THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT
Q U A R T E R L Y
Volume 21, Number 3 2014
www.spacehistory101.com
IGY S
CIENTIFICC
OMMUNITIESAND THE
P
REHISTORY OFTIROS
A
MERICANI
NTELLIGENCE ONS
OVIETM
ISSILEP
ROGRAMS, 1945-1954
A
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XPLORATIONM
AKINGH
ISTORY:
T
HERAMOS P
ROGRAMF
Fe ea attu urre es s
4 The Promise and the Threats of Satellite Capabilities: IGY Scientific Communities and the Prehistory of TIROS
By Angelina Long Callahan
21 An Interview with James Webb
By T. H. Baker
37 American Intelligence on Soviet Missile Programs, 1945-1954
By Christopher Gainor
47 Making History: The RAMOS Program
By Doran J. Baker, A.T. Stair Jr., Bartell C. Jensen, M.K.Jeppesen
Contents
Volume 21 • Number 3 2014
www.spacehistory101.com
B
Bo oo ok k R Re ev viie ew ws s
54 JJu us stt S Sa ayy Y Ye es s:: W Wh ha att II’’v ve e L Le ea arrn ne ed d a ab bo ou utt L
Liiffe e,, L Lu uc ck k,, a an nd d tth he e P Pu urrs su uiitt o off O Op pp po orrttu un niittyy
Book by Bernard Schwartz Review by Scott Sacknoff
55 A A B Brriie eff H Hiis stto orryy o off R Ro oc ck ke ettrryy iin n IIS SR RO O
Book by P.V. Manoranjan Rao and P. Radhakrishwan Review by Asif A. Siddiqi
57 T Th he e IIn ntte errn na attiio on na all A Attlla as s o off M Ma arrs s E Exxp pllo orra attiio on n::
T
Th he e F Fiirrs stt F Fiiv ve e D De ec ca ad de es s
Book by Philip Stooke Review by Maria Lane
59 W Wiizza arrd ds s,, A Alliie en ns s,, a an nd d S Stta arrs sh hiip ps s:: P Ph hyys siic cs s a an nd d M
Ma atth h iin n F Fa an ntta as syy a an nd d S Sc ciie en nc ce e F Fiic cttiio on n
Book by Charles L. Adler Review by Jonathan T. Malay
60 S Sa allllyy R Riid de e::
A
Am me erriic ca a’’s s F Fiirrs stt W Wo om ma an n iin n S Sp pa ac ce e
Book by Lynn Sherr Review by Valerie Neal
61 A A S Siin ng glle e S Sk kyy:: H Ho ow w a an n IIn ntte errn na attiio on na all C
Co om mm mu un niittyy F Fo orrg ge ed d tth he e S Sc ciie en nc ce e o off R Ra ad diio o A
As sttrro on no om myy
Book by David P.D. Munns Review by Roger D. Launius
62 E Exxp pllo orriin ng g S Sc ciie en nc ce e tth hrro ou ug gh h S Sc ciie en nc ce e F Fiic cttiio on n
Book by Barry Luokkala Review by Emily Margolis
63 B Be eyyo on nd d tth he e G Go od d P Pa arrttiic clle e
Book by Leon Lederman and Christopher Hill Review by Roger D. Launius
64 W Wh he ee ells s S Stto op p:: T Th he e T Trra ag ge ed diie es s a an nd d T Trriiu um mp ph hs s o off tth he e S Sp pa ac ce e S Sh hu uttttlle e P Prro og grra am m,, 1 19 98 86 6--2 20 01 11 1
Book by Rick Houston Review by Stephen Waring
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Bo oo ok k R Re ev viie ew ws s
51 O Op pe erra attiio on n P Pa ap pe errc clliip p:: T Th he e S Se ec crre ett IIn ntte elllliig ge en nc ce e P
Prro og grra am m tth ha att B Brro ou ug gh htt N Na azzii S Sc ciie en nttiis stts s tto o A
Am me erriic ca a
Book by Annie Jacobsen Review by Michael J. Neufeld
52 L Lu uc ck kyy P Plla an ne ett:: W Wh hyy E Ea arrtth h IIs s E Exxc ce ep pttiio on na all— —a an nd d W
Wh ha att T Th ha att M Me ea an ns s ffo orr L Liiffe e iin n tth he e U Un niiv ve errs se e
Book by David Waltham Review by Linda Billings
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RONTC
OVERC
APTIONCirca 1957, the artwork was used by Convair Astronautics (San Diego, California), a division of General Dynamics, in an adver- tisement celebrating the successful test flight of the Atlas Intercontinental Ballistic Missile. The first successful test launch of an SM-65 Atlas missile took place on 17 December 1957.
