The Nome Nugget

Missile Chief Justifies Repeated Atlas Failures

WASHINGTON. (AP) - Lt. Gen. Bernard A. Schriever, Air Force missile chief, told House investigators yesterday there is no cause for alarm over recent repeated failures in the long range Atlas missile.

Schriever expressed confidence the big intercontinental missile will be ready for combat use by approximately September 1 - some 60 days later than the original target date.

Schriever. head of the Air Research and Development Command, was the first witness in a House Space Committee inquiry into what has gone wrong in the Atlas program.

Of the five failures. Schriever described two as being related and said they occurred 100 to 150 seconds after launching.

In both cases. he said, the missiles exploded about 20 seconds after the two booster stages had dropped off.

"We have made a very detailed analysis and we are pretty sure we know where the problem existed and we think we have fixed it," Schriever said

He declined to elaborate during an open session but said however, there had been a very severe fuel problem in both these failures.

Of the three other failures, Schriever said all were unrelated but that he thinks the difficulty in each case has been corrected.

"It is, of course, too early for me to say with certainty that we have identified and eliminated the causes of our recent Atlas flight test malfunction." Schriever told the committee.

But he said the Air Force feels it has corrected the difficulties that caused five successive failures in Atlas firings over a five-month period.

He noted that an advanced model Atlas scored what he termed a completely successful flight over its full 5,500-mile Atlantic range last week.

Under questioning, Schriever said all of the five failures occurred in B and C series missiles which he described as latter models of the Atlas. The Air Force had achieved unexpected success with the earlier series, he said.