Man is busily engaged in the most ambitious campaign of his history: the conquest of space, that hostile void beyond Earth's protective atmosphere. He has invaded a region where there is no up nor down; no air to make the sky blue or to bring sound to his ears. He has "walked" in emptiness where sunlight is deadly hot and shadow deadly cold. To solve problems such as these, he has had to develop an outstanding technology. Take the problem of weightlessness. A sandwich and its crumbs would float in the spacecraft cabin; so an astronaut eats and drinks from tubes or plastic bags. If he tried to turn a nut with an ordinary wrench, he would spin helplessly in the opposite direction unless anchored to something; so special space tools have been devised, bearing strange names like spammer, plench, zert, and nab. To break away from Earth's gravity in the first place, he has built multi-stage launch vehicles that are combinations of two or more rockets stacked one atop another. He suffered through the frustrating early years when many space vehicles blew up on the pad, and technicians gloomily quoted "Murphy's Third Law: What can go wrong will go wrong." Now, spaceage technology is perfected to such a degree 'that successful missions are taken for granted by the public. The aerospace industry in the United States keeps 10,000 companies busy. Aerospace technology has affected the daily lives of each one of us. Weather satellites warn of approaching storms. Communications satellites relay TV pictures around the world. Space medicine research has made possible tiny electrical heart pacers, and wheel chairs that will literally walk upstairs. Housewives can thank space technology for high temperature ceramic cooking ware. The United States began its manned space program in 1958, when the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) came into being. But, many years before that, man had begun to take steps toward the conquest of space. One important step was the perfection of the rocket engine. In space, man is weightless (left). There is no air, so he must wear a pressure suit (center) which supplies oxygen. Coveralls (right) protect him from heat, cold, and tiny meteorites.   ETC ETC