SPACE: A Lap in the Race

Breathless scientist, to returning spaceman: Is there any life on Mars?

Spaceman: Well, there's a little on Saturday night, but it's awfully dead the rest of the week.

That loping shaggy dog was good for a laugh on both sides of the Potomac last week, and the laugh was not so much the measure of a joke as a symbol of Washington's high spirits about U.S. progress in the space race. In one spectacular month the U.S. has lapped the Russians—not with any single spectacular display such as Sputnik or the moon shots, but with a succession of scientifically important launchings that are building a solid stairway to the stars. Said a top Government space scientist: "The Soviets have been first with spectacular shots—we can't take that away from them. But we are first by as wide a margin in scientific shots. With our large number of small satellites we have amassed a real lead in space."

¶ The 94.8-lb., paddle-wheeled planetoid Pioneer V, launched March 11, is on its way around the sun in an orbit between Earth and Venus, sending back information on radiation, temperature, micrometeorites and magnetic fields on its small, five-watt transmitter.

¶ The 270-lb. Tiros I eye-in-the-sky satellite (TIME, April 11) is clocking 14 rotations of the earth a day, has already transmitted 6,000 photographs of all parts of the globe, including Russia and China.

¶ Last week the U.S. launched a 265-lb., candy-striped medicine ball called Transit IB, forerunner of a series of U.S. Navy satellites that by 1962 will provide more exact navigational guidance for ships and planes (see SCIENCE). And even the long-jinxed Air Force Discoverer program got off a perfect launching of Discoverer XI into polar orbit, though airmen once again failed to recover the data capsule that the satellite ejected.

Not since last October, when they launched the 4,037-lb. Lunik III, have the Soviets orbited a satellite. A fortnight ago Sputnik III tumbled back into Earth's atmosphere and burned up, so the box score on satellites still transmitting stood at U.S. six, U.S.S.R. zero. It was doubtful that, in the Kremlin, anybody was telling any new jokes about space.