Science: Lunik

The new planet was tiny, as planets go, but it was the first ever put into the solar system by man. The Soviet Union's moon-probe missile—promptly dubbed "Lunik" by the Russians—was a giant achievement in the young history of space exploration, the first time man had ever broken anything free from the tight gravitational hold of earth.

Lunik's great, multistage launching rocket, which probably weighed 250 tons or more, roared up from some part of the Soviet Union on Friday. When the Russians made their first announcement, they could already say with confidence that the final stage had attained escape velocity. On Saturday they could announce that at 9:59 p.m. E.S.T. Lunik had passed the moon and plunged on into outer space on an orbit around the sun. At week's end it was 318,000 miles from the earth and still going strong.

In contrast to U.S. Pioneers I and III, whose payloads were a modest 40 and 13 lbs. respectively, Lunik's sheer size was impressive. Its payload was 796.5 lbs. and the total weight of its final stage without fuel was 3,245 lbs.

Ever since the Russians launched their Sputnik III on May 15, 1958, rocket experts have known that they had the potential ability to toss a good-sized bird out of the earth's gravitational field. To put a satellite on a nearby orbit around the earth takes only about 25% less speed than the escape velocity (25,000 m.p.h.) that will free it from the earth. All the Russians needed to do was to increase slightly the power of Sputnik Ill's launching rockets or to reduce its final weight. U.S. failure to reach the moon was mainly due to the insufficient power of the launching vehicles. For the U.S. shots to succeed on their lesser thrust, every bit of sophisticated and delicate apparatus had to work perfectly, and this did not happen.

Degrees of Success. Since the Russians do not call their shots before they fire, Lunik may have been designed for several degrees of success. The most difficult would be to go into orbit around the moon, as the U.S. Air Force hoped to do with Pioneer I. But this stunt requires a small rocket to nudge the final stage into capture by the moon's gravitational field, and the Russians have not mentioned any such item. Next degree of success would be to pass around the moon and return to earth. If the Russians were trying to do this, they did not know their own strength. When Lunik passed the moon, it was going so fast (5,500 m.p.h.) that the moon's feeble gravitation could not pull it back.

The overall aim was good. U.S.'s Pioneer III deviated from its planned course by 3.5°. If it had reached the moon's orbit, it would have missed the moon by about 14,590 miles. The Russian miss (4,660 miles) was an error of only slightly more than 1°.