THE NATION: Beyond the Earth

At a time when political charge and countercharge revved the air waves, when a kind of national self-examination was going on, and when reports of declining U.S. prestige abroad could be politically magnified into charges that the U.S. had become a second-class power, a dazzling succession of achievements did much to restore U.S. pride last week. It was one of the space age’s most eventful weeks so far, and what went on above the earth all but dwarfed the confusions and diffi culties below. Within a span of 48 hours, U.S. spacemen:

¶Orbited Echo I, a thin-skinned, gas-filled balloon 100 ft. in diameter, pioneer of a future globe-girdling network of balloon satellites to be used to bounce com munications signals from one continent to another (see SCIENCE).

¶Recovered an instrument-laden capsule, ejected on cue by an orbiting Discoverer satellite, as it dropped from space into the sea near Hawaii. This success brought the U.S. closer to its space ambition for 1961: to fire a man into orbit and bring him back alive.

These two events would have been plenty for a single week. But in the accumulating momentum of missilery, U.S. missilemen fired successful test shots of Atlas and Titan intercontinental ballistic mis siles, got off a Polaris intermediate-range missile that traveled 1,100 miles, sent three Bomarc defensive missiles after fastmoving targets, and hit them (one Bomarc intercepted a supersonic Regulus II missile). And, only one week after an X-15 plane set a new speed record for piloted aircraft, the same X-15 climbed to an altitude of more than 131,000 ft., higher than any plane had ever soared before.

These feats in the sky went far to dispel any lingering fears that the U.S. lags behind the U.S.S.R. in space or missile technology. But quite apart from their cold-war significance, the technological feats added up to a splendid week for science, which transcends national boundaries, and for the boldness of the human spirit, which now transcends even the limits of the earth.