While “Red engineering schools” in the Soviet Union were “loaded with women”—one-third of Soviet engineering grads were female, the Washington Post reported in 1958—the United States still struggled to find a place for women and Negroes in its science workplace, and in society at large. The restlessness that disturbed Christine’s home state in the form of student protests in Greensboro would follow her, and engage her, at Hampton Institute. And though it would take years for her to realize that Hampton would be her basic training for the “civilian army of the Cold War,” she was just months from meeting some of the successes of an earlier collision between race, gender, science, and war: Dorothy Vaughan’s children, Ann and Kenneth; Katherine Goble’s daughter, Joylette; and the children of many of the other women who had come to Hampton Roads a generation ago and made it their home.
In August Christine bade adieu to Monroe and drove north with her parents in the Hydramatic, which was more than big enough to accommodate the three of them and the possessions she needed to begin her life at Hampton. The peaks of home flattened out as they approached the coast, and then, like the first time she had come to Hampton, it came into view: the James River. She would never renounce her love for the mountains, but the James—so broad and measured as it joined the Chesapeake Bay, so different from the narrow streams that rushed through the ridges of home—took her breath away. Crossing that river as she closed in on Hampton made her feel like anything was possible.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
What a Difference a Day Makes
Well into her nineties, Katherine Goble would recall watching the winking dot of light in the sky as vividly as if it were still October 1957. She stood outside in the unseasonably warm autumn nights of that year and tracked the shiny pinpoint as it moved low across the horizon. Around Hampton Roads and throughout America, citizens turned their eyes skyward with a mixture of terror and wonder, eager to know if the 184-pound metal sphere launched into orbit by the Russians could see them as they tried to see it from their backyards. They surfed the radio dial trying to lock on to the artificial moon’s beeping, its sound like an otherworldly cricket.
“One can imagine the consternation and admiration that would be felt here if the United States were to discover suddenly that some other nation had already put up a successful satellite.” Those words from a letter describing a secret 1946 RAND Corporation proposal to the US Air Force, suggesting that the United States design and launch a “world circling satellite,” sounded, in 1957, like the unheeded voice of Dickens’ Ghost of Christmas Future. In the 1940s, space research was deemed a little too far out to warrant systematic consideration and development. The Rand report gathered dust.
Now, with Sputnik circling overhead every ninety-eight minutes, Americans demanded to know how their country, so dominant in its victory in the last war, could have been surprised and usurped by a “backward peasantry” like the USSR. Panic spread from coast to coast: was it possible that the satellite was mapping the United States, with the intent of locking down targets for missile-delivered hydrogen bombs? Fear battled humiliation in the American psyche. “First in space means first, period,” declared Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson. “Second in space is second in everything.” Could Sputnik signal the end of the country’s global political dominance?
In reality, the United States wasn’t trailing the Soviet Union quite as badly as it appeared in the wake of the Sputnik crisis. The US Army’s Jupiter-C missile had been tested successfully on several occasions, and the Americans were ahead of the Russians in terms of the systems that guided missiles on their trajectories into space. But President Eisenhower had insisted that the nation’s first foray into space be presented as a peaceful effort, rather than an explicitly military operation that risked triggering a dangerous retaliation by the Soviet Union. The Americans had planned to launch the first satellite into orbit as part of the International Geophysical Year, a cooperative global science project that ran from July 1957 to December 1958. Physicists, chemists, geologists, astronomers, oceanographers, seismologists, and meteorologists from sixty countries, including the United States and the Soviet Union, collaborated to collect data and conduct earth science experiments, under the mantle of peaceful interchange between East and West. Trumped by Sputnik, the Americans played catch-up. The US Army’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory successfully orbited the Explorer I satellite in January 1958. Two months later, Project Vanguard, managed by the US Naval Research Laboratory, also managed to launch a satellite, though the achievement was overshadowed by Vanguard’s many rocket failures.
From where Katherine Goble was sitting, upstairs in Langley’s hangar, the Soviet move looked rather like a new beginning for the NACA nuts. Skies all over the world bore witness to four decades of successful Langley research, from passenger jets to bombers, transport planes to fighter aircraft. With supersonic military aircraft a reality, and the industry moving forward on commercial supersonic transport, it appeared that the “revolutionary advances for atmospheric aircraft” had run their course. Furthermore, Langley’s high-speed flight operations, which had been migrating over the years from the populated Hampton Roads area to isolated Dryden, in the Mojave Desert, were officially ended by a 1958 NACA headquarters edict. As Katherine and her colleagues in the Flight Research Division wondered what was next, Sputnik provided them with the answer.
Space had long been a “dirty word” for the airplane-minded Langley. Congress admonished the brain busters not to waste taxpayer money on “science fiction” and dreams of manned spaceflight. Even in the Langley Technical Library, which was arguably the world’s best collection of information on powered flight, engineers were hard-pressed to find books on spaceflight.
That didn’t stop Langley engineers from imagining how the missile bodies and rocket engines and reentry problems involved in high-speed flight research might also apply to space vehicles. Any craft that traveled into space first had to traverse the layers of Earth’s atmosphere, accelerating through the sound barrier and increasing numbers on the Mach speed dial, before escaping the pull of Earth’s gravity and settling into the eighteen-thousand-mile-per-hour speed that locked objects into low Earth orbit, following a circuit of between 134 and 584 miles above the planet. On the return trip, the vehicle skidded through the friction of the increasingly dense atmosphere, building up heat that could reach 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit. NACA engineer Harvey Allen discovered, somewhat counterintuitively, that although the most aerodynamically streamlined shapes were best for slipping out of the atmosphere, a blunt body that increased rather than decreased air resistance was best for dissipating the extreme temperatures on the way back down.
With the US government desperate to gain a foothold in the space race, Langley now could open its garage door and display its wares for the world to see. A group that included Mary Jackson’s division chief, John Becker, advocated for a vehicle that was capable of reaching orbital speeds and then gliding back down to Earth like a traditional aircraft, an advanced version of the X-15 rocket plane. It would be an elegant solution to the problem of space, they thought, one that made the hearts of the NACA’s old-school “wing men” beat faster.