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Vanguard TV-3 Blew Up 67 Years Ago
As many of you know, my father co-wrote the 1955 proposal for Project Vanguard. After it won, he designed the space tracking system Minitrack and the small test vehicle satellites.
In September 1957, the head of Vanguard, Dr John Hagen, discussed the schedule of the test vehicle satellites.
Vehicle 3 was the first launch with all three stages live. It got about four feet off the pad before it blew up. It got the unfortunate nickname “Flopnik.” It was also bad luck that the papers covered it on the 16th anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack.
Alton Jones, who was in the blockhouse, said that it was fortunate that the rocket fell away from them. They would have been killed if it had fallen towards them. For the next launch, they were much more prepared.
The payload survived and Dad bought a seat for it on a commercial flight back to D.C. It was in our house overnight and now resides in the National Air and Space Museum. Its sister Vanguard was the first satellite to carry solar cells and is the oldest robotic satellite still in orbit. My father was interviewed shortly afterward by a reporter for “The New Yorker” and commented that the 15-page countdown had gone smoothly which in itself was a major achievement.
I discussed this on the John Batchelor Show in 2017.
As I recall, the account in your book was quite interesting.
It’s remarkable to see a memo typed nearly a month before Sputnik (October 4, 1957) showing that the US already had a satellite development program not just in the works, but nearly ready to launch.
The Democrat/left media needed something to bash Eisenhower about, though, so that they could get the New Deal back in motion. By pretending the United States had been caught flat-footed they were giving themselves something to work with.
Once again, The Reticulator’s truth lands squarely in the center of the target reticle.
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He only had 6 watts to work with. 6 WATTS! This is including two thermistors and whatever other instruments. He basically had a club and stone for tools to make it work. Very impressive.
I can relate to the kitchen table story on your podcast link. Back in my 20’s I made a machine for night vision equipment that was hard wired ladder logic, no PLC here. I spent a lot of time on it, weeks I think, and it just didn’t work. I was still living at home. After supper and the kitchen table was cleared I unsoldered hundreds of wires and re-designed it from scratch over night. I was hourly and didn’t get paid for it but I was finally satisfied.
If anyone reading this would like a free review copy of either of these, or any of my other titles, PM me. They are both splendid books that I enjoyed narrating, and they will hold your interest while you’re learning something.
Those are both good. If it wasn’t for listening to your narration of Eisenhower’s Sputnik Moment I wouldn’t have made the remark in #3. I don’t recall that the book said anything quite like my interpretation, but it had information that helped me put 2 and 2 together. I was just a kid at the time of Sputnik 1 and the events thereafter, but I remember something of how people were panicking at the time. Nobody I knew was anxious about getting left behind by the Russians, but I knew from my newspaper reading and from reading those kiddie newspapers that were distributed at school that there was a big fuss in the country about it. As a kid, I wasn’t worried about it. I knew the U.S. would do just fine. Where I got that confidence is hard to say from this distance, because in our family the idea that the midnight knock on the door could easily come to our country was the norm, and I believed that, too.
Years later, in high school, some of us were talking about foreign languages. Not much was offered at our high school, and somehow in the family move from Nebraska to Minnesota I got off of any high school language track and never got back on. But some of my friends said that if we were going to learn any language it should be Russian, because that’s the language everyone would soon need. I was annoyed that anyone thought the United States wouldn’t prevail, and never expected to have any interest in the language at all, or any need to know it. However, now I wish that Russian had been offered in our high school and that I had started to learn it then. But if it had been offered, I’m sure that at that time I would have rejected it.
I found a binder full of primary Vanguard materials when I moved five years ago. Here’s an April 1957 study of the thermal properties of the test vehicle satellites.
That’s awesome. I have friends who wonder why they can’t just put a transistor radio in a rocket and put it in orbit. I have other friends, one of whom works for NRL and has two cubesats in orbit and an experiment on the ISS,who explain the challenges of making something that will continue to work when the part of it in the sun is over 150 degrees and the part in the shade is way below zero.
Star Trek had not yet brought us “stone knives and bear-skins.”
From the best episode of the series.