On Monday, April 14, 1958, I reported to work at the Army Ballistic Missile Agency (ABMA) at Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama. The famed German Rocket team was working for ABMA building rockets for War. The Soviet Union had launched two satellites, Sputnik I on October 4, 1957, and Sputnik II on November 3, 1957. These space firsts caught the United States by total surprise and Soviets had command of the skies. After the Navy and the Air Force had failures attempting to launch this country’s first satellite, President Eisenhower ordered the ABMA team to do it in ninety days. That was done on January 31, 1958, with Explorer I in eighty-eight days with the Redstone rocket.

Both Nations were rushing to be the first to place a man into space. Project Mercury was conceived for the US to put up our first astronauts in a crash program. The Air Force was banking on their Atlas rocket and the Army (ABMA) looked at their Redstone for this task. It was the Mercury – Redstone rocket, with one man up and down in space payload, work for ABMA and the Mercury-Atlas rocket, one man orbit payload work for the Air Force. ABMA was to follow with developing a large Saturn rocket and the Air Force to follow with the two-man Gemini orbit docking project as this was needed for us to go into space exploration.

Before our first astronauts had been picked to fly into space in the Mercury Program, I was already doing upgrade man flight work on the Redstone A7 engine in May of 1958 with the Army at Redstone Arsenal. The Mercury Program was not initiated until October 7, 1958

Our mission at ABMA was to prepare the Redstone rocket for our man flight rating. Three weeks after I arrived, I was assigned to man-rate the rocket engine. The seventy-eight thousand pound thrust Redstone A 7 used Liquid Oxygen and Kerosene fuels. The Redstone rocket was sixty-nine feet tall, seventy inches in diameter and had a payload weight of two thousand pounds.

The Mercury-Redstone Project started on a twelve hour – seven days a week overtime schedule. The production of new Mercury-Redstone rockets began in Building 4706. The directives, shop orders, memorandums and all documentation was stamped using a priority action system. A stamp saying “BLAST” and was used for the first step above routine priority. Two “BLAST – BLAST” stamps indicated a priority of urgent. Three “BLAST -BLAST – BLAST” stamps indicated a hand carry, emergency highest priority action.

Our work came with training. We were told that even a small mistake could cost a person’s life. We were told to work as if we ourselves, were riding the rockets. That “huge consequences” would be paid to the one who “killed someone” and this was the first chance for the rocket team during in its long history, to explore space with man launches,” said our Group Leader. “Dr. von Braun will not stand for failures or mistakes,” he added.

We were unaware that on October 24, 1960, the Russian’s large unmanned R-16 rocket exploded on its pad. The Russian leader, Nikita Khrushchev on September 23, 1960, was pounding his shoe on his desk in protest at the United Nations. Khrushchev had ordered his space officer, Marshall Nedelin, to launch the moon rocket while he was in the limelight. The window for a moon launch was about to close and the R-16 was in a delay because of a misfire. After a few minutes with fuel onboard, Nedelin ordered the technicians to inspect the failure when the R-16 blew up killing 165 people.

Mr. Khrushchev was irate that he had missed an important political event to prove that the Soviet Union was the better Nation. Later. Four accidents with the N1 moon rocket and money problems caused the Russians to abandon their moon project. We had won that race and didn’t know it! We launched Apollo 8 moon fly by on 12/21/1968 and Apollo 11 moon landing on July 16, 1969.