Science: Reaching for the Moon

(See Cover) On a stony California ridge, a rocket engine wide as a barn door lit the sky like an erupting volcano, while its roar racketed for 45 miles across the Mojave Desert. In a quiet Massachusetts laboratory, scientists carefully tuned a new and incredibly sensitive radio receiver designed to trap signals from far-out space. All over the U.S. last week, the story was the same: thousands of scientists and engineers sweated over strange new jobs−jobs more difficult than any they had ever attempted before. In a frenzy of creativeness they were producing new materials, machines, instruments, methods of measurement and computation. And no matter how well they did, they could be sure that they would soon be called on to do better. In his anxious assault on space, man has only begun to imagine how much effort he must expend, or how far that effort may take him.

For the U.S., the first real target was boldly defined on May 25, 1961, when President Kennedy told Congress: “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.” At that moment the U.S. was behind in the race to get men into space. The Russians had already shot Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin on an orbit around the earth; blazing a trail for future space travelers, they had taken pictures of the unseen face of the moon. U.S. Astronaut Alan Shepard had been forced to settle for a brief 302-mile arc that was sadly short of orbit.

But though the U.S. could not yet match the Soviet space spectaculars, the once-starved U.S. space program had made broad progress since that dismaying Friday in October 1957 when Soviet Sputnik I started its beeping, curving course. Dozens of unmanned satellites had been shot aloft to circle the earth, and each one had taught engineers more about rocket techniques, told scientists more about the space environment that wraps the world.

Focused Brilliance. Jack Kennedy’s challenge, and the money he mentioned so calmly ($531 million in fiscal ’62 and $7 billion to $9 billion during the next five years), supplied a new and powerful boost to the U.S. space campaign. Just as basic was the choice six months later of a round-eyed, enthusiastic electrical engineer named Dyer Brainerd Holmes to head the U.S. effort to reach for the moon.

In a new and proliferating profession that swarms with specialists of fiercely focused brilliance, Spaceman Holmes supplies a varied and vital collection of talents. At 40, he had already earned a reputation for big-league engineering triumphs. He had taken charge of RCA’s $40 million Talos antiaircraft missile program and had made the complicated bird fly right on its first try. (“The first Talos we fired at White Sands,” Holmes remembers with pleasure, “knocked the target drone so flat they couldn’t find the engines.”) He had bossed the design and construction of BMEWS (Ballistic Missile Early Warning System), the Air Force’s gigantic, $1.3 billion northern radar system, and made it a personal triumph. With BMEWS, he proved that he could handle touchy and cost-conscious subcontractors, that he knew how to keep materials moving, that he dared to talk up to superiors at home while keeping subordinates happy on the job. Easygoing engineers in search of placid lives had already learned to avoid Brainerd Holmes. Ambitious workers−from hard-hat musclemen to round-shouldered slipstick artists were already clamoring to work under the Brooklyn-born straw boss.

The young man who had licked BMEWS was a natural to tackle the moon. But at RCA, Holmes was making about $50,000 a year, plus the liberal fringe benefits (expense account,, stock options) with which successful corporations beguile high-bracket help. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration could offer him full command of all U.S. manned space flight, including Jack Kennedy’s promised voyage to the moon−and a salary deeply cut to $21,000 a year.

Unknown Perils. Says his friend Eugene F. O’Neill, boss of Bell Laboratories’ Telstar program: “Here he had this incredible project dropped in his lap. It was like being asked to navigate for Christopher Columbus. He kept asking how he could live with himself if he turned it down. In the end, it was his desire to push back the boundaries that prevailed. He has a streak of romanticism, religion, patriotism. He is not the cold, calculating type.” So Brainerd Holmes sold his Moorestown, N.J., home, moved his family (wife and two teen-age daughters, Dorothy, 17, Katherine, 13) to a modest house in Washington.

The prospect was not wholly reassuring. Making a manned voyage to the moon and back is far more difficult than cartoonists, space fictioneers, or even most engineers think. It is more hazardous than the six-orbit Mercury mission scheduled for this summer. It involves almost every science known to man−including microbiology, astrophysics, and the farthest-out varieties of chemistry. It demands massive knowledge in such fields as lunar geology, as yet practically unexplored. The project is full of unknowns, threatened with unimagined perils, and it calls for money in war-sized chunks. Before the first American flies to the moon, Brainerd Holmes will have to spend at least $20 billion. The tab may mount, without surprising anyone, to $40 billion or more.