Though the artwork is unsigned, Convair's resident artist at that time was John Sentovic. In 1994, General Dynamics sold its Space Systems Division to Martin Marietta (now Lockheed Martin). Permission to use the image has been granted by Lockheed Martin and the original ad can be found in the person- al archives of Paul Carsola, a researcher who has contributed to Questin the past.
Q U E S T 21:3 2014 51
www.spacehistory101.com By Annie Jacobsen
Little, Brown, 2014 ISBN: 978-0-316-22104-7 Pages: xii + 575
Price: $30.00, hardcover
Several people have asked my opinion of this book, which drew favorable reviews in the New York Timesand other media outlets. I should mention that I answered several inquiries from the author on the phone, I am prominently men- tioned in the acknowledgments, and my Wernher von Braun biography is extensively cited in the notes. Indeed several pages in the text are essentially lifted from Von Braun (with attribution). Unfortunately, I cannot endorse Operation Paperclipbecause: it is error-ridden, it produces no fundamen- tally new information, it is unbalanced, and its notes are poor.
It is not an academic work and cannot be criticized for trying to be one, but the net result is that, despite her discovery or devel- opment of several new sources, it does not advance the topic much beyond what was revealed in the muckraking Paperclip investigative journalism of the 1980s.
My negative impression of her accuracy set in early. On page 7 she calls the V-1 cruise missile the V-2’s “earlier ver- sion.” On page 8 she writes that the military leader of the German Army rocket program, Gen. Walter Dornberger, “often wore a long-shin-length leather coat to match the Reichsführer- SS [Heinrich Himmler]”—a ludicrous detail, as Dornberger wore Wehrmacht standard issue. I have written extensively about Dornberger’s collaboration with the SS in the criminal enterprise of the concentration camps connected to the V-2 pro- gram, but also about the Army-SS rivalry in the program—
Dornberger was no toady of Himmler. The next several pages are an overwritten scene of Albert Speer’s presenting the Knight’s Cross to Dornberger, von Braun, and two others, based on my quotations and summary from Dornberger’s mem- oir. But in the process Jacobsen adds many invented details for dramatic effect. On page 13, she describes von Braun associate Arthur Rudolph (best known for being forced to leave the United States in 1984 over his involvement with the Mittelwerk V-2 factory), as a “high-school graduate,” even though he had a two-year engineering technology degree. It is a minor error, but when multiplied by a hundred it casts doubt on the whole.
In my primary area of expertise, the V-2 and von Braun, every discussion of these stories throughout the book is error-ridden.
Jacobsen also misidentifies Third Reich leaders and organiza-
tions, gets the details of the reorganization of the U.S. military in 1947 wrong, and misspells the name of famous diplomat George F. Kennan in every reference to him. It leads me to doubt the accuracy of every story in the book that I do not know so intimately.
