Word: drift
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Pallid Pap. Lately, Muzak's message has begun to drift around the world, always with the same serene results it has accomplished in America. Women workers in an Argentine flour mill who used to fight and scream at each other on sight, now go to work peaceably to music's soft accompaniment. Passengers on the Trans-Siberian Railroad suffer the trip to the tune of Cossack songs and band music, and a brothel in Stuttgart has applied for the "Light Industrial" program local Muzak men offer...
...only the beginning of the job. There was still a series of delicate maneuvers to be performed before the spacecraft could do its appointed work. Accurate guidance was needed to match Syncom's orbit to the earth's rotation; it was moving a little too fast, drifting ahead of the earth by about 7.5 degrees of longitude per day. Out on the Navy control ship Kingsport in Lagos harbor, Nigeria, engineers sent radio signals that fired jets of hydrogen peroxide to slow Syncom down. Obediently the satellite changed the direction of its drift, began to move toward...
Next job was to spin the satellite so that its radio antenna would point at the earth. Other peroxide jets were fired and the antenna swung toward its target. The movement also increased the satellite's westward drift, and at midweek Syncom II was over Africa, oscillating back and forth across the equator in a lazy figure eight...
When Syncom reaches Brazil, its drift will be stopped by further jets of peroxide, and its antenna may be pointed with still greater accuracy at the earth. Then it will arc high above the New Jersey horizon, ready to relay messages to and from more than one-third of the earth...
Jockey for Position. Syncom II developed some drift after it went into orbit, as was expected, but in the wrong direction. The Kingsport next ordered Syncom to fire its hydrogen peroxide rocket to correct the slow eastward drift, and actually days will pass before Syncom's delicate guidance apparatus will jockey it into an exactly synchronous orbit. Then it is supposed to swing gently in a north-south figure-eight pattern, crossing the equator over the Atlantic Ocean while radiomen below test how well it can relay messages between distant points on the distant earth...