SPACE: Lost & Unfound

SPACE Lost & Unfound As a step toward the goal of sending a man into space with a high probability of getting him back alive, the Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) set out early this year on a new venture: the Discoverer Program, to send satellites into orbit and then try to recover the payload capsules after they had made several trips around the earth. The Discoverer Program's score up to last week: launchings, seven; satellites put into orbit, five; recovery attempts, four; recoveries, none.

From a launching pad at California's Vandenberg Air Force Base last week, a 78-ft., two-stage Discoverer rocket soared skyward into a fine north-south polar orbit. The following afternoon, on its 17th orbit, if things went according to plan, a remote-control signal would eject the 310-lb. payload from Discoverer VIII's orbiting second-stage rocket, and the capsule would fall earthward, slowed by a 30-ft.-wide parachute.

Day after the launching, nine C-119 Flying Boxcars, fitted with gadgets designed to snag the parachute in midair, took off from Hawaii's Hickam Air Force Base to hover over the target area. Two Navy recovery ships patrolled the ocean below in case none of the Boxcars managed to hook the parachute. Like its predecessors, the Discoverer VIII capsule was designed to float, flash lights and beam directional radio signals to guide the search.

But the searchers detected no sign of the capsule. Sadly, they came to the bleak conclusion that the Discoverer Program's fifth recovery attempt had failed.