The lack of any fundamentally new information is also troubling. I do not mean that there is nothing new in the book or that it is without value. Operation Paperclip is very readable and it covers many stories told in the previous literature better than they were before. Jacobsen found new sources to inter- view and she and her researchers (of which she lists several) have been to archives that Linda Hunt and Tom Bower, the two primary journalists of the earlier phase, have not cited.1 But much space is devoted to colorful and interesting descriptions of the various Allied holding facilities for Nazi leaders, the war crimes trials in Germany, and the growth of the Gehlen Organization (the ex-SS-dominated intelligence group in the U.S. occupation zone that became the West German intelli- gence agency BND). Most of this information is only tangen- tially related to Operation Overcast (the original name) or Paperclip. A large fraction of the book concentrates on chemi- cal and biological warfare and aerospace medicine, subjects that continue to shock in the willingness of members of the U.S. military to recruit Third Reich specialists connected to concentration-camp experiments on inmates, while covering- up or whitewashing the Nazi records of those they recruited.
Jacobsen develops these stories more than Hunt or Bower did, but I did not find anything that struck me as fundamentally new. The author herself acknowledges the pioneering work of Linda Hunt in using Freedom of Information Act to produce much new information in the 1980s. Her own contributions to research seem slight by comparison.
Jacobsen, following the tradition of Hunt and Bower, con- centrates on the scandals, which inevitably leads to an imbal- ance in presentation. Little is said about the substantive contri- butions of von Braun and company to U.S. ballistic missile and space programs, and the same is true of the specialists the U.S.
Air Force recruited—numerically the largest group taken by any of the services. (She of course uses the clichéd, but ominous- sounding term “Nazi scientists,” although the majority were engineers and many were not members of the Nazi Party, SA or SS.2) Even in the case of the frightening and repulsive cases of nerve gas and biological weapons development, was it in the U.S. national interest to walk away from those weapons (and some of the people needed to acquire expertise in them), know- ing that the Soviet Union would get that knowledge too? The Cold War led to some appalling moral compromises but it had a deterministic arms-race logic that was difficult to escape.
Jacobsen calls Paperclip a “nefarious child of the Second World War” that “created a host of monstrous offspring” [371]. Black-
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by David Waltham Basic Books, 2014 ISBN 978-0-465-03999-9 Pages: 208
Price: $26.99, hardcover
In Lucky Planet, David Waltham attempts to persuade the reader that Earth is the only habitable planet in the universe.
Chapter by chapter, he constructs a scientific argument intended to support this claim.
Waltham is a geophysicist and self-described astrobiologist with the Department of Earth Sciences at Royal Holloway College, University of London. He is widely published in the peer-reviewed literature, and in his papers he has been construct- ing his argument for “exceptional Earth” for a number of years—
see, for example, “Anthropic selection for the Moon’s mass,”
Astrobiology4(4), 2004; “The large-moon hypothesis: can it be tested?” International Journal of Astrobiology5(4), 2006; “Half a billion years of good weather: Gaia or good luck?” Astronomy
& Geophysics48(3), 2007. In the latter paper, Waltham provides an analysis that “implies possible selection for a stable climate [on Earth], which, if true, undermines the Gaia hypothesis and also suggests that planets with Earth-like levels of biodiversity are likely to be very rare.” In his book, “distinguishing between Gaia—the hypothesis that Earth and its life function as a self-reg- ulating organism—and Goldilocks—the idea that Earth is ‘just right’ for life—is a major theme,” Waltham writes.
Waltham goes for Goldilocks. His thesis, in his own words, is that “good fortune, infrequently repeated elsewhere in the Universe, played a significant role in allowing the long-term life- friendliness of our home” [1]. He argues that Earth has had a sta- ble climate for 4 billion years, for reasons unlikely to be repeat- ed elsewhere.
Waltham is not the first scientist to claim that Earth is a rar- ity. Perhaps the best-known advocates of the so-called rare-Earth hypothesis are Peter Ward and Donald Brownlee, who presented their case in their 2000 book Rare Earth: Why Complex Life is and-white judgments are easy—and a tradition for this topic—
but it hardly leads to a balanced assessment.
As for the notes, they are in the unfortunate trade-press tradition of page references in the back, primarily for quota- tions—but not even consistently for those. Despite the impres- sive looking bibliography, the notes are mostly to secondary sources, and proper archival citations to Paperclip and other documents are never given—that too continues the tradition of Hunt and Bower. And I cannot help remarking that, when she uses a note to make an (irrelevant) aside about the bombing of Auschwitz question (regarding John J. McCloy, who was U.S.
