Rude Astronauts (21 page)

“Everything changed for us after that,” says Henry Morse. “I guess we were sort of looking at Blue Horizon like it was a kid’s adventure. Y’know, the Rocket Boys go to the Moon. But Bob’s close call sobered us up.”

The incident also sobered up the White House. Upon the insistence of Vannevar Bush, the FBI hastily sought a new base of operations in New England for Team 390. Within a week of the attempted assassination, a new locale for Project Blue Horizon was found: the Monomonac Gun & Rod Club, which had been closed since the beginning of the war. The lodge was located in the tiny farm community of Rindge, due north of Worcester just across the New Hampshire state line, close enough to Worcester to allow the rocket team to quickly relocate there. Because the club was accessible only by a single, unmarked dirt road, it had the isolation which the FBI believed was necessary to keep Team 390 hidden from the world.

The FBI purchased the property, and in the dead of night on April 6, 1943, all the rocket team’s files and models were loaded into a truck. As far as Clark University’s collegiate community was concerned, Dr. Goddard had taken an abrupt leave of absence due to health reasons, and nobody on campus seemed to notice the sudden departure of the small, insular group of grad students from Physics 390.

The Monomonac Gun & Rod Club was set in seven acres of New Hampshire forest on the northwestern side of Lake Monomonac. The club consisted mainly of a two-story whitewashed lodge which dated back to the turn of the century; it had a handsome front porch which overlooked the serene main channel of the lake, a couple of spartan rooms on the upper floor which contained a dozen old-style iron beds, and a single outhouse beyond the back door. Mail from relatives was still sent to Worcester and forwarded once a week to New Hampshire; except for Esther Goddard, none of the families of the rocket team were made aware of the fact that their sons and husbands were now in New Hampshire.

The former sportsmen’s club was a far cry from the comforts of Clark University; most of the rocket team were unused to roughing it in the woods. Mice had taken up occupancy in the kitchen next to the long dining room, and the only sources of heat were a fireplace in the den and a pot-bellied stove on the second floor. One of the first orders of business was to knock down the hornet nests in the upper bedrooms and under the porch eaves. “The first week we were there, we almost went on strike,” laughs Gerry Mander. “If it hadn’t been for the fact that we were in a race against time, we might have told Bush and Hoover and all the rest to stick it until they found us some decent accommodations. As it was, though, we knew we had little choice.”

Yet there was another major problem in the relocation. In New Mexico, the engineering team at White Sands was building unmanned prototype rockets based on the plans sent by Goddard’s team, firing the rockets as soon as they could be made. The major hurdle was in producing a reliable engine for the spaceplane, now dubbed the “X-1.” It had to be capable of lifting 65,500 pounds to orbit, yet most of the prototypes exploded, sometimes on the launch pad. For each small success, there were dozens of setbacks. There had been several pad explosions already, and in the latest failure a couple of technicians had been killed when the liquid-hydrogen tank ruptured during pressurization.

“Part of the problem was that the team wasn’t in New Mexico to oversee the final stages of each test,” Morse says. “We were expected to build rockets without getting our hands dirty, and you simply can’t compartmentalize a project like that. What it came down to, finally, was that we had to have a test-bed in New Hampshire, whether Van Bush liked it or not.”

It took Robert Goddard several weeks of lobbying to convince Vannevar Bush that some of the hands-on research had to be done by his people. Once Bush finally caved in, though, the next task was to locate an appropriate location for the construction of the new prototype. A giant rocket engine is difficult to conceal; it simply could not be constructed on a workbench in a sportsmen’s club.

One of the prime military contractors in Massachusetts was the Wyman-Gordon Company, which was making aircraft forgings for the Army in its Worcester factory. Upon meeting with Wyman-Gordon’s president in Washington, DC, Vannevar Bush managed to finagle the company into renting out a vacant warehouse on the factory grounds. Final assembly of Team 390’s new prototype engine—referred to as “Big Bertha”—would be made in Warehouse Seven, from parts made across the country and secretly shipped to Wyman-Gordon. Big Bertha’s aluminum outer casting was cast there as well, although only a few select people at Wyman-Gordon knew exactly what it was.

