SPACE: High Marks for Big Joe

Their eyes glued to the skies, the monitors at the U.S. missile-tracking stations in the South Atlantic searched the darkness one night last week. Suddenly they gaped; far above, starbright and hell-hot, a thing—it looked like a meteor—plummeted through the stars of the heavens and then disappeared over the horizon. Hours later in Washington, U.S. spacemen announced the news: Big Joe, the funnel-shaped prototype of the vehicle that will carry the first U.S. man into space in 1961, had been shot aloft in a test and had been recovered intact. Had a man been inside for the historic flight, he would have made his return in complete safety.

Chief testing point for Big Joe was its ability to keep a passenger alive. From the moment that it was hurled from its Cape Canaveral pad by an Atlas-D, the capsule’s recording system went to work. Ten microphones registered the take-off noise—120-130 decibels (plenty loud, but not unmanageable for well-protected ears). Temperature readings recorded interior and exterior heat from more than 100 different points. Though Big Joe climbed 100 miles above the earth, malfunctioning booster engines in the Atlas kept the bird from reaching out to its planned distance; after thundering about 1,500 miles downrange—just a few hundred miles short of the target—the capsule began its fiery. 15,000-m.p.h. re-entry into the earth’s atmosphere.

At that instant, Big Joe’s two radio transmitters predictably blacked out under an electrical blanket of ionized air. But a recorder inside kept taping instrument signals until the one-ton capsule recovered its voice, then began transmitting all the data that it had collected in no man’s land. Slowing down to 700 m.p.h. in the atmosphere. Big Joe popped a parachute when it reached 50,000 ft., then another at 10,000 ft. It sizzled into the ocean at a gentle 20 m.p.h., 20 min. after takeoff, still beeping its signals. Homing planes quickly zeroed in on Big Joe’s position, radioed the nearest destroyer, and within 8 hr. the recovery ship hove to, plucked the capsule out of the sea.

Remarkably, Big Joe’s inside temperature, even during its hottest, fastest, most crucial moments, never exceeded 100°, a factor not lost on the seven U.S. astronauts, one of whom will one day ride into the heavens in another Big Joe.