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Unlocking the Secret. Under the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and its administrator, Dr. T. Keith Glennan, a deceptively mild man who held out stubbornly for his policies despite heavy criticism, the U.S. has sought from the first to achieve knowledge, not political prestige, from its space efforts. The U.S. space program has three closely related aims:
¶ Build research systems that will teach man about the earth's upper atmosphere and magnetic field, about cosmic rays, solar winds, solar-terrestrial relationships and the other unknowns that abound in space.
¶ Create "use" systems with direct and practical effect on man and his daily life. ¶Put man safely into space.
Unlocking the secrets of space began with the very earliest U.S. satellites, deftly and delicately instrumented with pin-head-small transistors, and gadgets with moving parts that were shrunk as if by a witch doctor. Explorer I, the first U.S. satellite, sent into orbit by Dr. Wernher von Braun and his expert Army rocket team, carried with it an 18-lb. instrument package. From it came data leading to the discovery of the fierce Van Allen radiation belts that rage in space.
Later satellites in the Explorer and Pioneer series went even farther in mapping and measuring space radiation—and found that it varies vastly, apparently uuuenced by huge solar flares. Pioneer IV, launched in March 1959 after five days of intense solar and auroral activity, found a Van Allen belt population ten times greater than that observed by Pioneer III during a period of solar quiet. The solar flares themselves may have a drastic effect on earth: on Feb. 10, 1959, for example, an observed sun flare was followed by magnetic storms, radio disturbances, recordhigh Arctic temperatures, and freezing rain and snow throughout much of the U.S. South. Further knowledge of such phenomena, says NASA's Dr. Homer Newell, could lead "to a distant satellite observatory to predict the arrival of a cloud of solar particles in time to light the smudge pots in Florida."
"This Is the Wonder." Even the U.S.