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The "Use" Systems. The basic research phase of the U.S. space program is well along, and the "use" systems are just now beginning to come breathtakingly into their own. Midas II is the forerunner of a system whose functional value as a deterrent against war is obvious. The Navy's Transit I-B is the exciting prototype for a system that will give the U.S. an all-weather navigational accuracy unmatched in human history. Developed by a pair of young Johns Hopkins scientists who studied the radio Doppler effects of Russia's Sputnik I and applied them to practical purposes, the Transit system is scheduled to have four satellites in orbit by 1962. They should be able to give every spot on earth a navigational fix, accurate to the quarter mile, every 90 minutes. Any ship with a whip antenna, a low-cost computer and a receiver will profit from Transit — and that includes missile-bearing submarines, to which navigational accuracy is utterly vital for finding their targets.
Scheduled to take its place within three or four years as Midas' sophisticated sister system is Samos (which, although NASA officials deny that it was named for anything in particular, might easily stand for Satellite and Missile Observation System). Planned as a true "eye in the sky," Samos will carry long-range, wide-angle cameras capable of photographing in detail the entire earth's surface and trans mitting the results to receiving stations.
The Flower Bed. A common saying among scientists is that if a science is free of controversy, it is a dead science. On that basis, the U.S. Air Force's Discoverer program is bubbling with life. Discoverer is expensive (just under $100 million this year), and it has thus far notably failed in achieving what has been billed as its great objective: recovering a re-entry capsule.
But as it is being developed at Space Technology Laboratory, Discoverer is basic to U.S. space doctrine. That doctrine insists on the importance of gaining "capability in space." Space, the theory goes, is a new medium that man must learn to negotiate, just as he once learned to travel on water. A satellite that merely goes round the earth is like a raft floating helplessly down a river. Only when primitive men learned to guide their rafts with sails or paddles did they achieve "capability" on water. Spacecraft must accomplish equivalent guidance before space navigation is a reality. Discoverer, manufactured by the Lockheed Aircraft Corp., is a major U.S. system for achieving the assorted techniques called "capability."