The Race to Space: Langley Research Center and Project Mercury

THE RACE TO SPACE:

Langley Research Center and Project Mercury

By Craig Collins

In the years following World War II, the scientific and technological superiority of the United States research complex seemed unquestionable – until Oct. 4, 1957, when the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik 1, the world’s first satellite, made an abrupt announcement: the race to space had officially begun, and the United States was a distant second.

Like all Americans, researchers at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) were surprised – shocked, even – by the launch, but they hadn’t exactly been caught flat-flooted; many had already drifted into space exploration in their high-speed aeronautics experiments and in the effort to help the military develop intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). This work necessarily involved rocketry. Researchers in Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory’s Pilotless Aircraft Research Division (PARD), for example, had explored the limits of aircraft speed and altitude both in Langley’s high-speed tunnels and in rocket tests launched from nearby Wallops Island. The PARD had launched its first test vehicle, a small two-stage solid-fuel rocket, in July 1945.

In the postwar years, at the request of the Pentagon, Langley and the NACA’s other laboratories – Lewis and Ames – had performed theoretical studies of ballistic missiles, rocket fuels, and automatic controls for supersonic missiles and aircraft. The National Security Council had approved a plan, Project Vanguard, to place a satellite in orbit, and by 1957 the X-15, a rocket-propelled piloted aircraft, was on the drawing board at Langley. Many military and NACA engineers were already debating how to put a person in an Earth-orbiting spacecraft. For years, Robert Gilruth, assistant director of PARD, had been urging his superiors to pursue a program to launch satellites into space, but they declined both for budgetary reasons and on the grounds that the NACA, and Langley, were research organizations. They didn’t develop things and lead projects; they ran tests and supplied research data to those who did.

But U.S. researchers were seized by a renewed sense of urgency when, a month after the launch of Sputnik 1, the Soviets launched Sputnik 2, which carried an even bigger payload into orbit – including the Soviet space dog Laika, signaling the Russians’ intent to send a human into space.

The Mercury-Redstone 3 (MR-3) carrying astronaut Alan Shepard in Freedom 7 lifts off from Cape Canaveral in Florida, launching into its suborbital flight.

NASA Photo

The Navy’s Project Vanguard attempted to launch a test vehicle on Dec. 6, but it was a disaster: After traveling 4 feet off the launch pad at the Air Force’s Cape Canaveral Missile Annex in Florida, the Vanguard rocket lost thrust, sank back to the ground, and exploded. James Hansen, in Spaceflight Revolution, his history of Langley’s space program, recounted the aftermath: “The international press dubbed the failed American satellite ‘Kaputnik’ and ‘Stayputnik.’ Cynical and embarrassed Americans drank the Sputnik cocktail: two parts vodka, one part sour grapes.” In New York City, Soviet delegates to the United Nations asked their American counterparts if the United States would be interested in receiving aid under the Russian technical assistance program. Then-Senator Lyndon Johnson of Texas called the Vanguard test “one of the best publicized and most humiliating failures in our history.”

By summer 1958, there were four different programs under discussion for sending a manned American satellite into space. Three were military projects. Langley researchers, led by Maxime Faget, head of PARD’s Performance Aerodynamics Branch, had already begun discussing the transition from hypersonic, upper-atmospheric flight to orbital space flight. Faget, like most PARD engineers, favored a wingless “nonlifting” vehicle – a spherical or shuttlecock-shaped capsule that would simply parachute back to Earth after reentering the atmosphere in a ballistic trajectory – while others thought a lifting vehicle would offer more maneuverability. Some in the Air Force derided the idea of a nonlifting capsule as “a man in a can on an ICBM.”

Members of the Space Task Group, including (left to right) Deputy Head Charles Donlan, Head Robert Gilruth, and Max Faget, look at a scale model of a Mercury space capsule.

NASA Photo

NASA and the Space Task Group

Gilruth, Faget, and their colleagues at Langley-PARD, however, were mindful that they were in a race. A hypersonic “space plane,” or even the semilifting, semi-ballistic vehicle envisioned by some NACA engineers, would either take too long to develop or be too heavy for the existing launch vehicle – the Army’s Redstone ballistic missile, the first to carry a live nuclear warhead for nuclear tests by the United States. The Air Force’s newer Atlas, the nation’s first successfully tested ICBM, was more powerful – it would eventually boost John Glenn and his Friendship 7 capsule into orbit – but was still, for the time being, considered too unstable to risk as a launch vehicle.

