Science: Pretty Darned Good

After months of frustration came the moment of triumph.

The Air Force’s costly Discoverer program was an immensely sophisticated effort, but so simple to score that it seemed to be just one failure after another. Its expense, climbing to $100 million this year alone, made it a target for cost-conscious critics, and the army of carpers swelled with each failure and half-success.

Twelve times a Discoverer satellite had been fired, atop a two-stage Thor-Agena rocket, from Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif.; twelve times it had failed to accomplish its total mission. To prepare the way for that day when a man can be shot into space and brought back alive. Discoverer’s task was to control a satellite at will in its orbit and guide it back for recovery, undamaged, at a specific point on the earth’s surface.

Discoverer’s margin of failure was irritatingly small. Not once had the Thor booster failed to carry its instrument-packed burden off the launching pad. Only on one occasion, when Discoverer IX was purposely destroyed 56 sec. after launching, did the second stage fail to separate and ignite. Six times the satellite was successfully guided into orbit and its instrument capsule, at an electronic command, dropped back toward earth. But none of the capsules was recovered. The other achievements seemed secondary. Public fancy fastened on perhaps the Discoverer program’s least important aspect: the attempt to snare the re-entry capsule in mid-air near Hawaii, with nets attached to specially equipped cargo planes. This made it a sort of heavenly baseball game —and the score stood at no runs, no hits, twelve errors. Actually, it mattered little how the capsule was recovered, as long as it was. Last week, one was.

Sweating It Out. As Discoverer XIII roared off Vandenberg’s launching pad last week, it looked exactly like its predecessors. But one important modification had been made. Speculating that previous re-entry failures had been caused by malfunction of tiny rockets designed to stabilize the satellite in orbit—by causing it to spin like a bullet—Lockheed Aircraft Corp. engineers had replaced the rockets with gas jets, anxiously prayed they had guessed right. In the console-banked control room at Sunnyvale, Calif., Air Force Colonel Charles G. (“Moose”) Mathison paced the floor while monitoring the countdown and alerting his worldwide tracking network. After launch, Mathison waited tensely for word that Discoverer was in orbit, broke into a grin at the happy news: Discoverer XIII was on a nearperfect circular course, only .003 of a degree off its predicted route.

As Discoverer XIII serenely circled the earth, a control station some 300 miles below, in Kodiak, Alaska, took charge. On the satellite’s 17th orbit, up to it came an electronic command: Release the instrument capsule. The order triggered a complex, irrevocable sequence of 22 events which permitted no margin for error. Jets first swept the 1,800-lb. satellite’s nose downward until it pointed to earth at a 60° angle. Pins kicked loose, freeing the 349-lb. instrument capsule for its descent to earth, and the newly installed gas jets immediately set it spinning at 60 r.p.m. The quick blast of a retrorocket slowed its speed of descent. As the Discoverer capsule knifed into earth’s atmosphere, it stopped spinning, shed all useless encumbrances—its gas jet equipment, the retrorocket, and the remains of a protective nose cone—and pared itself down to a svelte 143 Ibs. At 50,000 ft. the capsule’s parachute popped open, and it floated calmly down toward the Pacific, radios jabbering like magpies.

Lifting It Up. Discoverer XIII was aimed at a patch of Pacific Ocean 60 miles by 200 miles in size. It hit its target with an accuracy that proved embarrassing to the Air Force: C-119 planes assigned to pluck the capsule from the air with grapples were saturated with radio signals from directly overhead, could not get a fix on its position.

The Navy joyfully jumped to the rescue. Aboard the Haiti Victory, 100 miles away, observers pinpointed Discoverer’s position by radar, dispatched a helicopter to the scene. As the helicopter hovered 10 ft. above the choppy Pacific, Frogman Robert Carroll leaped into the ocean, strapped a cable to the bobbing satellite and gave the signal to lift away. Discoverer XIII—”Lucky Thirteen”—had returned safely to earth. Said Lockheed’s Missile Chief Herschel Brown: “The U.S. has accomplished an unprecedented first. The Russians have attempted a recovery orbit and failed. We have succeeded—and we feel pretty darned good.”