Practice Space Show

Three minutes after the Thor rocket made its predawn blastoff from Cape Canaveral, a new star flared bright yellow across the dark sky. Tiny by standard star measurements, the man-made balloon of plastic and aluminum was 135 ft. in diameter--tall as a 13-story building, and large enough to be seen by the unaided eye.

But the show was even more dramatic in the Canaveral control room, where technicians saw every detail of the balloon's brief life reported by a TV camera carried aloft by the launching rocket. The screen first showed a round metal canister containing the folded balloon as it separated from the rocket nose and sailed smoothly ahead. Then the canister split in two halves; the released balloon began to inflate, its folded segments billowing outward as 52 lbs. of powdered benzoic acid in its interior turned to gas. At first the balloon formed an irregular watermelon shape, sunlight glittering on its irregular surfaces. Then the skin tightened into a polished sphere.

Rocket and bright balloon climbed through space together, the balloon appearing to grow smaller as it forged ahead. As the pair of space travelers passed their apogee (922 miles) and fell faster and faster toward the earth, the balloon appeared to shrink to a bright speck. Tracked by the following camera, the big silver sphere hit the fringes of the atmosphere and disappeared in a puff of smoke. The show ended a few moments later when the rocket and TV camera also burned.

Only survivor was a movie camera that had photographed the same scenes, then descended safely to earth on a parachute. But for all the spectacular burnouts, the shot was not a failure. The great balloon, largest though not the heaviest man-made object ever to enter space, was intended to destroy itself without going into orbit. The shot was only a test to perfect the difficult art of inflating big balloons in vacuum. A similar attempt last winter failed when the balloon burst because of too much gas pressure (TIME, Jan. 26). Last week's success means that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration will soon try to put Echo II, its bigger and better radio wave reflector (passive communication satellite), in a high, shining orbit for the world to see and use.

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