The Missile Week

With the Explorer VI paddle-wheel satellite wheeling triumphantly overhead, U.S. rocket pads had their busiest week yet. Unhappily, results were mixed.

P:The Air Force fired an Atlas ICBM 5,000 miles down the Atlantic range from Cape Canaveral. The third successful Atlas shot in four weeks, the missile achieved "most of its objectives," helped offset the string of five failures that had put the nation's primary ICBM weeks behind schedule. Now, Air Force men say they hope to make the bird operational next month.

P:Also at Canaveral, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration tried to fling into orbit a10-lb. plastic and aluminum inflatable sphere that would circle the earth like an oversized beach ball (diameter: 12 ft.), measuring friction in the outer reaches of the atmosphere. The three-stage Juno II rocket itself (a modification of the Army's operational workhorse Jupiter) blasted off without a hitch, but the beach ball never achieved orbit, probably through a failure in the attitude control system.

P:Without the characteristic roar of blastoff, a Navy Polaris popped out of a large tube, impelled by compressed air in a device the Navy has installed at Canaveral to simulate the pitch and roll of a ship. Dubbed "the world's largest cocktail shaker," the $3,000,000 ship-motion simulator was held steady for this test, which concentrated on the compressed-air takeoff. It worked perfectly. The Polaris jumped silently to a point 60 ft. overhead where its first-stage engine came to life, and the missile left a long white trail behind as it took off on its 700-mile trip down range. Crowed the Navy: "A complete, unqualified success." But Polaris, the U.S.'s only solid-fuel IRBM, has yet to be tested at full power, is still months from operational status.

P:At California's Vandenberg Air Force Base, the Air Force launched Discoverer V, putting a ton of hardware into orbit, including the 1,700-lb. second-stage rocket and a 300-lb. instrument package--a new record for U.S. satellite payloads (but still far behind Russia's 2,134-lb. Sputnik III). After 17 trips through its polar orbit, retrorockets were to plunge Discoverer V back into the atmosphere, and C-119 transport planes--trailing trapezelike devices to snare the descending parachute--were waiting 700 miles southwest of Hawaii. But Discoverer V was never heard from again. The Air Force will keep on trying to make a successful catch; it is a primary step toward returning a space man to earth alive.

P:Biggest failure of the week was the Air Force's attempted firing of its 5,500-mile ICBM Titan. For the U.S.'s potentially most lethal ICBM, it was the first test for the full two-stage assembly. But the missile never left the ground, disintegrated in an explosion on the launching pad.

Last week's failures and semifailures obscured the overall record of U.S. rocketry to date. Totting up the figures, the U.S. could feel satisfied with results--though the figures were not quite so impressive as they sounded; e.g., a launch planned only to test a rocket's first stage, and which travels only half the full distance, is scored a "success" because it accomplishes all that it was expected to. The record, including satellite launches:

Partial Launches Successes Successes Failures

ICBMs Atlas 28 13 6 9 Titans 5 4 0 1 IRBMs Jupiter 21 15 5 1 Thor 58 41 9 8

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