Space Surge

(SEE COVER) Television monitors glared eerily in the darkened U.S. Air Force command post at Sunnyvale, Calif. At a winking control console sat Lieut. Colonel Charles Glenn Mathison, commander of the 6,$4Qth Test Wing (Satellite), listening through earphones to the crackle of reports from a vast communications network. Mathison made a final check with radar tracking stations scattered around the earth. All were ready. From Cape Canaveral, Fla. came the word: "RF system ready." At T minus 10 seconds, "Moose" Mathison gave Canaveral the go-ahead: "Ready to launch." Canaveral's countdown neared its end: ". . . eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one--main stage ignited." Mathison hunched forward,. almost as though he were riding with the huge missile. Cried he: "Go, baby, go!"

At that instant last week, the U.S. launched its biggest satellite. Roaring into near perfect orbit around the earth went Midas II, weighing 5,000 Ibs. with a 3,600-lb. instrument package. But Midas was more than a mere heavyweight monster. It was alive and alert, and in its nose was its reason for being: an infra-red sensor able to detect unusual sources of heat on earth or high in the atmosphere--and thus, by spotting exhaust flames, to give the U.S. warning of hostile missiles streaking toward it from distant lands.

Last week's Midas (for Missile Defense Alarm System) was an experimental model, and its orbit was carefully planned so as not to pass over the Soviet Union. After two days, it lost radio contact with earth. But even in its silence it spun through the sky as the prototype of a complete Midas system, scheduled for operation in 1963, that in its ability to sound an alarm and to summon retaliatory forces, should become a new and powerful deterrent against surprise attack. And most of all, Midas II was a dramatic symbol of the U.S.'s successful surge into space.

Quantity & Quality. The U.S. got off to a sluggish start in the race for space. It was the Soviet Union, using a giant rocket developed for military purposes, that opened the space age on Oct. 4, 1957 with Sputnik I. With the doomed dog Laika, the U.S.S.R. put the first animal into orbit. The Soviets scored the first hit on the moon, took the first photograph of the moon's far side. The U.S. still can not match the weight-lifting capacity of Russia's satellite booster.

But U.S. satellites have long since made up in quantity and quality what they lacked, until Midas II, in size. As of last week, Russia had successfully launched four earth satellites and three space probes. Against that, the U.S. has put 19 satellites into earth orbit, fired two successful deep space probes. So commonplace has U.S. space achievement become that it almost escaped public notice last week when an Aerobee-Hi rocket shot 137 miles into the air with eight ultraviolet telescopes to analyze starlight. Of ten satellites still circling the earth, nine came from the U.S.--and the information they have sent to earth has changed forever man's ideas of the universe.

Unlocking the Secret. Under the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and its administrator, Dr. T. Keith Glennan, a deceptively mild man who held out stubbornly for his policies despite heavy criticism, the U.S. has sought from the first to achieve knowledge, not political prestige, from its space efforts. The U.S. space program has three closely related aims:

P: Build research systems that will teach man about the earth's upper atmosphere and magnetic field, about cosmic rays, solar winds, solar-terrestrial relationships and the other unknowns that abound in space.

P: Create "use" systems with direct and practical effect on man and his daily life. P:Put man safely into space.

Unlocking the secrets of space began with the very earliest U.S. satellites, deftly and delicately instrumented with pin-head-small transistors, and gadgets with moving parts that were shrunk as if by a witch doctor. Explorer I, the first U.S. satellite, sent into orbit by Dr. Wernher von Braun and his expert Army rocket team, carried with it an 18-lb. instrument package. From it came data leading to the discovery of the fierce Van Allen radiation belts that rage in space.

Later satellites in the Explorer and Pioneer series went even farther in mapping and measuring space radiation--and found that it varies vastly, apparently uuuenced by huge solar flares. Pioneer IV, launched in March 1959 after five days of intense solar and auroral activity, found a Van Allen belt population ten times greater than that observed by Pioneer III during a period of solar quiet. The solar flares themselves may have a drastic effect on earth: on Feb. 10, 1959, for example, an observed sun flare was followed by magnetic storms, radio disturbances, recordhigh Arctic temperatures, and freezing rain and snow throughout much of the U.S. South. Further knowledge of such phenomena, says NASA's Dr. Homer Newell, could lead "to a distant satellite observatory to predict the arrival of a cloud of solar particles in time to light the smudge pots in Florida."

