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Notes and Sources, page ix.

from vacuum tubes to transistors, and those transistors didn't always work. The list of things they didn't know and that failed goes on and on and those things are, of course, the reasons why those early participants in the space age were pioneers.

The only non-American participant who is discussed at any length the book is Sergei Korolev, the mastermind of the Soviet Union's space program who was responsible for the launch of Sputnik. He was an extraordinary man of extraordinary tenacity, who at great personal cost survived Stalin's paranoid and casual cruelties. Despite his contribution to the Soviet Union's Cold War armory, some tribute seemed called for, and the so-called chief designer of cosmic-rocket systems has the introductory chapter to himself.

Sputnik, according to the historian Walter McDougall, sparked the biggest furor in the United States since Pearl Harbor. The satellite was Korolev's baby, and it was launched as part of the International Geophysical Year.

The IGY was the brainchild of Lloyd Berkner, a leading American Scientist. While scientists were still in the early stages of planning the IGY, I President Eisenhower announced that the U.S. would launch scientific I satellites as part of its contribution to the IGY. Within days the Soviet I Union made a similar announcement.

It seemed at the dine that the White House had bowed to pressure nom industry, scientists, and the military. But recent scholarship suggests that President Eisenhower hijacked the IGY and made it, in the words of c.s. Air Force historian R. Carghill Hall, the stalking horse for the administration's plans for reconnaissance satellites.

As is so often the case, there were many people to whom it didn't matter at all why what happened, happened. The space age had opened, :and the pioneers of navigation, weather, and communications satellites were ready.

At the Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) of the Johns Hopkins University, in Maryland, Bill Guier and George Weiffenbach listened to Sputnik's signal. Within the week, they were developing an approach to orbital determination that broke with a centuries-old tradition. Before Guier and Weitfenbach's work, the technique was to measure the angles to heavenly bodies and to determine orbits from those values. The scientists of the IGY had an elaborate optical and radio observational system in place for measuring the angles to satellites. Guier and Weiffenbach measured changes in

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