MAN IN SPACE

"Vsego khoroshego," a voice whispered briefly. "Good luck." A hatch banged shut, and the weirdly garbed figure was alone in the tiny cabin, strapped tightly to a padded, sculptured couch. A low roar filtered through his bulbous plastic helmet; he tensed involuntarily as the couch began to vibrate violently. Seconds later, he was moving--at first sluggishly, then with breathtaking speed. For three taut hours, as sweating scientists clustered around tracking screens and feverishly processed telemetry data, Radio Moscow disinterestedly played ballet music. Then a sudden silence and the curt, dramatic announcement: "The Soviet Union has successfully placed a satellite into orbit around the earth. There is a man aboard."

It could happen tomorrow. Soviet space experts offered mild demurrers (said one: "We need more experimental work to give us complete assurance of a safe return''), but few of the world's scientists doubted last week that man at last was nearly ready to launch himself boldly and bodily into space. When, a fortnight ago, the U.S.S.R.'s 10,143-lb. "flying zoo" floated gently to a landing before the startled eyes of peasants on a collective farm northeast of the Caspian Sea, Russia demonstrated unquestionably that it has mastered the techniques necessary to rocket a man into orbit around the earth and bring him back alive.

Most scientists feel that the Soviet Union will be the first to place a human in orbit: the U.S.'s Project Mercury, recovering from an embarrassingly slow start, is not far behind, but it will be at least nine months before a U.S. astronaut will enter orbit. "We have," mused one U.S. space expert, "a second-class nag in a first-class horse race." The Soviet achievement should give Russia an exploitable propaganda advantage. But what else, in terms of the basic science that may well decide man's future, will it mean? And what lies beyond mere orbiting in man's adventure into space?

By scientific standards, the time differential between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. is inconsequential. Spectacular as manned satellites will be, they are not an end in themselves. Says one U.S. technician: "Space is a passageway--not a destination." With orbital flight just around the corner, scientists are already looking for new places for man to go, new things to do, and new problems that might confront him when he breaks completely free from Planet Earth to seek his destiny in the uncharted, perpetual night of outer space.

In Earth Orbit

In one, major scientific sense, the orbital flight program seems almost self-defeating. Both Russia and the U.S. insist that they will not attempt to place a man in orbit until they can reasonably guarantee his safe return to earth. But when problems of thrust, guidance, artificial environment, communications, reentry and recovery have been sufficiently solved to permit this assurance, the program already will have proved its point: that man can survive in a satellite. Thus, to many scientists, the stunt of actually putting a man in orbit then seems scarcely worth the effort, risk and financial burden.

By the time the first U.S. astronaut starts his 4 1/2-hour trip around the earth, Project Mercury will have cost at least $350 million. Explains Mercury's Robert R. Gilruth: "We had to go with the boosters we had, built around the Atlas system. So everything had to be miniaturized, even the heat shield. We couldn't use off-the-shelf equipment. Miniaturization takes time and money." Design of a special lightweight oxygen bottle, for instance, took 18 weeks, cost more than $20,000. The Russians, whose rockets generate an estimated 800,000 Ibs. of thrust (v. Atlas' 360,000 Ibs.), had few weight restrictions, grabbed a huge advantage in the race to place a man in orbit. But enforced early miniaturization may pay off handsomely for the U.S. in exploration of deep space, when the huge distances involved (240,000 miles to the moon, 42 million miles to Mars) will create a more critical relationship between thrust and payload weight.

The first spaceman will be anything but a free soul. Swathed like a mummy in a cumbersome, confining space suit and strapped firmly to a couch, he will be able to perform only the simplest of manual tasks during his tour around the earth. His real job: to act as a human guinea pig for astrophysiologists, supply information on human behavior in the alien environment of space. Says Martin Co.'s Robert Demoret: "The important thing is to determine whether he can function effective, ly once he is up there. And that can only be done with any certainty by putting him out in space." The safe return of Russian Space Mutts Strelka and Belka apparently ensures that man will suffer no physiological ill effects in near space --but the psychophysiological impact of zero gravity and extreme isolation has yet to be tested on a human being under actual space conditions. Only minimum shielding against cosmic radiation will be needed on manned earth satellites; their low orbits (125 miles for the U.S.'s Mercury, 200 miles for the U.S.S.R.) will keep them at least 500 miles below the belt of dangerous radiation particles that girdles the earth.

