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Sprinting along the fringes of space, 21 miles above the earth, NASA Test Pilot Joe Walker last week gunned his rocket-powered X-15 to the greatest speed any airplane has ever achieved—an imagination-defying 3.920 m.p.h. In the nose of the X-15, a grapefruit-sized electronic wizard familiarly known as "the Q-ball" gauged the basic critical factors—direction, sideslip, friction—and told Joe Walker that he could safely press for the record. Said Walker, with affection: "The Q-ball is a go-no-go item. Only if she checks O.K. do we go."
Off Cape Canaveral last week, the nation's newest and biggest Polaris submarine, the Ethan Allen, slipped into the Atlantic to test-shoot its first missile. Shortly before firing time. Captain Paul Lacy took the Ethan Allen up to periscope depth to check the relative positions of his sub and its target by means of a remarkable celestial-navigation system that can shoot the stars, by day as well as by night, in any kind of weather. From a small Datico testing computer plugged into the Polaris itself came the signal that every one of the missile's million-odd parts was in sound firing order. With that, the missile was sent splashing up out of the sea, arced 1,100 miles downrange and landed square in the target area.
The feats of the X-15 and the Ethan Allen were gratifying to thousands of Americans who made them possible. Few could take such personal satisfaction as a trimly handsome man who makes his contribution to U.S. defense from a paneled penthouse office overlooking Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills, Calif. As president of the Northrop Corp., Thomas Victor Jones, 41, heads the crackerjack industrial team that makes the Q-ball, the Datico, the Polaris star-tracker—and the bodies, brains, eyes and nervous systems of scores of other devices to carry men, or the alert instruments of men, off the earth. Many of its competitors are bigger than Northrop (which, with assets of $128 million, ranks seventh in size among the old-line independent airframe companies), and some have more widely publicized products. But none has a better reputation with the men who manage the U.S. space program, and only a handful can match Tom Jones's boast: "Hardly a thing goes into space these days without something from Northrop aboard."
The Heaviest Responsibility. At an age when most successful executives are hopefully eying a vice-presidency, personable Tom Jones has rocketed to the top of an industry that bears the heaviest responsibilities ever imposed upon any branch of private enterprise. A curious conglomeration of aircraft companies, automakers, electronics firms and appliance manufacturers, the industry that has come to be called "aerospace" has as its prime immediate assignment the development and production of the weapons upon which the U.S. rests its hopes of maintaining its power and freedom. Beyond these here-and-now military needs lies another historic assignment—the creation of devices that will end man's age-old confinement to the earth and its atmosphere, and open up to human exploration the far corners of the universe.