Word: gilruth
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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There, a crowd of more than 3,000 and dozens of banners and placards awaited their 2:12 a.m. arrival. "Good ride, Skypokes" and "Welcome home, Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon and Captain Kirk," read the banners. As the crowd roared, the astronauts were greeted by NASA's Robert Gilruth, by their wives and by most of the astronaut corps. Spectators pushed through police lines to touch the sleeves of the astronauts' blue flight coveralls, to shake their hands and to ask for autographs. Astronauts Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders were clearly moved by the heroes...
...normally imperturbable space officials. "If we hadn't had other manned flights before," said Kennedy Space Center Director Kurt Debus, "the excitement, the stress would be unendurable. To go to the moon is symbolic of mans leaving earth, of opening vast new frontiers." The impending flight inspired Robert Gilruth, director of the Manned Spacecraft Center, to deliver a rhapsodic Christmas message to the centers 4,500 employees: "Perhaps the ancient mariners had the same feeling of anticipation as they set sail through the Straits of Gibraltar past the limits of the known world...
...practical preliminary step toward planetary voyages, suggested Spacecraft Center Director Robert R. Gilruth, would be to orbit a giant, cigar-shaped capsule around the earth in the mid-1970s. The big space station, said Gilruth, would be 615 ft. long, carry a crew of 100, and rotate end-over-end 31 times a minute to create an artificial gravity for those on board. Freed from the earth's atmosphere, astronomers on the station could peer through telescopes for an undistorted view of the destination of future space trips. How would this ambitious multimillion-dollar project be financed? An idea...
...experiment clearly proved that tethered spaceships can orbit in formation without wasting fuel. Robert Gilruth, director of NASA's Manned Spacecraft Center, immediately conjured up "colonies of vehicles fastened together in ways like this." The slow rotation of the system also provided a bonus: a small centrifugal force that acted like a weak gravitational pull, causing objects to drift toward and finally "fall" on the rear wall of Gemini's cabin. It was the first artificial gravity created during a manned orbital flight. After three hours of tethered orbiting, Conrad flipped a switch that jettisoned Gemini...
Quick Critics. In Houston, Flight Director Chris Kraft, NASA Manned Spacecraft Center Director Robert Gilruth and his deputy George Low glumly surveyed the failure of a mission. It may be weeks before the experts can identify the "glitch," the space-age devil that caused the trouble. And if it turns out to be a major design failure in the Agena, the Gemini program is in deep trouble. Five of the next six Gemini missions involve rendezvous and docking exercises with an Agena target...