Word: centaurs
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...wrote off on its Convair jetliners in 1961. Climbing back to its 1961 sales peak of $2 billion, the company last year earned $58 million on sales that were up by 22% to $1.8 billion. Nearly 80% of that comes from Government orders for items ranging from Atlas and Centaur rockets for NASA to Navy surface ships and nuclear-powered attack submarines...
...using an ion engine instead of chemical fuel for deep space acceleration, Stewart believes, scientists will be able to launch outer planet probes with rockets as small as the Atlas-Centaur, or send considerably larger payloads aloft with the Saturn 5. Combined with gravity assists from the planets, the ion engines should allow sophisticated unmanned probes to give man a close look at the outer planets, regions outside the solar system - and even the sun itself...
...ending for a flight that had made an impressive start. Launched by an Atlas Centaur rocket less than a second before its time "window" closed, Surveyor headed toward the moon on a near-perfect trajectory that would have set it down just 40 miles from its intended target in Central Bay. Their hopes buoyed, scientists at Pasadena's Jet Propulsion Laboratory planned a minor mid-course correction and ordered Surveyor's three small vernier engines to fire briefly. Two of the engines performed obediently, but the third refused to work. The resulting unbalanced thrust threw Surveyor into...
Shuffling the Standings. After a plague of misfortune and mismanagement had put it three years behind schedule, the Surveyor success was doubly sweet. Equipment broke down during tests and had to be redesigned. The second-stage Centaur-the first liquid-hydrogen rocket-had several mishaps and had flown only one completely successful mission before last week's shot. Summarizing the program, the House Space Committee characterized it as "one of the least orderly and most poorly executed NASA projects...
...last week, the clouds over Surveyor all seemed to dissipate. The Atlas-Centaur rocket that hurled Surveyor toward the moon was only one second late in leaving the pad; it followed a near-perfect trajectory that would have placed Surveyor only 250 miles from its target on the moon. The mid-course correction was so accurate that Surveyor actually scored an effective bull's-eye. Only one "glitch" marred the performance: one of Surveyor's two antennas failed to extend fully after the craft left the earth's atmosphere. But even this problem corrected itself. When Surveyor...