Science: New Look at the Cape

All week Cape Kennedy lived with tension as its spacemen worked toward the countdown of Gemini-Titan 3, the long-awaited two-man orbital flight that would take U.S. astronauts John Young and Gus Grissom past a significant milestone in their reach for the moon. Then came the news from Russia—a neatly timed reminder of the Soviets' continuing lead in the race to set man free from the confines of his own world.

Gloom descended over the Cape. The sound of disappointment ranged from profanity to polite and frustrated Pollyannity. But if all of Kennedy's arcane hardware, and all its dedicated scientists, seemed suddenly to have been eclipsed, U.S. missilemen did not stoop to hide either their present discouragement or their future plans. At Russia's spaceport near Baikonur, Kazakhstan, all operations are covered with cautious secrecy; even newsmen rarely get near the place. Space shots are never announced until they are aloft and functioning well. Failures are muffled behind a wall of security. The Cape, by contrast, is open, frank and plainly visible.

Overgrown Igloos. If there was any immediate benefit from the Russian stroll in space, it was the promise that in its urge to catch up, Congress would almost surely loosen the purse strings that have been tightening on the U.S. astronautical budget. And the availability of money has always been a measure of the Cape's success. After a disheartening failure, the answer has usually been: Tear down the old gantry. Toss out the old design. Build a new rocket. Hang the expense. Get the job done.

The result is a landscape of the future, so endlessly and rapidly renewing itself that it is almost beyond the capacity of ordinary mortals to keep up. For an expenditure that has so far soared to $1.75 billion, the U.S. has covered the sandy bulge of the waist of Florida with an architectural fantasy that began with the now familiar pattern of old Cape Kennedy proper: the bending, baking shoreline, the line of steel launching towers covered with red, rustproofing paint, the overgrown concrete igloos, blastproof behind 2-ft.-thick steel doors.

And over Cape Kennedy's northwest shoulder, a new landscape is taking shape. Its principal feature is the tall, white, broad-hipped barn for rocket assembly (see color pages); its major contribution is the application of U.S. assembly-line genius on a gargantuan scale.

Converted Germans. All the rapid changes that are commonplace on the Cape only reflect the rapid growth of U.S. missilery. In the beginning, out among the mosquitoes and the palmettos, there were only some captured German rockets and such converted German scientists as Wernher von Braun and Kurt Debus. Of those paleolithic days, few relics remain at the Cape except a blue-painted, Maltese-crossed V-l buzz bomb, and Debus, now NASA's Kennedy Space Center director. In 1961, Mercury Astronauts Shepard, Grissom, Glenn, Carpenter, Schirra and Cooper began blasting off. After his 22 orbits, Cooper splashed down in the Pacific nearly two years ago, on May 16, 1963—and even the Mercury program is now ancient history. The only landmarks left for the busloads of tourists who roll through the spaceport is a memorial Mercury-type gantry and a stainless-steel monument shaped like the symbol for the planet Mercury ( §) with a "7" in the loop. It stands at the entrance to Pad 14 where Glenn & Co. embarked.