Death of the Big Bird

Haggard from seemingly endless days of overwork, 200 missilemen reported in at Florida's Cape Canaveral missile test center one murky night last week to give the Atlas its final preening before flight. In a blockhouse a few hundred feet from the launching pad, physicists and engineers started radioing to foremen the long lists that comprised the exquisitely detailed ritual of inspection. Fitted together in the great steel bird's innards were some 300,000 parts, and a failure in one of them could cause a misfire.

It was nearly 3 p.m. when the hollow-eyed, unshaven missilemen finally had the Atlas, biggest bird in the U.S.'s missile aviary, ready for launching. Men inside the blockhouse listened in tight-lipped silence to the final countdown. At zero, a finger pressed a red button in a control panel, and the missile, rising slowly and majestically, started on history's second Atlas flight (see color pages opposite).

On paper, Atlas is "intercontinental," capable of soaring 5,000 miles. But Atlas I, launched at Cape Canaveral last June, flew erratically, lived only 22 seconds before a safety officer pressed a button to destroy it. Atlas II started off promisingly. In its straight-up flight, lasting 20 seconds or so, it seemed to be, in the missilemen's term, "programing" perfectly, i.e., doing what its makers and tenders expected. But as it arched into its southeastward course, the tail fire glowed too dark, and the bird faltered. The turbine pumps were failing to feed the right mixture of fuel, and because among those 300,000 delicately tooled parts there could be no human hand to make the needed adjustment, Atlas II was doomed.

Inside the blockhouse an Air Force officer peered through a scope (roughly resembling a surveyor's transit), saw the wobbly bird, now three miles up, skitter outside the safety zone. Dutifully, he pressed the fatal button. An enormous blob of flame suddenly enwrapped the bird. A moment later, all that remained of the ingeniously concocted, $6,000,000 Atlas were some shreds of metal and a smudge of smoke in the misty sky.

To uninitiated watchers the flight seemed a total failure--but not to missilemen. During those awesome 35 seconds, cameras and telemetering devices were recording valuable flight data on miles of film and tape. "As the surgeons say," a sad-eyed missile scientist said bravely, "the operation was a success but the patient died. We got data on the three miles of flight. The next big bird that flies may live a while longer."

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