PALM SPRINGS — Fifty years ago this month, Henry Richter sat in a mosquito-infested Florida marsh, waiting to find out whether America had successfully put its first satellite in orbit.
Tension was high. Just four months earlier, the Soviets had humiliated the United States by launching Sputnik. In December, America's first attempt to catch up to the Russians failed when the Navy's Vanguard rocket blew up on the pad.
"Flopnik," cried the headlines.
In the wake of that embarrassment, the project landed in the lap of a little-known Army research center in Southern California called the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
So on the night of Jan. 31, 1958 -- less than 90 days after being given the go-ahead -- Richter and other scientists waited nervously on a stretch of beach called Cape Canaveral as Explorer 1 lifted off the pad.
Confirmation that it had reached orbit took longer than expected.
"It was a sweaty-palms time," recalled Richter, one of a handful of high-ranking scientists and engineers still living who worked on the Explorer program.
He finally got confirmation from an improvised tracking station at the Temple City sheriff's office. "Temple's acquired," it said.
Minutes later, the world learned America had joined the space race.
The launch of Explorer was the first step in a journey of exploration that would culminate a decade later with the Apollo moon landing of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin.
It also was a coming-out party for JPL, which emerged from its cloak of military secrecy with a reputation for scientific and technical prowess it has maintained for the last five decades. Its robotic spacecraft have visited every planet in the solar system. The two Voyager craft are now poised to become the first man-made objects to reach interstellar space.
The story of JPL's 90-day miracle became the stuff of scientific legend. Single-handedly, it seemed, JPL had proved that American know-how was alive and well at a time when the country badly needed a shot in the arm.
"It's an attractive story," JPL historian Erik Conway said of the crash program that built and launched Explorer in less than three months. "The problem is, it's not true."
The real story of Explorer 1, according to Richter, Conway and other space historians, was of a long and often frustrating journey wrapped in Cold War politics, secret missile tests and White House miscalculations.