The wingless nonlifting configuration had other advantages, as well: It built on years of existing ballistic missile research, development, and production, and the fact that it would travel on a preordained ballistic trajectory meant that the engineering of stabilization, guidance, and control equipment would be minimal – and much less likely to result in malfunction. Rather than a propulsion system, the capsule would merely need “retrorockets” to decelerate the spacecraft and deflect it from orbit. Tests of model ballistic capsules in Langley’s 20-foot Spin Tunnel had shown that attitude control jets, like those used on the rocket-powered X-planes, would work to stabilize the vehicle during reentry, aided by drogue parachutes. By summer 1958, Langley-PARD researchers had settled on a shuttlecockshaped capsule design, based in part on model tests in the 11-inch Hypersonic Tunnel. For orbital flights, the design would eventually include a rounded ablative heat shield, made of resinous material that would literally burn away and slough off superheated layers as the capsule reentered the atmosphere.

One of the challenges of the PARD’s nonlifting vehicle design was the g-force an astronaut would encounter on reentering the atmosphere and suddenly decelerating. A team led by Faget had come up with a solution by mid-summer: a rigid “contour couch,” individually molded to fit the shape of each capsule pilot, made of fiberglass. Fabricated at Langley, the couch was tested on the big Navy centrifuge in Johnsville, Pennsylvania, where Navy pilots endured greater than 20 g.

The couch would more than suffice to support the body of a capsule pilot on liftoff and reentry.

Meanwhile, President Dwight D. Eisenhower was conveying his ideas regarding American space exploration to Congress. It was Eisenhower’s conviction that space should be primarily an arena for scientific inquiry, rather than for militarization. The president called for the establishment of a “National Aeronautical and Space Agency” that would absorb the NACA and assume responsibility for all space activities that weren’t primarily military in nature.

Congress complied with the wishes of Eisenhower, who signed the National Aeronautics and Space Act on July 29, 1958. When it began operations on Oct. 1, the new National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) absorbed the 43-year-old NACA and its 8,000 employees intact. The agency’s three aeronautical laboratories – Langley, Ames, and Lewis – were renamed “Research Centers” to reflect the expansion of their work into space.

The new law contained no language about who, exactly, should assume responsibility for manned space flight; this was, ultimately, a decision that would be up to Eisenhower and his advisers. By late August, the president had made his decision, in line with his “space for peace” policy. There was simply no military reason for putting a man in orbit, and the NACA had already done much work in the design, testing, and planning of a manned satellite project.

A full-scale model of the Mercury spacecraft undergoes testing in the Full- Scale Wind Tunnel at Langley Research Center in January 1959.

The next question was: Who in NASA would lead the project? While personnel from each of the centers had contributed ideas, Langley seemed the obvious choice. By the time the Space Act was passed, about 40 percent of Langley’s efforts were being spent on space and missile research – and about 90 percent of the work done by PARD. Faget, Paul Purser, Caldwell Johnson, and others in PARD, together with Charles Mathews and Christopher Kraft of Langley’s Flight Research Division, had drawn up basic outlines of the mission, how the capsule should be configured and outfitted, its heating loads, and structural and weight considerations for a manned payload to be lifted by an Atlas rocket.

The new aerospace agency was officially created on Oct. 1, 1958, and six days later its new administrator, Keith Glennan, assigned the job to the Langley Research Center. Robert Gilruth of PARD would become project manager of a separate Space Task Group (STG), a collection of Langley engineers (along with about a dozen borrowed from Lewis Research Center in Ohio) formed around a nucleus of PARD personnel. In December 1958, NASA publicly announced its program to send men – “astronauts” – into space: Project Mercury, named for the fleet-footed messenger to the Roman gods.

Langley and Project Mercury

In hindsight, one of the most interesting things about the American/Russian race to space was the way the new space programs reflected the societies that produced them. The Soviet program reflected a closed society; whatever Vanguard-esque failures it might have suffered, it suffered in secret, and its spaceflights were directed completely by automated, centrally controlled systems, requiring little knowledge or skill from cosmonauts.

