"We're in Trouble"

Glaring in the darkness like some colossal firework, a 98-ft. rocket blasted off a launching pad at Cape Canaveral, Fla. one night last week. As it zoomed skyward, trailing a gaudy glow of reds and greens, a watcher in the Canaveral blockhouse gasped out an awed, unscientific tribute: "Isn't she beautiful?"

The biggest rocket the U.S. had ever launched, a three-stage Atlas-Able, was off on the U.S.'s most ambitious space shot so far. The mission: to send an intricate, 372-lb. payload of instruments into the vicinity of the moon--and if all went well, into orbit around the moon. The rocket also carried a weighty cargo of hope and national pride: Nikita Khrushchev had kicked off his trip to the U.S. with the Russian moon shot; a U.S. answer exploded on the pad while he was in the U.S. Here, on the eve of the President's grand tour, was the U.S.'s chance to catch up.

Into the Sea. Some 40 seconds after the Atlas-Able blasted off, a flame-colored chunk fell off the rocket and hurtled into the sea. "I've never seen this before," growled a watching Air Force officer. "We're in trouble. We're in trouble. I'm sure we are." The rocket kept soaring until it disappeared from sight out over the Atlantic. But an hour later Program Director Adolph K. Thiel, somber and red-eyed, told waiting newsmen the unhappy news: "We didn't make it. Something happened. We don't know what."

By piecing together radar and telemetry data, film sequences and fragments of wreckage dipped from the shallow waters off the cape, missilemen managed to figure out what went wrong: the loft. long fiber glass "nose fairing" that was supposed to protect the third stage and payload from air friction and buffeting in the upper atmosphere fell off prematurely, after 40 seconds instead of the programed 4 1/2 minutes. Then the fierce drag of the atmosphere wrenched the payload-carrying third stage loose, made the second stage malfunction.

Until the '60s. If the U.S. had an adequate space program, the next step would be to remedy the trouble with the nose fairing and try again. But the shocking fact is that the U.S. has no more Atlas-Able rockets available for trying again. All the Atlases allotted to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration have already been assigned to other urgent space programs, and NASA has no spare funds to order additional Atlases. The bigger space vehicles that NASA has under development will not be ready for launching for more than a year: Vega (Atlas plus upper stages) in 1961, Centaur (Atlas plus more powerful upper stages) in 1962, Saturn (eight Jupiters clustered together) in 1963, Nova (giant single-chamber rocket) in the mid-1960s.

NASA Administrator T. Keith Glennan complains about Congress' "crippling" cuts in NASA funds. But in fact Congress trimmed NASA funds in the current fiscal year by less than 6%--from $530 million to $500 million--and Glennan helped bring on that cut himself when he argued at a congressional hearing that extra funds could not speed up U.S. space progress.

After last week's misfire, an anonymous "high administration official" charged that NASA was "stupid" and "naive" in the planning of its moonshot program. He was right. But much of the stupidity and naivete lay with the high official's cohorts, who have yet to speed up the Atlas production line--still proceeding at a leisurely 50% of capacity at the Convair plants in San Diego.

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