Science: Suggestion to Astronauts: Look, Ma, No Hands

It was evaluation time at Cape Canaveral last week, and if U.S. space technicians have any complaint, it is that U.S. space travelers still seem to think they are primarily airplane drivers. Like Colonel John Glenn before him, Commander Scott Carpenter soared into orbit with remarkably little faith in his capsule's automatic positioning equipment. He spent all but a few minutes of his five hours aloft "flying" his spaceship by hand, changing its attitude while in orbit with squirts of peroxide steam, at one point using two systems at once. As a result, he all but ran out of fuel, almost fouled up the delicate business of re-entry into the earth's atmosphere (TIME, June 1). Even so, he managed to keep remarkably busy at other things; he completed a surprising number of experiments designed to help future astronauts to study the tricks and tribulations they will have to handle as man races toward the moon.

No More Stars. Above Carpenter's right ear hung a glass globe in which he studied the movements of fluids freed from gravity. He had a camera with which he took pictures through the window, using several filters. He experimented with eating new kinds of special space food. He measured the brightness of stars and other outside objects with a photometer. Intricate gadgetry demanding his attention was everywhere. But for all his preoccupations, the astronaut found time to take a careful, searching look at the earth below him. And he brought back the best report yet of how man's home looks from nearby space. The sky is velvety black, he said, and against it the sunlit earth glows in brilliant shades of blue and green—colors hard to imagine or duplicate because of their wonderful purity. Everywhere the earth is flecked with white clouds. When his capsule swept over the dark side of the earth, the ground was lit only by the feeble glow of the quarter-moon. But he could still see the horizon against the deeper black of the sky, and point his capsule by it.

All orbiting astronauts, starting with Yuri Gagarin, saw a bright blue band around the earth. Carpenter looked more carefully through a special filter and saw two bands, the lower one made up of many colors—red, blue, white and a little green. The pictures that he took of the two bands are being analyzed at M.I.T., where they are considered important for the design of instruments to sense the edge of the earth and guide the return of home-bound future spaceships.

When he turned his attention upward and outward—away from earth and toward the vast reaches of space—Carpenter discovered that the interiors of future spaceships will have to be redesigned if passengers are to get a clear look at the starry sky. Since he had to keep watching his instruments, Carpenter could not turn off Aurora 7's panel lights, so his eyes never became adapted to darkness; he saw no more stars than are visible from earth. He did not see the Gegenschein, a comet-like trail of particles that is believed to follow the earth.