This
Was ROCKET SCIENCE By
GARY R. MORMINO Tribune
correspondent TAMPA
- Moon madness gripped Tampa Town in the fall of 1865. As
Civil War artillerists prepared for the world's first moon shot, Texas officials
howled at the selection of Tampa as command central. But howl as they might, a
powerful cannon located on Tampa's Stone Hill propelled the rocket La Columbiad
heavenward. Fired
by the imagery of the popular 1865 novel "From the Earth to the Moon,"
the rocket launch was pure fiction. But novelist Jules Verne's imagination had
correctly identified Florida as home to rocket men and moon madness. In
the real-life Tampa Town of 1865, residents dwelled on earthly concerns of death,
taxes and conquering Yankees. The city's coffers were so threadbare that residents
abolished city government in 1869. World
War II, not the Civil War, determined the fate of American rocketry. German scientists
developed V-2 rockets capable of terrorizing British citizens. In the waning days
of the war, the race to capture evil but brilliant German rocket scientists pitted
America against the Soviet Union, a contest fatefully won by the United States. Nazi
scientists such as Wernher von Braun may have killed innocent civilians and used
slave laborers, but they were now invested with jump-starting the American rocket
program. It happened as Communists replaced Nazis as the new villains in the Cold
War world. Rocket
Fever In 1949,
officials selected an obscure spit of land jutting into the Atlantic Ocean as
ground zero for America's space program. In 1946, a Tampa Tribune reporter had
described Canaveral as "a small community on the sparsely populated cape
of a scrub-covered key." In
July 1950, Florida's Space Age began with the firing of a 14-ton, two-stage rocket
combining a German-built V-2 rocket and an American-designed WAC Corporal. The
missile roared over the then-sleepy communities of Cocoa Beach, Titusville and
Melbourne Beach. Teams of scientists, technicians and engineers arrived daily,
accompanied by their overachieving children, making Brevard County the fastest-growing
county in the fastest-growing state in America. Brevard's
population exploded in the 1950s and 1960s, increasing tenfold. When asked what
was happening to quaint Brevard County, a motel owner said simply, "We've
all got rocket fever here." The
1950s was the American decade. While most of the world was still riding bicycles,
Detroit-made cars with soaring fenders and gleaming chrome bumpers defined American
power and consumption. Ironically,
precisely when U.S. economic and nuclear power reached its zenith, Americans began
to express signs of insecurity and unease. In the early 1950s, Communist spies
and agents set off alarms at the state department and university campuses. Hollywood
movies scared the bejesus out of young and old with messages of alien invaders
and scientific experiments gone terribly wrong: "The Day the Earth Stood
Still" (1951), "It Came From Outer Space" (1953) and "Creature
From the Black Lagoon" (1954). In
the summer of 1952, Tribune readers were alerted to what was said to be a flying
saucer - emitting a "gosh awful screeching sound" - that landed in the
Hillsborough River. Red
Nightmare October
4, 1957, was no ordinary day. Television antennae that dotted old and new neighborhoods
allowed Tampa Bay residents to enjoy the premiere of "Leave It to Beaver." Thousands
of miles away, in the Kazakh desert, in a place so secret that no Central Asian
maps identified the settlement, Soviet engineers launched the first Earth-to-space
satellite. Soviets named the technological marvel sputnik, meaning traveler. Americans
were crestfallen. When
Tampa Tribune Managing Editor Virgil "Red" Newton heard the news, he
was skeptical. He was tired of hearing about the Russians, he scowled to the night
city editor, Leo Stalnaker. He later recollected, "We were the only newspaper
in the world that handled sputnik with a one-column head." One
month later, the Soviets added insult to injury by launching a second satellite,
this one carrying Laika, a Russian dog plucked from an animal shelter. The hapless
dog may have died for Cold War prestige, but scientists at Cape Canaveral were
readying rockets and chimpanzees to match the Soviet feat.
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