Science: Space Surge

(SEE COVER) Television monitors glared eerily in the darkened U.S. Air Force command post at Sunnyvale, Calif. At a winking control console sat Lieut. Colonel Charles Glenn Mathison, commander of the 6,$4Qth Test Wing (Satellite), listening through earphones to the crackle of reports from a vast communications network. Mathison made a final check with radar tracking stations scattered around the earth. All were ready. From Cape Canaveral, Fla. came the word: "RF system ready." At T minus 10 seconds, "Moose" Mathison gave Canaveral the go-ahead: "Ready to launch." Canaveral's countdown neared its end: ". . . eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one—main stage ignited." Mathison hunched forward,. almost as though he were riding with the huge missile. Cried he: "Go, baby, go!"

At that instant last week, the U.S. launched its biggest satellite. Roaring into near perfect orbit around the earth went Midas II, weighing 5,000 Ibs. with a 3,600-lb. instrument package. But Midas was more than a mere heavyweight monster. It was alive and alert, and in its nose was its reason for being: an infra-red sensor able to detect unusual sources of heat on earth or high in the atmosphere—and thus, by spotting exhaust flames, to give the U.S. warning of hostile missiles streaking toward it from distant lands.

Last week's Midas (for Missile Defense Alarm System) was an experimental model, and its orbit was carefully planned so as not to pass over the Soviet Union. After two days, it lost radio contact with earth. But even in its silence it spun through the sky as the prototype of a complete Midas system, scheduled for operation in 1963, that in its ability to sound an alarm and to summon retaliatory forces, should become a new and powerful deterrent against surprise attack. And most of all, Midas II was a dramatic symbol of the U.S.'s successful surge into space.

Quantity & Quality. The U.S. got off to a sluggish start in the race for space. It was the Soviet Union, using a giant rocket developed for military purposes, that opened the space age on Oct. 4, 1957 with Sputnik I. With the doomed dog Laika, the U.S.S.R. put the first animal into orbit. The Soviets scored the first hit on the moon, took the first photograph of the moon's far side. The U.S. still can not match the weight-lifting capacity of Russia's satellite booster.

But U.S. satellites have long since made up in quantity and quality what they lacked, until Midas II, in size. As of last week, Russia had successfully launched four earth satellites and three space probes. Against that, the U.S. has put 19 satellites into earth orbit, fired two successful deep space probes. So commonplace has U.S. space achievement become that it almost escaped public notice last week when an Aerobee-Hi rocket shot 137 miles into the air with eight ultraviolet telescopes to analyze starlight. Of ten satellites still circling the earth, nine came from the U.S.—and the information they have sent to earth has changed forever man's ideas of the universe.