Sidenote: The Russians and the Germans had a huge lead on our development of large rockets capable of launching satellites or being used in Intercontinental missiles. We had many failures trying to build a rocket to launch a satellite and match the Russians who had launched the first one--Sputnik. For example, the Russians developed hypergolic fuels and the Germans used it in a fighter jet, the Comet. So we turned to some immigrants-- scientists or engineers from Germany like Werner Von Braun and Kraft Ericke to build a rocket using German technology down to the engineering that went into the German V2 Missile. That V2 based rocket launched the first US satellite and was the basis for our first ICBM.