BUILDING BIGGER BOOSTERS

Catching up with the Soviets in booster rockets was the first problem. There has been heartening progress. Besides the none-too-reliable military Atlases that put the first Mercury astronauts in their orbits, the U.S. now has the Air Force Titan II, which is just starting its tests but is already considered a very reliable bird. Its structure is stiffer than the thin-skinned Atlas, and its two stages have thrust enough (430,000 Ibs. and 100,000 Ibs.) to make the next big advance in space, orbiting the two-man Gemini capsule around the earth.

An even bigger booster, the Saturn C1, is not a military weapon at all but an integral part of the Apollo man-on-the-moon project. Developed at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center at Huntsville, Ala., its first stage is largely the creation of famed Wernher von Braun, who designed V-2 rockets for the Nazis in World War II. With eight H-1 (Atlas) engines bound together to produce 1,500,000 Ibs. of thrust, the Saturn C-1 has been test-flown twice from Cape Canaveral, and it worked perfectly each time. The future star of the Apollo Project, the Advanced Saturn (C5) has yet to take final shape, but its most critical segment, the great F-1 engine developed by North American Aviation, Inc., is familiar to thousands of startled Californians as the loudest inhabitant of their state. The F-1 is 18 ft. to 20 ft. tall and 16 ft. across the end of its thrust chamber. Too big to be tested at “Suzy,” North American’s test facility in the Santa Susana Mountains northwest of Los Angeles, it is trucked to Leuhman Ridge in the Mojave Desert. There, the test stand towers 275 ft. above the rocky ground. Tucked in its steel skeleton are tanks for lox (liquid oxygen) and kerosene, while stairs, cables, and many-colored pipes thread their way among the girders. The F-1 looks small in this immense structure, but it does not act small. After a careful countdown, a brilliant spout of flame bursts from its throat, and a sound beyond description rolls across the desert. The flame hits a steel deflector 130 ft. below, spreads in a wide fan, and pushes ahead of it a dense cloud of smoke, steam, dust and rocks.

Five of these mighty machines, which are now well into their final reliability tests, will lift each Saturn C-5 off the ground with 7,500,000 Ibs. of thrust. Then a second stage, with five J-2 hydrogen-burning engines (1,000.000 Ibs. total thrust), will take over. Between them, the two stages will be capable of putting a 240,000-lb. payload on an earth orbit 140 miles high. A third stage, with a single J-2 engine, will push 90,000 Ibs. to earth escape velocity and deliver that hefty payload at the moon.

State of the Art. When Brainerd Holmes and his NASA associates talk about the C5, the basic tool of their moon mission, they are not bothered at all that it is still unfinished. No F-1 engine has been fired except on a test stand, and the J-2 hydrogen engine (also made by North American) is even farther from flight. None of this worries Holmes. Like most engineers, he is used to forecasting the technical future by figuring what can be accomplished with combinations and modifications of existing equipment. There is nothing in the C-5 Advanced Saturn, he says, that is beyond the present “state of the art.” Since the smaller engines of the Saturn C-1 have flown successfully in clusters of eight, then the F-1 engines can surely be harnessed in clusters of five. He also concedes that liquid hydrogen, basic to the Apollo project, is an extremely difficult fuel, but insists that its problems can be licked.

STUDYING THE ROUTE

The most crying U.S. need in space is big boosters. But before men can fly to the moon, land there, and return to earth in reasonably good condition many more facts will have to be gathered about the hostile space environment. Space doctors will have to learn more about how the human body reacts to space conditions. More must be learned about the sun, which sends out deadly radiation at capricious intervals. Meteors must be counted and weighed, and their effects assessed. The moon must be studied and restudied before a manned vehicle can hope to land there safely. Even the earth itself must be studied more closely: it is the target of homebound space voyagers, and its appearance as seen from space is little known.

Strange Birds. These are some of the concerns of the NASA divisions that deal with unmanned flight. Since the instrumented vehicles that these divisions shoot into space can be much smaller than those that will be needed by human crews, much of their hardware is already in space and functioning magnificently. Other strange birds are ready, or almost ready, to go.

The Goddard Space Flight Center at Greenbelt, Md., ten miles northeast of Washington, controls all unmanned civilian space vehicles intended to stay this side of the moon. Like all NASA centers, Goddard is a raw-looking and fast-growing place, spreading like a frontier clearing into a forest that formerly belonged to the earthbound Department of Agriculture. Its buildings, with odd antennas sprouting from their roofs, suggest the fearful complexity of the space age. Coaxial cables rear out of the ground and dive into the innards of electronic computers. Owlish young mathematicians wander in forests of electronics, flicking computer switches and managing somehow to look both callow and wise.

