From Devil's Island To Cape de Gaulle

If the world were flat, the end of the earth would undoubtedly be French Guiana. A remote, jungle-shrouded patch on the northeast shoulder of South America, one-sixth the size of metropolitan France (see map), the colony is so stagnant that its population has increased by only 10,000 in 350 years, to its present total of 31,000 inhabitants. French Guiana's chief contributions to mankind so far have been one of history's most infamous prisons, Devil's Island, and the loan of the name of its sleepy capital, Cayenne, to a famous variety of pepper. But now at last the lethargic land is due for its share of grandeur: France is planning to turn it into a platform for Charles de Gaulle's vaunted, if somewhat stunted, rocket and space program.

To date, the French have conducted their tests in the Algerian Sahara, but under the Evian agreements they must get out by mid-1967. The new site will be a 250,000-acre, twelve-mile-wide strip along the French Guiana coast to be rilled out with rows of launch cranes, quarters for technicians and a master command post. The French government has allotted an initial $60 million, and French agents are shopping in French-speaking Caribbean islands for 5,000 workers. Construction on what has already been nicknamed Cape de Gaulle is to start late next year, and France's first missile firings from South America are scheduled for early 1968.

But why the Western Hemisphere, which will require shipping everything from scientists to cherry pickers across 4,400 miles of ocean, as well as digging a deep-water port near Cayenne? De Gaulle's spacemen explain that Guiana, being near the Equator, offers scientific advantages--such as facilitating polar as well as equatorial orbits and achieving greater orbital speed from the earth's rotation.

Should De Gaulle ever succeed in wedding his obese atomic bomb to his frail Diamant rocket (current orbital payload: 175 Ibs.), France will have obtained a nuclear-missile capability of sorts in the Western Hemisphere--a feat even Khrushchev presumably failed to achieve. France has magnanimously made clear that it plans to permit other nations to use its Guiana pad, including, by all means, the U.S.

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