Word: lunik
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Just when U.S. space achievements were beginning to make up for Sputnik jolts to the U.S.'s pride and prestige, the Russians sent their Lunik soaring far beyond where any man-made object had ever penetrated before. Once again the world marveled at the U.S.S.R.'s technological prowess. Pressing and immediate question: Why is the U.S. still lagging in a race that may decide whether freedom has any future...
Despite those lost years, the U.S. has just about closed the ballistic-missile gap. As most U.S. missilemen see it, the U.S.'s ballistic missiles are, militarily speaking, superior to the U.S.S.R.'s. The Russian rocket that carried the Lunik into orbit produced a lot more thrust than any U.S. missile, but if the military job of a ballistic missile is to travel accurately from one point on the globe to another with a warhead in its nose, U.S. missiles appear fit to do the job at least as well as their bulkier Russian counterparts...
...Lunik's great, multistage launching rocket, which probably weighed 250 tons or more, roared up from some part of the Soviet Union on Friday. When the Russians made their first announcement, they could already say with confidence that the final stage had attained escape velocity. On Saturday they could announce that at 9:59 p.m. E.S.T. Lunik had passed the moon and plunged on into outer space on an orbit around the sun. At week's end it was 318,000 miles from the earth and still going strong...
...contrast to U.S. Pioneers I and III, whose payloads were a modest 40 and 13 lbs. respectively, Lunik's sheer size was impressive. Its payload was 796.5 lbs. and the total weight of its final stage without fuel...
Degrees of Success. Since the Russians do not call their shots before they fire, Lunik may have been designed for several degrees of success. The most difficult would be to go into orbit around the moon, as the U.S. Air Force hoped to do with Pioneer I. But this stunt requires a small rocket to nudge the final stage into capture by the moon's gravitational field, and the Russians have not mentioned any such item. Next degree of success would be to pass around the moon and return to earth. If the Russians were trying to do this...