Word: earthly
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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John F. Kennedy came to Cambridge to ask the Economics Department how to write a Labor Reform Bill, and promised local citizens that his Senatorial campaign would be marked by "fewer tea parties" and a more down-to-earth approach. When the Senator cancelled his world-wide speaking tour, people took this to mean that he would campaign inside the State this time...
...touch with the ground stations. There will be no window for him to look out, but an "optical display" (undetermined) will give him a kind of indirect visibility. If anything goes wrong early in the ascent, he can fire an escape rocket that will bring him back to earth, with luck, before he has climbed too high...
Except for peeks at the optical display and conversation with the ground, the pilot will have little to do in his orbit around the earth. An automatic attitude sensor will operate the gas jets that keep the capsule from rolling. Then, at a signal from the ground or from the pilot himself, the jets will somersault the capsule, turn it so that its retrorockets can fire and slow its speed...
...instrument-carrying capsules will be fired to gradually increasing heights. Then primates (the NASA no longer calls them apes or monkeys) will get lengthening rides. On about the seventh shot, a man will be sent up 70 miles, landing 200 miles away. Next a manned capsule will orbit the earth once. Final step: to put a man in orbit for 24 hours and bring him back alive...
...coveted Government contract for the first space capsule designed to carry a man into orbit around the earth (see SCIENCE) went last week to St. Louis' McDonnell Aircraft Corp. The contract itself was modest-only $15 million-but the prestige is enormous. Twelve topflight companies submitted plans and bids on the project. McDonnell won because its president, James S. (for Smith) McDonnell Jr., and his engineers had long since anticipated the Government's needs. They had been working on the project with their own money for more than a year, before the Government decided to go ahead. When...