TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/caps/60s/60rivalr

Text File | 1990-12-01 | 12KB | 217 lines

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  [The Soviet Union led the U.S. in space technology and achievement
at the start of the 1960s. After launching Sputnik, the first earth
satellite, in 1957 and the first rocket to the moon two years later,
the Soviets in 1961 announced still another "first"--a big one.]


                                                    (April 21, 1961)

  Triumphant music blared across the land. Russian's radios saluted
the morning with the slow, stirring beat of the patriotic song, How
Spacious I My Country. Then came the simple announcement that
shattered forever man's ancient isolation on earth: "The world's first
spaceship, Vostok (East), with a man on board, has been launched on
April 12 in the Soviet Union on a round-the-world orbit."

  Radio reporters identified the "cosmonaut" as Major Yuri
Alekseevich Gagarin, 27. According to the official announcement, the
Vostok had blasted off from an unidentified launching pad at exactly
9:07 a.m., Moscow time. Brief bulletins, from time to time, traced its
orbital track. At 10:15 he checked in over Africa: "The flight is
normal. I am withstanding well the state of weightlessness." At 11:10
a report was broadcast that at 10:25 Gagarin had completed one circuit
of the earth and that the spaceship's braking rocket had been fired.
This was the perilous point when the Vostok, its nose white-hot from
friction with the earth's atmosphere, began its plunge to a landing.
All Russia waited nervously and the government-controlled radio milked
every moment for suspense. Not until 12:25 was the proud announcement
put on the air: "At 10:55 Cosmonaut Gagarin safely returned to the
sacred soil of our motherland.


                                                     (June 2, 1961)

  "These are extraordinary times," said President Kennedy in his
second State of the Union speech of the year. "We face an
extraordinary challenge."

  The costliest and most controversial proposal was a redoubled
effort to overtake Russia in the space race--an effort that would
require $531 million immediately, perhaps $20 billion more in the next
decade. It is time, he said gravely, "for this nation to take a
clearly leading role in space achievement. For while we cannot
guarantee that we shall one day be first, we can guarantee that any
failure to make this effort will make us last." Biggest item on the
stepped-up space agenda: a project to land a man on the moon by
1971--an undertaking, the President said, that would cost as much as
$9 billion more in the next five years.


  [The following year, the U.S. lifted its own astronaut into earth
orbit.]

                                                      (March 2, 1962)

  "This is a new ocean," said President Kennedy, "and I believe that
the U.S. must sail on it." The President, still tingling from a day
of thrill and suspense shared by the nation and the world, was paying
tribute to Lieut. Colonel John Herschel Glenn Jr., 40, the freshly
commissioned admiral of that new ocean. As the focus of a mighty team
effort involving a host of fiercely dedicated men, vast technological
skills and millions of dollars of the national wealth, John Glenn
accomplished on his flight through the heavens--which he laconically
called a "successful outing"--far more than a brief and exciting
escape from man's earthbound environment.

  This was the moment. He had worked toward it for three years. He
had suffered agonies of frustration. Now he was alone, flat on his
back on a form-fit couch inside the instrument-packed capsule named
"Friendship 7". In an incredibly matter-of-fact voice, John Glenn
began to count, "Ten, nine, eight, seven, six... "A great yellow-white
gush of flame spewed out from the Atlas-D missile. For nearly four
seconds, it seemed rooted to its pad in the space-age wasteland of
Cape Canaveral, a flat, sandy scrub land dotted by palmetto trees and
looming ungainly missile gantries. Then the rocket took off,
heading into the brilliant blue sky. "Lift-off," said Glenn. "The
clock is operating. We're under way."

  In the next four hours and 56 minutes, John Glenn lived through and
shared with millions a day of miracles. There was beauty. "I don't
know what you can say about a day in which you have seen four
beautiful sunsets," Glenn said later, "three in orbit, and one on the
surface after I was back on board the ship."

  As he approached Australia, Glenn radioed Astronaut Gordon Cooper
in the tracking station at Muchea: "That was about the shortest day
I've ever run into. Just to my right, I can see a big pattern of
light, apparently right on the coast." The glow was the city of
Perth, which had prepared a welcome for Glenn that was also a test of
his night vision. Street lights were ablaze. Families turned on their
porch lights, spread sheets out in the yard as reflectors. Glenn
radioed Cooper a grateful message: "Thank everybody for turning them
on, will you?"

  Just as Glenn was beginning his second orbit, an instrument panel
in the Project Mercury Control enter at Canaveral picked up a warning
that the Fiberglas heat shield on Friendship 7 had come ajar. If the
shield were to separate before or during the capsule's re-entry into
the earth's atmosphere, John Glenn would perish in a flash of flame.

  Glenn took the news of the deadly threat with characteristic
calmness. He made the adjustments necessary to keep the retro-rocket
packet in place, hand-flew his capsule into proper attitude for
descent--and braced himself. Timed by a pre-set mechanism in the
capsule, the braking rockets fired in sequence.