"This Is the Wonder." Even the U.S.

Vanguard I, scoffed at by Russia's Nikita Khrushchev as a "grapefruit," paid rich scientific rewards: its sensitive instruments measured the earth and discovered it is pear-shaped, with a soft. hump at the North Pole and a 50-ft. depression at the South Pole. Moreover, Vanguard reported that the earth did not bulge as much at the equator as geodicists had previously estimated; since the bulge results from the earth's spin, the discovery meant that the earth's mantle is harder than had been believed. Says NASA's Dr. John Hagen, who heads the Vanguard project: "This is the wonder of this satellite business--that a satellite's orbit can tell us something so basic about the earth we are standing on.'7 The most spectacular performance made yet by a space-research vehicle was that of Pioneer V, which last week was still sending radio data from 12 million miles away as it continued on its lonely journey toward the orbit of Venus. About 25,000 miles from earth, Pioneer V found a current of electricity (also noted by Explorer VI), carrying perhaps 5,000,000 amperes, flowing around the planet. Farther out, Pioneer V's magnetometers showed that the earth's magnetic field terminates at about 56,000 miles--almost twice as far as had been calculated. 'There is a theory," says a scientist at Space Technology Laboratories in Los Angeles, "that the solar wind hits the field boundary in puffs, and not continuously. When the puff hits, there is an inelastic collision--the solar particles stop and stay." This is something like being hit in the face with cotton candy; it doesn't bounce off. And it would explain the magnetic boundary being farther out than expected.

Still farther out, Pioneer V reported a weak magnetic field that apparently has nothing to do with earth. What causes it? Perhaps a ring current in the sun's corona? Or the field of the galaxy itself? The mystery is one that fascinates space scientists.

Cloud Camera. However much such way-out wonders may entrance the men who are making space science their life, and however deeply the research vehicles may probe into the bade but dreadfully complex mysteries of the solar system, they are hardly calculated to set the world's nonscientific citizens to dancing in the streets. Still, there is one U.S. research satellite--which is also a "use" vehicle--whose function can excite scientist and layman alike: it is Tiros I, the weather-observing spacecraft launched in April of this year.

_Since then, Tiros has taken and transmitted back to earth thousands of photographs of the cloud formations that help make the world's weather. Its TV camera is still working, and indeed it is almost too successful: U.S. meteorologists have been inundated by information about cloud patterns never before available to them, and it may take them years to analyze the findings. There was, for instance, a gigantic cyclonic formation off Hawaii, 2,000 miles across, a phenomenon never before observed. When the real meaning of such patterns is analyzed and applied to weather forecasting and perhaps weather control, the impact can be not only of immense importance to military forces but of consuming interest to all the world's flying, farming, fun-seeking peoples.

The "Use" Systems. The basic research phase of the U.S. space program is well along, and the "use" systems are just now beginning to come breathtakingly into their own. Midas II is the forerunner of a system whose functional value as a deterrent against war is obvious. The Navy's Transit I-B is the exciting prototype for a system that will give the U.S. an all-weather navigational accuracy unmatched in human history. Developed by a pair of young Johns Hopkins scientists who studied the radio Doppler effects of Russia's Sputnik I and applied them to practical purposes, the Transit system is scheduled to have four satellites in orbit by 1962. They should be able to give every spot on earth a navigational fix, accurate to the quarter mile, every 90 minutes. Any ship with a whip antenna, a low-cost computer and a receiver will profit from Transit -- and that includes missile-bearing submarines, to which navigational accuracy is utterly vital for finding their targets.

Scheduled to take its place within three or four years as Midas' sophisticated sister system is Samos (which, although NASA officials deny that it was named for anything in particular, might easily stand for Satellite and Missile Observation System). Planned as a true "eye in the sky," Samos will carry long-range, wide-angle cameras capable of photographing in detail the entire earth's surface and trans mitting the results to receiving stations.

The Flower Bed. A common saying among scientists is that if a science is free of controversy, it is a dead science. On that basis, the U.S. Air Force's Discoverer program is bubbling with life. Discoverer is expensive (just under $100 million this year), and it has thus far notably failed in achieving what has been billed as its great objective: recovering a re-entry capsule.

