Space: Two Touches of Venus

After lonely, four-month journeys through the void, two ingeniously contrived spacecraft—one Russian, the other American—reached Venus last week. Methodically investigating the cloud-shrouded planet, they successfully radioed their findings back across 50 million miles of space to scientists on earth. The dual performance was perhaps the most impressive demonstration yet of the technical progress made by man during his first decade of space flight.

Diving directly into the planet's dense, murky atmosphere, Russia's 2,427-lb. Venus 4 ejected an egg-shaped, instrument-crammed capsule. Although the mother ship was quickly incinerated by the frictional heat of...