Scrapbook highlights
Some of the more interesting or notable articles from the 1960s space scrapbooks:
The Voice From Space said yesterday: “The sky is very, very dark, and the Earth is a light blue. Everything can be seen very clearly.”
It was the voice of Yuri Alexeyevitch Gagarin, the young Russian who, a few minutes before, had been hurled skywards into the greatest adventure ever undertaken by Man.
Out in Space, at a height of 125 miles, whirling round the world at five miles a second, Gagarin talked by radio to his base in Russia about what he saw on a television screen in his Spaceship.
And from him, for the first time, the world learned what it feels like to be a man out in boundless Space . . . alone in a great emptiness where no man had been before.
A grumpy response to Gagarin’s flight:
The first reaction here to Russia’s space feat was to turn for solace to the American Astronauts. But they were . . . ASLEEP. “It’s 3 a.m. in the morning, you jerks,” their Press officer, Lieut.-Colonel John Powers told inquiring newspapermen.
Build-up to the first US astronaut:
though there are still forty-eight hours to go to the blast-off—if all goes without a hitch—the ballyhoo button has already been pressed.
America is in for a severe bout of Space fever.
Gherman Titov, second man in orbit:
“Some people say there is a God out there,” the 27-year-old Soviet major replied. “But in my travels around the earth all day long I looked around and didn’t see him. I saw no God or angels.
“Up to our first orbital flight by Yuri Gagarin no God helped build our rocket. The rocket was made by our people. I don’t believe in God. I believe in man, his strength, his possibilities and his reason.”
Enos, first (and only) chimpanzee in orbit:
Ham, America’s first ape in space, was also scheduled to make the flight. But three days ago at Canaveral he rifled a box of biscuits and ate himself out of the trip.
Incorrect reports of Russian lunar mission:
Target date for a cosmonaut to set foot on the planet is 1964—perhaps three years earlier than any American is expected. British experts are now convinced of these things after a careful analysis of recent Soviet scientific literature, and from reports from behind the Iron Curtain.
Castro, the Congolese, the Senate’s military witnesses, the embattled Algerians, and all other such spear-carriers slunk off into the wings today and left the centre-stage spotlight on the hero for tonight: the bronzed out dazed guinea pig known as Lieutenant Colonel John H. Glenn.
Like the rest of us, he is composed almost entirely of the compounds of carbon with a little water added. But he is prized like no champion Black Angus, tuned like no Stradivarius, gaped at, preserved, and photographed more lovingly than the Parthenon. For three weeks at least no human in the history of medicine has been so weighed and X-rayed and pumped and filtered and tapped.
He is coddled as delicately as any filterable virus, and somewhere in a sound-proof bunk deep in Cape Canaveral’s jungle of towers and radar sources and launching pads he is put to rest with the tenderness of a mother hiding her first-born from Herod.
A blueprint for war in Space has been prepared by the US Air Force. It envisages Space “battleships,” Space command posts, refuelling and repair points. And the plan includes at least one frightening new weapon. … A new weapon, the LASER, is already being developed. Laboratory LASERS have punched holes in stainless steel. Last week one slashed through a diamond—the hardest substance on earth. Present LASERS are only the size of flashlights. If they could be built to the size of big guns and supplied with enough power, the possibilities are enormous.
John Wyndham writing about the future of humanity:
Recently announced was a breakthrough in genetics called DNA, which appears to be the first step that may lead to the control of heredity. …
The direction of our own destiny will soon be in a new stage, but it is not an entirely new trend. It began when we discovered that diseases were not just acts of God, and that it was possible to keep alive many a child that unassisted nature would have slain young. The control of heredity will mean the checking of hereditary diseases such as haemophilia, the disappearance of inherited malformations, the elimination of colour-blindness and some types of asthma, and so on—benefits which no one would contest.
Also, there are mental qualities which are every bit as undesirable as physical defects. Surely it would be a crime to allow a baby to inherit instability or criminal tendencies; and would it be fair to let it be just mediocre when it might be highly intelligent?
… [In this imagined future,] We are healthier, stronger, more intelligent, longer lived; perhaps we have keener powers of perception so that we have begun to think a little differently, perhaps that has improved our brains so that our heads have to be a little bigger to hold them comfortably, and then just a little bigger still.
And then, presently, who are we? Are we still ourselves or have we become a different sort of mankind? Who can tell—and where is anyone to say “Stop!”?
… How are we to know which is the road to disaster, and which is the true line we should take? THE ANSWER, IT NOW APPEARS, LIES IN SPACE.
The Woman in Space Program, with rather more discussion of hair and clothing and marital status than any article about men:
Jacqueline Cochrane, who holds more speed, distance and altitude records than any other living person, wore a shimmering silk Chanel suit and chain-smoked as she testified to the House Committee on Science and Astronautics. She said her experience showed women would prove as fit as men, physically and psychologically, for space flying.
… [Jerrie Cobb] insisted there was no battle of the sexes and said women weighed less and needed less food and oxygen than men. They were more radiation-resistant, less prone to heart attacks, less susceptible to monotony, loneliness, heat, cold, pain and noise.
A third blonde, Senator’s wife Janey B. Hart—she has four boys and girls—wore a chunky gold bracelet and a huge astronaut’s wrist watch as she told the Congressmen that space was being restricted to men, “like some sort of stag club.”
She said: “For many women, the Parents-Teachers Association just isn’t enough.”
Lt.-Col. John Glenn, the first American to orbit the earth, declined an invitation to try a new high altitude roller-coaster at the State Fair in Columbus, Ohio. “Things like that make me nervous,” he said.
The Story of Telstar — 8-page introduction to the first TV satellite:
Unless they knew better, many people used to think of the Post Office as a rather dull and unexciting place. The launching of TELSTAR proved to such people that the Post Office is not just an organisation which sells stamps, issues dog and radio licences, and collects and delivers your letters. It is also responsible for communications.
Images from the first transatlantic TV programme.
What Telstar might have shown — the 1960s equivalent of collecting some random people’s uninformed opinions from social media and publishing that as a news story. Back then they asked a Duke, a Lord, an OBE, and a future Dame.
The first satellite computer networking:
Telstar added another first to its achievements when it demonstrated that communications satellites can relay information around the world from one earthbound computer to another
… Walter W. Finke, president of Honeywell Electronics Data Processing, said “The test was a forerunner of the high-speed, intercontinental computer network that in years to come will handle the data processing needs of the bulk of world commerce.”
Some home photos, mainly showing that it was not easy to capture images of a TV set.