ASTRONAUTS PASS TEST WITH HONOURS

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30536, 3 September 1964, Page 17

ASTRONAUTS PASS TEST WITH HONOURS

(N.Z. Press Association—Copyright)

VALLEY FORGE (Pennsylvania), September 2.

Man could be even more valuable in space than engineers had supposed, U.S. officials said on Tuesday when two potential astronauts emerged from a two-week stay in a simulated space cabin.

U.S. Air Force Captains Albert R. Crews, aged 34, and Richard E. Lawyer, aged 31, both graduates and now staff members of the Aero-space Research Pilot School at Edwards Air Force Base, California, spent the two weeks in a cylindrical cabin about 9ft across and 7|ft tall, as cut off from the world as if they really were in outer space.

The space station, enclosed by a huge vacuum tank and heated by electric lights focused as an artificial' sun, rested firmly on earth,, inside a tall, box-like laboratory building of the General Electric Company’s missile and space division near Philadelphia.

, The men inside, breathing ■ a pressurised artificial atmosphere, eating liquid’or freezedried space rations, knowing 1 where they were and what 1 was happening to them only through instrument readings 1 and the fade-in, fade-out voice - contacts with radio “ground ’ stations” as they “passed over,” might as well have been in orbit. One of the results of the test, said Mr Richard A. Passman, manager of General Electric’s manned space operations, was proof that properly-trained astronauts could perform in space better than anybody thought they could. Present space projects, such as the two-man Gemini orbital flight, were designed, as they must be, around the best available estimates of the human factor—just how much a man could be expected to do during an extended space flight. The two-week test just ended raised the standards and required the two-man crews to do more than before. “Actually,” said Mr Passman, “they did even better than that”