The American space program unfolding at NASA, on the other hand, was surprisingly open and collaborative, and its designers leaned heavily on the knowledge and skills of individual astronauts. The men selected to be the first Americans in space, the “Mercury Seven” – Scott Carpenter, Gordon Cooper, John Glenn, Gus Grissom, Wally Schirra, Alan Shepard, and Deke Slayton – were chosen from among the ranks of skilled aviators from the U.S. Air Force, U.S. Navy, and U.S. Marine Corps, all of them possessing degrees in science and engineering. After their introduction in April 1959, the Mercury Seven arrived at Langley as full working members of the STG, assigned responsibility not only for the flights themselves but also for designing hardware and systems. Langley engineer Charles Donlan, STG’s deputy project manager, and legendary Langley test pilot Robert Champine played critical roles in the selection of the Mercury Seven.

A NASA graphic depicting a Mercury suborbital flight.

NASA Image

Project Mercury had three objectives: to place a manned spacecraft in orbital flight around the Earth; to investigate the ability of a human to perform and function in the environment of space; and to recover the man and the spacecraft safely. The wording of these objectives was far simpler than the problems the STG was about to solve. At Langley, STG staff became not only researchers, but also project managers, often working with private contractors – such as McDonnell Aircraft, which had won the contract to build the Mercury capsule – to confront the challenges of manned spaceflight.

At Langley in November 1959, John Glenn operates the Mercury Procedures Trainer to prepare for his orbital flight of 1962. This simulator allowed astronauts to practice both normal and emergency modes of system operations. The operator at the control panel, engineer Charles Olasky, put the astronauts through simulations of entire missions as well as emergency situations. The trainer was later moved to the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston in 1962.

NASA Image

PARD’s work in rocket launch, guidance, control, and telemetry had laid the groundwork for test launches of a Mercury capsule from Wallops Island atop a four-cluster solid-fueled rocket, developed by Faget and Purser. The rocket’s four fins led Faget to nickname it “Little Joe,” for its resemblance to a roll of two on each of the dice – a hard 4 – in a craps game. The first launch of the 50-foot, 28,000-pound Little Joe occurred in October 1959. The rocket was of huge significance to Project Mercury, allowing engineers to evaluate instrumented payloads, the Mercury capsule escape rocket, and recovery systems, all with a rocket that cost a small fraction of the $1 million Redstone or $2.5 million Atlas launch vehicles. Little Joe rockets sent two rhesus monkeys, Sam and Miss Sam, into space in December 1959 and January 1960. Both monkeys survived reentry; Sam traveled 55 miles into space and was recovered intact in the Atlantic Ocean.

Another STG program was designed to evaluate a full-scale model of the Mercury capsule, known as “Big Joe,” in a test of the ablative reentry heat shield. Big Joe was successfully launched atop an Atlas booster, separated from the rocket, and fell safely back to Earth on Sept. 9, 1959, in conditions that closely simulated orbital reentry. Between August 1959, and November 1961, there were 20 unmanned Mercury missions, each designed to test functions of hardware such as spacecraft, boosters, escape systems, or tracking networks.

The Mercury Seven, who piloted the manned spaceflights of Project Mercury from May 1961 to May 1963. The astronauts were assigned to the Space Task Group at Langley for training. Photographed in January 1961 posing with an Air Force F-106B at Langley are, left to right, M. Scott Carpenter, Gordon Cooper, John Glenn, Virgil “Gus” Grissom, Walter Schirra, Alan Shepard, and Donald “Deke” Slayton.

NASA Image

In Langley’s High-Speed Hydrodynamics Tank, a 2,177-footlong, 8-foot-wide concrete water channel designed to test amphibious aircraft floats, STG investigators dropped dummy capsules in water impact trials, while other experimenters conducted airdrop tests of capsules with parachutes over Chesapeake Bay. STG’s propulsion experts, borrowed from Lewis, discussed designs of the attitude control, separation, and reentry rockets. One of Langley’s most important contributions to Project Mercury was achieved by non-STG personnel: the mission control and global satellite tracking network that would allow operations officers and flight surgeons to remain in constant radio contact with Mercury astronauts. In Spaceflight Revolution, Hansen described this effort as “the biggest, most difficult to carry out logistically, and the most adventuresome” of Langley’s Mercury efforts. In an era when it wasn’t possible to pick up a telephone and instantly reach another continent, when the primary communications links with other continents were undersea telegraph cables laid at the turn of the 20th century, NASA Langley researchers had to oversee the building of their own global system from scratch.