Young engineers set a strange contraption in the sunlight and watch it click and squirm and eerily point toward the sun. Colleagues gather to admire, their talk tangled with figures and newborn jargon. Nothing is simple at Goddard. In the corner of a control room is a small telephone switchboard attended by a bored young man. It looks as if it belonged in a flyblown small-town hotel, but it has a space-age name, SCAMA (Switching, Conferencing and Monitoring Arrangement), and it is the center of the world’s only global voice communication network. By flicking a switch, SCAMA’s operator can talk clearly and instantaneously with NASA stations that belt the globe, including such odd spots as Kano, Nigeria, and Woomera in Australia’s desert. When an astronaut is aloft, SCAMA can follow his voice sweeping all the way around the earth.

Scientific satellites may be built elsewhere, but they usually come to Goddard for final testing. As space scientists develop more ambitious creations that are harder to test under simulated space conditions, Goddard is getting ready for them with its nearly completed Space Environment Simulator. The Simulator can take into its belly a spidery satellite 40 ft. high and 28 ft. across. Then pumps will draw out the air, creating a hard vacuum just like that existing in space 250 miles high. The chamber’s walls can be cooled to match the deathly cold of space, and a battery of arc lamps above quartz windows simulates the fierce unscreened sunlight. If a satellite survives this torture, it will probably work in actual space.

Bell Telephone Labs built the incredibly . successful Telstar communications satellite, but Goddard men launched it, and NASA’s rich experience with space electronics made its triumph possible. Other communications satellites are even now in the works, including Relay, a joint NASA-RCA project that will be launched late this year, and Syncom, which will be placed in orbit 22,300 miles above the earth. Any one of these systems, or a combination, may eventually handle the bulk of the world’s long-distance communications. These complicated communications satellites may soon become the biggest kind of commercial business, justifying in dollars and cents a hefty part of the U.S. space investment.

Even more ambitious satellites are approaching completion. One will study the physics of the earth from an advantageous distance; another will carry a telescope and other instruments to observe the stars, planets and other heavenly bodies without the distortions and loss caused by the earth’s atmosphere. Both satellites not only will change profoundly their respective sciences, but the knowledge that they send down from space will contribute heavily to the success of manned space navigation.

Unmanned exploration of the moon itself is the job of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. Mostly because of launch difficulties, none of the JPL’s first four Ranger spacecraft has yet sent usable data back from the moon. But the next two are almost finished, and JPL considers them much superior to their predecessors. The job of Ranger 5 will be to land (at 100 m.p.h.) a package of tough instruments on the moon. A temperature-sensing device will report the moon’s horribly hot and cold climate over a tiny radio, and a seismometer will feel the ground for moon-quakes or shocks caused by meteor impacts.

Such information, skillfully interpreted, will be valuable for planning manned landings on the moon. More valuable still will be detailed pictures of the moon radioed to earth by Ranger 6 just before it crashes to destruction. Even such fleeting views should tell much more about the moon’s mysterious surface than is now known. Another moon explorer under development by JPL and Hughes Aircraft is Surveyor, which will try to make a soft landing on the moon, take closeup pictures and transmit them to earth, besides analyzing samples of moon “soil.” Later spacecraft will orbit the moon, photographing its topography in detail while mechanical eyes search for safe landing places for the spacecraft of human explorers. Long before men set foot on the moon, instruments will have made many parts of its surface fairly familiar.

Intricate Monsters. As Holmes and his NASA associates lay plans for invading the moon, they can safely assume that scientific knowledge will have increased enormously before the first flights begin. Their urgent concern now is to prepare launching facilities with which to make those flights. Technical direction of the program will eventually come from the Manned Spacecraft Center, 36 miles southeast of Houston. At present, NASA’s 1,600-acre tract of rangeland (formerly part of the J. M. West ranch) looks like a playground for bulldozers. Little actual building has started, but eventually the area will have laboratories, office buildings, and massive test communications and control facilities.

On the Mississippi, at New Orleans, NASA has acquired the great, Government-owned Michoud plant, which made torpedo boats in World War II. There the bulky segments of the C-5 Advanced Saturns will be assembled. They will then be taken by barge (the only way they can be carried) to a thinly inhabited area in nearby Mississippi for static testing. Then they will be floated along the Intracoastal Waterway to Cape Canaveral for final assembly and launching into space.

