Science / Space Race

[March 23, 1960] Sergeant goes AWOL! (Explorer S-46 fails)

2 Comments

So far this month, it's Air Force: 1, Army: 0.  The latest Explorer probe, launched today atop an Army contractor-made Juno II booster failed to orbit.  This is in contrast to Pioneer 5, launched March 11 on an Air Force contractor-built Thor Able, which is still beeping merrily away to the orbit of Venus.  Both launches were made under the auspices of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).

The failed probe was the 10.2 kilogram "S-46," and it was another University of Iowa special designed to further investigate those belts of charged particles girdling the Earth.  They're called "Van Allen" belts after the professor whose team first discovered them back in 1958, and which has produced many of NASA's satellite experiments to date. 

S-46 was sent toward the heavens by the Juno II, a modified version of the Jupiter missile now being based in Turkey and Italy.  At the Jupiter's top is the same cluster of Sergeant rockets that, mated with the smaller Redstone rocket, launched America's first space probe in January 1958.  S-46 was supposed to go into a high, eccentric orbit, similar to that of Explorer 6, to give all of the belts a thorough mapping.

To those wondering why anyone would bother to pull the same stunt twice, the answer is that the environment around the Earth is always changing.  There are terrestrial and solar factors, all of which increase and decrease the magnetic and particlular characteristics of orbital space.  The more data we can collect, the more continuously we can collect it, and the more vantages from which it can be collected, the more complete can by our understanding of geophysics.

Sadly, while the Jupiter first stage performed fine, it looks like one of the Sergeants misfired, which caused the whole second stage to go cock-eyed.  The ill-fated would be Explorer never made to orbit.

I feel badly for the folks at UoI, many of whom have become personal friends.  This Juno II was the last back-up left over from the Army's lunar Pioneer program (that launched Pioneers 3 and 4).  It looks unlikely that NASA will have another spare booster handy to launch another copy of S-46 for some time, if ever.

This doesn't mean we'll never have another Van Allen mapper in orbit.  It just means the fellow after whom they were named may not have first dibs on their next investigation.

Next up: this month's Fantasy and Science Fiction!

—




(Confused?  Click here for an explanation as to what's really going on)

This entry was originally posted at Dreamwidth, where it has comment count unavailable comments. Please comment here or there.

2 Comments Leave A Comment
Magazine

[March 21, 1960] Conservation of Quality (April 1960 Astounding)

2 Comments

I believe I may have discovered a new physical law: The Conservation of Quality.

Last year, Galaxy editor Horace Gold decided to slash writer pay in half.  The effect was not immediately apparent, which makes sense since there was likely a backlog of quality stuff in the larder.  But the last issue of Galaxy was decidedly sub-par, and I fear Gold's policy may be bearing bitter fruit.

On the other hand, Astounding (soon to be Analog) editor John Campbell has been trying to reinvent his magazine, and this latest issue, dated April 1960, is better than I've seen in a long time.  To be sure, none of the stories are classics for the ages, but they are all readable and enjoyable.


by Kelly Freas

Randall Garrett still pens a good quarter of the magazine, and you know how I feel about him, but he's not bad this month.  For the lead serial, Out Like a Light, Garrett teams up again with Laurence Janifer under the pseuonym "Mark Phillips" in a sequel to That Sweet Little Old Lady.  FBI Agent Malone and Garrett look-a-like Agent Boyd investigate a series of Cadillac heists only to discover a ring of teleporting juvenile delinquents.  I had expected the story to drag, and it is occasionally too cute for its own good, but I found myself enjoying it.  We'll see if they can keep up the interest through two more installments.

Next up is the enjoyable short story, The Ambulance Made Two Trips by ultra-veteran Murray Leinster.  Mob shake-down artist meets his match when he tangles with a psionically gifted laundromat owner who can alter probability to make violence impossible—with highly destructive results!  It's a fun bit of wish fulfillment even if it (again) stars the Heironymous device, that silly psychic contraption made out of construction paper and elementary electronics.  I'm not sure whether Campbell inserts references to them after editing or if authors incorporate them to ensure publication.

