Original Redstone launch team recalls start of modern space program

Bill Grafton ran.

As the last one on the pad before the launch of the first Redstone rocket from Cape Canaveral, on Aug. 20, 1953, it was his job to plug an igniter into the enormous, seven-story missile.

"I was a little bit nervous, because this thing was filled with all the fuel and it was sitting there puffing like an old train," Grafton, 89, remembered recently.

When he hooked up the igniter, it unexpectedly triggered a liquid oxygen valve to open, dumping a smokey-looking cloud of condensed water around him. Fearing an explosion, Grafton took off, continuing to sprint even after a 25-foot cord reached its limit and yanked a headset and hard hat from his head.

"Because if that thing had gone off — of course, by that time I would have probably been flying anyway," he laughed.

Engineers repaired an electrical short and the rocket proceeded to blast off on a brief flight that members of the launch team consider the start of the modern space program.

Versions of the Redstone went on to launch the first U.S. satellite and the first American in space. Within 15 years of the countdown that sent Grafton running, some of the team were supporting a manned flight around the moon, launched from the new Kennedy Space Center by a rocket that dwarfed the Redstones and everything since.

"Redstone I would put as the benchmark for space history," said Ike Rigell, 91, of Titusville. "And if you look at this generation, we're the first and only generation that has experienced the entire space program. After us, there's nobody that lived through those early days."

Four of the five living members of the original Redstone launch team gathered last week at Rigell's Titusville home to reminisce and record some of their stories.

Reed Barnett, of Melbourne Beach, and Bill "Curly" Chandler, of Astor, Fla., joined Rigell and Grafton, visiting from Flagstaff, Ariz. Their friend Jim Rorex was unable to make the trip from Huntsville, Ala.

"We're getting kind of old," said Grafton. "We thought we ought to get together while we can still get around."

The team

The engineers arrived from Huntsville's Redstone Arsenal in 1953 as civilian employees of the U.S. Army Ballistic Missile Agency, part of a team led by legendary German rocket scientists including Wernher von Braun and Kurt Debus.

Rigell remembers Cocoa Beach then offering only a small motel and The Surf restaurant. Grocery runs required trips to Cocoa or Melbourne.

As for many Brevard County pioneers, blood-sucking insects loom large in their early memories.

"I can't exaggerate the mosquito problem," said Rigell.

It was so bad Chandler said he cried one night, resolving to leave and never return. A truck regularly sprayed fumes into the small blockhouse close to pads 3 and 4. Fueled rockets provided some relief.

"We sure enjoyed it when they loaded the vehicle because we all wanted to go out to the pad and walk in those vapors," said Chandler. "Not only was it cool, but it got rid of the mosquitoes."

The launch team consisted entirely of white men. Rigell remembers a colleague warning Debus not to start a meeting on a sensitive subject because a secretary was there, and women couldn't keep secrets.

"That was the culture," said Rigell, noting that Debus dismissed the objection.

The Redstone was a large ballistic missile then being developed to carry nuclear warheads during the Cold War. After its on-pad repairs, Grafton made a safe retreat to nearby Hangar C to watch the first launch.

Inside the blockhouse, a team of about 30 followed countdown procedures that fit on a single page, front and back. Time events were marked with an "X" rather than a "T," possibly a German preference, Rigell speculates.

After the rocket climbed beautifully through a low cloud deck, Grafton began hearing strange grinding sounds. A splash in the ocean that some initially thought was a porpoise turned out to be the rocket, which had tumbled with its engine sputtering on and off.

The flight was still considered a success, and a photo taken shortly afterward shows Grafton and Barnett in hard hats among a group of 10 smiling men.

"In those days, all the programs, if you could get the engine fired up, no matter how far it went, you claimed partial success," said Rigell.

But under von Braun's leadership, the Redstone team understood they were part of a development program and could learn important lessons from mistakes, not perfection.

In this case, a German engineer volunteered that a nut he'd tightened may have pushed some lines askew, contributing to the engine trouble.

His punishment? A bottle of champagne, as a reward for speaking up.

"We learned that lesson and it's still enforced today, as far as I know, at the space center," said Rigell. "If you make an honest mistake, you admit it and you get commended. But don't make that mistake again."

Failures and successes

The third Redstone blew up on the pad. A pressure wave pushed through pipes routing cables to the blockhouse, knocking off an interior panel with a shower of the materials they had stuffed inside to keep out bugs and snakes. No one was hurt.

Grafton had argued against a proposed change in how to start the Rocketdyne engine, since existing procedures had worked during testing in Huntsville.

"Big mistake," he said.

Rigell remembers the January 1958 launch of the Explorer 1 satellite, which was the U.S. response to the "wake-up call" of Sputnik a few months earlier, as one of the biggest moments in his life.

In May 1961, a Redstone boosted Alan Shepard's Freedom 7 Mercury capsule from the Cape on a 15-minute suborbital ride, weeks after Yuri Gagarin had become the first person to orbit the planet.

And a few weeks after that, President John F. Kennedy issued his challenge to fly men to the moon and back.

During the early Redstone program, von Braun already dreamed about exploring the moon and beyond, and had a model on his desk of a futuristic booster that could fly back to the ground. But most of the others were focused on the defense-related mission at hand and never imagined moon shots were on their horizon.

Rigell, who went on to become chief engineer and deputy director of launch vehicle operations in the Apollo program, said the big-budget, fast-paced program drastically changed the small Redstone team's do-it-yourself, "mom-and-pop" operation.

"When Apollo came in, we were like General Electric or Walmart," he said. "We were big stuff."

The four original launch team members last week visited Cape Canaveral Air Force Station to see the pads and blockhouse where they started the space program.

Rigell remembers looking at the first Redstone on Pad 4, standing nearly 70 feet tall and six feet in diameter, and thinking, "This thing's too big to fly!"

"And 15 years later we're listening to Frank Borman and his crew on Christmas Eve reading the Book of Genesis, circling the moon," he said. " Now that's incredible."

Contact Dean at 321-242-3668 or jdean@floridatoday.com.