ALL-AUSTRALIA PHOTOS AT 1,000,000 FEET UP

Press, Volume XCV, Issue 28222, 9 March 1957, Page 6

ALL-AUSTRALIA PHOTOS AT 1,000,000 FEET UP

Cameras For Rocket Lift Will Cost Thousands

[By JACK PERCIVAL]

SYDNEY, February 25. CAMERAS will soon, for the first time, take a picture of the whole of Australia. It is not a picture which can be taken by any amateur or professional.

To get it, a photographer would have to set up a 200-mile high ladder at, say, Alice Springs. He would then have to stand on a platform in a space suit and take pictures toward Point Cloates (midway along the Western Australian coast), in the direction of Sandy Cape (Queensland), facing the Roper river, and down to the Great Australian Bight.

Then, if the space suit worked and the photographer was not blown from his perch by a 200 miles an hour jet stream, he would have to climb back to earth with his negatives. The first pictures of the whole of Australia, showing the curvature of the earth, will not be taken by men. They will be recorded by robots, which will hurtle at 5000 miles an hour to the required height, controlled by electric “brains.”

When they have taken their pctures, the robots will be blown up by a demolition charge. But their cameras will drift back to central Australia attached to parachutes. The cameras will be contained in special compartments in a rocket. When the demolition charge goes off, the camera compartments will be shed intact from the debris. Already cameras have been carried to great heights at Woomera in rockets powered by Bristol Thor ram-jets. When the compartments have been recovered and the films removed, the cameras have been found ready for use again without any repairs. I have seen moving pictures taken by robot photographers 40 miles high. They are sharp and dramatic. Height of 200 Miles Lieutenant-Colonel J. V. Warner, of the Bristol Rocket Division, Woomera, told me last week that when cameras reach a height of 200 miles over central Australia they will be able to take pictures of the horizons 1200 miles away. “That should do the job for the first time,” he said. “I doubt if these first pictures of the whole Australian continent will show that Captain Cook, Bass and Flinders and the Navy Hydrographical Department have been wrong—but you never know.” Lieutenant-Colonel Warner, tall, thin, fair-haired, bespectacled, exuberant like a schoolboy, queued up with citizens of Adelaide to take an hour’s courtesy flight in the Bristol Britannia. The Bristol Britannia cruised

The cameras which take the first pictures of the whole of Australia will cost thousands of pounds each. Triggering them and setting them up in their compartments will involve hundreds of man hours by specially trained technicians. Associated Newspapers Feature Services.

over Adelaide at 20,000 ft —less than four miles high. Last week Lieutenant-Colonel Warner saw one of his company’s missiles, the Skylark, soar to 70 miles—about half the distance it is planned to send it up in a few months. From 120 miles high the Skylark will be able to take pictures of Australia up to about 900 miles in every direction. After 120 miles high the rocket will be stepped up gradually to 200 miles. “We should be able to get some good pictures from 630,000 ft,” said another rocket expert. “But from 1.056,000 ft (200 miles) the cameras will really ‘see’ something.” A Bristol man told me the rocket, which will reach 630,000 ft in tests in a few weeks, is 25ft long, 17$in in diameter and costs about £ 6000. This figure, of course, excludes the cost of initial development, which runs into hundreds of thousands of pounds. During initial firings the rocket is being sent only 70 miles high to gather information about the upper atmosphere. Devices carried in it are determining temperatures and winds. “Window” (strips of tinfoil) will be dropped and tracked by radar to determine wind There is no chance of the rocket falling on anybody's head, I was told. When it is fired it is sent up range at an angle, not vertically. Fired at an Angle If it were fired vertically it could be difficult to forecast where the shattered pieces might fall When it is fired at an angle, experts can work out beforehand to within a few yards where the instrument compartments and debris will hit the ground.