Harry Harrison is back with another "Stainless Steel Rat" story featuring Slippery Jim diGriz (the first having appeared in the August 1957 Astounding).  My nephew, David, had rave reviews for The Misplaced Battleship, in which con man turned secret agent tracks down the construction and theft of the galaxy's biggest capital ship.  I liked it, too: stories with lots of interstellar travel get extra points from me, and Harrison is a good writer.  Not as compelling as Deathworld, but then, that was a tour de force.


by John SchoenHerr

Wedged in the middle of Harrison's tale, on the slick-paged portion of the magazine, rocketteer G. Harry Stine has an entertaining plug for model rocketry.  It is a hobby that has grown from a dangerous homebrew affair to a full-fledged pastime.  Safe miniature engines are now commonplace, and launches can be conducted in perfect safety—provided one observes all the rules.  Stine prophetically notes that the first person to walk the sands of Mars is already alive and in high school, and he (of course, he) probably cut his engineering teeth on model rockets.  Maybe so.

The story published under Randall Garrett's name is The Measure of a Man, and it's surprisingly decent.  The lone survivor in a wrecked Terran battleship must find a way to get the hulk back to Earth in time to warn humanity of an alien superweapon before it is used.  Again, I like stories with lots of planets and spaceships.  I also liked the direct reference to Leinster's The Aliens, a really great story.

Finally, we have Rick Raphael's sophomore effort, Make Mine Homogenized, a surprisingly good story about a tough old rancher, a cow that starts producing high octane milk, and hens that lay bomb-fuse eggs.  The first half is the superior one, in which the rancher discovers that her (yes her!) "milk" is highly combustible and that, when mixed with the fuse eggs, creates an explosion that puts Oppenheimer's work to shame.  The second half, when the AEC gets involved, is still good, but it digresses and becomes more detached.  I really enjoyed the intimacy of the beginning.  I'm a sucker for accurately detailed farm stories, having grown up on a farm. 


by Kelly Freas

So, there you have it.  A perfectly solid Astounding from cover to cover.  Who'da thunkit?

Happy Spring everyone!

—




(Confused?  Click here for an explanation as to what's really going on)

This entry was originally posted at Dreamwidth, where it has comment count unavailable comments. Please comment here or there.

2 Comments Leave A Comment
Science / Space Race

[March 18, 1960] A million miles from Earth! (Pioneer 5 update #1)

2 Comments

Who calls a press conference at 2:00 in the morning?

And what sort of fool journalist covers a 2 A.M. press conference?

NASA and me, respectively.

Dr. Keith Glennan, NASA's administrator, admitted that it was an unorthodox time to gather scientists and reporters together, but given the unprecedented nature of the event to be discussed, it's quite understandable.  After all, never before in the history of humanity has a message been received from an artificial probe 1,000,000 miles from Earth.

Pioneer 5, the interplanetary mission launched last week, is now four times as far from the Earth as the Moon, and its 5 watt transmitter is still being picked up loud and clear.  In a dramatic flourish, just after the conference started, Dr. Glennan ordered the tracking station in Hawaii to query the spacecraft.  The plucky probe responded in a jiffy (discounting the 5-second delay since radio signals travel at the speed of light) to the delight of the audience.

One of the great advancements of Pioneer 5 is its use of digital data.  Earlier probes used analog data, faithfully transcribing experimental results as a steadily varying voltage that would be transmitted, real-time, to Earth.  Not only can digital data be easily stored so complete results can be sent back to Earth at any time, it also requires no "translation" to a language ground-side computers can understand.  This means that data can be analyzed far more rapidly.

In fact, Pioneer 5's latest space weather report on the cosmic radiation, magnetic field, and micrometeorite situation a million miles out was reduced and presented during the course of the half-hour press conference.  How's that for instant service?

