Vanguard

NASA’s Historical Data Book gives Vanguard as 21.9 metres tall with cone and aerodynamic spike, 124,544 newtons of first stage thrust, and 11.3 kilograms to a 555 kilometre orbit, rising to 24 kilograms with the later Allegany Ballistics Laboratory third stage. The 1.14 metre diameter comes straight from the design decision recorded in NASA’s programme history: the cylindrical tanks were to be forty-five inches across. Encyclopedia Astronautica prints 23 metres for the height, but only NASA’s figure says what is included in it.

It won on politics, not performance. A seven-man committee picked the Naval Research Laboratory proposal over von Braun’s Orbiter three votes to two, with two members abstaining on the grounds that they were not guided missile experts and would follow the majority. One member was home ill and later said he would have voted the other way. Part of the objection to the Army was explicit in the record: some of the group disliked using a booster derived from a Nazi vengeance weapon built by German engineers, and thought an American satellite launcher should be an American product.

The deeper constraint was that the satellite programme must not slow the missiles down. When the National Security Council endorsed a satellite in May 1955 it attached two conditions: stress the peaceful purpose, and do not interrupt work on intermediate range and intercontinental ballistic missiles. Vanguard touched no weapons programme. The Redstone was one.

On 6 December 1957, two seconds after ignition and four feet off the pad, thrust ceased and TV-3 crumpled and exploded. The satellite rolled clear into the bushes, still transmitting. The next morning sell orders on Martin Company stock were heavy enough that the New York Stock Exchange suspended trading in it at 11:50 a.m., and the Soviet delegation at the United Nations asked whether America would care to receive technical assistance under its programme for backward nations.

Then it worked, three times out of eleven orbital attempts. Vanguard 1 went up on 17 March 1958, proved that solar cells could power a spacecraft, kept transmitting on them until 1965, and produced the first geodetic result from orbit by showing that the southern hemisphere is flatter than the northern one. It is still up there, the oldest artificial object in space, and NASA’s own history estimated in 1970 that it had another 240 years to run. The second and third stages went on to become the Able and then the Delta upper stages, which is a longer legacy than the programme’s reputation suggests.