r BRITAIN PREPARING FOR THE SPACE AGE

Press, Volume XCVII, Issue 28524, 1 March 1958, Page 15

r BRITAIN PREPARING FOR THE SPACE AGE

Tests On The Ground By Medical Scientists

[From JON POWIS, In London]

INSISTENT reports that Russian rocketeers are .. . aU ". CI ® man space have jolted the Western world during the past few weeks

But one section of British scientists has remained unimpressed;

Cynical! On the contrary, to these men manned space vehicles—rocketships to you—are the coming thing.

And as far as they are concerned, it is just a matter of building a big enough rocket.

Equipment for the first space traveller is already available—at the Institute of Aviation Medicine, a Royal Air Force branch at the famous Farnborough aerodrome. The scientists at the institute not only know what they are talking about; they have experienced it —on the ground. These are the men who are putting Britain into the Space Age —even though she is officially a non-starter because it has been announced that she cannot afford to build space rockets. Officially, the institute is devoted to research into ways and means of making flying safer for pilots of conventional aircraft. That means that they are vitally Interested in how much the human body can stapd. How fast can it be accelerated without damage? How long can it stand up to spinning and tumbling motions? How does it react to ultra-low and ultra-high temperatures? “Whirligig” Every one of these questions has its application in space travel and the answers with which the British scientists have come up are every bit as important as those which United States scientists collated in the seven-day experiment that airman Donald G. Farrell completed in his tiny space cabin recently. The men at Farnborough must look ahead. That is their job. And when they look ahead now they see—space travel I went with Wing Commander F. Latham, head of the institute’s accelerations section, to have a look at his prize exhibit, the centrifuge. The staff laconically refer to it as the whirligig. Sometimes it’s been called the Chamber of Horrors. But this is the machine which has enabled Latham and his colleagues to prove that the human body is capable of standing up to the terrific acceleration of a rocket leaving the earth’s surface to go, say, to the moon.

The centrifuge is in a pit two storeys high. It is a huge steel girder, 60ft long, made up of smaller tubular steel pieces welded into an enormously strong lattice framework.

At each tip of the centrifuge arm is slung a gondola, a small, rounded metal nacelle where the volunteer Subject is strapped in an aircraft seat. The gondola can swing floor-outward as the speed of the centrifuge increases.

Latham and his scientists can connect up their medical apparatus—devices for measuring blood pressure, temperature and so forth —to the volunteer in the nacelle. Latham told me with pride that the Whirligig is designed to withstand an acceleration of 30g—or 30 times the force of gravity. That’s roughly equal to going through the sound barrier from a standing start in one second. In another room is a machine to test a pilot’s reaction to tumbling. It is simply an aircraft seat into which the victim is strapped.

Then switches, are pressed and the seat starts to rotate head-over-heels. Faster and faster. There is another machine that resembles a rotating stretcher, on which the subjects can be spun lengthwise like a rolling log. Another section of the building houses high-altitude test chambers, where human guinea-pigs sit in high-altitude suits while the air is sucked out of the chamber. In the rarefied atmosphere left inside the chamber the subjects can test new equipment, or scientists can record their reactions to situations which could occur. For instance, what happens if a pilot flying at 80,000 feet suddenly loses the pressurisation in his cockpit? Vacuum The Farnborough research men reproduce the circumstances by sucking the air out of a huge tank and putting a guinea-pig pilot in the high-altitude chamber at the pressure which he would normally have within his cockpit capsule. Then when they are ready the scientists open a valve. The vacuum in the reservoir tank suddenly sucks the remaining air out of the test chamber, reproducing the required conditions. From the experiments the scientists have been able to evolve high-altitude pressure suits which they are convinced will enable man to survive in outer space, unprotected by any metal capsule. Hot And Cold The men who piece together the first space station will wear that sort of rig. It will be cold. So they are evolving systems of heating the suits. When the space traveller’s rocket re-enters the earth’s atmosphere it will heat up, perhaps above boiling point. So at Farnborough they have evolved clothing to keep the pilot cool by piping refrigerated air to different points of his body. When the space travellers take off they will undergo terrific acceleration. When they approach the earth again they will undergo the reverse force—deceleration.

The Farnborough men have established just how much of each force they can take.—Associated Newspapers Feature Services.