Scrapbook 1: 1961–1962 — Skybolt, OSO 1, Project West Ford, Scatback, Atlas-Centaur

The development programme of the Skybolt ballistic missile, for the bombers of the United States Air Force and the Royal Air Force, is being speeded up. More money has been put into it by the Department of Defence in Washington. This will allow for an expanded test programme and an early start on the production of components.

There is also evidence of a reduction in range from the 1,000 nautical miles for which the missile was originally designed, and some relaxation in the precision sought. Britain is developing the use of the Skybolt in the Mark 2 Vulcan bombers, which are due to be equipped with their first Skybolts early in 1965.

Modifications

It now appears that Britain will be paying about 15 per cent of the total cost of the programme, up to the time of production. Slightly more than £30 millions has been set aside for the modifications to the Vulcan navigational system.

Planned expenditure in the US has now risen to $450 millions or £170 millions. At the development stage, almost all the British expenditure will be in sterling.

The rise in the estimated cost of Skybolt has been described by Professor Courtland Perkins, the former assistant secretary of the US Air Force for Research and Development as “the most spectacular example of stretch.” The Douglas Company, according to Professor Perkins, originally said that the research into the missile and its development would cost $120 millions. This figure has now been raised to $450 millions.

In addition to the £30 millions now allocated, the RAF will pay for the missiles themselves (for the Vulcans) and for the nuclear warheads which must be produced for them. No estimate of the production cost of the weapon is yet available and under present accounting practices the cost of the warheads will not be published.

The RAF is showing great confidence in the Vuclan-Skybolt combination and is now suggesting that there will be no need to replace it as the main British heavy nuclear force until 1972. Until recently, it had been assumed that another aircraft or a submarine rocket base was being considered for 1970.

THE first test firing of the Skybolt missile, launched from a giant B52 bomber over Cape Canaveral, was “one heck of a success,” a United States Air Force official said yesterday.

Skybolt, an Anglo-American missile due to become operational in 1964, will be supplied to the Royal Air Force for use with British Vulcan bombers.

In the test the two-stage missile dipped after the first stage ignited—and then climbed steeply and disappeared from sight.

The Air Force official said: “We don’t know if the second stage ignited. But we consider it one heck of a success to gain so much on a maiden flight.”

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (UPI) The United States will launch within a few days the first of a new series of satellites to find a way to forecast radiation “storms” that threaten manned flight through space.

The 440-pound moonlet, called an “Orbiting Solar Observatory” (OSO), will be sent aloft aboard a three-stage Thor-Delta rocket, possibly as early as next Tuesday.

OSO-1 will take the first direct, undistorted look at the sun to try to find out what makes it tick. The sun is the source of most of the high-intensity radiation that blows through space, making manned flights to the moon and planets a hazardous undertaking.

The family of OSO satellites that the federal space agency plans to launch during the next 11 years—a period covering one full “sunspot” cycle—probably will produce a method for predicting solar flares, scientists said.

Would ‘Fry’ Travelers

These flares are eruptions on the face of the sun. One expert said that on the average of one day out of 45, space travelers to the moon would be “fried” by such radiation, and that a journey to the moon during four or five other days during this period would be extremely dangerous.

America’s ambitious program for manned exploration of space calls for sending a team of three astronauts around the moon within the next five years, and to land three men on the moon shortly thereafter. However, occurrences of solar storms are expected to get steadily higher during the next few years, reaching a peak in 1966–67.

Scientists said the problem will have to be met by one of two solutions. Provide shielding averaging one ton per man for space travelers, or find some way for forecasting solar flares reliably.

OSO-1, costing more than $6 million to launch, will carry 13 experiments to study radiation from the sun, the most intensive such research ever undertaken with the use of earth satellites.

The moonlet will be hurled toward a nearly circular orbit more than 350 miles above earth. If all goes as planned, it will stay “alive” for six months and possibly a year, pouring out information on the workings of the sun that have baffled man for centuries.

One key to success of the experiment will be the ability of scientists to line it up so it looks constantly at the sun. The moonlet will carry small nitrogen jets for this purpose. “The lifetime of these jets will determine the lifetime of OSO itself,” the space agency said.

The satellite also will carry a tape recorder to “memorize” information through 90 minutes of the 95 minutes it is expected to take OSO to orbit the globe once. During the remaining five minutes, technicians at ground tracking stations will play back the recording by remote control.

U.S.-Owned Space Network Urged

WASHINGTON (UPI)—Sens. Estes Kefauver, D-Tenn. and Wayne Morse, D-Ore., here proposed legislation calling for a government-owned space satellite communications network.

