Word: missilemen
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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...
...missilemen at the Pentagon and Cape Canaveral studied the figures, agreed that the Russians were ahead in terms of weight of payload, propulsion power, general rocket reliability. The U.S.S.R.'s rocket was also the first far-out Russian rocket detected by U.S. tracking systems. Whatever their secret launching-pad failures, the Russians apparently scored with the first rocket they got off the ground...
...Point Lead? Many U.S. technicians believe that the Russians have probably long since frozen their basic rocket design upon one model, and it now functions with workhorse reliability. U.S. missilemen take some comfort in the fact that the U.S.'s newer, more sophisticated rockets have intricate and ingenious instrumentation, guidance systems, planet scanners, communication. Another key U.S. claim: the U.S. has succeeded in miniaturizing its instrument payloads-not to mention its military missile warheads...
Sputnik Rivals. The Atlas, with its nearly 4½ tons, was widely hailed as the heaviest object to be put in orbit, but the Russians were quick to put in a counterclaim. Leonid Sedov, often an official spokesman for Soviet missilemen, declared that each of the three Soviet carrier rockets that orbited the earth weighed considerably more. These weights are not known accurately outside Russia, since the Russians maintain that only the instrument payload is important. The payload of the dog-carrying Sputnik II (instruments, dog, transmitter, etc.) weighed 1,120 lbs., v. the Atlas' 200 plus. Sputnik...
...first Discoverer, missilemen suspect, will do no more than report the cloud cover of the earth. Later versions may eventually take pictures with real cameras. If the satellite is recovered intact, the films can be developed on earth. Another possible trick would be to have the pictures developed automatically on board the-satellite and sent to earth by facsimile radio. A good telescopic camera orbiting several hundred miles up might photograph objects as small as Russian military bases...