Space: Two Steps Toward the Moon

A pair of space missions designed to help pave the way for a U.S. manned landing on the moon got off to success ful starts. Lunar Orbiter 2, which will begin surveying the lunar surface for suitable landing sites this week, was eased into a high orbit around the moon. Astronauts James Lovell Jr. and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin Jr. blasted off for the last of the dozen Gemini flights, and, despite a radar failure, performed with polished perfection the complex rendezvous and docking maneuvers that simulate those to be made on the Apollo moon mission.

Launched on a near-perfect trajec tory toward the moon, Orbiter 2 briefly lost and then regained its navigational lock on its guiding star Canopus; other wise it was not bothered by glitches. As it sped toward the moon 93 hours later, some 2,770 miles above the lunar sur face, Orbiter’s retrorocket fired, slowing the craft enough for lunar gravity to draw it into an elliptical orbit.

Dipping to within 112 miles of the moon at its perilune, or closest ap proach, and swinging out to 1,145 miles at its apilune, or farthermost distance, Orbiter will remain “parked” in high or bit until late this week. Another blast of its retrorocket will then place it in an orbit that will come within 28 miles of the moon. Only then will its cameras go into action to shoot medium-and high-resolution landing site pictures.

Missing the Eclipse. After two successive 24-hour postponements caused by malfunctions in their Titan rocket’s guidance system, Astronauts Lovell and Aldrin finally soared into orbit in Gemini 12. Using an optical tracking device in place of the faulty radar, they successfully rendezvoused and docked during their third orbit with an Agena target vehicle that had been fired aloft 99 minutes before Gemini.

The flight plan next called for a boost to a 460-mile-high orbit, but that had to be canceled when telemetry disclosed problems with Agena’s propellant pump. Instead, the astronauts made another and equally remarkable rendezvous—with the moon’s circular shadow, which was racing across the Pacific at 1,060 m.p.h. during Saturday’s eclipse of the sun. In the brief seven seconds that they flew through the corridor of total eclipse, the astronauts shot movies and still pictures of the blacked-out solar disk. Then, standing in the open hatch of his orbiting platform, Astronaut Aldrin shot pictures of the earth and the stars for 2 hours and 28 minutes-longer than anyone has spent continuously outside his craft in space.

At week’s end the astronauts still had unfinished business. Before splashing down in the western Atlantic on Tuesday, they planned a tethered flight with Agena and a space walk by Aldrin designed to evaluate man’s ability to work in space. In another experiment, they will photograph a sodium vapor cloud released into the upper atmosphere by a high-flying French rocket to coincide with the passage of Gemini.