Their proposal renewed the fight over public vs. private ownership of utilities. President Kennedy already has asked Congress to create a privately owned corporation to operate the space communications system.

The Senate space committee will open hearings on the Administration measure and a bill by Sen. Robert S. Kerr, D-Okla., which also would set up a privately owned corporation.

Space Test In a Spin

CHICAGO (UPI) — Naval researchers, working on the problem of how to put man into space, reported that six men adjusted rapidly to a room that rotated in the manner of a satellite at launching.

Dr. Ashton Graybiel, director of the U.S. Naval School of Aviation Medicine at Pensacola, Fla., and the medical officer in charge of the Able-Baker monkey flight, conducted the experiment. It was described in the July Archives of Neurology, published by the American Medical Association.

The report said four voluntees at a time were locked inside a circular room for two days while it was rotated at velocities from 1.71 to 10 revolutions per minute.

Most of the volunteers initially developed discomfort: apathy, visual illusions and nausea, but all these symptoms decreased or disappeared rapidly, the report said.

Graybiel said he hoped his findings would be useful in selection, indoctrination and preconditioning of personnel for space flight. He said they also held promise of furthering the study of the etiology and control of motion sickness.

THE Russians may have decided to play the Americans at their own game and go into the “sky spy” business.

A new Sputnik, launched by the Russians last week-end, could have TV cameras aboard, similar to those with which they photographed the far side of the Moon.

They are being unusually secretive about the new satellite—their fourteenth.

Very little has been heard of what it is supposed to do—and nothing at all about how it is faring.

British scientists have picked up signals from the new Sputnik. But without knowing the precise code, the signals are meaningless.

Even so, the scientists can get some idea of what is going on. They say the amount of information being sent back to Russia from the Sputnik is much more complex than hitherto.

Daily

At the Pentagon, the United States defence headquarters near WashIngton, the idea that the new Sputnik could be a “sky spy” is being given careful thought.

The Pentagon has little to say on the subject—even though the new Sputnik is daily crossing vast areas of American territory.

My colleague Donald Ludlow, in Washington, told me yesterday: “No one will say even how many times it has passed over, or how much territory it could have mapped.”

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP)—The United States plans next week to launch the world’s first orbiting solar observatory to probe basic mysteries of the sun and how its rays affect the earth.

The satellite, nicknamed Oso, may provide man with his first undistorted study of the sun.

The aim is to send Oso whirling in an orbit 350 miles above the earth. At that altitude the instruments aboard will make solar studies uncluttered by the blanketing veil of the earth’s atmosphere.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) reported the 440-pound satellite is the first of several such observatories planned during the next few years.

Eruptions of flares on the sun occur in 11-year cycles, each cycle ranges from maximum to minimum activity, and then a new one starts. Scientists say we are at present about at the midpoint of one of the periods. NASA hopes to chart the rest of this cycle at least half of the next one.

The space agency said a procession of Oso satellites could help answer such questions as how the sun controls the upper atmosphere, the origin and history of the solar system and the structure and evolution of the stars and galaxies.

The answers could lead to better explanation of how the sun determines the earth’s weather, upsets radio communications an changes the composition of the radiation belts girdling the globe.

The earth’s atmosphere protects people from most of the lethal radiation streaming from the sun by absorbing or distorting the rays—such as gamma rays, X-rays, ultraviolet and infrared.

Oso carries 13 scientific instruments to measure these particles as they fly through space. From the measurements, NASA said, “the abundance of the elements in the sun, the sun’s composition and the intensity of its radiations can be studied.”

By RONALD BEDFORD, Mirror Science Editor

AMERICA announced yesterday that she is to repeat an experiment which angered world scientists when it was tried last October—sowing a crop of 250,000,000 hair-thin copper wires in Space.

The idea is that the needles should settle 2,000 miles above the earth, forming a sort of floating carpet.

By bouncing radio signals off the under-side of the carpet, American scientists claim that they can provide a communication system for:

1. Their rapidly-growing fleet of atomic submarines, which can fire Polaris H-rockets while still submerged, and

2. Their vast fleet of Strategic Air Command H-bombers, scores of which are always in the air ready to devastate Russia in the event of a surprise attack.

Protests

The October experiment failed because the needles clustered together in five or six small clumps.

It drew violent protests from Russian and British scientists, who complained that a carpet of needles might hamper astronomical research or imperil Space craft.

