Word: moone
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Whoops. Pioneer's destination was the skirt of the moon's gravitational field. Only during three days of each month-and within that period, only during 18 fleeting minutes of each day-were the earth and moon in such relationship to each other that Pioneer, precisely fired and guided, would pass ahead of the moon, sweep slowly into her field and take up an orbit (see below...
...woes, were all but hysterical with joy. When Cape Canaveral's pencil-mustached Major General Donald Yates walked into a press conference, newsmen rose and applauded. In Hawthorne, Calif., at the Data Reduction Center of Ramo-Wooldridge's Space Technology Laboratories (the Air Force's top moon-probe contractor), Air Force officers and civilians whooped and pounded one another. In the Pentagon, top brass cheerfully poured out their delight in hourly pronouncements on Pioneer's progress...
...moon-probe Pioneer is man's first triumph in applied celestial mechanics. Earth satellites, like bullets, baseballs or missiles, need to contend with the earth's gravitation only. Pioneer was born on a higher level of technical evolution. Its projected course toward the moon took into account three of the overlapping gravitational fields (the earth's, the sun's, the moon's) that govern the solar system. To set it on its trajectory called on theoretical astronomical and mathematical lore that man has painstakingly been accumulating without practical employment since the birth of science...
Drawing a bead on the moon is something like shooting a duck from a spinning merry-go-round, using a bullet that takes two days to creep near its target. The moon has its own motion; it speeds around the earth on a somewhat elliptical orbit at 2,300 m.p.h.*Even more disturbing to the moon-marksmen is the rotation of the earth. In every minute, the earth rotates enough to make a 1,000-mile difference in the rocket's position when and if it reaches the moon's orbit...
...into space must start slowly and speed up to escape velocity only after it has climbed above nearly all of the atmosphere. At high altitude the necessary speed is somewhat less than 25,000 m.p.h. because the earth's gravitational pull grows weaker with distance. To reach the moon requires slightly less speed than to escape entirely, since the moon is not at an infinite distance and because its own gravitational pull can offset the earth's diminishing pull if the rocket gets close enough. When Pioneer had risen above the atmosphere, it was moving...