Throughout the early history of spaceflight, success was typically bred of failure and fear. A milestone launch 45 years ago this week signaled the United States' first successful reaction to both.
On Jan. 31, 1958, the Explorer 1 satellite was lofted into Earth orbit. America belatedly joined a race into the space it would later work to conquer. In the process, the satellite made an important scientific discovery.
The Space Race was fueled, of course, by Cold War anxiety. The world's first satellite was the Russian Sputnik, put into orbit on Oct. 4, 1957. It was the rocket under Sputnik that truly fueled fear, however. The Russian R7 rocket was designed to carry warheads across the ocean and deliver them to other continents.
Sputnik's electronic beeps, heard by amateur radio operators around the world, announced to the American public that the Soviets were ready to send a nuclear warhead into space and back down to any American city.
Spurred by political and public outcry, President Dwight Eisenhower stepped up plans for the first U.S. satellite. The initial attempt, on Dec. 6, 1957, relied on a rocket booster called Vanguard. The setup blasted off, rose a few feet, then fell to the ground and exploded.
Meanwhile, a U.S. Army rocket team headed by Wernher von Braun (who developed the V 2 missile in Nazi Germany) was about ready to make a separate attempt. Von Braun's Jupiter C successfully launched the Explorer 1 satellite just a few weeks later.
The atmosphere surrounding spaceflight engineering and management was as different then compared to today as are the world's political relations. In the early years of the space race, scientists almost wholly governed their universe.
Rules were few, and those that existed were broken. Explosions occurred. Scientists got injured. Rockets were carried aboard commercial airliners to meet launch deadlines.
The Explorer (officially known as Satellite 1958 Alpha) was developed, built and launched in less than three months. The Explorer work was mostly done at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.
The 31-pound satellite was launched from Cape Canaveral in Florida at 10:48 P.M. EST on Jan. 31, 1958. It orbited the planet once every 114.9 minutes, ranging in altitude from 224 to 1,575 miles.
Explorer 1 had a science plan, too. It carried equipment to detect cosmic rays. The count was lower than expected, however. James Van Allen, who built the instruments, theorized that the devices may have been saturated by an output of charged particles trapped in space by Earth's magnetic fields.
A discovery was made, structures that came to be called the Van Allen Belts.
Other rockets had entered space before the Explorer 1 milestone. A year later the Soviets would send a small probe, Luna 1, hurtling past the Moon. But Explorer 1 signaled the American response to the Soviet Union's initial space effort and thus, in many minds, it was the true launch of the Space Race.
advertisement
