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Dangerous speeds and forces develop quickly. If an astronaut is reeled in from 5,000 ft. away, he will speed up to 600 m.p.h. before he gets within 25 ft. of the ship, and the strain on his tether will rise to many tons. Assorted and intricate schemes have been suggested for the avoidance of this dangerous difficulty. But the day may come when an astronaut will break his tether and drift off into endless space because a comrade has reeled him in too fast.
Limberer for Lava. A suit designed for use in weightless space can include several hundred pounds of instruments, oxygen, propellant, cooling agent, tools and other supplies. The wearer will not feel the weight, only the inertial mass. For some missions his less and torso will need little flexibility; they can stay stiff while the man works with his arms and moves around with his rocket thrusters.
But a suit for exploration of the moon presents different problems. Tt needs no built-in propulsion, but its limbs must be flexible to permit the wearer to clamber around on the moon's surface, which is probably covered in many places with chunks of rubble and unstable dusty slopes. One U.S. astronaut recently put on a moon-exploration space suit and stumbled across a lava bed in Oregon. He found the knees too stiff for such work, and the suit is being made more limber.
U.S. space-suit plans call for exchangeable equipment: a massive propulsive backpack for use in weightless space, and lighter suits emphasizing oxygen and cooling apparatus for exploring the moon. These suits have not reached the rigorous testing stage, in which men will wear them in a vacuum chamber under the glare of simulated space radiation. Less ambitious suits for emerging from Gemini capsules are farther advanced. Like the suit worn by Leonov. they will carry their own oxygen and cooling equipment and also trail an umbilical cord as an extra safety measure. They are designed to support life in a vacuum for several hours, and U.S. space-suit experts, who were deeply impressed by the pictures of Leonov's brief excursion, suspect that his suit could do the same.
Orbiting Station. It may not be long before Russian cosmonauts have the capability of doing serious work in space—which will be needed on their chosen lunar route. Present U.S. plans call for a giant rocket that will push astronauts near the moon, then send a part of the vehicle into lunar orbit. The Russians seem to be leaning toward the orbiting-platform concept promoted for years by German-born Dr. Wernher von Braun, who is now Director of the Marshall Space Flight Center at Huntsville, Ala.
The platform will be put together gradually while circling on an earth orbit, its parts and supplies carried up by rockets of reasonable size. A vehicle designed for flight in a vacuum will be assembled and fueled aloft, and after it is fully checked out, its trained crew will arrive. When it takes off for the moon, the vehicle will not need much extra thrust since the platform on which it stands is already moving around the earth at 18,000 m.p.h. The ship's structure can be light since it will not have to battle its way through the dense lower atmosphere.