SOVIET LEAD IN SPACE RACE

Press, Volume C, Issue 29514, 16 May 1961, Page 15

SOVIET LEAD IN SPACE RACE

General Warns House Committee

(N.Z. Press Assn. —Copyright)

WASHINGTON, May 15.

The Soviet Union was three years and a half to four years ahead of the United States in the ability to keep men in space for long periods of time, an Air Force expert has warned, United Press International reported. The Chief of Life Sciences Space Work in the United States Air Force (Brigadier-General Don Flickinger) gave the warning before the United States House of Representatives Space Committee in testimony published last night.

He said he was shocked at the Soviet Union's knowledge in the field as demonstrated by Major Yuri Gagarin’s space orbit of the earth. The general said as a military man he was concerned that the Soviet Unson might "in the relatively near future” be able to dominate space.

General Flickinger’s testimony, and supporting statements by other witnesses showed that even if the United States had the Soviet Union's stronger rocket it could not put men into anything more than a brief orbit. The Life Sciences Director for the National Aeronautics and Space Agency, Colonel Charles Roadman, said United States scientists knew enough to support Project Mercury —in which one man was to be sent three times around the earth late this year. But they did not have adequate data so far to support the subsequent Apollo programme. in which three men were to be put into a brief orbit, he said. The United States would soon make its first attempt to hit the moon, the ‘‘New York Times" said today The target was the Ocean of Storms, near the western edge of the Moon as seen from the Earth. Three instrumented vehicles were to be fired in an initial series, which was to start in the second half of this year. Walter Sullivan, writing in the “New York Times,” said that although payload capsules would carry retrorockets to slow them down, the landings would still be "hard.”

The instrument package

was being designed to withstand an impact, on a concrete surface, of about 200 miles an hour and still function.

The project in this respect differed from the successful shot by the Soviet Union in which a rocket hit the moon on September 13. 1959. Sullivan said. The Russian rocket, which landed near the junction of the Seas of Serenity, Tranquillity and Vapours, performed no scientific experiments after impact. Less than a month later, the Soviat Union launched another rocket that circled the moon and took pictures, for the first time, of the ’’back’’ of the moon and radioed them back to earth. The American capsule would contain a "vidicon” camera to send images back to earth during the vehicle’s final plunge, so providing the first close-up pictures of the moon’s surface.

This camera was the type of television scanner carried by the Tiros weather satellites. Sullivan wrote. While this presumably would be smashed, it was hoped other equipment would survive the crash, including a seismometer, a radio system to send its readings back to earth, and batteries to keep it running for several weeks. Sullivan said that plans for rocket exploration of the moon and planets were outlined in a report on the work of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory of the California Institute of Technology The laboratory was in charge of preparing payloads for the vehicles that were to make these journeys.