Science: Reaching for the Moon

(4 of 10)

at Greenbelt, Md., ten miles northeast of Washington, controls all unmanned civilian space vehicles intended to stay this side of the moon. Like all NASA centers, Goddard is a raw-looking and fast-growing place, spreading like a frontier clearing into a forest that formerly belonged to the earthbound Department of Agriculture. Its buildings, with odd antennas sprouting from their roofs, suggest the fearful complexity of the space age. Coaxial cables rear out of the ground and dive into the innards of electronic computers. Owlish young mathematicians wander in forests of electronics, flicking computer switches and managing somehow to look both callow and wise.

Young engineers set a strange contraption in the sunlight and watch it click and squirm and eerily point toward the sun. Colleagues gather to admire, their talk tangled with figures and newborn jargon. Nothing is simple at Goddard. In the corner of a control room is a small telephone switchboard attended by a bored young man. It looks as if it belonged in a flyblown small-town hotel, but it has a space-age name, SCAMA (Switching, Conferencing and Monitoring Arrangement), and it is the center of the world's only global voice communication network. By flicking a switch, SCAMA's operator can talk clearly and instantaneously with NASA stations that belt the globe, including such odd spots as Kano, Nigeria, and Woomera in Australia's desert. When an astronaut is aloft, SCAMA can follow his voice sweeping all the way around the earth.

Scientific satellites may be built elsewhere, but they usually come to Goddard for final testing. As space scientists develop more ambitious creations that are harder to test under simulated space conditions, Goddard is getting ready for them with its nearly completed Space Environment Simulator. The Simulator can take into its belly a spidery satellite 40 ft. high and 28 ft. across. Then pumps will draw out the air, creating a hard vacuum just like that existing in space 250 miles high. The chamber's walls can be cooled to match the deathly cold of space, and a battery of arc lamps above quartz windows simulates the fierce unscreened sunlight. If a satellite survives this torture, it will probably work in actual space.

Bell Telephone Labs built the incredibly . successful Telstar communications satellite, but Goddard men launched it, and NASA's rich experience with space electronics made its triumph possible. Other communications satellites are even now in the works, including Relay, a joint NASA-RCA project that will be launched late this year, and Syncom, which will be placed in orbit 22,300 miles above the earth. Any one of these systems, or a combination, may eventually handle the bulk of the world's long-distance communications. These complicated communications satellites may soon become the biggest kind of commercial business, justifying in dollars and cents a hefty part of the U.S. space investment.

Even more ambitious satellites are approaching completion. One will study the physics of the earth from an advantageous distance; another will carry a telescope and other instruments to observe the stars, planets and other heavenly bodies without the distortions and loss caused by the earth's atmosphere. Both satellites not only will change profoundly their respective sciences, but the knowledge that they send down from space will contribute