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State University of Iowa's James Van Allen (TIME Cover, May 4, 1959) has ready an instrument package with detectors capable of measuring radiation particles down to near-zero energy: "This will enable us to look into the region of trapped radiation, which is the most poorly known and has not even been considered before in an exploratory way. We could come up with some good measurements on these particles, which may be the most important of all to geophysics." Other scientists talk of sending a probe into the sun's mysterious corona.
A group of scientists at Massachusetts Institute of Technology has worked out a Mars probe in such detail that it fills 800 pages. They consider it entirely practical to coast an instrumented probe around Mars and take close-up pictures to solve the famed puzzle of the Martian "canals" and settle for all time the argument about whether or not there is life on the planet.
Some scientists talk hopefully about Venus—which presents much greater problems. A probe trying to take close-ups of Venus will see little more than is visible with telescopes from the earth: a featureless, faintly yellow cloud deck. A probe could probably find out whether Venus has a magnetic field, and this would explain something about the planet's interior. Some sort of radar might roughly map the surface under the cloud deck. But to get a real look at it would require at least a landing by an instrument package —which would be a feat of extraordinary difficulty. The Venusian atmosphere is apparently so thick and laden with dust or liquid droplets that the surface, which may itself be a deep ocean of some liquid other than water, is entirely dark. Since Venus is closer to the sun than the earth, its surface is probably much hotter than earth's tropics. Violent storms are almost certain to rage in the atmosphere. It takes a hardy scientist even to think of landing an instrument package on this hostile ground—but many do.
For the U.S. Navy, space holds the answer to many a practical problem. The Navy is studying a communications satellite that could relay messages to a submarine submerged in any of the earth's oceans. The Navy is developing its own weather-reporting rockets, which it hopes can be fired from relatively small shipboard mounts and will soar up to 1,000 miles to take weather surveys for 3.000 miles around.
And Finally: Man. But always, and inexorably, all talk about space must arrive at one key question: when will man himself move into the skies beyond the sky? In the U.S., most of the basic engineering for a man-carrying spacecraft has been done—at least on paper. But humans cannot be miniaturized like instruments, and to get a man into space and keep him there safely and in reasonable comfort will require a rocket booster beyond anything the U.S. now has. The problems of booster capacity and human space travel therefore become inextricably entwined—and it is no coincidence that, by direct order of President Eisenhower, work on developing the eight-engined Saturn booster and on the man-into-space Project Mercury share the highest priorities in the U.S. space effort.