to a request of the R&D board for views on requirements for upper-air research vehicles.22

But, while the endorsement was of help, association with the military also brought problems. At its 7 May 1947 meeting, the UARRP learned that the R&D board's upper-atmosphere group was considering assigning primary responsibility to different agencies for different kinds of upperatmosphere research. Although nothing ever came of this, the thought of dividing the research into assigned parcels conflicted with the basic research instincts of UARRP members.

More serious, however, was the question of security classification that arose periodically. In defense of the research program, panel members were accustomed to pointing out the many practical benefits to be gained from data and knowledge obtained. Over the years the list of potential benefits to the military grew, until a report issued at the start of the International Geophysical Year by a number of the panel members cited a dozen important applications:

• Design of missiles, high-altitude craft, and space vehicles.

• Determination of the reentry behavior of long-range ballistic missiles. Special techniques of high-altitude navigation.

• Evaluation of hazards to personnel and equipment in the high atmosphere and space.

• Improvement of weather forecasting.

Study of climate.

• Prediction of the trajectories of biological, chemical, or radiological agents.

Development of reliable point-to-point communications.

• Development of reliable and accurate methods of guidance, control, and delivery of missiles to their targets.

• Development of reliable and accurate methods of detection of enemy missiles and high-altitude craft.

• Development of countermeasures against enemy missiles.

• Remote detection of nuclear explosions.23

But to the extent the salesmanship succeeded, it also raised the question of why the sounding rocket results shouldn't be classified if they were so valuable to the military, which was paying for them.

From the outset the panel had assumed that its program, being basic research, would be unclassified. In a memorandum to the White Sands

Proving Ground, Col. H. N. Toftoy of the Army Ordnance Department had written that V-2 firing schedules, rocket design, and flight information would be unclassified.24 This decision was important to the program, since the flight information was intimately related to the high-altitude data obtained from the rocket, and since design data were needed for interpreting measurements-for example, aerodynamic pressure curves were required in obtaining atmospheric densities from pressure measurements along the surface of the flying rocket. A serious threat arose when, at the October 1952 meeting of the panel, Earl Droessler of the R&D board announced that the military had again raised the question of classification of upper atmospheric data. The panel unanimously agreed to fight classification, citing the importance of the scientific process, in particular open publication and free exchange of information, to a basic research activity. While there was something to be gained by classifying certain specific uses of scientific information, there was much to be lost by classifying the purely scientific data. In these efforts the panel was successful, and the program remained unclassified.

The program called for a lot of work, but it was exciting. Panel meetings were enjoyable, with none of the tedium that so often weighs oppressively on committee meetings. For most of the members, after a period of preparation at home base-in Washington, Silver Spring, Cambridge, Ann Arbor, or elsewhere-there would be a period of some weeks or a couple of months working in the lonely beauty of the New Mexico desert. How exhilarating it was to send a rocket roaring into the clear blue sky, watch the missile trace a brilliant white vapor trail against the azure background, a trail the stratospheric winds soon blew into complicated twists and knots, and then to jump into a jeep and race northward to retrieve cameras and instruments! On one such day in March 1957, with the sky as bright a blue as it ever had been, V-2 no. 21 landed in the heart of the White Sands National Monument. What a glorious hunt riding up and down over the snow-white dunes of gypsum sand that stretched as far as the eye could see! At the end of the day, with a solar spectrograph, cameras, and other instruments safely stowed aboard the jeeps, the impact party, as it was called, slowly worked its way out of the barren wilderness. As the group approached the edge of the monument, where the gypsum deposit has acquired a pinkish tint from the surrounding red sands of the Tula Rosa Basin, the sun was setting. An occasional yucca growing amid the pinkwhite dunes provided a display of incomparable beauty, which the glowing sun transformed into a fairyland. When the white sands were finally left behind, one could feel the emotional release.

The routine was frequently broken by bits of humor. Early in the program, before the range was properly instrumented for tracking the V-2s, von Braun often watched the flying rocket as it rose above the desert, judging by eye whether it was on course. If the missile strayed, von Braun

called for stopping the engines by radio. On one occasion, the eye failed to detect a tipping toward the south, and the missile landed in a cemetery in Juarez, Mexico, causing something of an international incident. Rumor had it that von Braun's lapse might have been related to his having some instruments riding on the rocket. At any rate preparations to track the missiles by instrument were accelerated.

The Naval Research Laboratory used radio signals from the flying rocket to measure the electrification of the ionosphere. For this purpose the laboratory installed ground stations uprange from the launching area. One day as the men were preparing one of the stations for an approaching flight, an Army jeep drove up, and a soldier got out and began driving a stake into the ground not more than a stone's throw from the station. Curious, the men asked what that meant. That, they were told, was the aiming point for some planned Honest John rocket tests. The men let it be known they didn't fully appreciate being made the target of rocket firings. "Not to worry," was the answer, "we never hit the target, anyway!"

Often there was frustration to struggle with. During the countdown for the firing of V-2 no. 16, something in the tail switch, which was supposed to turn the experimental equipment on after takeoff, was wrong. An effort was made to reconnect the switch there on the launch stand with the fully loaded rocket waiting to take off. After launch, however, instead of turning instruments on, the rewired switch proceeded to turn everything off. A postflight review showed that there were several ways in which the switch could have been connected to do the intended job, and only one way in which it would fail. The one and only wrong way had been chosen-an important object lesson regarding hasty, last-minute changes in the field. It turned out, however, that this rocket tumbled end over end in flight, which would have made the reduction of data an exceedingly complex matter. The scientist in charge later said it was probably a good thing that the equipment had been turned off, for otherwise the experimenters would surely have been unable to resist the temptation to try to interpret the measurements and probably would have wasted a lot of time. on a futile exercise.