The network that resulted from this effort consisted of several stationary communications sites – plotted, surveyed, and built around the world, in places as far-flung as Bermuda and the Australian outback – and two shipboard stations. NASA Langley supervised the site contractors who built these installations, and within two years, the network that allowed NASA to maintain constant radio communication with orbiting Mercury astronauts had been powered up. The new network formed the foundation of today’s Mission Control Center at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, where project managers track spacecraft and satellites.

NASA research mathematician Katherine G. Johnson is photographed at her desk at NASA Langley Research Center with a globe, or “Celestial Training Device,” in 1962. Johnson was an African- American “human computer” who worked at Langley from 1953 to 1986. Not only did she calculate the trajectory of the 1961 flight of Alan Shepard, the first American in space, she also verified the calculations made by early electronic computers of John Glenn’s 1962 launch to orbit and the 1969 Apollo 11 trajectory to the Moon. In 2015, during a ceremony at the White House, she received the nation’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Her story, and the story of other groundbreaking African- American computers, was captured in the 2016 book, Hidden Figures, and on the big screen in a major motion picture by the same name.

NASA Photos

Meanwhile, the Mercury Seven underwent rigorous physical conditioning, training, and evaluation at Langley. In the Hydrodynamics Tank and the nearby Back River estuary, they practiced how to get out of floating space capsules. In simulations designed to replicate the weightlessness and sensory disorientation they would experience during orbit and reentry, they were put to the test. Langley staff designed and built several simulation systems to familiarize astronauts with the Mercury capsule, increasing in detail and complexity until each astronaut was simulating spaceflight in his own custom-fitted couch. By May 1961, Project Mercury was ready to send its first man into space.

The first American to orbit the Earth, astronaut John Glenn is seen here inside his Friendship 7 Mercury spacecraft during the Mercury-Atlas 6 flight, Feb. 20, 1962.

NASA Photo

Langley’s Spaceflight Legacy

The initial race to space was a sprint the United States lost by a half-step: the first American in space, Alan Shepard, got there three weeks after Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, who became the first human in space on April 12, 1961. Shepard, for his part, maintained it was an abundance of caution on the part of NASA and the STG that kept him from beating Gagarin into space, but in the ensuing decades, those three weeks would seem to matter less and less, as the American space program flourished and the Soviet program floundered.

At NASA – and in particular, at Langley Research Center, where the STG had succeeded in putting a man into orbit – the die had been cast. The U.S. space program, even as Project Mercury was unfolding, grew both its footprint and its ambitions. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, the agency’s first, and still its largest, space research laboratory, was established in May 1959 in Greenbelt, Maryland. By that summer, the STG had grown from its core of about three dozen people to include 400, with staff members scattered throughout the country, working on various project elements. With more plans for space exploration on the drawing board, a brand-new home for the STG was designed and built near Houston, Texas. Gilruth and the STG moved to the new facility, which opened for business in September 1963.

The facility NASA had inherited from the Air Force at Cape Canaveral would become the nation’s primary launch center for human spaceflight: the John F. Kennedy Space Center, named for the man who responded to Shepard’s first American spaceflight with what may have been the most audacious expression of hope ever uttered by a political leader. On May 25, 1961 – 20 days after Shepard’s flight – Kennedy challenged the engineers of NASA to go beyond the Earth’s orbital sphere. Their new goal, he said, should be “landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth.” He knew what he was asking; in a later speech he would call NASA’s lunar exploration program “the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked.” Langley researchers would become key players in this adventure, which the young president wouldn’t live to see to the end.

Major Sources: This New Ocean: A History of Project Mercury, by Loyd S. Swenson, Jr., James M. Grimwood, and Charles C. Alexander. Washington, D.C.: NASA, 1966. Published online at https://history. nasa.gov/SP-4201/toc.htm.

Spaceflight Revolution: NASA Langley Research Center from Sputnik to Apollo, by James R. Hansen. Washington, D.C.: NASA, 1995.