Secrecy was paramount. Only a handful of Wyman-Gordon workers were involved in the construction of Big Bertha; all had survived extensive background checks by the FBI, and what they were told was on a strict “need-to-know” basis. The FBI put counterspies to work in the factory to guard against Nazi infiltrators, and work on Big Bertha was done only after midnight, when the least number of people were at the plant. When necessary, the Team 390 members were brought down from New Hampshire to the plant to supervise the engine’s construction, making at least three transfers to different vehicles en route, with the final vehicle usually being a phony Coca-Cola delivery van owned by the FBI.

It was a little more difficult to find a suitable site for test-firing Big Bertha; Wyman-Gordon’s plant was located in the middle of a residential neighborhood. This time, though, the rocket team didn’t leave it to the FBI; Henry Morse and Roy Cahill borrowed Esther Goddard’s car and spent several days driving around southern New Hampshire trying to find a place for the test-firing. After only a few days, they finally located a dairy farm in nearby Jaffrey, New Hampshire.

Jaffrey had a freight line which ran straight up from Worcester, and the farm was located only two miles from the siding. Its owner, Marion Hartnell, was a World War I veteran who had just lost his only son in the fighting in France. He had no love for the Nazis, and once he was approached by Goddard himself, he eagerly volunteered to let the team use his barn for the test-firing of Big Bertha. “We told Mr. Hartnell that there was a possibility that our rocket might blow up and take his barn with it,” Cahill recalls. “The old duffer didn’t bat an eyelash. ‘So long as you can promise me you’ll shoot that rocket of yours right up Hitler’s wazoo,’ that was his response. He even turned down our offer of rent.”

In the night of November 26, 1943—Thanksgiving eve, exactly six months before the launch of the
Lucky Linda
—Big Bertha was loaded onto a flatcar at the Wyman-Gordon rail siding. A special freight train took it due north across the state line to Jaffrey, where after twelve a.m. on Thanksgiving Day the massive rocket engine was carefully off-loaded onto a flatbed truck, which in turn drove it to the Hartnell farm. An Army Corps of Engineers from Fort Devens in Ashby, Massachusetts, spent the rest of the morning anchoring the prototype engine onto the concrete horizontal test-bed which had been built in the barn. Shortly before noon, Goddard and his scientists began making their preparations for the test while the townspeople of Jaffrey unwittingly enjoyed their Thanksgiving meals. Team 390 waited until exactly 10 p.m., then Robert Goddard threw the ignition switch on the control board outside the barn.

“I think everybody was standing a hundred feet away from the barn door when we lit the candle,” Mander recalls. “When it went, I almost wet my pants. I thought we were going to blow up the whole damn farm.”

Big Bertha didn’t explode, though; the engine produced 60 tons of thrust for the requisite ninety seconds. “When it was over,” Morse says, “Bob turned to us, let out his breath, and said, ‘Gentlemen, we’ve got a success. Now let’s go have that Thanksgiving dinner.’ I swear, the old man was ready to cry.”

The next night, Big Bertha was taken back to the Jaffrey rail head, loaded onto another flatcar, and started on its long journey across America to New Mexico. The first big hurdle of Blue Horizon had been jumped. Yet, despite the place he had earned in history, farmer Hartnell never told anyone about the Thanksgiving rocket test which had been made on his farm. He died in 1957 still maintaining secrecy, leaving the new owners of his farm puzzled at the strange concrete cradle which rested inside his barn.

The final months of Project Blue Horizon were a race against time. MI-6 and the OSS knew that the Nazis were in the final stages of building the
Amerika Bomber,
but the location of work was still unknown and the Nazis’ rate of progress was uncertain. Silver and Gold had long since been pulled out of Peenemünde, so the Allies were now blind as to what the Nazis were doing. Reconnaissance flights by the Allies over Germany had failed to locate the two-mile launch track which Sanger had specified in the Black Umbrella document. Unknown to MI-6, it had been built near Nordhausen by the Dora concentration camp prisoners and camouflaged with nets; the Luftwaffe’s scientists were coming steadily closer to fulfilling their primary objective: within the secret caverns of Nordhausen, the sleek antipodal rocket-plane was gradually taking shape and form.

