The Practical Spacemen

Data on space flight is a valuable byproduct of the billions of dollars the government is pouring into its military missile program. A successful intercontinental ballistic missile, for example, will be a close cousin of a space vehicle, since it will spend much of its flight time in space and would need only 9% more energy to become an earth satellite.

Last week some 500 scientists, encouraged by this growing fund of information, gathered in San Diego at a symposium held by the Air Force and Convair Division of General Dynamics Corp. to talk in down-to-earth terms about the practical problems of converting space theory into space hardware. Much of the conference was classified, but two projects, openly described, show how science is simulating space conditions on earth.

One project centers around the old problem of reentry, i.e., how to keep a space vehicle (or missile) from burning up due to friction when it hits the relatively dense atmosphere of the earth at 20,000 m.p.h. To study this friction in the laboratory, Dr. Gabriel M. Giannini, a close friend of the late Atomic Physicist Enrico Fermi, is building a device called a "plasma jet." A stream of inert gas such as argon is passed through a high intensity electric discharge. The resulting heat forces a jet of highly ionized gas out a small hole at enormous speed and temperature (even a small jet will quickly chew through a steel plate). Since the jet is largely ionized (electrically charged) particles, it can be accelerated by electric and magnetic fields and forced through a flaring nozzle up to ten to 15 times the speed of sound, the velocity of missiles and space vehicles.

To create a chunk of space on earth, California's Litton Industries Inc. has developed a vacuum chamber big enough to hold a man. The device can simulate conditions some 200 miles above the earth, where air molecules wander around as individual particles, not as a gas. Wearing a space suit, a scientist eventually will enter the vacuum and experiment with such puzzling problems as the behavior of lubricants in space, and the reaction of a model satellite, minus a protective cushion of air, to sunlight. X rays and ultraviolet rays beamed in through portholes in the chamber.

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