(5 of 8)
Magnetically guided missiles steer, like ships, by following automatically the pattern of the earth's magnetic field. When a long-range missile is guided by "automatic astro-navigation," it flies by night and has wise little telescopes to pick up certain stars. Photosensitive tubes note the position of the stars. This information, processed by a complicated electronic brain, tells the missile the course it is following over the surface of the earth. It corrects its own course if necessary; it knows when it reaches the target and when to explode its bomb.
Test Flight. Developing a missile is astonishingly difficult. It demands new metals, new chemicals, new electronics, even new kinds of thinking that only computing machines can do fast enough. There is, in addition, a very special headache. A missile cannot be flight-tested by a human pilot who lives to make his report. Once the missile is fired, it is gone forever. It turns into junk on the desert or sinks under the sea. So the missilemen have developed other methods of testing their single-flight birds.
The missile's first flights are generally made on a calculating machine, such as the REAC (Reeves Instrument Corp.) analogue computer used by CalTech at the Army's Jet Propulsion Laboratory near Pasadena. The performance characteristics of the missile's components go into this brainy machine in the form of dial settings; the results come out as curves drawn on paper. A simulated flight takes only a few seconds and costs almost nothing. Between flights, adjustments can be made to see if the missile can be improved by altered tail surfaces or controls. To test such details by actual flights would cost a whole missile each time.
Real flame-and-metal tests are done at ranges equipped with elaborate instruments to catch and record every shred of information. The Army, whose domain is ground-launched missiles, does its testing at White Sands Proving Ground in New Mexico. The Navy uses White Sands too and also conducts tests at Point Mugu, between Los Angeles and Santa Barbara, or from the Norton Sound. The purpose of both Point Mugu and the Norton Sound is to support the fleet in its introduction of the new weapons.
The Air Force tests a great variety of missiles at Holloman near White Sands. Its Patrick Air Force Base at Banana River in Florida (150 miles south of Jacksonville) will be the testing ground for missiles of all the services that have ranges too long for safe testing elsewhere. Patrick's advantage is that it can fly its birds over the thinly inhabited Bahamas, where a chain of instrument stations is now being built.
Sacrifice on the Desert. A "shot" at White Sands Proving Ground or Holloman Air Force Base is solemn with ritual.
The dusty desert to the east of the Organ Mountains is sown with nonhuman eyes: radars, telescopic cameras, instruments to measure the missile's enormous speed. Housed in small concrete buildings or perched on platforms, they cover the whole range, which is roughly 40 miles wide and 100 miles long. Roosting on high mountains are astronomical telescopes with 16-inch mirrors that can photograph the missile like a planet in space.