Word: geminis
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...anxious minutes after voice contact was lost with the Gemini capsule Molly Brown last week, the fate of the largest man-carrying spaceship ever launched by the U.S. worried a waiting nation. But the electronic blackout had been made familiar by earlier space shots. And despite the fact that the capsule dropped into the Atlantic about 60 miles short of its se lected landing spot, Molly's three-orbit cruise, like the moon flight of Ranger IX, was an all-but-perfect mission. By changing their course three times, Astronauts Gus Grissom and John Young demonstrated that U.S. spacemen...
Purring like contented kittens, the most remarkable support crew ever assembled kept unceasing vigil last week as Gemini spun through space with its two passengers. At Cape Kennedy and at the space complex in Houston, at Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland and at 14 other sites from the Canary Islands to the South Indian Ocean, dozens of electronic computers guided, watched, advised and occasionally admonished the two astronauts. In fact, the Space Age's first orbiting digital computer, a hatbox-sized model that can make 7,000 separate calculations a second, went along for the ride in Gemini...
...computer is, in fact, the largely unsung hero of the thrust into space. Computers carefully checked out all Gemini's systems before the launch, kept precise track of the spacecraft's position in the heavens at every moment, plotted trajectories and issued precise commands to the astronauts. On their detailed instructions, the astronauts made the first change of orbit ever achieved in flight; computers not only designed the new orbit, but also told the command pilot at what time and for how long he should fire his thrusters to achieve...
...simply too busy to look back. Even the establishment of a new, $170 million NASA Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston will not diminish its activity. What is moving to Houston is administrative control and planning of manned space missions, the training of astronauts, and-beginning with the second Gemini shot scheduled for this fall-ground control of manned missions. But the place the missions will blast off from will still be the sandy flatland around Cape Kennedy. And until NASA's Saturn rocket is operational, the Air Force will continue to provide adaptations of its defense-developed missiles...
...already at the point of becoming routine and outdatedly slow-good enough for such bread-and-butter missions as re laying messages, photographing the moon, measuring micrometeoroid impact, sending space vehicles past Venus and Mars, monitoring radiation and watching the earth's weather. For the first manned Gemini mission, scientists have bred a new generation of fuels designated "hypergolic"-powerful liquids that explode on contact with one another but require no delicate refrigeration for storage...