Pioneer also gave an account of its own health.  NASA's week-old baby is healthy and happy: its interior remains at a balmy 63 degrees Fahrenheit, its solar-powered batteries are charging nicely, and the transmitter is strong. 

In the weeks to come, Pioneer 5 will remain on the air out to an anticipated distance of 25,000,000 miles.  This flight will challenge NASA's ability to track and hear the probe to the limits of current technology. 

And, apparently, any notions that I might have a reasonable sleeping schedule!  Not that I'm complaining—it's an amazing time to be alive.

—




(Confused?  Click here for an explanation as to what's really going on)

This entry was originally posted at Dreamwidth, where it has comment count unavailable comments. Please comment here or there.

2 Comments Leave A Comment
TV

[March 16, 1960] Four More! (Twilight Zone Wrap-up)

2 Comments

There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man’s fears, and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area which we call … The Twilight Zone.

It's a stirring intro, no doubt, and it never fails to put me in the mood for a half-hour of suspense and surreality.  Since its debut in October of last year, The Twilight Zone has consistently delivered a superior television experience (though even this fine show occasionally misfires: if I have any complaint, it is how frequently the protagonist degenerates into screaming madness about 15 minutes in.)

Continuing my tradition of recapitulating episodes in batches of four, here are episodes 20 through 24:

By far the weakest of the bunch, at least to me, is the first: Elegy.  A three man crew of a deep space mission crash land on an "asteroid" (you've got to love those entirely Earth-like asteroids on this show.) They appear to have traveled back in time some two centuries to mid-20th Century America—except that all of the inhabitants of the area seem to be frozen in time.  Rather than coming to the logical conclusion that the place is an exhibit in a museum, they instead become increasingly hysterical and spend much wasted time trying to get the dummies to respond to shouts.  It turns out that the asteroid is actually a cemetery with myriad themed plots for the wealthy deceased.  In the end, the crew are duped by the cemetery's caretaker into becoming permanent residents.  It's all rather silly.

Mirror Image, in which a sensible young woman discovers that there is another her attempting to take over her life, is better.  For one thing, it is one of the few episodes starring a woman.  For another, rather than going insane, she quite reasonably comes to the right conclusion as to what's happening.  Also, the obligatory helpful young man is far less creepy than the one we saw in The Hitchhiker.  The only flaw comes in the second act, when our heroine spends several minutes retelling the events that the audience has just seen happen to her: Twilight Zone often suffers from passing in the second act.  Disregarding that, it's an interesting premise, and the best stories are the ones that keep you pondering after they have finished.

There was a lot of buzz around the water cooler regarding the third episode, The Monsters are Due on Maple Street.  After a strange meteor causes a local power outage, the inhabitants of a suburban neighborhood quickly become suspicious of each other and soon degenerate into violent anarchy.  It's a pretty clear metaphor for The Red Scare.  I'd dismiss it as hackneyed, but McCarthyism is too recent a memory.  Mistrust is a cheap commodity, easily traded.

That brings us to last week's episode, A World of Difference, which I quite liked.  A corporate businessman sits down to make a call to his wife.  When the phone doesn't work, he hears a director call, "Cut!" and discovers that he's really on a soundstage, and everyone believes him to be an actor.  He is then confronted by an angry ex-wife and a much put-upon agent, who corroborate his new identity.  There is a fine ending that leaves one questioning which is the true reality?  And in the end, what does reality even mean? 

Coming up next, the April 1960 Astounding!

—

Galactic Journey is now a proud member of a constellation of interesting columns.  While you're waiting for me to publish my next article, why not give one of them a read!



(Confused?  Click here for an explanation as to what's really going on)

This entry was originally posted at Dreamwidth, where it has comment count unavailable comments. Please comment here or there.

2 Comments Leave A Comment
Magazine

[March 13, 1960] Shineless shoe (April 1960 Galaxy, Part 2)

7 Comments

Mediocre magazines are always the hardest to plow through.

When I've got a good issue in my hands, reading is a pleasure, and I generally tear through in nothing flat.  Bad issues are unpleasant, but I also feel no compunctions in skimming.

