326 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1963 



which permitted us to see in the ground station exactly the picture 

 being photographed at the telescope. 



In the summer of 1959 we were ready for another sequence of 

 flights. The character of these flights was entirely different from 

 those in 1957 in one decisive respect. In 1957 after launch the entire 

 balloon and telescope system operated completely automatically, ac- 

 cording to its built-in program of operations without any possibility 

 of human influence during the flight. In 1959, when the balloon had 

 reached its stable altitude of 80,000 feet in the stratosphere, a small 

 group of engineers and astronomers in the ground station took over 

 the actual operation of the telescope through the newly added com- 

 mand and television links. It is hard to describe the excitement we 

 felt as for the first time we saw on the television screen the picture of 

 a piece of the solar surface and as this picture moved about over the 

 surface of the sun in perfect accordance to the radio commands we 

 gave. We thus could select during the flight particularly favorable 

 areas for our research, such as areas on the solar disk far removed 

 from any apparent disturbance like sun spots or prominences. Or, 

 in contrast, we could move to an area occupied by an active sunspot 

 group to study the effects of the magnetic fields in the sunspots on 

 the convective gas motions. 



If human control during the flight so greatly increased the effective- 

 ness of this research undertaking, one might ask whether it would 

 not have been better if one of us had gone up in a sealed capsule with 

 the telescope. I believe that such a manned flight would not have 

 been a good choice; the effort required to safeguard the life of the 

 person going up would seem far larger than the effort required in 

 developing the necessary radio links to permit human control from 

 the ground. Furthermore, the person in his capsule, attached to the 

 same suspension from the balloon to which the telescope itself must 

 be attached, would have had to avoid any motion whatsoever to pre- 

 serve perfect quietness for the telescope pointing. This strong convic- 

 tion that mimanned balloon flights are preferable for this type of 

 astronomical experiment in no way implies the opinion that manned 

 high-altitude balloon flights have not been of decisive value. Indeed, 

 I believe that without the vital and energetic enthusiasm for manned 

 stratospheric balloon flights balloon technology would never have 

 developed to the state that permitted us to lift Stratoscope I into the 

 stratosphere. I strongly suspect that mucli the same situation will 

 hold in the satellite field. It seems entirely plausible that most of the 

 research results from the space program will come from unmanned 

 space vehicles. It appears equally true, however, that the natural 

 human urge for manned flight into space is the essential driving force 

 behind the teclmological developments necessary for any space flights. 



But back to Project Stratoscope. After a series of four flights we 



