Space: Closer to Orbit

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration last week stepped up its timetable for the moment when the first U.S. astronaut will be spun into orbit around earth. NASA announced that the U.S. learned enough from its first two manned suborbital flights by Astronauts Alan Shepard and “Gus” Grissom (plus, presumably, the limited reports of the U.S.S.R.’s orbiting Cosmonauts Yuri Gagarin and Gherman Titov) to cancel a third planned suborbital ride. Thus only two apparent steps still remain before manned orbit: successfully launching an unmanned but human-dummied Mercury capsule into orbit (possibly this week), then orbiting a chimpanzee. The speedup could put an astronaut into orbit late this year.