 October is a very historic month in space. Czech Jäger first broke the sound barrier in level flight, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, and NASA was formed, all this month in space history. In the years after the Second World War, new technologies marrying solid engineering and skilled piloting in the sky were pushing airplanes higher and faster. But there was a limit, colloquially known as the sound barrier that no airplane could pass. The sound barrier isn't caused by sound, but by air building up in front of and around an aircraft as it approaches the speed of sound. The air can't move out of the way fast enough, which increases drag on the airplane and reduces lift, and at the same time, the air above the wings moves faster than the speed of sound, forming shock waves that shake and rattle the aircraft. In the early and mid-1940s, pilots had flown faster than sound but only in a dive, and they usually didn't recover to tell engineers about it. Wind tunnels were equally useless for gathering supersonic data, since the shock waves that shook aircraft in flight bounced off the walls and rattled models. What engineers needed was a research aircraft. Fell answered the call with the X-1. Designed after a bullet which was known to travel faster than sound on level flight leaving the barrel of a gun, it held 8,000 pounds of fuel and was painted bright orange so it could be seen in the sky. To conserve that fuel for the all-important powered flight, the X-1 was launched from underneath a B-29 bomber. The morning of October 14th was U.S. Air Force General Chuck Yeager's eighth flight in the X-1. He fell from the B-29 at 20,000 feet. He lit all four rocket chambers in his XLR-11 engine and reached Mach 0.88. He shut off two of the rocket chambers, but momentum kept him accelerating past Mach 0.92. When he turned on a third rocket chamber, he hit Mach 0.96. Then he reignited the fourth chamber. The Mach meter on his X-1's dashboard seemed to fail. The needle tipped right off the scale. Bell engineers hadn't thought to put numbers on the Mach meter higher than one. That's how much faith they had that their aircraft could break the sound barrier. Yeager's top speed that day was Mach 1.06. Yeager's flight opened the skies, and ten years later, almost to the day, Sputnik opened space. Sputnik was launched as part of the International Geophysical Year. The 17-month period of solar activity between July 1957 and December 1958 that scientists around the world agreed to study in tandem. Both the United States and the Soviet Union had announced their intentions to launch satellites as part of their I-G-Y efforts. But the Soviets got there first. Sputnik was launched on October 4, 1957. It was a simple, shiny ball filled with batteries and equipment that emitted a beeping sound radio operators worldwide could listen in on. The beep changed depending on temperature. President Eisenhower wasn't too worried about Sputnik. He knew, as did scientists in the still nascent world of rocketry, that the satellite was incredibly simplistic. But the American people saw Sputnik was large, 184 pounds, which meant that the rocket that launched it could easily send missiles halfway across the world. The beep was construed as menacing, broadcasting a secret code or picking up locations of major cities. It wasn't, but fear spread nonetheless. Eisenhower's response was to speed up America's satellite program. He'd already decided that the Navy would have the first shot at launching a U.S. satellite on its Vanguard rocket. Vanguard was a missile without military applications, unlike the Army's Redstone. Eisenhower turned Vanguard's third test launch into the country's first satellite launch attempt. This decision didn't please the Army, which had Werner von Braun and a team of German engineers working at its ballistic missile association on the Jupiter-C rocket, a member of the Redstone rocket family that was ready and able to launch a satellite into orbit. When Vanguard failed spectacularly on live television in December, the Army was given a launch window for the next month. They worked out well. As January 31st rolled over onto February 1st, 1958, Explorer 1 reached orbit. This episode of interservice rivalry and infighting proved to Eisenhower that the nation wouldn't get anywhere in space, either in the name of military defense or peaceful exploration, with the bodies in charge divided. Fearing Soviet militarization of space, Eisenhower created the Advanced Research Projects Agency, ARPA, which was later renamed DARPA, in February of 1958, to develop space technology for military application. But he didn't want space to be purely a military domain. Recall that he'd chosen Vanguard over Redstone because Vanguard didn't have military applications. A civilian space effort was signed into existence in July 1958 through the National Aeronautics and Space Act. The NASA we know today began operations on October 1st that same year. See you next month!