New Moon

"I was thinking this globe enough till there sprang out so noiseless around me myriads of other globes." --Walt Whitman

At 1:35 p.m. one day last week the doors of the old White House conference room swung open and 50 reporters walked in, some grabbing chairs, the others lining up against the walls. At a great oval table before them sat Presidential Press Secretary James Hagerty, his spectacles glinting in the bright light, surrounded by five unfamiliar-looking men, whom he introduced as distinguished scientists. They were calm, poised, at ease; a few of the reporters licked their pencils nervously as Hagerty began to speak.

"On behalf of the President," said Hagerty, "I am now announcing that the President has approved plans by this country for going ahead with the launching of small, unmanned, earth-circling satellites . . . between July 1957 and December 1958. This program will for the first time in history enable scientists throughout the world to make sustained observations in the regions beyond the earth's atmosphere."

Out of Their Orbit. Hagerty added that this first U.S. satellite would be a project for peace, not for war. It would be a U.S. contribution to the International Geophysical Year (1957-58), and its explorer's view of sun, moon, planets, stars and space, transmitted down to mankind by telemeters, would be available to all scientists, including the Russians.*

Since the nature of the White House announcement had not openly been disclosed, Washington's political reporters, not its science writers, were on hand to get the news. There had been talk about man-made satellites for years, but the pundits were admittedly out of their orbit. They poured out incredulous questions, gasping at many of the answers. Hagerty turned the meeting over to the National Science Foundation's Dr. Alan T. Waterman and the National Academy of Science's Dr. S. Douglas Cornell.

The U.S., the scientists explained, was going to rocket-fire a satellite, about the size of a basketball, between 200 and 300 miles into space; the satellite would then circle the earth in its orbital path for several days or weeks, at the speed of 18,000 m.p.h. (see SCIENCE). The scientists had not yet determined what the satellite would be made of, but thought it would cost about $10 million, exclusive of the launching operation.

Into the Sun. Much was undecided and unknown, the scientists emphasized. "This is just a beginning experiment and you don't know until you start . . . where you go from there. You want to crawl in space before you fly." But fantasy flashed irrepressibly through their sober scientific pronouncements: "It should be barely possible to see it at twilight with the naked eye . . . certainly with a good pair of binoculars ... It will be illuminated by the sun, just like the moon . . . very much like a little moon."

So it was last week that the U.S. formally entered the space age. By week's end, in millions of U.S. homes, the bright-eyed youngster with a space helmet in the closet and a space comic under his pillow was being listened to with new interest. Man seemed to be much closer to Whitman's eerie concept of other globes springing out noiseless from the sky.

* Who claimed last April that they had begun work on a similar satellite, which they labeled "automatic cosmic laboratory."

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