SPACE: A Few Seconds on Infinity

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Pad 17A at Cape Canaveral was bathed in a fluffy, gently swirling fog. Cradled in its candy-striped gantry, breathing icy puffs of liquid oxygen, was the Air Force's 88-ft. Pioneer moon-probe missile. In the blockhouse, the countdown droned on for nearly 24 hours, finally ticked through the seconds to zero.

Just after zero, the blast burst down into the undulating swamp fog; there came a cloud of fiery gold that swept smoke and flame into eddying billows. As the rocket rose roaring, 100 newsmen cheered from the observation post a mile away, and down on the nearby beaches men, women and children, camped out in tents, told each other that this was a night to remember.

Up into the black space shot Pioneer, trailing its dazzling fire, burning first one stage, then the next, then the next, shucking off, in turn, its carefully designed earth clothes. In three minutes it was gone from sight, truly free, reaching up to where no man-made thing had ever touched. And a few moments later, as if responding to the challenge, the waning moon rose out of the Atlantic to the east of the Cape.

Whoops. Pioneer's destination was the skirt of the moon's gravitational field. Only during three days of each month—and within that period, only during 18 fleeting minutes of each day—were the earth and moon in such relationship to each other that Pioneer, precisely fired and guided, would pass ahead of the moon, sweep slowly into her field and take up an orbit (see below).

As first word came of the shot's success, Project Pioneer's scientists, technicians and observers threw off the guarded reserve that they had built up over months of missile woes, were all but hysterical with joy. When Cape Canaveral's pencil-mustached Major General Donald Yates walked into a press conference, newsmen rose and applauded. In Hawthorne, Calif., at the Data Reduction Center of Ramo-Wooldridge's Space Technology Laboratories (the Air Force's top moon-probe contractor), Air Force officers and civilians whooped and pounded one another. In the Pentagon, top brass cheerfully poured out their delight in hourly pronouncements on Pioneer's progress.

The Trajectory. One by one, Pioneer's tracking stations reported in with good news. Cued by the Hawthorne Data Reduction Center, the big radiotelescope station in Manchester, England picked up Pioneer within a dozen minutes, sent tracking information clacking back into the electronic data-reducing headquarters in the Space Technology Lab. But moments later, at the third stage rocket burnout, with Pioneer at maximum velocity, Canaveral scientists quickly computed speed and altitude. Had Pioneer shot up at too vertical an angle and thus been robbed of some of its getaway speed? The computations said yes. The scientists instantly decided to fire all eight vernier rockets in the fourth stage (although these had been held in reserve to deliver only incremental power) in the hope that the speed would increase enough to keep Pioneer aimed at its target. But the added thrust only increased the speed by 160 ft. per second—not enough.

Still, the news of the deviation did not dim the achievement. The all-important fact was that the bird had plumbed the black beyond, had climbed to unheard-of heights, and what was more, was reporting its voluminous findings.