Word: astronaut
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...Going higher by 2,000-ft. steps, the subjects had progressively shorter times of useful consciousness. But even at 40,000 ft. the Indians averaged 1½ minutes, and one held out for more than two minutes. These results answered the first question with an emphatic yes: an astronaut having temporary trouble would be able to function effectively far longer, and thus perhaps save his life, if he had the High Andean's altitude endurance...
...Astronaut. By next day, editors around the world had showered Moscow correspondents with their own rockets (correspondents' term for inquiries about competitors' stories). France-Soir and London's Daily Mail both ran Page One drawings of the compleat astronaut in space suit, breathing gear and seat belt. Said one query: "Like interview and first-person impressions." Demanded another: "Competition says it's woman, not man. Confirm...
...identity"-but volunteered no hints as to the identity of its mysterious news informants. Turning to such tried-and-true sources as Estes Kefauver and the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory's Fred Whipple (who, said A.P., "expressed no surprise"), the A.P.-in common with big-city newspapers-kept the astronaut aloft with scientific and political punditry...
...aspiring astronaut almost overplayed the gag. After a London tabloid splashed a picture of the "passport" across half a page, hundreds of people asked for passports and announced their readiness to trade this world for another. Plaintively the society announced that it was all a fake-they were not prepared to sell any round-trip tickets from Liverpool Airport to Mars. They had never even bought any shares in "British Milky Way Space Ships, Inc." Then the scientists went back to what they know how to handle: their telescopes, their rocket motors, and the antiseptic world of interstellar mathematics...
Thus Goddard was not only an "astronaut," as you call them, but actually started the whole modern cycle of astronautics. He is the spiritual father of the whole German and French discussion along these lines in the '205 and '305, though Ley gives him scant treatment in his book...