But it's those middle-of-the-road, "C Minus" magazines that drag you down.  Each story is a chore, but none are so offensive as to register on the memory, even in their badness.

Had I known that this month's Galaxy would be so lackluster (my apologies to those who favor the Bird), I might have skimmed faster and compiled my reviews into one article.  As it is, I have to devote an entire column's space to the four remaining pieces, and they don't deserve the energy.

Willy Ley's column, entitled What's Only Money, is an arid piece on the history and composition of coin currency.  As a numismatist, I found the subject matter interesting, but the presentation was lacking.  I miss the Dr. Ley of ten years ago.

Don't Look Now, by Leonard Rubin, is a turgid tale about (I think) image projectors and the way they disrupt our lives in the future.  I tackled this story in small increments, and it left virtually no impression on me.

Then you've got the vignette, The Power, by veteran Fredric Brown.  It is neither remarkable nor offensive.

Rounding out the issue is George O. Smith's, The Troublemakers, which starts promisingly but falls flat on its face.  It is really two intertwined stories.  The first involved a headstrong (read: "thinks for herself") young woman who objects to being sedated into placidity, as is the norm in the overcrowded, genetically optimized future.  Note that Mr. Smith believes 6 billion souls will lead to cramped living conditions—see my thoughts on this issue in a prior article.

She also refuses to be paired with a somnolent drip of a fellow, who needs medication to act at an even minimal level of energy.

Then you've got the young spacer, who believes he has discovered an efficient hyperdrive that could open the stars to humanity.  He is told to cool his heels in a dead-end assignment until he discovers the error in his mathematics.  There, of course, isn't one.

It turns out, as is telegraphed far in advance, that the seemingly unfair practices of the society, ostensibly designed to cull outliers, are really designed to find the few exceptional people so that they can be sent to far flung colonies and become the cutting edge of humanity.

I do find the idea of a crowded society a fascinating one, and rigid societal norms take on heightened importance in that circumstance.  Contrast the American expression, "the squeaky wheel gets the grease," to the Japanese expression, "the nail that sticks out gets pounded."  It makes sense that, on an overpopulated Earth, culture would favor conformity and sticking to the center of the bell curve.

But Troublemakers is boring, so even a good premise can't save it.  And with that, the April 1960 Galaxy comes to an unsatisfying end.

Twilight Zone is on tonight.  Let's see if that improves my outlook.  I've got a four-week summary coming up soon.
—

Galactic Journey is now a proud member of a constellation of interesting columns.  While you're waiting for me to publish my next article, why not give one of them a read!



(Confused?  Click here for an explanation as to what's really going on)

This entry was originally posted at Dreamwidth, where it has comment count unavailable comments. Please comment here or there.

7 Comments Leave A Comment
Science / Space Race

[March 11, 1960] Venus (orbit) or Bust! (Pioneer 5)

Leave a comment

The Space Race headlines were anything but exciting last month, but today's news makes up for February's doldrums in spades.

Last year, there was a great deal of fanfare regarding last August's launch of Explorer 6.  This testbed of an orbital spacecraft was developed by Los Angeles based Space Technology Laboratories (STL), the Air Force's pet contractor.  Its purpose was to make use of the experiments designed for the marginally successful lunar Pioneer probes (0-2) and also to test a new digital telemetry system that will allow communication with spacecraft over interplanetary distances.

Explorer 6 was a huge success, and it appeared that a Venusian probe utilizing the technologies pioneered and verified by the paddle-wheel satellite would be launched late last year.  That launch never materialized, probably due to setbacks in the parallel Atlas-Able luar missions, which will use the same technologies in a larger package to explore the Moon. 

Instead, the folks at STL made an interplanetary copy of Explorer 6 for a deep space mission past the orbit of Venus without the possibility of a planetary rendezvous. 

Dubbed Pioneer 5, this morning it was successfully launched atop that proven workhorse of prior STL missions, the Thor-Able booster.