At Canaveral, once an Air Force principality, NASA has begun to look and act like the majority stockholder. The gantries and pads of the military “Missile Row” are busier than ever, but they are dwarfed by the 310-ft. gantry and 240-ft. umbilical tower of the Saturn C-1 site, which boasts the most elaborate blockhouse in the space business. A second gantry and tower are rising fast, and farther north NASA is buying thousands of acres of beachland, swamp and orange groves for the stupendous equipment needed to launch the great C-5 moon rockets. These intricate monsters, 325 ft. tall, will not be put together on the pads, as is the present practice. The C55 will be assembled on 2,500-ton racks, each supported on eight crawler treads 12 ft. high. An umbilical tower will stand at one end, the rocket at the other end. When assembly is complete, the entire mechanism will creep to the launching sites at one mile per hour along wide, heavy-duty roads. The assembly building, crawlers, roads and launch sites for the C-5s will cost $400 million, which alone is nearly four times the yearly cost of maintaining all national parks.

Preferred LOR. No C-5s are scheduled to fly before 1965, but assembly and launch facilities must be started well ahead. Much of Holmes’s attention goes into such planning, but not long ago he had to make a more crucial decision: he had to select the “mode” in which the first men will fly to the moon.

According to present NASA thinking, there are only three possible methods for making a manned moon expedition. The direct approach requires a multistage rocket big enough to fly straight to the moon and land a manned spacecraft there with everything needed for the return trip back to earth. Mode No. 2 is Earth Orbit Rendezvous (EOR), which requires two rockets to meet on an orbit around the earth. One of them fuels itself from the other and departs, replenished, for the moon. In mode No. 3, LOR (Lunar Orbit Rendezvous), a single rocket will proceed to the moon and park its manned upper stage in a lunar orbit. Then a small manned landing craft will descend to the lunar surface, stay there for a short while, and climb up again for orbital rendezvous before returning to earth.

Until recently NASA officially favored Earth Orbit Rendezvous. But now Lunar Orbit Rendezvous has become the most favored mode. Dr. Joseph F. Shea, Holmes’s deputy in charge of systems, makes a convincing case for the decision. Each mode, says Shea, was broken down into major elements, starting with takeoff from the earth. To each element was assigned a number expressing its relative hazard as accurately as possible. A very safe element, for instance, might have been given the fraction .9998, while a very dangerous one might have gotten .75, meaning that it would probably fail one out of four times. After all the hazard numbers, from take-off to return, were multiplied together, the result represented the hazard of the whole mode. In the final reckoning, LOR looked best. Chief advantage is the smallness of the lunar landing vehicle, which will be easier and safer to set down on the moon. Shea is sure that rendezvous near the moon will be no more difficult than rendezvous near the earth.

There are still too many unknowns for NASA scientists to make an irreversible decision. But Holmes smiles with a hint of apology, “We have to choose some plan, or we’d better pack up and go home.” Then he turns intensely serious. “We can’t change too often though. It costs too much money.” He picks from his desk a child’s china bank in the shape of a rocket. When he puts a nickel in the slot, the coin falls right out through the open bottom. “A friend gave me this,” he says, “to keep me thinking about the taxpayers’ money.”

TRAINING FOR THE MOON

The earth-circling trips of the astronauts and cosmonauts were almost as passive as floating down a river on an oarless raft. Making a rendezvous in space will have to be learned by long, expensive and dangerous practice, The basic trainers will be the two-man Gemini* capsules. Shortly before the astronauts take off in one, an Atlas will shoot an unmanned Agena-B rocket into a circular orbit 300 miles above the earth. When the orbit has been carefully determined by ground observers, a Titan II will toss a manned Gemini capsule into a 150-mile orbit in the same plane. Being nearer the earth, the Gemini will move slightly faster than its Agena target. When the two craft reach the proper relative positions, the astronauts, having made their calculations, will fire small rockets just long enough to boost their capsule into an elliptical orbit that will carry it up toward the target.

If all goes well, the astronauts will locate the target by radar or by spotting its flashing strobe light. Though they will be circling the earth at enormous speed (18,000 m.p.h.) the two vehicles will be approaching each other at a relatively low rate, perhaps 35 m.p.h. After carefully measuring the target’s relative speed by Doppler radar, the astronauts will fire small bursts from their rockets, gradually slowing their approach to a few feet per second, the speed of a slow walk. At some point they will give their craft “a kick in the apogee” to turn its elliptical orbit into a circular path matching the curve of the target.