But as it is being developed at Space Technology Laboratory, Discoverer is basic to U.S. space doctrine. That doctrine insists on the importance of gaining "capability in space." Space, the theory goes, is a new medium that man must learn to negotiate, just as he once learned to travel on water. A satellite that merely goes round the earth is like a raft floating helplessly down a river. Only when primitive men learned to guide their rafts with sails or paddles did they achieve "capability" on water. Spacecraft must accomplish equivalent guidance before space navigation is a reality. Discoverer, manufactured by the Lockheed Aircraft Corp., is a major U.S. system for achieving the assorted techniques called "capability."

Discoverer is an ambitious craft. It car ries in it a complicated guidance system that watches the horizon with infra-red eyes and shoots high-pressure gas through a series of jets to keep the rocket horizontal in respect to the ground below. When a Discoverer -- and there have been eleven fired so far -- has circled the earth 17 times on a polar orbit, it passes over Kodiak, Alaska, where a radio control station sends an order that sets the guidance system on a new track, tilting it 60DEG from the horizontal. An electric impulse fires explosive bolts to kick off a re-entry capsule, a retrorocket slows the capsule's speed, a drag parachute pops out, a radio beacon shrills signals, and aluminum chaff is released to show on the radar screens of the recovery aircraft and ships waiting anxiously below. All this must be accomplished on a rigid time schedule with millisecond accuracy if the Discoverer is to be successfully recovered.

So far it has not been -- a fact that fails to bother its sponsors. Says an Air Force officer involved in the program: "With the Discoverer, we sort of rigged our own public relations trap, because recovery was the last item on our laundry list of objectives. But Discoverer is really the test bed from which an awful lot of earth satellite systems will flower.''

They have already begun to flower. Midas profited from the "capability" lessons taught by Discoverer. Samos will certainly profit. And so will some of the most elegant of the other systems now being developed.

Moon Orbiters. Preparations for one of those systems are under full steam at the Space Technology Laboratory, which will have two tries next fall at putting a satellite in orbit around the moon. Boosted away from earth by an Atlas missile and two smaller upper-stage rockets, the moon satellite will weigh 350-400 Ibs. It will be spin-stabilized by ten small rockets and will get electric power for its instruments and controls from four paddle-wheels covered with 8,800 solar cells. All this has become standard U.S. practice. What is novel about the moon orbiter is a restartable engine technique for on-course guidance.

To have a chance of going into orbit around the moon, a space vehicle must make its approach at just the right speed and angle. To chivy itself into this ideal situation, the S.T.L. moon orbiter will have two engines--one firing forward and the other backward. The backward-pointing engine will have four tubes, each with two explosive valves, permitting it to be started and stopped four times by signal. The forward-pointing machine will have two tubes, giving it two starts and stops. Ground-controlled alternate firings of the forward and rearward engines are calculated to keep the orbiters on the right course, ease them into moon orbit at a speed of 5.000 ft. per sec. If the first shot works. S.T.L. may use its second or biter for a long-range crack at Venus which will be in a fairly good position next January.

Other-World Mission. Operated for NASA by Caltech, Pasadena's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which has been in on the U.S. space game from its inception, has franchise described by its director, brilliant, balding Dr. William Pickering, in otherworld terms: "Our mission is the exploration of the moon, the planets anc interplanetary space." In determined pursuit of that mission, Pickering's J.P.L. is working toward a series of space shots, currently planned at five, known as the Ranger series and scheduled to begin in null

Boosted by Atlas missiles. Ranger's second stage will be an Agena-B rocket on top of which will sit what J.P.L. calls an "all-purpose bus." It looks a little like a squat oil well derrick hung with antennae, solar-cell paddles and other odd-looking gadgets. Inside is a shrewd little electronic brain and a gas-jet attitude-control system based on the space capability of the Discoverer series. The most interesting Ranger shots, those intended to land instruments on the moon, will also have one-start hydrazine engines for course correction.

During the launch, the bus will be shrouded to protect its fragile structure from air blast, but as soon as it is safely in space, the shrouding will come off. The bus will separate from the second-stage rocket, and its brain, which contains a preset program of the maneuvers that the bus must perform during flight, will go into action. Its first command in effect will tell the gas jets: "Turn this bus until its two solar panels see the sun equally. Then keep it that way."

