Television: Space Scoop

"I could see the curvature of the earth below, stretching away to the south, featureless, the way a map looks. There was no sound except a faint whistling of the air outside the cabin. It was real detached up there, I can tell you. You sort of wondered if you still had any contact with the earth."

The speaker was no TV space cadet,* but a real-life space pioneer, Test Pilot William Bridgeman, 41, describing how it felt to whish 15 miles above the earth at nearly twice the speed of sound (TIME, July 28, 1952). He was the star of Flight Toward the Stars, the first half-hour in a 13-show series called Doctors in Space and devoted to the problems of conquering space. The new show, the timeliest series of the season, came not from Madison Avenue but from the University of Houston's enterprising educational TV station KUHT. It opened last week in Chicago, Boston, San Francisco and Pittsburgh as well as Houston.

The first show, abundantly illustrated with film clips and diagrams, gave viewers the A B Cs of rocket travel. In the rest, Houston Physics Professor John Rider and Dr. Hubertus Strughold, the father of space medicine, will explore the subject with such experts as Major General Bernard Schriever, the Air Force missiles chief. Captain Iven Kincheloe, who has flown higher than any other man (24 miles up in a Bell X-2), and Krafft Ehricke, Convair rocket designer who helped develop the Atlas missile.

Eighteen months in production with the help of the Air Force's School of Aviation Medicine, the series will be seen on all of the 28 U.S. educational stations. In the spring, it will become available for noncommercial use on regular stations. Made for only $3,000 each (provided by the Educational TV and Radio Center at Ann Arbor, Mich.), the films will add up to TV's most complete survey of manned space flight—and a major scoop for educational over commercial TV.