TIME: Almanac of the 20th Century

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<text> <title> (1960s) Soviet-American Rivalry </title> <history> TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1960s Highlights </history> <link 07781> <link 07646> <link 07647> <link 07558> <link 00149><article> <source>Time Magazine</source> <hdr> Soviet-American Rivalry </hdr> <body> [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 Is 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. </body> </article> </text>