Science: Reaching for the Moon

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F-1 is 18 ft. to 20 ft. tall and 16 ft. across the end of its thrust chamber. Too big to be tested at "Suzy," North American's test facility in the Santa Susana Mountains northwest of Los Angeles, it is trucked to Leuhman Ridge in the Mojave Desert. There, the test stand towers 275 ft. above the rocky ground. Tucked in its steel skeleton are tanks for lox (liquid oxygen) and kerosene, while stairs, cables, and many-colored pipes thread their way among the girders. The F-1 looks small in this immense structure, but it does not act small. After a careful countdown, a brilliant spout of flame bursts from its throat, and a sound beyond description rolls across the desert. The flame hits a steel deflector 130 ft. below, spreads in a wide fan, and pushes ahead of it a dense cloud of smoke, steam, dust and rocks.

Five of these mighty machines, which are now well into their final reliability tests, will lift each Saturn C-5 off the ground with 7,500,000 Ibs. of thrust. Then a second stage, with five J-2 hydrogen-burning engines (1,000.000 Ibs. total thrust), will take over. Between them, the two stages will be capable of putting a 240,000-lb. payload on an earth orbit 140 miles high. A third stage, with a single J-2 engine, will push 90,000 Ibs. to earth escape velocity and deliver that hefty payload at the moon.

State of the Art. When Brainerd Holmes and his NASA associates talk about the C5, the basic tool of their moon mission, they are not bothered at all that it is still unfinished. No F-1 engine has been fired except on a test stand, and the J-2 hydrogen engine (also made by North American) is even farther from flight. None of this worries Holmes. Like most engineers, he is used to forecasting the technical future by figuring what can be accomplished with combinations and modifications of existing equipment. There is nothing in the C-5 Advanced Saturn, he says, that is beyond the present "state of the art." Since the smaller engines of the Saturn C-1 have flown successfully in clusters of eight, then the F-1 engines can surely be harnessed in clusters of five. He also concedes that liquid hydrogen, basic to the Apollo project, is an extremely difficult fuel, but insists that its problems can be licked.

STUDYING THE ROUTE

The most crying U.S. need in space is big boosters. But before men can fly to the moon, land there, and return to earth in reasonably good condition many more facts will have to be gathered about the hostile space environment. Space doctors will have to learn more about how the human body reacts to space conditions. More must be learned about the sun, which sends out deadly radiation at capricious intervals. Meteors must be counted and weighed, and their effects assessed. The moon must be studied and restudied before a manned vehicle can hope to land there safely. Even the earth itself must be studied more closely: it is the target of homebound space voyagers, and its appearance as seen from space is little known.

Strange Birds. These are some of the concerns of the NASA divisions that deal with unmanned flight. Since the instrumented vehicles that these divisions shoot into space can be much smaller than those that will be needed by human crews, much of their hardware is already in space and functioning magnificently. Other strange birds are ready, or almost ready, to go.

The Goddard Space Flight Center