National Affairs: Thorpiter or Thupiter?

To end a bitter and expensive interservice rivalry, retiring Defense Secretary Charlie Wilson last week ordered a capable three-man committee to merge the Army’s experimental Jupiter and the Air Force’s Thor into a single intermediate-range ( 1, 500-mile) ballistics missile. The multimillion-dollar marriage brokers: Major General John B. Medaris. boss of the Army’s missile-making Redstone Arsenal; Major General Bernard A. Schriever, boss of the Air Force’s ballistics-missile program; and Wilson’s special assistant for guided missiles, William M. Holaday, onetime Socony Mobil Oil Co. Inc. research director. Wedding date: “Earliest practicable,” probably October.

Even as Wilson ordered the IRBM nuptials, the Army reported that it had scored a major research breakthrough. A Redstone-built, rocket-powered Jupiter “C” test vehicle, fired 400 miles into the ionosphere from its launching site at Cape Canaveral. Fla.. reached a top speed of 12,000 m.p.h., dropped into the Atlantic with its nose cone intact, despite the destructive 20,000° friction heat generated on its “reentry” into the earth’s atmosphere. Thus the Army laid claim to being the first to solve the fantastically complicated “reentry problem” (and also exulted in the fact that the test Jupiter “C” landed 1,200 miles from its launching site, within a quarter-mile of its plotted destination area).

To rub in the success of their bird over the Air Force’s Thor, more ambitiously designed but so far unsuccessfully flown, Army scientists produced a letter carried through space in the Jupiter’s nose, jubilantly sent it off to the addressee, Research Boss Medaris, who read it and stuck it in his blouse pocket without revealing its text. Where they had previously conceded that the new mating of Thor and Jupiter might conceivably be called “Thorpiter.” Army scientists now were claiming more credit, joked that they would settle for nothing less than “Thupiter.”