When the gas jets obey, the long axis of the bus will be pointing properly at the sun. and the brain will tell the jets to roll the bus around that axis until its dish antenna is pointing at the earth, sending reports and intently listening for orders. In twelve to 17 hours, the first command will arrive. It will tell the brain to make the gas jets tumble the bus into a new and carefully calculated attitude. Then the bus, its course corrected for a collision with the moon, will turn again to look at the sun and point its antenna backwards at the earth.

Soft Moon Impact. During its last hour of falling toward the moon, the bus will turn its bottom downward. A gamma ray spectrometer will go into action, reporting to earth the kind of radioactivity on the moon's surface and giving some idea of its material. A TV camera will take pictures every twelve seconds and transmit them to the earth. At about 100.000 ft. above the moon's surface, an electronic altimeter will tell a 300-lb. survival package (because it is part of the Ranger system, the package inevitably has come to be known as "Tonto") to separate from the rest of the bus. The survival package, slowed by a solid-propellant retrorocket, should land on the moon at something like 70 m.p.h. This is the purpose of the voyage: to set a package of instruments on the moon without too much of a jolt.

J.P.L.'s philosophy about its mission to explore the solar system holds that new means and methods are called for. Most space studies so far, says Dr. Alfred Hibbs, chief of J.P.L.'s Division of Space Sciences, have been done by instruments (Geiger counters, photocells, etc.) that were already highly developed for use in balloons and sounding rockets to study cosmic rays and other denizens of nearby space. They work fine as far as they go, but they cannot analyze the surface of the moon, proving that it is made of something other than green cheese. This and other novel lunar problems will require novel instruments.

One such instrument under advanced development is a seismometer to measure moonquakes. Ordinary seismometers are notoriously ponderous and delicate instruments, but at Caltech and Columbia's Lament Laboratory, moon seismometers have been developed that weigh only a few pounds and can be dropped from 2,000 ft. onto an airport runway and still work properly. The final design to be landed on the moon is not settled, but it will essentially be a three-or four-pound weight suspended on springs in such a way that slight motion of the lunar surface on which the instrument rests will make the weight move in respect to its housing. This will create a faint electric current, just as a telephone transmitter does when sound waves hit it. Amplified and sent back to earth, the vibrations (if any) will tell seismologists much about the moon's crust, and perhaps whether it has a dense core like the earth's. They may even tell about meteors slamming down hard on the moon's airless surface.

Other instruments to study the moon are being planned. Some of them may shoot neutrons or other radiation at moon material to see how it reacts. These instruments will be helped by the moon's vacuum, which is better than the best in earthside laboratories. Other instruments will be hampered by vacuum. Bearings cannot be lubricated in the usual way, and their dry, vacuum-soaked parts may freeze together. But J.P.L. scientists and their collaborators hope to land on the moon a small, tough laboratory that will sample moon material, perhaps by drilling a hole and blowing the dust into a collector, and analyze it chemically. Some instrument packages will peer around with television eyes, transmitting grim moonscapes to the earth. Many of these instruments will work on Mars too, but for studying Venus, which has a dense, dark atmosphere probably churned by violent winds, a special design will be necessary.

Close-Dps of Mars. As they zestfully look to the future of their new science, U.S. spacemen boil with ideas that would have seemed inane or insane only a few-years ago. Some projects have already been instrumented and are waiting only for the rockets required to carry them into space. Others are well along on the drawing boards--and still others remain as the fascinating dreams that may become tomorrow's reality.

State University of Iowa's James Van Allen (TIME Cover, May 4, 1959) has ready an instrument package with detectors capable of measuring radiation particles down to near-zero energy: "This will enable us to look into the region of trapped radiation, which is the most poorly known and has not even been considered before in an exploratory way. We could come up with some good measurements on these particles, which may be the most important of all to geophysics." Other scientists talk of sending a probe into the sun's mysterious corona.

A group of scientists at Massachusetts Institute of Technology has worked out a Mars probe in such detail that it fills 800 pages. They consider it entirely practical to coast an instrumented probe around Mars and take close-up pictures to solve the famed puzzle of the Martian "canals" and settle for all time the argument about whether or not there is life on the planet.

