FULL-SIZED WORKING MOCKUP.
Nosecone/Payload Carrier Working Mockup, approximately 37 1/4-inches tall, 6-inch diameter, [Pasadena & Huntsville: Jet Propulsion Laboratory & Army Ballistic Missile Agency, c.1957], comprising painted metal nose cone fitted with fiberglass insulator to matching painted metal cylindrical payload carrier with fiberglass base on which is written in yellow paint: "F&AE Lab," separate metal adapter ring and with 4 coil-wound antennae, each with weighted tip, that attach to payload carrier base; in original fitted wooden case, 40 x 7 1/2 x 8 inches, with plastic (Bakelite?) handle on hinged lid with "F&AE LAB" written in yellow paint, and "NOSE CONE & PAYLOAD" stenciled in black.
Provenance: Fabrication and Assembly Engineering Laboratory, ABMA (with painted identification to case and payload carrier base).

The successful launch of Sputnik-1 sent the United States population into a panic. In the midst of a cold war, the Soviets demonstrated that they had a rocket powerful enough to send a satellite into orbit.

The Army Ballistic Missile Agency (ABMA), directed by Wernher von Braun, and Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), led by William Pickering, had already been working on the launch of a satellite into orbit, but the Navy's Project Vanguard was chosen to be the U.S.'s first satellite mainly to lessen the perception of military involvement. Compared to the Explorer Program, Project Vanguard was a risk as it utilized untried components. ABMA & JPL had already performed a successful test of the Jupiter C military booster rocket with a dummy payload in the JPL upper stage on September 20, 1956—more than a year before Sputnik-1.

Project Vanguard proved a failure when the rocket burst into flame on the launchpad at Cape Canaveral on December 6, 1957. The U.S. had already suffered the first blow of not being the first into space and the Vanguard compounded the international embarrassment. Von Braun, who was well-known to the public especially after his involvement with three Disney documentaries on space travel, took advantage of situation to let the media know of the missed opportunity to beat the Soviets into space.

Finally, due to public and congressional pressure, ABMA was given the go-ahead to proceed with the Explorer I. The team, which included University of Iowa physicist James Van Allen who provided some of the payload instruments, had surreptitiously been continuing their work on the project and were ready in just a few months.

On January 31, 1958, after some delay, the Jupiter C (re-christened Juno) rocket carrying the satellite was successfully launched. Van Allen, von Braun and Pickering were not at the launch, but were gathered in the War Room of the Pentagon. They awaited news confirming the reception of the satellite's transmissions. It was estimated that the satellite would pass over the first of the West Coast telemetry stations in 91 minutes, but that time passed and there was still no reception. Finally, 108 minutes after liftoff, the San Gabriel Radio Club picked up the signal and the second station in Earthquake Valley picked it up moments later.

There was great jubilation in the room. President Eisenhower, who been under great political pressure since Sputnik-1 and the failed Vanguard launch and who had only recently suffered a stroke, was called late at night he said "That's wonderful. I sure feel a lot better now." But he was reserved: "Let's not make too big a hullabaloo over this."
Van Allen, von Braun and Pickering participated in an early morning press conference at the National Academy of Sciences where "the three men spontaneously picked up a prototype of the tubular Explorer I satellite and hoisted it over their heads in a victory pose. The photo became an instant icon of the space age" (Foerstner).

The instruments on board the satellite included an Anton 314 omnidirectional Geiger tube detector used to measure the flux of energetic charged particles and a telemetry system to transmit the data to ground receiving stations around the world. Each station sent their tapes to Van Allen's team at University of Iowa and 694 Scotch reel-to-reel audio tapes in total were collected.

Detector data on these reels seemed flawed with gaps of information in the many miles of tape. The gaps at first proved a mystery until Van Allen's team, which included faculty and graduate students, realized when they experimented with a spare payload and an x-ray machine "that massive levels of radiation could choke off the detector." Faculty member Ernst Ray left a note for Van Allen that read: "Space is radioactive." They reanalyzed the data from the tapes and began to see that the "Earth's magnetic field trapped a dense blizzard of charged subatomic particles in a region from about 600 miles to 6,000 miles in space. This band encircled Earth from 35 degrees north to 35 degrees south, a swath that reached roughly from Richmond, Va., to Buenos Aires in Argentina. The trapped particles traversed that distance near light speed, spiraling back and forth within the radiation zone. The Van Allen Belt – Earth's radiation belt, was named for University of Iowa physicist.

"The detection of the Van Allen belts was the first major space discovery and the most important finding of the IGY" (Dickson p182). "It opened up a new mapping of the solar system, ushering in new fields of science such as magnetospheric physics to explore the magnetic fields of planets and plasma physics, devoted to the solar wind of charged particles radiating outward from the sun" (Foerstner).

James Van Allen, in a March 31, 1970 interview, reflected on the achievement: "The successful orbiting of Explorer I is one of the landmarks in the technical and scientific history of the human race. Its instrumentation revealed the existence of radiation belts around the Earth and opened a massive new field of scientific exploration in space. It inspired an entire generation of young men and women in the United States to higher achievement and propelled the Western World in the Space Age."

The present example has the markings of the ABMA's Fabrication and Assembly Engineering Laboratory on both the case and the base of the unit. The fitted carrying case would have been produced to transport this working mockup back and forth to either Van Allen at the University of Iowa for his work on the payload instruments, or to ABMA's F&AE Lab for integration with the Jupiter C rocket or back to JPL. The pieces show clear signs of use.

Brzezinski, Matthew. Red Moon Rising: Sputnik and the Hidden Rivalries That Ignited the Space Age. NY: [2007].; Dickson, Paul. Sputnik: The Shock of the Century. NY: 2001.; Foerstner, Abigail. Explorer I. University of Iowa, 2014.