Word: echo
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Orbited Echo I, a thin-skinned, gas-filled balloon 100 ft. in diameter, pioneer of a future globe-girdling network of balloon satellites to be used to bounce com munications signals from one continent to another (see SCIENCE...
...waited in the silence that followed, twisting the coffee cup in his hands. Suddenly, the speaker crackled again, and an excited voice relayed a message from Australia: "Woomera has it!" Pierce leaped out of his chair, his glasses bouncing on his nose. "It's in orbit," he cried. "Echo is in orbit." An hour later, a familiar voice filled the room : "This is President Eisenhower speaking." The President's words, spoken into a White House tape recorder months before, had just been broadcast from Goldstone, Calif., and had carried clearly across 2,500 miles of space to Holmdel...
Long & Hard. The biggest man-made object ever placed in space, Echo I is a plastic balloon as high as a ten-story building, with an aluminum coat that refleets radiomagnetic waves of frequencies up to 20.000 megacycles. Its skin is only .0005 in. thick-about half as thick as the cellophane on a pack of cigarettes. Packed accordion-fashion into the nose of a Thor-Delta rocket fired from Cape Canaveral, the 136-lb. satellite was filled with sublimating powders that expanded into gas in the direct rays of the sun and caused the balloon to inflate itself...
...orbit was a triumph of precision. Echo I was circling the earth once every 121.6 min. at altitudes ranging from 1,018 to 1,160 miles. It deviated from its planned course by only one-tenth of a degree and four miles of altitude. Visible as the brightest stars in the night sky it was quickly sighted by observers in England. Australia and Japan. After it has been bombarded by meteorites and misshapen by the cold of sunless space, it is anybody's guess how long Echo I will remain on course. But this did not diminish the jubilation...
...rights, it was time for one great national yawn. The big eye of television was dull and glazed after keeping the U.S. up late through two political conventions. The last balloon had drifted to the floor of convention hall, the last "never before" was but an echo, and the last "man who" sagged into contemplation. But the U.S. was wide-awake. The conventions of 1960 had shaken up the country...