During early rendezvous practice, Gemini crews will probably depend on guidance from the ground. Later, crews will make their own calculations; they will also actually “dock” the two satellites, bringing together interlocking parts that ”mate” firmly. At the end of each mission, the target rocket will be abandoned and the Gemini capsule will head back to the earth’s surface. NASA hopes to land it on the comparatively friendly land instead of the unfriendly sea. The landing area has not yet been selected, but it will probably be set in the Plains states east of the Rocky Mountains. The Gemini may make its final touchdown suspended under the airy-looking Rogallo wing,* an inflated combination of parachute and glider (see diagram) that can be steered to a favorable spot.

After quite a number of Gemini crews have been trained in basic rendezvous techniques, they will graduate to larger, more complicated Apollo capsules, which will contain all the apparatus needed for a landing on the moon, including the “bug,” more formally called the Lunar Excursion Vehicle. While circling around the earth, the astronauts will enter the bug, detach it, take short space rides in it, and finally return to earth in the parent vehicle. These operations will be almost exactly the same as those the astronauts will have to perform when making a rendezvous on an orbit around the moon. No landing on the moon will be attempted until several crews are proficient and all predictable operating difficulties have been eliminated.

DESTINATION MOON

At last the great C-5 rockets will be ready. The first that goes to the moon may not attempt to land; instead, it may merely cruise around to give its crew a good look. Later trips may go into brief lunar orbits, but not land either. If all goes well, before the end of President Kennedy’s promised decade, will come the moment of truth. A C-5 with a tightly trained crew and full supplies will take off from Canaveral. After its first two stages have burned, it will swing into a parking orbit around the earth. After making sure that all is well, the astronauts will take their departure for the moon, burning just enough fuel to reach earth-escape velocity.

Weighing about 85,000 Ibs., the moon bound spacecraft will have three parts: the command module, housing the three-man crew; the service module, with supplies, engines and propellants; and the small landing bug. During the three-day voyage to the moon, the astronauts will make computations and burn fuel to correct their course. They will also take the bug out of the rear of the service module and attach it to the nose of the command module. After arriving in the vicinity of the moon, they will burn a little more fuel to nudge their ship into a 100-mile-high lunar orbit. Then two of the crewmen will crawl into the bug through an airlock and detach it.

The bug will have its own rocket engines. By firing those engines briefly, the crew will be able to put their ship into an elliptical orbit that will dip to within ten miles of the moon’s airless surface. As they swoop through perigee, the men in the bug will study the barren geography below, trying to recognize places that they have seen on maps and photographs. They will be able to correct their orbit as they climb back to apogee.

If anything has gone wrong, they will still have a chance to rejoin the mother ship and return to earth without landing. But if all is well, they will make their landing attempt on their next close approach to the moon. By burning sufficient fuel, they will check the motion of their bug, making it sink slowly toward the surface. They will be able to hover for about one minute and move sideways 1,000 ft. in search of a good landing place. Finally the bug will settle down, steadying itself on four spidery legs.

Later crews may spend as many as four days exploring the moon, but the first men to land will probably take off again promptly. They will wait only for the mother ship to appear overhead. When it is about 3° behind their zenith, they will fire their rockets and rise vertically, leaving their landing gear behind. Because of low lunar gravity (16% of the earth’s) and lack of atmosphere, take-off from the moon should be comparatively easy. NASA planners believe that finding the mother ship and joining it will be no more difficult than long-practiced rendezvous with the same equipment while on earth orbit. The bug will be abandoned, to circle endlessly around the moon, and the reunited three-man crew will head back for earth. They will have to graze the atmosphere, hitting a “corridor” only 40 miles deep, but they will have plenty of time to correct their course.

As they explain these maneuvers, NASA enthusiasts make the trip sound as simple as a Sunday picnic, but no one actually believes that the voyage will be safe or easy. All sorts of unexpected obstacles may force changes of plan. No one knows, for instance, whether human bodies can stand a full week exposed to zero gravity. If they cannot, some sort of substitute gravity will have to be supplied by spinning the spacecraft−a stunt that will call for radically new apparatus. Another unknown is the lunar surface; no one is sure at present just how hostile it is. Astronomers point out that it is inconceivably old, that it has stewed in a vacuum and been exposed to fierce radiation for billions of years. It may be spotted with strange things, such as free radicals−highly reactive fragments of chemical compounds−that are best avoided by humans. Another threat may come from storms of deadly particles shot out of solar eruptions. The first flights to the moon are scheduled for a period when the sun will be extremely active, so NASA men hope that astrophysicists will soon find some way to predict eruptions dependably in advance.

