Was There a Man in Space?

Russian space scientists last week scored a new first of sorts. They admitted that something went wrong with one of their spacecraft.

When the Russians launched their latest satellite, they described it in some detail: it was a practice spaceship, weighing five tons (a new orbiting record), and containing a cabin with the necessary fittings to keep a man alive. There was no man on board, the Russians said, only a dummy the weight of a man. As the satellite cruised around the earth, instruments would report whether conditions inside it were right for a living man. Then the cabin would be detached and brought down to burn up in the atmosphere. The Russians said they would make no attempt to land or recover the cabin.

"Alive." Since it took to space on perfect propaganda schedule before the Paris summit conference, the Russian satellite provoked nervous curiosity in Washington that it might be more than it seemed. Washington State's well-informed Democratic Senator Henry M. ("Scoop") Jackson, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, made headlines by announcing: "There is growing reason to suspect that a man may be sitting in the Soviet 'spaceship', circling the globe at this very minute, and that the Soviets may very shortly attempt to return this man--alive--to earth." Major General John B. Medaris, the U.S. Army's former missile chief, suspected the same thing. The Russians are "not so stupid," he guessed, as to put up a man-carrying satellite with no man in it. Neither Jackson nor Medaris gave evidence to back their hunches, but students at Nasson College in Springvale, Me. listened to the satellite's radio and claimed to hear a jumbled voice "like Donald Duck with a sore throat." A dissenting opinion came from Brigadier General Don Flickinger, Air Force chief of bioastronautics. Flickinger taught that the 10,000-lb. spaceship might be capable of carrying a two-man crew, but he did not believe it was actually carrying a living man. The Russians, he said, have become quite sensitive about being called callous and they would not send a man into space without a good chance of getting him back.

U.S. tracking stations and amateur moon-watch teams followed the spaceship, which was clearly visible at dawn and dusk. Its three radio transmitters made it easy to track electronically. Four days after the launching, a moon-watch team at Sacramento, Calif, reported that the spaceship had apparently separated into three parts. Soon Air Force and Smithsonian trackers at Cambridge, Mass. concluded that the spacecraft had thrown off small parts, perhaps seven in all, and was on a new and higher orbit whose apogee (high point) had risen from 208.6 miles to 418.5 miles above the earth.

Something must have gone wrong. The way to bring a satellite, manned or unmanned, down to the atmosphere is to fire a forward-pointing retrorocket to reduce its speed. If this is done properly, the satellite will curve down into the denser air, where it will be slowed further by friction. If the retrorocket is fired in the wrong direction, it will speed the satellite up and put it on an orbit with a higher apogee. The U.S. Air Force Discoverer satellite program has suffered from just such aiming errors.

"An Order Was Sent." While U.S. spacemen were guessing, an official announcement came from Moscow. "An order was sent to the ship," it said, "to switch on its braking device to deflect the ship down from its orbit and detach its pressurized cabin. However, as a result of a fault in the spaceship's orientation system, the direction of the retrorocket's blast deviated from that planned. As a result, the speed of the spaceship, instead of being reduced, increased slightly, and the ship slipped into a new elliptical orbit, lying almost in the same plane but having a much higher apogee." The Russians also explained that while most of the spaceship's instruments had reported faithfully, an attempt to rebroadcast voice signals sent up from the ground had produced only jumbled sounds.

No tangible evidence has been presented that the Soviet's pre-summit spacecraft actually contained a live man. If it did, he was good and dead.

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