Nearly 60 years ago, the US Navy launched Vanguard 1 in response to the Soviet Union’s Sputnik satellite. To this day, Vanguard 1 is still circling our planet.
From his desk at the European Space Operations Center in Darmstadt, Germany, space debris analyst Tim Flohrer monitors some 23,000 objects orbiting planet Earth. They ranged from spacecraft and satellites – some still functioning, most not – to discarded rocket parts and tool debris. All of them are the result of 60 years of space exploration.
Using radar data from the U.S. Space Monitoring Network and observations from optical telescopes, Flohrer ensures that none of this space debris poses a hazard to operating spacecraft.
Before we spoke, I asked Flohrer to check out object 1958-002B, also known as Vanguard 1. This grapefruit-sized metal ball was launched into high orbit in March 1958. And it’s still there, traversing Earth in an elliptical orbit at an altitude between 650 and 3,800 km from the planet’s surface.
“Early generation satellites, such as Sputnik, have returned to Earth,” said Flohrer. “But I expect Vanguard 1 to stay in orbit for hundreds, if not thousands of years.”
Created by the US Marine Research Laboratory (NRL) in 1955, Vanguard was promoted as America’s first satellite program. The Vanguerd system consists of a three-stage rocket designed to launch spacecraft for research purposes. An ambitious rocket, satellite and network of tracking stations are part of the US contribution to the 1957-58 International Geophysical Year, a scientific research collaboration involving 67 countries, including countries on both sides of the Iron Curtain.
“This is not a space race,” said NRL historian Angelina Callahan. “The US has always been outspoken in terms of satellite launches and objectives, but the Soviets were more stealthy.”
So, when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik on October 4, 1957, the world was shocked. “A lot of the disappointment with Sputnik (for the US satellite team) is due to the fact that their partners in international cooperation launched satellites without notifying them,” Callahan said.
“There’s a huge fear that Sputnik has evoked,” said Tom Lassman, curator of Cold War rockets at the National Museum of Aerospace in Washington DC. An identical “backup” version of the Vanguard-1 satellite is on display at the institution’s branch, the Udvar-Hazy Center.
“Sputnik made the top military officers realize that the Soviet Union could hit us with missiles,” Lassman continued. In the weeks following the Soviet launch, President Eisenhower’s White House pressured the Navy to launch a US satellite as soon as possible.
On December 6, 1957, the event that was originally planned as a test of the Vanguard Experimental Vehicle 3 (TV3) became a massive public event. While the Soviets only announced Sputnik after the satellite successfully reached orbit; politicians, senior military figures, and the media gathered in Cape Canaveral, Florida to watch the launch of TV3.
After a series of delays, at 11:44 a.m., the Vanguard rocket lifted off from the launch pad. A few seconds later, someone in the control room shouted: “Look out! Oh my God, no!” when the rocket rose about one meter into the air and fell to the ground in flames. The nose of the rocket came off – the Vanguard satellite was still twinkling. (You can read the full report on this disaster in the NASA report).
The New York Times newspaper called the explosion a “blow to the dignity of the United States”. Senator Lyndon Johnson called it “embarrassing”. Others were not even diplomatic – some newspapers dubbed the US satellite “flopnik”, “kaputnik”, or “stayputnik”.
For the NRL team, the news was unfair. “There have been many failures in a successful research and development process,” Callahan said. “By learning from these failures, they developed a very good system.”
A rocket pioneer and ex-Nazi, Wernher von Braun, who has long been intent on launching something – whatever it may be – into orbit, seizes the opportunity. With the support of the US Army, at the time he was developing the Jupiter rocket – which was an evolution of his V2 ballistic missile.
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