. It turns out that two cables that connected the rocket to the ground systems had disconnected at the wrong time, causing a relay in the rocket to close and indicate that the flight was over. Therefore, the flight system shut down the engines, jettisoned the tower and deployed the parachutes. The problem was quickly fixed, and on Dec. 19, 1960, the first successful flight of the Mercury-Redstone combination, still uncrewed, was achieved. On Jan. 31, 1961, the first crewed launch of a Mercury-Redstone took place. However, instead of a man inside, it was a chimpanzee. The chimp was known as "No. 65" at the start of the flight. If successfully recovered after the flight, he would be given the name "Ham." Ham was an acronym for Holloman Aerospace Medical Center where he was trained. In preparation for the flight, Ham was taught to push a lever when a blue light flashed on a panel. If he did it within five seconds, he received a banana pellet. If he didn't do it in time, he would receive a slight shock on the foot. The flight didn't go as planned. A valve malfunctioned, causing the Redstone rocket to deliver far more thrust than intended. The excessive thrust caused the escape rocket to be triggered, this time for real, and the capsule was pulled away from the rocket, subjecting Ham to 17g of force. That's 17 times the force of gravity. Today's fighter pilots normally train for a maximum of 9g. When the tower completed its job and was jettisoned, the retro rocket pack used to slow the capsule for reentry also fell away, leaving only air pressure and parachutes to slow the decent. This meant that Ham would then pull almost 15g on reentry. Ham survived the flight and would later retire from NASA, eventually ending up in a zoo in Asheboro, North Carolina, where he died Jan. 19, 1983, at age 25. The problems with the chimpanzee flight prompted von Braun to schedule another uncrewed test flight. But the astronauts objected. They argued that the Russians could launch a man into space at any time. They then pointed out that the problems with the Redstone were unique to the one flight and were easily fixed. Despite the protests of the astronauts, von Braun would not launch humans on the Redstone rocket until he had a perfect test flight. On March 24, 1961, what would have been the U.S.'s first manned flight to space flew as an uncrewed test flight. The mission was flawless. However, on April 12, 1961, Russian Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space, making one orbit of the earth in his Vostok 1 spacecraft designed by von Braun's rival, Sergei Korolev. The United States had been beaten again. On May 2, 1961, Alan Shepard was scheduled to become America's first man in space, but weather forced postponement. It seems like our current delays for the moon launch are nothing new in the space program. Finally, on May 5, 1961, Shepard launched from Cape Canaveral, reaching an altitude of 116 miles and landed in the Atlantic Ocean 302 miles downrange. During the flight he tested some of the systems to be used in the future, including manual pilot control of the spacecraft. It was a flawless mission. There would be one last mission for the Mercury-Redstone when Virgil I. "Gus" Grissom would do another suborbital mission on July 21, 1961. The flight was a success, but after landing in the Atlantic Ocean, the hatch accidentally blew and the capsule sank. Grissom was pulled from the water by a U.S. Navy helicopter. This was the end of von Braun's Redstone rocket in the space program. The Atlas rocket was ready to take John Glenn into space as the first American to orbit the earth. But von Braun wasn't done. A young, newly elected president was about to give him and NASA an ultimate challenge. Ned Jilton II is a photographer, history lover and columnist. You can contact him at ndjphoto@aol.com.