Some scientists talk hopefully about Venus--which presents much greater problems. A probe trying to take close-ups of Venus will see little more than is visible with telescopes from the earth: a featureless, faintly yellow cloud deck. A probe could probably find out whether Venus has a magnetic field, and this would explain something about the planet's interior. Some sort of radar might roughly map the surface under the cloud deck. But to get a real look at it would require at least a landing by an instrument package --which would be a feat of extraordinary difficulty. The Venusian atmosphere is apparently so thick and laden with dust or liquid droplets that the surface, which may itself be a deep ocean of some liquid other than water, is entirely dark. Since Venus is closer to the sun than the earth, its surface is probably much hotter than earth's tropics. Violent storms are almost certain to rage in the atmosphere. It takes a hardy scientist even to think of landing an instrument package on this hostile ground--but many do.

For the U.S. Navy, space holds the answer to many a practical problem. The Navy is studying a communications satellite that could relay messages to a submarine submerged in any of the earth's oceans. The Navy is developing its own weather-reporting rockets, which it hopes can be fired from relatively small shipboard mounts and will soar up to 1,000 miles to take weather surveys for 3.000 miles around.

And Finally: Man. But always, and inexorably, all talk about space must arrive at one key question: when will man himself move into the skies beyond the sky? In the U.S., most of the basic engineering for a man-carrying spacecraft has been done--at least on paper. But humans cannot be miniaturized like instruments, and to get a man into space and keep him there safely and in reasonable comfort will require a rocket booster beyond anything the U.S. now has. The problems of booster capacity and human space travel therefore become inextricably entwined--and it is no coincidence that, by direct order of President Eisenhower, work on developing the eight-engined Saturn booster and on the man-into-space Project Mercury share the highest priorities in the U.S. space effort.

Many U.S. scientists believe that there is too much emphasis on getting a man into space at the earliest possible moment. The huge expenditures now being poured into Mercury and Saturn could, they argue, be better used for the near future on instrumented vehicles. Says Iowa's Van Allen: "It is still much more effective to build instruments to make scientific observations than it is to support and maintain a man comfortably and helpfully in a spacecraft."

But even the dissidents agree that the day is not too far off when man will have a valid function in space. As instrumented spacecraft get more and more sophisticated, it becomes more and more difficult to transmit, record, digest and interpret their food of raw data. The best solution at present is to put small computers in the spacecraft. One kind, called a "Tele-bit," translates the data from the instruments into figures that are sufficiently simple to send over the transmitter and can go directly into a big ground computer. But when spacecraft begin to work at such distances as Mars, even this sort of wizardry becomes cumbersome. Frorn as far away as Mars, it requires a giant transmitter to send back one yes or no answer per second to a question. Explains Van Allen: "Instead of sending a yes answer in a second, you may have to stretch it out over a minute if the distance and noise level are great enough. It's almost like talking in a noisy room. If you want to make yourself heard, you're much better off trying to speak slowly than rapidly."

Thus, if an instrument-packed spacecraft were to land softly on Mars to observe Martian weather, soil, vegetation and earth tremors, the information that it would gather might be bottlenecked forever by its slow-acting transmitter. Then, says Van Allen, will be the time "when it will be more efficient to send up a man or a party of men to make observations, digest them and transmit back what is roughly equivalent to a monograph on the subject." Only half facetiously. Van Allen has one more idea about the advan tages of men over instruments in space: "There are many more subtle things that a man could report, such as 'Gee whiz, I have a terrible headache' or 'I have just vomited all over the cabin.' "

Since the first rockets poked into space, humans have come to realize what a small place they live in. The earth's atmosphere is an insignificant film, thinner in proportion than the skin of an apple, but it is opaque to most kinds of information-bearing radiation, so most of the realities of the universe remain mysteries to man. Space science gives humans a chance to come out from under the atmosphere to see what the universe is really like.

And where will this inquiry lead? Space scientists consider the question rather ridiculous. No one, they say, could have foreseen what would happen when 16th century astronomers looked out at the solar system and decided that the sun does not revolve around the earth. But out of that bold assault on old and in correct ideas grew the modern science that has enabled man to outgrow his planet. In the past three years, man's knowledge of his universe has increased more than in the centuries between Galileo and Sputnik I. What tomorrow may hold overwhelms the imagination.

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