Bright for Fear. Holmes knows all these dangers−and many more that he does not discuss with visitors. But when asked if his job ever frightens him, he has a ready reply: “No, I’m not bright enough.”

The truth is, Brainerd Holmes is bright enough to be frightened, and not a bit ashamed of his fears. But he knows he must give those fears short shrift. “We have plenty of skeptics,” he says. “They’re all over the place, and loud. But the head of the project can’t be a skeptic.” Looking back across his high-arcing career. Holmes has never had a taste for action-defeating doubts. At Cornell, where he studied electrical engineering, he was president of his fraternity, Chi Psi. “I was made president for two reasons,” he explains disarmingly. “I was a pretty able fellow, and the class was pretty depleted by the war.” Holmes himself got into the war briefly, serving at Pearl Harbor in 1944 in a radar maintenance pool. “My Navy career was good for me,” he laughs, “but not much good for them.” Before war’s end he married his college sweetheart, Dorothy (“Docky”) Bonnet, and when he came home he went to work for the Western Electric Co. in Kearney, N.J.

Everyone he ever worked with remembers him as a restless, dynamic worker, and as a scientist who was not afraid to work with his own hands. He repaired the plumbing and electrical wiring in his own house, designed and built his own TV set, serviced his own car.

The Knack. He was an ideal systems engineer from the start. “The problem in systems engineering,” says Dr. Elmer Engstrom, president of RCA and one of Holmes’s early bosses, “is to find people with a special knack for marrying men, machines, tactics and everything else into one large system. We could see right away that Holmes had the knack.” Says O’Neill, “He made quite a splash with it” and did it on schedule, within costs, and made it work as advertised.”

Not long after Holmes went to work for RCA, building Talos, he earned a proud title: “One-Shot Holmes.” But making Talos work the first time was simple compared with his next job, on BMEWS. Worried by the nightmare of Russian missiles curving southward across the Arctic Ocean, the Air Force desperately wanted radars that could warn of a missile’s approach. No ordinary radars could do the job; it was a Holmes plan that got RCA its most expensive contract ever.

In one of the world’s worst climates, in all-day darkness and howling blizzards, and in a place that can be reached by ship, with luck, only three months each summer, Holmes’s hot-shot organization built, at Thule, Greenland, two radar reflectors as big as football fields set on edge. The radar beams that they fired over the horizon were strong enough to kill a man who blundered into them.

This vast, unprecedented program required the coordination of 3,000 private subcontractors. Holmes’s crew hit every target date, kept within Air Force budget limits, and the giant radars worked up to every specification.

Noon Alarm. On one famous occasion they worked too well. One October night in 1960, as the powerful pulses from Thule’s radar swept rhythmically over the icecap, back came strong reflections that showed as targets on the radar screens. This was just what BMEWS was built for. Warning of possible missile attack flashed across ice and tundra to the North American Air Defense Command at Colorado Springs; a frantic flap spread over the continent. Airbases waited for red alerts, their bombers poised on the runways. Roused out of bed at home in Moorestown, Holmes listened carefully to a telephoned description of the frightening signals and realized what must have happened. Radar pulses from Thule had soared far beyond Russia and hit the rising moon 240,000 miles away. Reflected back to earth in 2.6 seconds, they showed up on the radar screens exactly the same as reflections from much nearer missiles might have done.

When the excitement died down, Holmes taught BMEWS how to distinguish between the moon and missiles. But he could hardly know that this would not be his last tangle with that cold and distant target. Whatever obstacles he stumbles into, Brainerd Holmes is determined to hit the moon on schedule. The U.S. space program must proceed at top speed, he argues, even if the Russians (whose space spectaculars are the principal goad that moves Congress to the necessary generosity) should retire wholly from the space race. “When a great nation is faced with a technological challenge,” says Scientist Holmes with scientific directness, “it has to accept or go backward. Space is the future of man, and the U.S. must keep ahead in space.”

* Latin for twins. Spacemen pronounce it jem-i-nee.

* Named for Aerodynamicist Francis Rogallo of Langley Research Center, poineer developer of the portable wing.