Exploring the Unknown: Selected Documents in ... - The Black Vault

Exploring the Unknown
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to NASA thereby facilitating the tapping of expertise from the builders of the
Redstone rocket. 92 In addition to a large number of other modifications, NASA
engineers worked to lengthen the Redstone tanks and scrapped the original fuel,
Hydyne, for alcohol. Hydyne proved too toxic and difficult to work with. In all,
NASA’s rocketeers made some 800 changes to the Redstone to prepare it for
human spaceflight. 93
Then there was the problem with the reliability of the Atlas rocket, envisioned
as the launcher of choice for the Mercury orbital missions. A converted
ICBM, the Atlas had been undergoing an on-again, off-again development since
1946. Canceled once and underfunded thereafter, the Air Force had been unable
until the Sputnik crisis to secure sufficient resources to make serious progress on
it. Because of this difficulty, its designers at the Convair Corp. had accepted, as
a given, a 20 percent failure rate. In fact, the rate proved much higher in the
early going. As 1959 began, seven out of eight launches had failed. Sometimes
the Atlas blew up on the pad and sometimes it veered off course in flight only
to be destroyed by the range safety officer. Instead of 80 percent reliability, still
not acceptable for human flight, the Atlas had an 80 percent failure rate. 94 That
would most assuredly not do with astronauts aboard. Robert Gilruth testified to
Congress about this problem a few months after the creation of the Space Task
Group. “The Atlas . . . has enough performance . . . and the guidance system is
accurate enough, but there is the matter of reliability. You don’t want to put a
man in a device unless it has a very good chance of working every time.” Gilruth
urged time and money to test the hardware under actual flight conditions without
people aboard. “Reliability is something that comes with practice,” he said.
Ever so incrementally, Atlas project engineers improved the performance of
the launch vehicle. They placed a fiberglass shield around the liquid oxygen tank
to keep the engines from igniting it in a massive explosion, a rather spectacular
failure that seemed to happen at least half the time. They changed out virtually every
system on the vehicle, substituting tried and true technology wherever possible to minimize
problems. They altered procedures and developed new telemetry to monitor
the operations of the system. Most important, they developed an abort sensing system
92. T. Keith Glennan to the President, “Responsibilities and Organization for Certain Space
Activities,” 2 November 1959. Folder 18674, NASA Historical Reference Collection, NASA History
Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.
93. Swenson et al., This New Ocean, p. 181; NASA Office of Congressional Relations, “Mercury-
Redstone III,” p. 5-1; William M. Bland, Jr., Space Task Group, Memorandum for Project Director,
“Second Coordination Meeting Concerning Project Mercury with NASA, ABMA, and MAC
Representatives Held 20 March 1959, at NASA, Space Task Group, Langley Field, Virginia,” 27
March 1959; T. Keith Glennan, NASA Administrator, to Neil H. McElroy, Secretary of Defense,
14 July 1959. Folder 18674, NASA Historical Reference Collection, NASA History Division, NASA
Headquarters, Washington, DC.
94. For able histories of the Atlas, see Dennis R. Jenkins, “Stage-and-a-Half: The Atlas Launch
Vehicle,” in Roger D. Launius and Dennis R. Jenkins, eds., To Reach the High Frontier: A History of U.S.
Launch Vehicles (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2002), pp. 102–170; John Lonnquest,
“The Face of Atlas: General Bernard Schriever and the Development of the Atlas Intercontinental
Ballistic Missile, 1953-1960,” Ph.D. Diss., Duke University, 1996; Davis Dyer, “Necessity is the Mother
of Invention: Developing the ICBM, 1954–1958,” Business and Economic History 22 (1993): pp. 194–
209. Although dated, a useful early essay is Robert L. Perry, “The Atlas, Thor, Titan, and Minuteman,”
in Eugene M. Emme, ed., History of Rocket Technology, pp. 143–155.