(See Cover) On a stony California ridge, a rocket engine wide as a barn door lit the sky like an erupting volcano, while its roar racketed for 45 miles across the Mojave Desert. In a quiet Massachusetts laboratory, scientists carefully tuned a new and incredibly sensitive radio receiver designed to trap signals from far-out space. All over the U.S. last week, the story was the same: thousands of scientists and engineers sweated over strange new jobs−jobs more difficult than any they had ever attempted before. In a frenzy of creativeness they were producing new materials, machines, instruments, methods of measurement and computation. And no matter how well they did, they could be sure that they would soon be called on to do better. In his anxious assault on space, man has only begun to imagine how much effort he must expend, or how far that effort may take him.
For the U.S., the first real target was boldly defined on May 25, 1961, when President Kennedy told Congress: "I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth." At that moment the U.S. was behind in the race to get men into space. The Russians had already shot Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin on an orbit around the earth; blazing a trail for future space travelers, they had taken pictures of the unseen face of the moon. U.S. Astronaut Alan Shepard had been forced to settle for a brief 302-mile arc that was sadly short of orbit.
But though the U.S. could not yet match the Soviet space spectaculars, the once-starved U.S. space program had made broad progress since that dismaying Friday in October 1957 when Soviet Sputnik I started its beeping, curving course. Dozens of unmanned satellites had been shot aloft to circle the earth, and each one had taught engineers more about rocket techniques, told scientists more about the space environment that wraps the world.
Focused Brilliance. Jack Kennedy's challenge, and the money he mentioned so calmly ($531 million in fiscal '62 and $7 billion to $9 billion during the next five years), supplied a new and powerful boost to the U.S. space campaign. Just as basic was the choice six months later of a round-eyed, enthusiastic electrical engineer named Dyer Brainerd Holmes to head the U.S. effort to reach for the moon.
In a new and proliferating profession that swarms with specialists of fiercely focused brilliance, Spaceman Holmes supplies a varied and vital collection of talents. At 40, he had already earned a reputation for big-league engineering triumphs. He had taken charge of RCA's $40 million Talos antiaircraft missile program and had made the complicated bird fly right on its first try. ("The first Talos we fired at White Sands," Holmes remembers with pleasure, "knocked the target drone so flat they couldn't find the engines.") He had bossed the design and construction of BMEWS (Ballistic Missile Early Warning System), the Air Force's gigantic, $1.3 billion northern radar system, and made it a personal triumph. With BMEWS, he proved that he could handle touchy and cost-conscious subcontractors, that he knew how to keep materials moving, that he dared to talk up to superiors at home while keeping subordinates happy on the job. Easygoing engineers in search of placid lives had already learned to avoid