On the first day of February 1958, three men held aloft a model of
Explorer 1, America's first Earth satellite, for the press
photographers. That image of William Pickering, Wernher von Braun,
and James Van Allen became an icon for America's response to the
Sputnik challenge. Von Braun and Van Allen were well known, but who
was Pickering? From humble beginnings in a remote country town in
New Zealand, Pickering came to California in 1928 and quickly
established himself as an outstanding student at the then-new
California Institute of Technology (Caltech). At Caltech, Pickering
worked under the famous physicist Robert Millikan on cosmic-ray
experiments, at that time a relatively new field of physics. In
1944, when Caltech's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) was developing
rocket propulsion systems for the U.S. Army, Pickering joined the
work-force as a technical manager. He quickly established himself
as an outstanding leader, and 10 years later, Caltech named him
Director of JPL. And then, suddenly, the world changed. In October
1957, the Sputnik satellite startled the world with its
spec-tacular demonstration of Soviet supremacy in space. Pickering
led an intense JPL effort that joined with the von Braun and Van
Allen teams to answer the Soviet challenge. Eighty-three days
later, on 31 January 1958, America's first satellite roared into
Earth orbit. A few months after that, Pickering's decision to
affiliate JPL with the newly formed National Aeronautics and Space
Administration set the basis for his subsequent career and the
future of NASA's ambitious program for the exploration of the solar
system. In the early days of the space program, failure followed
failure as Pickering and his JPL team slowly ascended the "learning
curve." Eventually, however, NASA and JPL resolve paid off. First
the Moon, then Venus, and then Mars yielded their scientific
mysteries to JPL spacecraft of ever-increasing sophistication.
Within its first decade, JPL-built spacecraft sent back the first
close-up photographs of the lunar surface, while others journeyed
far beyond the Moon to examine Venus and return the first close-up
views of the surface of Mars. Later, even more complex space
missions made successful soft-landings on the Moon and on Mars.
Pickering's sudden death in March 2004 at the age of 93 was widely
reported in the U.S. and overseas. As one NASA official eulogized
him, "His pioneering work formed the foundation upon which the
current program for exploring our solar system was built." On this,
the 50th anniversary of the beginning of the Space Age, it is
proper to remind ourselves of the ordinary people who met the
extraordinary challenge to make it happen.
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