National Affairs: LIFE IN MISSILELAND

“We’ve all got rocket fever here,” said the manager of the Starlite Motel in Cocoa Beach, Fla. one day last week. “Everything centers on the Cape. We look at it and live with it every day.” The Cape is Cape Canaveral, home of the Air Force missile test center, and the everyday facts of life of nearby Cocoa, Cocoa Beach, Melbourne, Rockledge and Titusville—on Florida’s east coast—probably have no parallel anywhere else in the world.

It is a land where highways are likely to be blocked so that trailers can haul their menacing, canvas-shrouded packages to the secret precincts beyond the gates. Tank trucks make shuttle runs between the Titusville railroad sidings and the Cape, carefully hauling highly volatile liquid oxygen for rocket fuel. It is a land of piercing shrieks and thunderous roars, and when the shrieks and the roars combine in one nerve-racking racket, housewives, office workers and schoolchildren rush outdoors to watch another missile on the way, and to compare notes on its performance.

Research in a Fish Bowl. Whenever a big rocket shoot is scheduled at the Cape, word spreads from homes to stores to filling stations and motels to the concessions on the public beaches, not five miles from the top-secret launching pads. Within the hour the beach crowds are 25% above normal. Binoculars, telescopes and cameras magically appear. “I know there’s a missile on a launcher,” says an eight-year-old boy, building sand castles, a pair of binoculars around his neck.

Before T (for test) time, all eyes look for the now familiar telltale signs: the radar search dish on the Cape begins rotating; crash boats put out to sea; the yellow warning spheres are hoisted atop the 90-ft. poles; the eight massive service towers and gantries clank and clatter. The tips of the missiles are often visible on the skyline. “Conducting tests on the Cape,” said one missileman, “is like performing research in a fish bowl.”

Smiles in the Motels. The big night shoots are usually the occasion for the Cape’s wives to get together while their husbands work. If there is sufficient warning, they gather at patio parties to watch the gushing clouds of steam tinged with pink, the towers ablaze with brilliant greenish-white light, the plumes of clean-burning jet flame. And in the Starlite Motel, which rents 70 of its 87 units to missilemen from Convair, North American Aviation, Bell Telephone Laboratories, A.C. Spark Plug, the practiced observer at after-the-shoot cocktail parties can tell from the demeanor of his hosts how the shoot has gone. Smiles among the Convair group might mean a promising static-test day for the Atlas intercontinental ballistic missile, frowns among the North American missile monkeys might show a bad day for the Navaho intercontinental air-breather.

“After three years,” said the wife of a Radio Corp. of America missileman, “you get used to it.” But the wife of a General Electric official contradicts her. “I’ve never gotten used to it, and I never will. Every time I hear a roar that isn’t a jet, I break my neck getting outdoors. My husband never says anything, and if he comes home happy, I want to know why.”

Satellites in Swim Suits. In 1950 the population of Brevard County was 23,600; it is now 70,000. Acreage values have increased by 400% to 500%, and almost no rentals are available. Two years ago a pair of missile contractors and a used-car salesman opened a real-estate office on a borrowed $10,000, made $250,000 profit the first year, have made sales worth $467,000 in the first six months of 1957. Such is the boom that missile-land needs one additional classroom and one new teacher every week.

In Cocoa Beach the visitor can buy drinks with such exotic names as the “Satellite Cocktail,” “Snark,” “Flaming Matador,” can order a sandwich called “Snarkburger.” And around and about missileland, youngsters are picking up bits and pieces of a weird new language; e.g., “If a bird doesn’t program in an X direction or wanders outside the family of destruct criteria fail-safe imposes a condition of zero-lift.”*

History in the Raw. As they fuel the missile boom and live their rarefied daily lives, the missilemen, their families and the people who house, feed and take care of them are well aware that they have a grandstand, motel-roof view of historymaking in the raw at the Wright Field of the rocket age. One day last month hundreds crowded out on to the beaches to watch the first test of the U.S.’s big one, the Atlas. They shouted like football fans as Atlas rose, gasped as it began to lurch out of kilter, watched sadly and silently as it fell (TIME, June 24) in its first limited flight.

Early this week the Cape’s amateur missile watchers passed the word that several towers were fat with missiles. Scuttlebutt was that one was a 1,500-mile Thor, another an earth satellite test rocket, or one could be Atlas No. 2. Another one was—well, it could be anything—maybe two rockets joined side by side, maybe something new, maybe, one man said, something for a trip around the moon. The only thing sure was that every resident within 50 miles was listening for the rumor and the roar.

*If something goes wrong with a missile in flight, it is automatically blown up.