Word: astronaut
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...Astronaut Carpenter twice flunked out of the University of Colorado. Yet last week, when Colorado gracefully gave him his B.S. in aeronautical engineering, President Quigg Newton aptly explained: "For years to come, his example of courage and character, and of what a man can make of his life if he wills to do so, will serve as an inspiration to thousands of young people in this university...
Carpenter's fellow astronaut John Glenn failed to finish at Ohio's Muskingum College. In the same flight pattern was Charles Lindbergh, who quit the University of Wisconsin after two years to learn flying. In fact, a list of famous dropouts could well begin with John F. Kennedy, who dropped out of Princeton in 1935 before he crashed through at Harvard (cum laude) in 1940-along with Jacqueline Kennedy, who deserted Vassar before eventually graduating from George Washington University...
...camera with which he took pictures through the window, using several filters. He experimented with eating new kinds of special space food. He measured the brightness of stars and other outside objects with a photometer. Intricate gadgetry demanding his attention was everywhere. But for all his preoccupations, the astronaut found time to take a careful, searching look at the earth below him. And he brought back the best report yet of how man's home looks from nearby space. The sky is velvety black, he said, and against it the sunlit earth glows in brilliant shades of blue...
...Much Control. By his own time-consuming efforts to control his capsule, articulate Astronaut Carpenter learned valuable lessons about how to fly, and how not to fly, orbiting spacecraft. Such a ship moves on a predetermined orbit, and except for firing retrorockets for reentry, an astronaut cannot appreciably change its course or speed. If he applies no control at all, the capsule will go through a drifting motion, rolling and tumbling slowly as it circles the earth...
...Mercury spacemen are tempted by three separate systems for controlling their capsules-manual, automatic and fly-by-wire. The manual system has direct mechanical connections between the control stick and the valves of a set of peroxide jets. When the astronaut moves the stick, steam blasts through selected jets to give the capsule the desired turning motion. Once it starts turning in frictionless space, it continues to turn, and it cannot be stopped without using more peroxide. Vigorous use of the manual system will quickly empty its fuel tank...