Nonetheless, there was talk within the White House and the Pentagon that the Black Umbrella report had been a red herring. There had already been one similar instance, earlier in the war, when the Nazis had been suspected of developing an atomic weapon. In response, the War Department had begun a crash program to develop its own atomic bomb. This program, based in rural Tennessee and codenamed the Manhattan Project, had been unsuccessfully struggling to develop an atomic bomb when a Danish physicist, Niels Bohr, managed to escape to the West with the reliable news that the Nazis were nowhere close to attaining controlled nuclear fission, let alone perfecting an atomic bomb.

Although minimal atomic research was secretly continued at the Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, the Manhattan Project had been scrapped, mainly to fund Project Blue Horizon. Now, however, some people within the Pentagon were saying that Sanger’s antipodal bomber was another chimera and that vital American resources were being wasted. On their side in the White House was Vice President Harry S Truman, who had begun referring to the American rocket program as “Project Buck Rogers.” Yet Vannevar Bush persisted; unlike the atomic bomb scare, there was no proof that the Nazis were
not
developing the
Amerika Bomber
. Roosevelt pragmatically followed his advice, and Project Blue Horizon was not cancelled.

“Not knowing what the Germans were doing was the scary part,” Roy Cahill recalls, “so all we could do was work like bastards. We stopped thinking about it in terms of the glory of putting the first American in space. Now we only wanted to get someone up there without killing him.”

Through the early part of 1944, Team 390 rarely left its makeshift laboratory at the sportsmen’s club. The ten scientists were constantly in the lodge’s dining room, pulling twenty-hour days in their efforts to design the rest of the X-1. The FBI bodyguards had taken to cooking their meals for them, and the long table in the middle of the room was buried beneath books, slide rules, and teetering mounds of paper. Big Bertha had only been one component which had to be designed from scratch; life-support, avionics, telemetry and guidance systems, even the pilot’s vacuum suit still had to be developed. As the long New Hampshire winter set in, the days became shorter and the nights colder; tempers became frayed. More than once, members of the team went outside to settle their disputes with their fists. The only instance of relaxation any of the team’s survivors remember was the December morning after a nor’easter dropped seven inches of snow on them; they dropped work and had a spontaneous snowball fight on Lake Monomonac’s frozen surface.

“Bob was the one who really suffered,” Henry Morse remembers. “His health had never been good, and the overwork, plus the hard winter we had that year, started to gang up on him. Esther used to come up from Worcester to make sure that he didn’t overexert himself, that he rested once a day, but he started ignoring her advice after awhile. None of us was sleeping or eating well. We were frightened to death that the very next day we would hear that the
Amerika Bomber
had firebombed New York. It was that much of a race.”

Piece by piece, the X-1 was assembled in New Mexico from the specifications laid down by Team 390. Unlike Big Bertha, some vital components such as the inertial guidance system were installed virtually without testing. There was simply not enough time to run everything through the wringer. The White Sands engineers knew that they were working from sheer faith. If Goddard’s People were crucially wrong in any one of thousands of areas, the spacecraft they were building would become a deathtrap for its pilot.

“How in the hell did we get a man into space?” After many years, Morse shakes his head. “Because we were scared of what would happen if we failed.”

In the end, it was a photo finish. Both the
Amerika Bomber
and the X-1 were finished and brought to their respective launch pads in the same week. Goddard and his team left New Hampshire for White Sands on May 15 to oversee the final launch, whenever it occurred. It was now a matter of waiting for the Germans to launch the
Amerika Bomber
.

The denouement is well recorded in the history books. The vigil at White Sands ended early on the morning of May 26, 1944, when high-altitude recon planes and ground-based radar spotted the
Amerika Bomber
over the Pacific Ocean. Within twenty minutes the X-1—christened the
Lucky Linda
by its pilot after his wife—was successfully launched. Skid Sloman piloted the X-1 through a harrowing ascent and intercepted the A-9 in space above the Gulf of Mexico—during its final ascent skip before the dive which would have taken it over New York. High above the American heartland, Sloman destroyed the
Amerika Bomber
with a solid-fuel missile launched from the X-1’s port wing. Sloman then successfully guided his ship through atmospheric re-entry to touchdown in Lakehurst, New Jersey.