Pffft

It was to be a real extravaganza. No fewer than 450 newsmen were on hand at Cape Canaveral, along with a tangle of cameras, cables and vans set up for television's first "live" space shot. Marveled the U.S. Marine Corps' onlooking Astronaut Lieut. Colonel John Glenn: "They've got everything here but a camel and an elephant." The occasion: the launching, as an immediate prelude to the U.S.'s first actual man-in-space effort, of a "canned man" -- in reality, a 40-lb. apparatus billed as being electronically able to "breathe, sweat and speak."

At 11:15 a.m., after a couple of delays, the 88-ft. Mercury-Atlas rocket belched off its launching pad. Forty seconds later, the range safety officer pressed the button that destroyed the rocket, which had deviated badly from its course. In a month of U.S. flops, this was the pffft seen around the nation--and even if, as scheduled, the U.S. sent a man on a long, downrange missile ride this week, the feat would still seem puny in comparison with the achievement of the Soviet Union's Major "Gaga" Gagarin.

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