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Notes and Sources, page 252.

Kershner's trips to the Pentagon (page 97) were remembered by both Guier and Weiffenbach. Though there is no written record of these trips at APL, he presumably had to go back and forth several times.

Transit on Discovery is mentioned several times in memos, letters, and progress reports of Transit in the APL archives (page 98), and various members of the team explained that it was part of DoD efforts to determine Earth's gravitational field and thus, of course, the forces that would act on a ballistic missile in flight.

The details in pages 98 to 104 were extracted from numerous reports and memos in the APL archives, from interviews with the Transit team members, and from memos and papers that Henry Elliott had kept.

Chapter ten: The Realities of Space Exploration


The account of the launch of Transit 1A is pieced together from comments from different team members. Lee DuBois, for example, remembered the tears in his eyes when the satellite failed (page 105).

Details of the twenty-five-minute flight and the results gleaned come from the records that Henry Elliott had kept and from reports in APL's archives (page 106).

Numerous memos and reports in the APL archives testify to Kershner's industry in preparing for Transit 1B and Transit 2A (pages 106 and 107).

John Hamblen's undated, typed note requesting the team members to document component testing (page 107) is among the papers in the APL archives.

My description of how the launch might have been is pieced together from people's memories and photographs of later launches found at APL

A progress report details what happened scientifically following the successful launch of Transit 1B (page 108 - 109). Bill Guier explained what the report meant and supplemented it with his own memories.

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