Leap Toward the Moon

One after another last week, a flock of Cape Canaveral's biggest birds climbed above their own flaming tails and soared toward space. Both by their failures and by their successes they carried U.S. spacemen closer to their most urgent target: the far-off moon.

Success & Statistics. Saturn, the largest of U.S. missiles now ready for flight, and the one officially designated to take U.S. astronauts on their first flight as far out as the moon, passed its second test in a row with a perfect score. Its cluster of eight liquid-fuel engines lifted the 20-story, 927,000-lb. missile off the launch pad in a spectacular display of steam and ear-shattering sound. And since the test was concerned only with Saturn's first-stage booster, scientists were free to use the dummy upper stages for an ingenious experiment. Stored in Saturn's snout as ballast were 23,000 gal. of water weighing 95 tons. When the rocket neared the peak of its trajectory, seconds after its engines cut out, it was blown to bits on radio command. Some 65 miles above the Atlantic, the water released by the explosion spread into a giant, sun-splashed cloud of ice crystals. Below, on the earth's surface, a network of radars and cameras traced the course of the cloud, gathering data for weathermen.

From the blockhouses of Canaveral to remote tracking stations, spacemen were jubilant. Saturn had flown precisely according to plan, reaching a top speed of 3,750 m.p.h., curving 50 miles down range before being purposefully destroyed. From the brief flight, scientists got 602 different kinds of information radioed back to them. Said a proud program officer: "One success may be a miracle, but with two we start building statistics." In the course of eight future statistic-building tests scheduled to be finished by 1964, Saturn will acquire a live second stage, which will be powered by a cluster of six 15,000-lb.-thrust engines nourished by liquid hydrogen and oxygen. Scientists figure that Saturn eventually will be able to heave more than 200,000 lbs. into orbit around the earth, or send an 80,000-lb. payload to outer space. This is far more weight than can be put aloft by any other U.S. missile--more than enough to send three astronauts around the moon and back, far more than the missile that sent Soviet Cosmonaut Gherman Titov around the globe 17 times.

Failure & Proof. Even though Saturn's successful test last week demonstrated that U.S. missiles pack increasing power, it remained for another missile to prove that Cape Canaveral's marksmen are getting sharper, too. Ranger IV rose perfectly from its pad, engines screaming as it highballed toward its lunar landing. Almost 64 hours later, Ranger hit the far side of the moon, but its flight was far from an unqualified success. Soon after takeoff, something went wrong with the computer that was supposed to control the missile's many instruments and trans mit the data back to earth. As a result, the spacecraft's velocity could not be slowed before it hit the moon. The scientists got no television pictures of the moon as planned; they could count no ' meteorites nor could their carefully packed moonquake meter land in working order. Discouraged, one National Aeronautics and Space Administration official lamented: "All we've got is an idiot with a radio signal." But idiot or not, for the first time, the U.S. had actually hit the moon with a missile--a missile that destroyed itself and its cargo in a 6,000-m.p.h. impact.

All week the Canaveral record keepers were busy tracking the achievements and disappointments of U.S. missilery. After 13 successful launches in a row, one of the Army's solid-fuel, tactical Pershing missiles had to be destroyed seconds after takeoff. After seven straight successes, one of the Air Force's usually reliable Minutemen also had to be blown up.

Centaur, the nation's first missile to use highenergy, liquid-hydrogen fuel, flunked its first flight test when its Atlas booster shut down seconds after ignition. But by week's end, the trend toward repeated failure was reversed as the skies were peppered with missiles. A second Pershing flew properly. The first International Satellite--a joint effort by the U.S. and Great Britain--was successfully nudged into orbit by a Thor-Delta rocket to gather data on cosmic radiation. A smaller Nike-Cajun was shot 75 miles high in another ionosphere-probing experiment. The Air Force fired two satellites from Point Arguello, Calif, in secrecy-shrouded round-the-pole missions. And the Russians stayed in the space race by launching their fourth Sputnik in six weeks.

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