From Skate to Space

In the half light of the North Pole, 50 years after Explorer Robert Peary first got there, the U.S. nuclear submarine Skate cleaved up to the surface through densely packed winter ice. There Skate's officers and men, on their second underwater voyage to the Pole (TIME, Aug. 25), conducted a solemn ceremony: they scattered the ashes of Polar Explorer Sir Hubert Wilkins, dead since last December, who had envisioned the possibility of journeying to the Pole by submarine. That done, Skate submerged, went on to complete a record trip of 3,090 miles and twelve days under the ice pack, in which it surfaced ten times through the ice to demonstrate its ability, as a Navy announcement put it last week, "to operate at any time of year in polar regions."

Other entries in the armed forces log:

P: The Air Force recovered a data-packed capsule ejected from the nose cone of a Thor intermediate-range missile at the end of a 1,600-mile test flight from Cape Canaveral. In 27 standard Thor flights, it was only the third time a nose-cone capsule had been retrieved.

P: The Navy unveiled the world's biggest amphibious helicopter, the twin-turbine-powered Sikorsky HSS-2, designed to set down on land or ocean's surface in all but the worst weather.

P: The Army, which had said it might have to drop one of its 15 combat divisions, decided instead to take the Administration's ordered 30,000-man manpower cut out of quartermasters, engineers, military police, ordnance and supply types.

P: The National Aeronautics and Space Administration approved models of one-ton mushroom-shaped satellite capsules designed to fly men into space in the early 1960s. The model satellites survived preliminary tests of rocket shots into the atmosphere, drops from high-altitude aircraft, wind-tunnel speeds of 10,000 m.p.h., and justified what NASA termed "significant progress" toward "a safe and reliable, manned satellite capsule."

P: Roy W. Johnson, head of the Pentagon's Advanced Research Projects Agency, told a Senate space subcommittee that ARPA is spending $1,000,000 on a wild-blue-yonder project designed to fly a 1,000-ton manned platform through space by baby A-bomb nuclear power. Not long ago, said he, the project was called "screwball"--but it "looks a little less screwball now."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.