The Great Capsule Hunt

It was late in the evening when Major General Tufte Johnsen, commander of the Norwegian air force's northern command, picked up the telephone. Calling him from California was an old friend, U.S. Air Force Lieut. Colonel Charles A. Mathison. The colonel's bizarre message: Be on the lookout for a recoverable capsule likely to float down from outer space at about 0230 or 0300, Spitzbergen time. Thus last week began one of the most incredible treasure hunts in the short, incredible history of space.

Only the day before the phone call, the U.S. had launched its eighth successful satellite, Discoverer II. It blasted from its launching pad at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, its nose fitted with a 160-lb. capsule, its second stage jammed with equipment measuring the satellite's ability to stabilize itself in free flight (see SCIENCE). Significantly, the capsule was the first of its kind, a forerunner of the type that will later carry biomedical specimens and pave the way for the development of reconnaissance and man-in-space satellites.

Pinpoint. Discoverer II, cruising on its elliptical pole-to-pole course at 17,000 m.p.h. (ranging from 220 miles to 152 miles from the earth), was to have launched its capsule over the Pacific Ocean near Hawaii on its 17th orbit. A retrorocket would slow it down to force its entry into the scorching atmosphere. Then an orange parachute (lined with aluminum for radar reflection) would pop at a preset speed, drop it gently toward the water. Eight Air Force C-119 flying boxcars, trailing 15-ft. by 30-ft. nylon harnesses, were to try snagging the package before it hit the sea.

But computations, made shortly after the launching, showed that Discoverer II was orbiting faster than anticipated: 90.5 minutes for the round trip instead of 94 minutes. Quickly, scientists pinpointed the spot where the automatic ejection would occur: the area of Norway's Spitzbergen archipelago, far beyond the Arctic Circle —some 700 miles from the North Pole. Finding the capsule in Spitzbergen's icy wastes would be hard enough. Tougher still was another problem: under agreement with Soviet Russia, which operates coal mines in Spitzbergen, Norway permits no military operations in the area, keeps the archipelago strictly, delicately neutral.

Sighting. Norway's General Johnsen, nevertheless, knew just what to do. He telephoned his friend Knut Deinboll, director of the Great Norwegian Mining Co. at Longyearbyen (pop. 800). Deinboll, a former Norwegian air force flyer, had two hours to set up a search. He flashed the mining company's office at the sister village of Ny-Alesund (pop. 1,000), then set out to rouse the sleeping villagers of Longyearbyen. He organized a dozen ski patrols of two and three men each, assigned them to nearby mountain lookout positions. Soon three men rushed back from their patrol to report seeing the orange parachute drifting down from the sky. It had fallen into the mountains south of the village, not far from the Russian mining community of Barentsburg.