emonstrate to the American physicists the state-of-the-art development of the technology. Goddard believed that Nazi rocket researchers had stolen his ideas, though the V-2 seems to have been merely a product of concurrent development. In 1945, a team of Nazi V-2 scientists led by Wernher von Braun defected to the US, fearful of being taken by the Russians. This had the effect of concentrating a good deal of the latest rocket technology in the US and depriving it from the Soviet Union, which would during the Cold War become America's chief rival in the space race. After World War II, research continued into rocketry, much of it directed by the von Braun-headed team.
In 1950, a V-2 modified with an American stage-two rocket lifted off a launch pad at Cape Canaveral, Fla., the first such launch of its kind from that site (Crouch, 1999). Over the rest of the decade rocket scientists persisted in trying to improve the technology and send a working machine into earth orbit.
A lot of the rocketry research of this period was theoretical because there was not a uniform scientific consensus on whether a missile launched into space, above Earth's atmosphere, could survive the practical ordeal. The concern was comparable to the doubts held by some of the scientists on the Manhattan Project, which resulted in the creation of the world's first atomic bomb, regarding whether the fission atomic chain reaction could be controlled and truncated. In his book no the Mercury manned space-flight program Tom Wolfe says that many of these fears were laid to rest when, on December 12, 1953, test pilot Chuck Yeager flew an X-1A rocket-accelerated plane at a record-breaking speed of more than Mach 2, specifically 2,655 kilometers per hour, or 1650 mph (Yeager, 1993). Previously, in 1947, Yeager had broken the sound barrier by flying at less than one-half that speed--1,065 kilometers per hour, or 662 mph. The importance of the 1953 flight was that it made c...