• U.S.

Science: Recovery at White Sands

3 minute read
TIME

When spacecraft are fired from Cape Canaveral, recovery of the segment that returns to earth often becomes a full-dress Navy spectacular. Destroyers, carriers, airplanes and helicopters scout hundreds of miles of ocean to pull an encapsuled astronaut out of the drink or save a set of valuable instruments. But such shows are so costly that they are attempted only when the cargo that comes back from space is especially important. Most of the Cape’s missiles and satellites deliver all their information by radio and are abandoned when they hit.

At White Sands Missile Range, N. Mex., where swarms of smaller missiles are tested over solid land, recovery teams are kept consistently busy. Nearly every fragment of returning missiles is searched for and found. The wreckage dug out of alkali flats or mesquite thickets often tells more about a flight than any amount of telemetry could radio back to base. For this reason White Sands testing is preferred for correcting tough cases of missile misbehavior.

Dangerous Quarry. The White Sands recovery force, headed by Lieut. Colonel Otto F. Thum, has 250 men and 150 widely assorted vehicles, including Jeeps, 10-ton wreckers, bulldozers, power shovels and 35 airplanes and helicopters. All are needed; the range is as big as Connecticut, and although some parts are bare desert, others are precipitous mountains and dense, hummocky tangles of thorny scrub. Finding small missiles—or fragments of small missiles—in this hairy country is a job for resourceful men.

Colonel Thum gets each firing schedule in advance and deploys his forces accordingly. If a missile to be tested has heat-seeking guidance, he cannot use aircraft for fear the missile will turn on the planes. When aircraft can be used, they loiter as close as they dare. Sometimes they drop a flare to mark the impact. Sometimes the helicopters land and pick up small items, but fallen missiles are dangerous. Each carries a “destruct” charge to blow it to bits in case it heads for a place where it can do damage. Colonel Thum’s recovery men are experts in the nasty business of disconnecting these charges without touching them off.

Shark Oil & Chutes. As missiles become more sophisticated, smaller pieces become more important to find; the White Sands recovery force is always alert for bright ideas that will help them find their quarry. One promising trick is to station seven or eight men with powerful telescopic theodolites on the edges of the impact area. They note the direction of the dust cloud raised by missile impact; then computation gives an accurate fix.

Instrument packages from high-flying rockets are sometimes dropped by parachute, and to keep them from drifting out of reach, Sandia Corp. is developing a homing parachute controlled by a small radio. When the radio locates the proper impact area, air is automatically spilled from the proper segment of the parachute to make it slant toward a convenient landing.

But oldtime, nontechnical methods are not neglected either. Missile-sniffing dogs are getting intensive training. A pair named Dingo and Count are being schooled to locate small missile fragments coated with paint mixed with squalene, a noisome extract of shark-liver oil. The dogs have already learned to ignore coyote and rabbit scents, and they can whiff a shark-flavored fragment half a mile downwind. Vernon Miller, chief of the range instrumentation division, thinks that the dog detectives will be over the research hump and busy at serious work within six months.

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