The Big Bird Sanctuary

The "PMR" is a wasteland of sand and water. It covers more than 50 million square miles and extends almost halfway around the earth. Its inhabitants hunt goats in fern-forested Kauai. and missile nose cones in the sleepy lagoon of Eniwetok. It is the habitat of strange "birds" with peculiar names--Samos, Discoverer. Midas, Nike-Zeus--whose flights are scratched across the sky in weird contrails and tracked by missile-watching machines on a California mud flat and in such far-flung outposts as Alaska, Hawaii, Kwajalein and Christmas Island. The PMR--for Pacific Missile Range--is the nation's largest testing and training ground for missiles and space apparatus.

Cuban Gutter. Of the U.S.'s three missile ranges, Cape Canaveral, Fla., makes the most headlines, with its man-in-space shots. The Army's White Sands is dimly recalled as the site of long-ago atomic tests. But White Sands and Canaveral lack what the PMR has: plenty of room.

White Sands is so constricted that it can only be used for research and development of small weapons systems.

Canaveral's Atlantic Missile Range, says a PMR officer, "is like a bowling alley. Castro's Cuba forms a right-hand gutter, and the Atlantic shipping lanes form the left. You've got a tight shot downrange. In the PMR, on the other hand, you have no such proscriptions. The many tiny islands of Oceania serve as tracking and data-collection stations clear across the Pacific. Our range is long, wide and well marked." Foreseeing the day when the missile program would require such roominess, the Department of Defense in 1957 acquired 20,000 acres of canyon-scarred coastland at Point Arguello, Calif., as the main spread of the PMR, with Point Mugu, a Navy missile-testing center 120 miles to the south, as headquarters, and Vandenberg Air Force Base as the principal customer. After the commissioning of the new range, less than four years ago, the PMR's officials began making beachheads on Pacific islands for tracking stations and training headquarters. By last week 13,000 persons manned the PMR outposts, from Elmendorf A.F.B. in Alaska to faraway Canton Island, more than 4,000 miles from California.

PMR has tested most of the operational missile-age hardware of the Army, Navy, Air Force, and is increasingly a testing ground for NASA. The first operationally fired Thor was launched from Vandenberg, and so was the first Atlas to be rocketed across the Pacific. The Discoverer series was launched into polar orbit, and the 1960 recovery of the gold-plated capsule of Discoverer XIII off Hawaii marked the first time an American object had been retrieved from orbit in space.

One of the PMR's most important functions is to provide actual training for missile-era airmen and ground troops--something neither Cape Canaveral nor White Sands is equipped to do. Aircraft squadrons fire their air-to-air and air-to-surface missiles over the PMR's vast instrumentation almost every morning. Marine Corps antiaircraft missile battalions set up their Hawk batteries on the offshore islands of Santa Barbara Channel and fire away at the PMR-launched drones. British and Canadian Thor crews get their first actual experience in firing their missiles over the PMR--training they cannot get at home.

Almost anything can--and does--happen in the environs of the PMR. Last week a 125-lb. bear, suitably tranquilized and strapped into a capsule, was rocketed from a B58 bomber going 1,060 m.p.h. out of Vandenberg A.F.B. The bear, known as Big John, dozed through his flight, ejection, and safe descent by parachute from an altitude of 45,000 ft.

PMR's range masters have divided the Pacific into seven shooting galleries: the sea test range (for small missiles), the polar orbit range, the IRBM impact area, the ICBM impact area, anti-ICBM range of Kwajalein, and a planned equatorial orbit range based on Canton Island. On Kwajalein, the radar serves an extra purpose: keeping tabs on Soviet Russia's experimental ICBMs when they cut across the U.S. range heading for their Pacific impact area.

Small Ballpark. At the PMR's Mugu nerve center, Rear Admiral John Clark. 56, a ramrod-straight naval airman, runs the range from a windowless "management room" with a triangular conference table and 14 wall panels that disclose the latest data on program progress and range conditions across the ocean-spanning domain. An old sea dog, Clark survived the mortal attack on the carrier Lexington at the Battle of the Coral Sea. Last summer, before his transfer to the PMR, he commanded the Navy's Carrier Division 16, and directed the recovery of Astronaut Gus Grissom after the space flight of Liberty Bell 7. Says Clark: "The PMR is a real national asset. The taxpayers are paying for it, but too damned few of them realize the scope of what we're doing. The range looks like a nice big area, but in terms of the future it's a pretty small ballpark. I think our role in the future will inevitably loom larger and larger, as the oceans grow smaller and smaller."

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