High Commissioner to Germany in the early fifties), it has at least two factual errors [518].
Operation Paperclip is not the book that the scholarly world, or the general public, need on this topic. It is unfortunate that the first scholarly work, by Clarence G. Lasby,3 remains the only balanced one, although it is completely dated by the revelations of the 1980s and the scholarship that has appeared since. A new study is needed, one informed by new historio- graphic perspectives, as well as by all the archival sources that have become available. I am not going to write that book, so I hope somebody does. It could make a fruitful doctoral disserta- tion.
Michael J. Neufeld National Air and Space Museum Smithsonian Institution
Washington, DC
Notes
1 See Linda Hunt, “U.S. Coverup of Nazi Scientists,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (April 1985), 16-24, and Secret Agenda: The United States Government, Nazi Scientists and Project Paperclip, 1945 to 1990(New York: St. Martin's Press, 1991); Tom Bower, The Paperclip Conspiracy. The Battle for the Spoils and Secrets of Nazi Germany (London: Michael Joseph, 1987). See also Christopher Simpson, Blowback: America's Recruitment of Nazis and the Its Effects on the Cold War (New York: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1988), which focuses primarily on the CIA and intelligence.
2 I decided that the Soviet term “specialists” was more useful in my global survey of the recruitment of German and Austrian aerospace experts: “The Nazi Aerospace Exodus: Towards a Global, Transnational History,” History and Technology28 (2012), 49-67.
3 Project Paperclip: German Scientists and the Cold War(New York:
Atheneum, 1971). Also valuable from an occupation-centered per- spective is John Gimbel’s Science, Technology and Reparations:
Exploitation and Plunder in Postwar Germany (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990).
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In October of 1968 I finished my work on the Support Crew ofApollo 10and then was assigned to the Support Crew of Apollo 11. At that time,Apollo 8, 9, 10, and 11were “queued” up to challenge the Moon.
In December I flew to Patrick Air Force Base and awaited the launch ofApollo 8, the first launch to the Moon. I was invited to the pre-launch party for Apollo 8but had to miss it because of an unwise social commit- ment. However on launch morning I and all the other observing astronauts viewed a pic- ture-perfect launch of Apollo 8 and 2 1/2 days later were all in the Observing room at Mission Control to “witness”Apollo 8’s entry into lunar orbit based on observations of data and conversations of the flight con- troller in the Control Center.
Everything went well and hours later we were treated to on-board video and ver- bal descriptions of their view of Earth and areas near the United States. Jim Lovell was captivated by the clarity of the view he had of the Bahama Islands. The crew read from the first chapter of Genesis and sent heart-felt greetings to those of us who
looked-on and listened in awe-struck silence.
The return trip was made without inci- dent and the crew was welcomed home by many grateful loved ones. The crew was feted at the White House and then sent on a goodwill tour of their home planet which went off without a hitch.
Two spectators at the pre-launch party, launch, and the return to Earth were Eddie Richenbacker and Charles Lindbergh both of whom were highly grateful for the recognition. In January 1969 a large box arrived at the Astronaut Office. The staff opened the box and discovered copies of The Spirit of St. Louisaddressed to all the astronauts and NASA VIPs.
In reading Lindbergh’s account of his navigation across the Atlantic, I was amazed by the similarity of his description of the
“dead reckoning” navigation technique he described and the method we were taught 25 years later in flying school. I really felt a kinship with a man I had always admired greatly.
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Biillll PPoogguuee,, PPiilloott,, SSkkyyllaabb 44 courtesy: Heritage Auctions lot 40525
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Q U E S T 21:3 2014 2
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Wernher von Braun in front of the S-IC engines of a Saturn V at the Space and Rocket Center, Huntsville, Alabama. Credit: NASA
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