New Goals, New Problems

The scientist's sternest task is to admit the inevitable, and in space travel the unhappy inevitable may be that man can never journey "safely" to the moon and planets. But scientists are making plans just the same. The huge, multistage rocket with which Russia launched its Dognik could boost a 600-lb. capsule into orbit around the moon, and the size of the capsule can be increased by 100 Ibs. for each additional 20,000 Ibs. of thrust that Soviet scientists can coax from the boost er. Says a U.S. engineer: "The Russians probably could soft-land an instrument package on the moon within six months, and they should be able to make a manned landing within 18 months." The U.S. is hard at work on development of big new chemical boosters such as Saturn (1,500,000 Ibs. of thrust), plans to flight-test cheaper, deep-space electrical propulsion systems in 1962, and hopes to make a manned moon orbit in 1963. But the problems of a round trip across 480,000 miles of space are fantastic. The greatest hazard is cosmic radiation. The U.S.'s interplanetary probe, Pioneer V, reported a sinister, unpredictable enemy lurking in space: wide-ranging "storms" of deadly proton particles, spewed forth by the sun, of such energy (up to 20 billion electron volts per particle) that they will easily penetrate the thickest protective shield.

In some areas the picture is encouraging. Space communications are more than adequate: the U.S. maintained direct, constant contact with Pioneer V until the 70,000 m.p.h. probe was 22.5 million miles from earth. And both Russia and the U.S. have the technological capability to guide a rocket on an interplanetary mission. Says Martin's Demoret: "Guidance is an engineering problem, and we don't think it's a great one at all. We already can do the job. Whether we go to the moon, to Mars or to Venus, we'll be able to guide space vehicles accurately enough."

Can vehicles be returned to earth? Russia's recovery of its massive, animal-carrying satellite and the U.S.'s twin successes with Discoverer capsules proved that present re-entry systems work--sometimes. But manned space flight requires complete re-entry reliability, something neither Russia nor the U.S. can claim. "All we can do now is get capsules down with parachutes," says one U.S. scientist. "Ideally, we will want to land the full vehicle and its occupants, re-use the vehicle for other flights." Probable method: orbital reentry. Rather than plunge directly into earth's atmosphere and risk crushing G forces or a fiery disintegration from friction, a spaceship would ease into a wide orbit around the earth, cut its speed with retrorockets, and circle slowly to a landing. Orbital reentry also would permit the space pilot to pick out a precise landing point.

This is the landing system that will be employed by Dyna-Soar, the Air Force's $700 million, Boeing-built, maneuverable space vehicle, scheduled for first flight tests about 1964. Designed to be fired into orbit atop a Titan missile, Dyna-Soar is the closest thing to a spaceship in development now in the U.S. The dog capsule appears to put Russia well ahead of the U.S. in spaceship manufacture; its massive weight indicates that the passenger cabin probably will be large enough to support a crew of three men for a sustained period of flight.

At the International Astronautical Congress last month in Stockholm, U.S. Missileman Wernher von Braun unveiled de tailed drawings of spaceships designed for mating to the U.S.'s Saturn booster. Among them: a three-man "space station" (see diagram) with an individually sealed sleeping compartment, an emergency escape capsule, workroom, pantry, and environmental control machinery capable of maintaining an artificial earth atmosphere for months at a time. A shorter, 15,000-Ib. version of the station could be lifted by Saturn into circumlunar trajectory.

The most uncomfortable slowdown in the U.S. man-in-space program could be called the "spacesuit sag." Explains Martin's Demoret disgustedly: "We don't even have an adequate space pressure suit yet. These Buck Rogers things make good pictures, but all a man can do in one is sit and twiddle knobs. It takes him a good 30 seconds just to lift his hand from his knee to the top of his head, and if he falls down, he can't get up." Today's bulky pressure suits are designed for short-haul earth orbiting; they lack--among other things--latrine facilities for sustained periods of flight. Says Demoret: "What we eventually hope to do is send a man out into space in his street clothes. To do this, we need a flexible space suit, like zipper-front coveralls, which he can pop into quickly in an emergency. It takes three people to dress today's astronaut."

Why Go?

Only three years ago, before the launching of Sputnik I, manned exploration of space was a subject fit for discussion primarily in science-fiction pulps. Now, despite risks, problems, pitfalls, and the end possibility of abject failure, man-in-space programs have succeeded in attracting the world's ablest scientific brains and corralling a healthy slice of the economic resources of the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. What does man hope to learn by boosting himself into space? Says a U.S. scientist: "We haven't the foggiest notion. We don't know what traveling through space will teach us about the earth's environment, and there is no clearly justifiable military role for man in space. But we do know that whatever we could learn from sending instruments up, we can learn more, faster, by sending a man up too." There are no clear technological advantages to be gained by placing a man in orbit around the earth. It is strictly an experiment in engineering. But there are distinct political and prestige benefits. And, says British Astronomer Bernard Lovell: "When it comes to getting a man to the moon or the planets, the scientific situation is completely different. At that point, we can justify having our instrumentation under direct human control. With a man on the moon or the planets, there is every possibility of enriching our knowledge of the process of creation." Last week the avenue to space was open, and by courageously striding up it, man could expect at the very least to reprove a simple, historical truism: yesterday's twaddle is tomorrow's technology.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.