On another occasion, as a physicist watched a rocket carry aloft the cloud chamber over which he had labored long and hard, he remembered that he had forgotten to remove the lens cap from the recording camera. To add to the feeling of despair, the telemetering record indicated that the cloud chamber had worked perfectly during the flight.

Of course, it was always heartbreaking when the rocket failed to perform. It was difficult enough for some experimenters to reconcile themselves to the thought that the equipment they had struggled to perfect would often be destroyed on a single flight. There was consolation when the flight produced the data sought, but not when the rocket failed. After the program had been under way for some time, it was noted that the

rockets bearing the simplest payloads seemed to have the best success. The Applied Physics Laboratory group, which never attempted to load rockets to full capacity, had acquired an image of almost perfect success. In contrast, the Air Force Cambridge Research Center, which tried to conduct dozens of complicated experiments on a single flight-and even lengthened the V-2 by a whole diameter to make additional instrument spacehad developed an image of almost complete failure. The Naval Research Laboratory, which flew payloads intermediate between those of APL and AFCRL in complexity, succeeded about two-thirds of the time. There seemed to be an interaction between the experimenting and the launching operations, the more complex experiments tending to induce more problems with the rocket itself. The suspicion that this was actually happening was widely held, but never proved. On closer look, the evidence is not as clear as it seemed at the time, for the Princeton experiments were as simple as any, and yet all their rockets failed, which was no doubt the main reason for Princeton's early withdrawal from the program.

One cannot work with rockets without a certain amount of danger. Although the missiles were aimed away from them, the stations uprange were nevertheless exposed to some risk that the rocket might land on one of them. No direct hit ever did occur, but on a few occasions the wreckage from a falling rocket landed uncomfortably close. The greatest danger existed when the rocket was being loaded with propellants and people were still working around it, completing last minute preparations. When a spurt of hydrogen peroxide set a jeep afire, the industrial supplier was moved to assert publicly that the liquid was perfectly safe if only it were handled properly. Most distressing were accidents to personnel, as when a fuming sulfuric acid mixture being loaded into a V-2 prematurely ejected, spraying the face of a worker and endangering his eyesight. The acid mixture was used to generate visible clouds in the stratosphere, which were then tracked to measure stratospheric winds.

The author vividly remembers working with a companion on a platform 10 to 15 meters above ground, inserting live JATO* rockets into receptacles in the midsection of a fully loaded V-2. Tests had shown that JATO would ignite from the slightest applied voltage, and care had to be exercised not to generate any static electricity or to permit current to flow through the JATO igniter from the ohmmeter being used to check the circuits. Other workers had retired to a respectful distance. Slanting cables had been drawn between the work platform and the ground, down which—if things went wrong-one could slide and then run like hell to safety. The JATOs, which were intended to impart a spin to the rocket in the upper atmosphere, did not ignite during the loading. But, then, neither did they spin the V-2 in flight.

*Jet Assist Take Off rockets permitted heavily loaded aircraft to take off from short runways.

INTERNATIONAL CONTACTS

From the panel's labors gradually accumulated an array of answers to important questions that had previously been intractable. As noted earlier, published results began to attract attention in the United States. The sounding rocket program also aroused interest abroad. At the panel's 13 June 1950 meeting, Sydney Chapman, renowned geomagnetician from the United Kingdom, joined the discussions. From that time international contacts gradually broadened, as Chapman became a frequent participant and visitors from Belgium, Australia, Japan, and Canada came. In the fall of 1952 the Royal Society's Gassiot Committee-a committee concerned with upper atmospheric research-proposed an international meeting on that subject, to be held at Oxford the following August. At the conference the Europeans heard the U.S. program and results discussed in detail, while the Americans became aware of a growing interest among scientists from other countries. By publishing the proceedings in book form, the British stole something of a march, giving panel members occasion to reassess their own publication program.25

At this very period early plans for a "Third Polar Year"-a worldwide cooperative program of geophysical investigations-were taking shape (chap. 5). Van Allen and other panel members had already been considering the possibility of conducting rocket soundings in the vicinity of Fort Churchill, Canada. The author proposed at the panel's January 1953 meeting that a "full fledged operation of Northern latitude firings be organized for the Third Polar Year 1957-1958" and presented objectives and requirements for such a program at the following meeting.26 In October 1953, Joseph Kaplan, chairman of the U.S. National Committee for the International Geophysical Year (the new name for the Third Polar Year), and Sydney Chapman, chairman of the International Committee for the IGY, both approved the idea of an IGY rocket program. Kaplan reported that the panel would be asked to serve as advisory committee to the National Academy of Sciences' National Research Council for the rocket phases of the IGY program, but very shortly thereafter the academy established its own Technical Panel on Rocketry.27 To coordinate planning and preparations for firings at Fort Churchill-after some negotiations Canada formally extended an invitation to the United States to set up a rocketlaunching range there-the panel formed a Special Committee for the IGY (SCIGY). Hearing of the Research Council's Technical Panel on Rocketry, the panel transferred SCIGY to the academy's technical group.28 SCIGY's membership was then expanded slightly to the following:

H. E. Newell, Naval Research Laboratory, Chairman

J. W. Townsend, Jr., Naval Research Laboratory, Executive Secretary John Hanessian, Jr., National Academy of Sciences, Recording Secretary