Pioneer 5 is now beep-beeping its way through interplanetary space on a journey of unparalleled distance and longevity.  While both the Americans and Soviets have launched probes into solar orbit (Pioneer 4 and Luna 1), these were battery-powered ships whose transmissions faded shortly after whizzing past the moon.

Solar-powered Pioneer 5, with its long-range communications abilities, will relay information about the interplanetary medium up to a distance of 25 million miles away.  That's 100 times further than the distance from the Earth to the Moon!

Such a long trip can hardly be summed up in a single article, so expect status reports as this intrepid little (100 pound) probe zooms through the vastness between Earth and Venus' orbits.  For the first time, we will have an in depth analysis of the radiation and magnetic fields beyond terrestrial boundaries.  Moreover, the lessons learned on this mission will be invaluable to future efforts, particularly upcoming flights to Venus and Mars.

Can you tell that I'm excited?  I hope you are too!

—

Galactic Journey is now a proud member of a constellation of interesting columns.  While you're waiting for me to publish my next article, why not give one of them a read!



(Confused?  Click here for an explanation as to what's really going on)

This entry was originally posted at Dreamwidth, where it has comment count unavailable comments. Please comment here or there.

No comments Leave A Comment
Magazine

[March 9, 1960] First shoe of the month (April 1960 Galaxy, 1st half)

2 Comments

Good old Galaxy magazine.  Dependable, occasionally brilliant, very thick.

So thick, that I traditionally break down my review of each bi-month's issue into two articles, and who am I to buck tradition?  Without further ado, the April 1960 Galaxy.

First up is Earl Goodale's Success Story, a surprisingly entertaining satire on an interstellar soldier's life and career.  It's sort of a cynical answer to Heinlein's Starship Troopers.  I don't know much about Mr. Goodale—this is only his second story, as far as I can tell.

Clifford Simak must have a number of expensive bills to pay, for he's published quite a number of stories this year already.  His latest, Condition of Employment, about a down-on-his luck engineer who is desperate to make one last flight home to Mars, is not as good as All the Traps of Earth, but better than The Gleaners, both of which came out last month (in F&SF and IF, respectively).  I particularly liked the disdain which the story's protagonist felt for the ominpresent, oppressive greenery of Earth.  I feel some empathy—I grew up in the desert, and I find an unbridled environment of foliage (and its attendant insect populations) unsettling rather than attractive.

The Nuse Man is back, compliments of author Margaret St. Clair.  The Airy Servitor, about a thought-activated invisible butler much akin to Aladdin's genie, is a lot of fun.  My favorite line: "Bert and Franny wore expressions suitable to persons who have just seen a dining room explode."  Beware itinerant salesmen from the future bearing gifts they don't understand.

When I saw Cordwainer Smith's name on the cover, I became quite excited.  After all, his No, no, not Rogov was a tour de force.  The Lady Who Sailed the Soul has the trappings of a good story, it has the subject of a good story, but somehow it fails to be a good story.  This tale of the first and only relativistic interstellar spaceship pilot is overwrought and somehow anti-feminist despite having feminist protagonists.  Perhaps because they are such caricatures.  I also dislike stories where women are motivated solely by love for their man.


by DILLON

Finally, we have James Stamers' Solid State, a dull tale of crystalline teleportation (as in using enlarged crystal lattices as vessels for instant transit) that I barely remembered even just after reading.  They can't all be winners, I suppose.

That's it for this batch.  See you when the other shoe drops!

—

Galactic Journey is now a proud member of a constellation of interesting columns.  While you're waiting for me to publish my next article, why not give one of them a read!



(Confused?  Click here for an explanation as to what's really going on)

This entry was originally posted at Dreamwidth, where it has comment count unavailable comments. Please comment here or there.

2 Comments Leave A Comment
Science / Space Race

[Mar. 5, 1960] Interlude with clippings

2 Comments

Here's an inconsequential entry as I put my thoughts on the new Galaxy together.  I clipped it from the kids' section of the local paper.