  On the ground, Astronaut Alan Shepard, the capsule communicator at
Cape Canaveral, lost radio contact with Glenn. At the same time, other
instruments tracking the capsule stopped registering. It lasted for
seven minutes and 15 seconds. Then came John Glenn's exultant voice.
"Boy!" he cried. "That was a real fireball!"

  Glenn had made it. As it later turned out, Glenn's heat shield had
been in place all along; a monitor in the capsule had been flashing a
misleading signal to the ground. But John Glenn could not be certain
that he was safe until he saw that the parachute which would lower his
capsule gently into the Atlantic had opened. Said he the next day:
"That's probably the prettiest ol' sight you ever saw in your life."

  At 2:43 p.m., Friendship 7 splashed into the Atlantic with a sizzle
as the red-hot shield turned the sea water to steam. Across the U.S.,
the TV audience sagged weakly with relief.


  [In 1963, the U.S. sent the first man-made satellite to another
planet, Venus.]

                                                  (March 8, 1963)

  The pale glow of Venus marked the morning--as it has done so many
times since man learned to recognize Earth's nearest planetary
neighbor. On that December day, though, the morning star held a
special attraction for the men of Caltech's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Almost as if they could see it all happening, they squinted into 36
million miles of space, out into the vicinity of Venus, where for the
first time in history a man-made space traveler was cruising into
range. A gold and gleaming machine, sporting angular purple wings and
unblinking electronic eyes, was swooping toward its target. Mariner II
was giving earthbound scientists their first close look at the distant
planet that has tugged so long at their adventurous imagination. And
when Mariner's radioed reports were finally decoded by the JPL crew
that had built the spacecraft and sent it on its way, Venus would
never seem quite the same again.

  Would the morning star live up to the romance of science and turn
out to be teeming with life? Were there, as some romanticists
confidently expected, forests of intelligent, moving trees? Or would
Mariner prove the accuracy of some of the glummer theories of radio
astronomy--that Venus is a barren ball covered with a dull layer of
dust?

  Mariner's instruments scanned Venus three times, crossing first the
dark side, then the boundary between light and dark, and finally the
sunlit side. The microwave radiometer reported a surface temperature
of about 800 degrees F. (melting point of lead: 621.5 degrees F.),
which seems to vary hardly at all over the whole planet, dark side as
well as light side. It showed no detectable water vapor.


  [That same year, the Soviets sent the first woman into space, a feat
not duplicated by the U.S. for another 20 years.]

                                                     (June 21, 1963)

  It was by all odds the most extraordinary date a man and woman ever
had. The Soviets one day last week orbited Vostok V, piloted by Air
Force Lieut. Colonel Valery Feodorovich Bykovsky, 28, LISTEN WORLD,
headlined Izvestia, SOVIET MAN IS AGAIN STORMING THE COSMOS. But this
time, Soviet Woman was storming right along. Two days later, Bykovsky
was joined in orbit by the first female in space, Lieut. Valentina
Vladimirovna Chereshkova, 26, at the controls of Vostok VI. In radio
and television transmission to the breathless spectators on the
ground, he referred to himself as "The Hawk," while she called
herself "The Seagull."

  After Seagull joined Hawk, there were messages. Said Khrushchev:
"Dear Valentina Vladimirovna, cordial congratulations to the world's
first woman cosmonaut on the wonderful flight through the expanses of
the universe...A happy journey to you! We will be extremely glad to
meet you on Soviet soil." Smiling at the TV camera in her
capsule--some viewers described her as resembling a tougher-looking
Ingrid Bergman--Valentina thanked Khrushchev for his "fatherly
concern," assured everyone she was feeling fine.


  [In 1965, the U.S. obtained the first photographs of the planet
Mars.]

                                                      (July 23, 1965)

  The picture was grainy and ill-defined, a blur of white curving
across a black background. It would take months of painstaking
analysis to determine what it really showed. But one quick glance gave
the scientists at Caltech's Jet Propulsion Laboratory the most
important message of all: from 135 million miles in space, their
spacecraft, Mariner IV, had sent home the first closeup portrait man
has ever made of the far-off planet Mars.

  By week's end, three pictures were made public. The second and
third shots, like the first, showed broad, desert like areas but few
outstanding surface markings.

  Remarkable as those photographs were, they tended for a few excited
moments to hide the rest of a remarkable feat. Without a single
snapshot to show for its travels, Mariner IV would still have earned
its place in the annals of science. In its 325-million-mile, 228-day
flight, it had charted interplanetary reaches never before explored by
man and set an impressive record for long-distance communication. All
during its trip, Mariner sent back valuable scientific information
about the solar wind, cosmic dust, magnetic fields and deep-space
radiation. In the vicinity of the red planet it scouted the hazards
that astronauts will meet when they try to land there. It gave
earthbound experts their most accurate estimates of the planet's
structure and mass; it beamed radio signals through the Martian
atmosphere to study its density and looked for signs of a magnetic
field.