National Affairs: THE RITE OF SPACE

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Poking his wobbly way through the scrub, stubble and sand of Florida's Cape Canaveral comes a creature from the ages. The armadillo, his precision-made armor plate intermeshing fluidly, moseys along, oblivious of time. Skittering across his path is another anachronism, the beady-eyed, evil-looking horned lizard, uglier than the sum of the menacing spikes that jut from his body. On trundles the armadillo, scarcely noticing a wide hole in the ground. From the hole run two telephone lines; a few feet away, they connect to a pair of phones lying in a ditch. The armadillo scratches ahead. The lizard leaps from a rock. The telephones are mute. For an instant, the desolate scene seems like the end of the world.

Not the world's end but the beginning of the future is mirrored here, for rising in that ancient, sandy patch is an orchestration of new sounds hammered out by an instrumentation unknown anywhere else in the free world. The solo tone of an old-fashioned foghorn is overcome by the shriek of liquid oxygen as it pours under high pressure through valves and pipes. Clanging chords of hammer on steel, the humming sostenuto of machinery, the blip-blip rhythms bouncing onto radar screens from a network of grotesque antennas—the counterpoint races on in time to a thousand clocks, paced by thousands of hard-hatted men, their ears attuned, their hands ready at buttons, keys, switches, knobs, cranks and valves, their eyes darting from tube to dial, their pulses shooting over the unhurried step of time. And then the fire, the roar, the chorus of triumphant cries.

THIS is the rite of space that is performed day and night at the Air Force Missile Test Center at Cape Canaveral, the point from which the first U.S. man—possibly the first man in the world —will journey to the moon and beyond. Cape Canaveral is the U.S. Spaceport of the Future, and today it is in full-dress rehearsal—a monumental, $370 million stage where, day and night, civilian and military scientists and technicians work with freshly blueprinted tools over the incredibly complex mechanisms of space travel. With each launching of an Atlas, Jupiter or Thor—though flames may consume the bird only minutes later—the men of Cape Canaveral are testing and proving everything from an idea to a pump, amassing the knowledge that will ensure the success of man's epochal flight into space as well as the reliability of space-ranging weapons of war.-

Wrapped up in Cape Canaveral's future is an organization as complex as a missile itself. It is an industrial cooperative of 15,000 acres, operated for the Air Force by Pan American World Airways and RCA. The facilities are shared by a score of missile contractors (e.g., Convair, Lockheed, General Electric), who use the testing equipment and range for development of their projects for the Army, Navy and Air Force. The man who makes it run is Air Force Major General Donald Yates (West Point '31). Headquartered at Patrick Air Force Base, 18 miles south of the Cape, onetime Meteorologist Yates, 48, juggles an armory of problems that range from interservice rivalry to housing and road-building plans—even to labor troubles (e.g., a dispute with a union on whether a missile is a "common carrier").

The Fever