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I I " Wm \Wj w '■*, mWdfdds ' v ■ ,a • ? v|?s ;%! ’ ’ „ p \ ■ p J | |CH|| « M - fMr* * *% yffigyaßwppg "fSS/Tmmh- “ 7* -1H Blast Into Orbit: For takeoff. Atlas will have special nose rocket to save man in case of a misfire. Artist's diagram, above right, shows: A. Return-trip retrorockets B. Beryl lium heat shield C. Inflatable landing bags and D. Re entry parachute. Pressure capsule is outlined in black 10 .V\ v •dfeiiife | g:SaMPyy. , -'’ T^^BSsßjßP^^.'ji||Mn|w|wßßß^H^Bß*F^^p^^fclL\ t vi ****»**—y~ Riding The Atlas Into Space This month construction starts on the steel cone that will carry the first man into orbit. Here’s a preview of the great adventure By ELIOT TOZER Drawings by Ed Yehell Sometime this month, a company somewhere in the United States will start working on an eight foot steel conical chamber. If you didn't know what it was, you might mistake it for a diving bell and in fact, it will operate much like one but in reverse. For if all goes well, sometime next year this capsule will be in orbit around the earth with a man in it. Who he will be no one knows yet. But we do know that we can put him into space. The four ton Atlas that went into orbit last December proved we could get the weight up. Now all we need is a space capsule that will keep a man alive and get him back to earth the same way. This steel cone will be it. Here, to the best of our current scientific knowledge, is what that first history-making orbital flight will be like: It is dawn at Cape Canaveral. A mon ster ICBM, probably an Atlas, stands poised on the firing pad in the last few minutes of its count-down. In its nose is the steel space cap sule, hung in a streamlined cone to make it stable in flight. It is capped with a metal slab of beryllium to keep it from burning up during the heat of re-entry into the atmosphere. The pilot, selected after thousands of test hours by the National Aeronautics and Space Admin istration's Aeromedical Advisory Committee, fidgets uneasily as he rides up the gantry elevator. His pressure suit is uncomfortable, and he has never gotten completely used to it even though he lived in it for days in a fitting room; for hours of high-G runs in the centrifuge at Johnsviile, Pennsylvania; and during a score of weightless flights at the School of Aviation Medicine in Texas. But he knows he must wear it; it's a back-up to the sphere’s helium-oxygen system on the one-iri-a-thousand chance that a meteor may plow through the satellite's double walls and reduce its "atmosphere” to a frigid vacuum. On reflex, he goes over in his mind once again the quick steps he must take in that event. The medics help him through the hatch. So much gadgetrv, to get a few breaths, of air. Steel canisters, delicate valves, air-tight hose connec tions to give him the right amount of oxygen at the right pressure. Pellets of lithium hydroxide like those used in the Randolph AFB sealed cabin by Airman Donald Farrell to absorb carbon dioxide. Sticks of lithium chloride like the ones used by the Navy’s Strato-lab balloonists to absorb vapor. Yet on earth you took breathing for granted. “Now ... 30 min- Continued on page 12 THIS WEEK Mogoiin* / February 8, 1959