Professor Fred Hoyle, of Cambridge University, branded it as “a major intellectual crime.”

A DEAD Russian astronaut may be orbiting the earth in a Space-ship launched two years ago, according to a senior American Air Force officer.

The officer is Colonel Barney Oldfield, chief Press officer of the North American Defence Command.

He suggested at Fort Worth, Texas, that the booster unit of the Russian Space-ship falled to separate.

“If this is so,” said Colonel Oldfield, “it is a ‘first’ to which the Russians are welcome—the first cosmic coffin in a celestial cemetery.”

He was disclosing for the first time information which, he said, had been gleaned by American U2 spy planes.

Exploded

Colonel Oldfield said that photographs showed rockets on Russian launching pads. Later the rockets had gone, and there was only scorched earth in their places.

“We know the Russians did not put anything into orbit from these spots,” he said. “Whatever was there must have exploded on the pad.”

AMERICAN rocket scientists sent a monkey into Space yesterday, brought it back to earth . . . and lost it in the Atlantic Ocean.

Yesterday’s Space traveller, a 4lb. monkey called Scatback, was launched—in a 6ft. capsule aboard a 100-ton Atlas rocket—at Cape Canaveral, Florida.

Scatback went 6,000 miles, in a huge arc which took him 600 miles above the earth and brought him down somewhere in the South Atlantic.

The capsule carried a radio beacon to help searchers to find it. But the beacon failed.

Rough seas made the hunt even harder. And two planes helping the search had to give up when fuel ran low.

Late night Scatback was still missing.

SEDALIA, Mo. (Special)—Three hundred mobile homes will be supplied for the Air Force’s Minuteman ICBM construction site headquartered at Whiteman Air Force Base, Mo., in a contract for nearly $1.5 million awarded Frontier Homes Corporation, Omaha, Neb.

The homes, which will be used by Air Force and other contractor personnel as well as Boeing employes, will be located at Butler, Sedalia and Warrensburg, Mo.

Solid-Propellant Rockets Won’t Drop Burned Booster

Two-stage rockets now being built as antiaircraft missiles will not drop the first stage after it has burned out. In the past the burned-out booster stage was jettisoned to reduce weight. But the process also required complicated separation instruments and a joint between the stages. More efficient solid fuels will reduce the over-all size and weight of the missile and overcome the dead-weight problem of carrying the booster for the remainder of the flight.

AMERICAN plans to hurl bigger and better Spaceships to the Moon and the planets suffered a severe setback last night.

A new rocket, called Centaur, using a new fuel, exploded fifty-five seconds after liftoff from the new Pad 36 at Cape Canaveral.

The 135-ton Centaur rocket was designed to put a one-ton robot on the Moon, or send half-ton robot Spaceships to Mars a Venus later this year.

The new fuel, liquid hydrogen, was in the rocket’s second stage. Scientists hoped that it would provide two-fifths more “kick” per pound per second than existing fuels.

The 105ft rocket lifted off cleanly but exploded in a huge mushroom of bolling flame several thousand feet up.

EIGHTY scientists and administrators meet in London today to spend the next three weeks trying to get the Commonwealth into orbit.

Their big task: to decide how best to move into the Space communications business while keeping existing methods of long-distance communication—by cable and radio—up to date.

In addition to Britain, countries taking part in the talks, which will be mostly In private, include Australia, Canada, Ceylon, Ghana, India, New Zealand, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, and Sierre Leone.

The delegates have to decide how far ahead to go with the round-the-world telephone cable plan, costing £80,000,000, that is now in hand. Only the first section, linking Britain and Canada, is complete.

Saved

Most important question is: How much of this money could be saved to go towards the £200,000,000 Spacephone idea put before the Government by the British Space Development Corporation?

The Spacephone plan calls for eight to ten satellites in orbit 7,480 miles up. By 1968 they could enable you to dial Australia, via Space, for 7s. 6d a minute.

Delegates to the vital communications talks know that theirs is one meeting that really HAS to get off the launchpad. Time is not on the side of the planners.

In a few weeks, the first of a series of advanced communications satellites will be blasted off from Cape Canaveral, in Florida.

These satellites are designed to develop transatlantic communications networks and transatlantic TV from Space.

Britain is joining the American experiments. A £500,000 communications satellite tracking station nearing completion at The Lizard, Cornwall, will track the cone-shaped US relay satellites, each weighing 85lb.

• Any tendency on the part of British delegates at the London conference to adopt a go-slow policy on economy grounds will, I forecast, result in some very sharp prodding from the younger Commonwealth countries.