Science: Journey into Space

Enthusiastic rocket men are convinced that, given enough money, they could begin right now to build a rocket that would carry men to the moon. Better still, they could put together an artificial satellite, a sort of interstellar service station, observation platform and motel (TIME, Sept. 17). The foreseeable difficulties can be shrugged off as mere "engineering details."

But one problem is more than an engineering detail: Can men survive the wild, high ride into outer space? Last week in Washington, Drs. J. P. Henry and E. R. Ballinger of the Aero Medical Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base told how mice and monkeys are helping them find an answer.

Three white mice, one with part of the balance mechanism of his inner ear destroyed, were put in pressurized compartments in the noses of rockets. Movie cameras recorded their reactions as they shot into the thin upper atmosphere over White Sands, N. Mex. As the rockets neared the peak of their flights, they began to decelerate, then turned over and fell toward earth. For a few insane moments until they slowed down in dense air, the mice were essentially weightless. Buoyant and panicky, the two normal ones thrashed in their chambers until they felt the familiar pull of gravity again. The third, without equilibrium from the start, curled up in a nook and seemed not to care what was happening.

Five monkeys, with whom the doctors seemed to feel more identification, were better treated. They were anesthetized before being shot aloft. Doped on morphine and resting quietly on sponge-rubber beds, they rode 80 mi. into space. All the while, instruments registered the reactions of their cardiovascular and circulatory systems and the changes in their breathing. Radioed back to earth, this information suggested that the monkeys were not seriously disturbed. At any rate, not until they landed. Four died when their rockets' parachutes failed to open. A fifth got down safely, but—still unconscious from morphine—died of heat prostration in the desert.

Valuable as they may be, the Henry-Ballinger studies are only a beginning. They prove little about what will happen to men—or even animals—during the longer weightless periods of full-dress space travel. Monkeys and mice have not seen the end of this sort of thing. When bigger & better rockets are built, the scientists will be calling on them for help with still more answers.