How Tiros Photographs the World (including Russia)
The day of the high-flying spy plane may be over. America’s camera-toting satellites will soon be ready to take over security reconnaissance work
By S. DAVID PURSGLOVE
IS America’s first military reconnaissance satellite already orbiting the earth? Tiros I—launched in April—was called a “weather observation satellite.” But it has disturbed top U. S. officials the way weather never could.
Nobody expected the camera-carrying Tiros to do more than demonstrate the feasibility of weather satellites (it actually has come up with significant, although not new, information about weather). But Tiros has embarrassingly done more for military spy satellites than it has for weather satellites.
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After Telstar, what?
The Stay-Putnik
It’s our new Syncom, a satellite that promises a better bounce for world-wide TV and telephone
THE newest U.S. communications satellite—scheduled for launch this month or sooner, in an attempt to top Telstar— can’t be expected to streak across the sky at regular intervals. To the operators of a tracking station, it won’t even seem to be in orbit. Instead, the unnatural instrument package will hang around over the Atlantic, tracing a lazy north-south figure-8 every 24 hours.
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Amazing Turbine-Rocket to Explore Outer Space
By Lew Holt
Prof. R. H. Goddard, famous rocket experimenter, has just patented a remarkable turbine-rocket which makes the age-old dream of traveling in space mechanically possible. Details of this astonishing invention and of other experiments which pave the way for regular lines of ships traveling through the earth’s stratosphere at 1000 miles an hour are presented in this absorbing article.
DOWN in a secluded section of New Mexico a scientist who has for years been experimenting with rockets has succeeded in devising a mechanism combining the principles of the rocket and the turbine, giving the world an entirely new vehicle of transportation capable of traveling hundreds of miles above the earth’s surface— and perhaps, some day, of making a trip to the moon or nearby planets.
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Queer Facts about Star Gazers
HAVE you ever seen a picture of a square star? Why do astronomers live longer every year than anyone else? Would you believe it is impossible to look through the world’s largest telescope? Do you know astronomers don’t always point their telescopes at the stars they really want to observe?
There are no square stars, of course, although the scientists make photographs that show them as squares. They do it with a special camera equipped with a traveling back that moves up and down so the rays from separate stars are recorded as square patches on the film. This makes it easier to measure their comparative brilliance.
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This is a pretty amazing article. It’s a concise summary of the big bang theory published only 3 years after Edwin Hubble made his famous observations about the redshifts of distant galaxies. Yet it’s pretty much identical to one you’d see today. Only a few details like the size of the initial “atom” and the age of the universe seem off. Keep in mind it took another 35 years or so before the scientific community came to accept that the big bang really happened.
Blast of Giant Atom Created Our Universe
By Donald H. Menzel
Harvard Observatory
OUT of a single, bursting atom came all the suns and planets of our universe!
That is the sensational theory advanced by the famous Abbe G. Lemaitre, Belgian mathematician. It has aroused the interest of astronomers throughout the world because, startling as the hypothesis is, it explains many observed and puzzling facts.
According to Lemaitre’s theory, all the matter in the universe was once packed within a single, gigantic atom, which, until ten thousand millions years ago, lay dormant. Then, like a sky-rocket touched off on the Fourth of July after having remained quietly for months on a store shelf, the atom burst, its far-flung fragments forming the stars of which our universe is built.
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How You’ll Fly to the MOON
THE days of dreaming about a trip to the moon are over. The research destined to make that trip an actuality is already well under way.
Next May the first step on the long, long trail into space may be made: Man hopes to send something up that will never come down again (see “Going Up for Keeps,” p. 66). In the words of Dr. Fritz Zwicky, the California Institute of Technology physicist who suggested the May satellite-making experiment, “We first throw a little something into the skies. Then a little more, then a shipload of instruments—then ourselves.”
And other scientists agree. Dr. James A. Van Allen, of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, anticipates sending a rocket to the moon (one way, no crew) within 15 years. “A conservative estimate,” he says. Maj. P. C. Calhoun, chief of the AAF’s guided-missile branch, expects to travel to the moon and back in his lifetime. And the University of California at Los Angeles already offers a course in rocket navigation!
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Five Roads to Doomsday
By Richard F. Dempewolff
UNDER a star-studded dome of blue sky, people gazed upward uneasily. Something was wrong with the solar system. The friendly, familiar moon had ceased to be friendly. Slowly, it was moving closer and closer to earth until, finally, an unfamiliar moon, huge and terrible, filled half the sky.
There was no beauty in the awesome spectacle. With the moon’s advance, ocean tides grew into mountains of water, spilling over continents, obliterating cities. Molten matter from deep under the earth’s crust, spewed from every crater and crevasse. Oceans atomized with hissing roars. Cities crumbled and were engulfed in a sea of liquid fire.
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Aparently Pluto’s status as a planet has been in doubt from the very beginning.
Pluto Is an Exceedingly Minor Planet
SINCE his discovery, the planet Pluto has been a good deal of a disappointment to his sponsors. Now Dr. Baade, of Mt. Wilson observatory, estimates that Pluto’s mass is something like that of Titan, the largest satellite of Saturn. But the mass of Titan, though the diameter is 2,600 miles, is but l/50th that of the Earth, or less than twice that of the moon. So that Pluto ranks as the largest asteroid, rather than the smallest planet; and it may be necessary to look farther for unknown planets.
Soviet Cities on the Moon?
by Albert Parry
We advertise our failures, but the Soviets don’t. For all we know, Moscow’s scientists and engineers did try to shoot a rocket to the moon last November 7, to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Communist seizure of power in Russia, but failed.
You will recall that for a while, during that weekend, some mysterious radio signals were heard from outer space. They were not accountable by the two Sputniks, and soon they faded out.
We may surmise that, in their try for the moon, the Soviet shooting team took a wrong aim, and that the rocket they fired is now either orbiting around the sun or is lost in space.
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According to this article the answer is: exactly like us.
WHAT WILL “SPACE PEOPLE” LOOK LIKE?
by Willy Ley
Condensed from This Week Magazine
A short time ago man put artificial satellites in space. Sometime in 1958 we will launch a piloted aircraft into space. Some scientists are confident we could hit the moon with an unmanned rocket today. Within 10 or 20 years spaceflight will be an almost everyday occurrence.
Once we are in space, the question arises — will we be the only ones? Will we find other intelligent beings plying the spaceways, and if so. what will they be like? We cannot predict everything, of course, but we do have a good idea of what space people might look like.
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