SPACE: Capsule in the Icestack

Called off last week by the U.S. Air Force was the great capsule hunt in the icy wilds of Spitzbergen. There—somewhere—the telltale orange parachute with the instrumented nose capsule of Discoverer II was seen to drop into the mountains after it was ejected from orbit. And there Norwegian coal miners, U.S. air-rescue squadrons and helpful Norwegian helicopter pilots scoured the bleak, white mountains for eight days (TIME, April 27). The search—in which residents of a local Russian mining community participated on their own—was halted after the arrival of Colonel Theodore Tatum, air-rescue boss for the Air Force in Europe,...