I like how space travel has fired up the imagination not just for adults but for kids, too.  This will be their moonbase in twenty years…

—

Galactic Journey is now a proud member of a constellation of interesting columns.  While you're waiting for me to publish my next article, why not give one of them a read!



(Confused?  Click here for an explanation as to what's really going on)

This entry was originally posted at Dreamwidth, where it has comment count unavailable comments. Please comment here or there.

2 Comments Leave A Comment
Magazine

[March 1, 1960] The Slow Sibling (March 1960 IF)

2 Comments

It is March Oneth, as my father would say, and it's time to review the last of the March 1960 science fiction digests.

Last on my plate was IF Science Fiction, which in 1959 had proven a slightly erratic but worthy sibling to Galaxy Science Fiction, also edited by Horace Gold.  Sadly, this current issue reminds me more of the inferior issues of Imagination or Amazing.  It's not all bad, just rather weak.

It has been said of Clifford Simak that when he's good, he's very good, and when he's not, he's forgettable.  It appears he used up all of his energy on his masterpiece appearing in this month's F&SF, because his lead novella for IF, The Gleaners, is mediocre.  It's a story about a fellow who coordinates a for-profit time travel agency that sends agents back in time to observe, but not to meddle.  It's a tough job: the agent defection rate is high, and there is much pressure to verify the historical assertions of the various world faiths.  It sounds like it would be a great read, but it doesn't do much interesting development.  Perhaps Cliff should start over and try making a novel on the concept.

Raymond Banks has a short story called to be continued about colonists marooned on a tiny island hundreds of light years from Earth for centuries.  The beginning and ending are a bit slipshod, but the meat of the story is pretty good, and I particularly like that the story features a starship crewed by a pair of women. 

In The Upside-Down Captain, by Jim Harmon, an ethnologist joins the crew of a starship to seek out truly unusual planets.  The ship is aided in its endeavor with the help of a cybernetic brain—but is the robot really being much help?  It's oddly paced and written, weakening what might have been a strong story.

There are a couple of very short vignettes that I shan't spoil other than to give their titles and authors since any description would give away most of their game.  They seem to be written by unknowns, either amateur auteurs or pseudonymic regulars.  They are Old Shag, by Bob Farnham, and Monument, by R.W. Major; neither are good, but nor are they long.

Ray Russell has something of a career writing for Playboy.  His Father's House is an story about an heir forced to inhabit his deceased father's home, bullied by ghostly holograms of his abusive parent, for five years in order to collect an inheritance.  The protagonist seemingly has two choices—be a penniless but satisfied writer and husband or endure a lonely, unfulfilling life in the hopes of inheriting a fortune.  In the end, he comes up with a third path with no down sides.

Ignatz, by Ron Goulart, is a cute story about a fellow who leads a one-man crusade against the fad of "Applied Lycanthropy," whereby the citizens of his sleepy town transform into cats for fun and relaxation.  The fellow hates cats, you see; they make him feel "crawly."  It's cute, though I can't imagine what anyone could have against felines, of whom I am far more fond than dogs.

The magazine ends rather strongly with Daniel Galouye's satirical Gravy Train, in which a retired couple on a remote planetoid gets mistaken for an important Third-World state and finds itself the recipient of a torrent of aid from both the Capitalist and Communist intergalactic empires. 

All in all, it's not so much a bad issue as a merely weak one.  Most of the stories end rather abruptly with a decidedly last-decade sci-fi slammer, and the writing has a slapdash feeling about it.  Perhaps it's just a temporary lull. 

In any event, I've got a whole new crop of magazines for this month that I'm looking forward to sharing with you.  See you soon!

—

Galactic Journey is now a proud member of a constellation of interesting columns.  While you're waiting for me to publish my next article, why not give one of them a read!



(Confused?  Click here for an explanation as to what's really going on)

This entry was originally posted at Dreamwidth, where it has comment count unavailable comments. Please comment here or there.

2 Comments Leave A Comment

55 years ago: Science Fact and Fiction