Word: mooned
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...throw them on the wall and they'll keep on ticking. American missiles are like expensive ladies' wrist watches that look nice but tend to stop frequently." An old missile hand at Cape Canaveral turned to a football figure. The Russians, said he, are now leading in moon shots by 7 to 6-they have converted after the touchdown. He did not need to add that, operationally speaking, missilery is perhaps the one game where peace and safety can be lost to a one-point lead...
...planet was tiny, as planets go, but it was the first ever put into the solar system by man. The Soviet Union's moon-probe missile-promptly dubbed "Lunik" by the Russians-was a giant achievement in the young history of space exploration, the first time man had ever broken anything free from the tight gravitational hold of earth...
...more, roared up from some part of the Soviet Union on Friday. When the Russians made their first announcement, they could already say with confidence that the final stage had attained escape velocity. On Saturday they could announce that at 9:59 p.m. E.S.T. Lunik had passed the moon and plunged on into outer space on an orbit around the sun. At week's end it was 318,000 miles from the earth and still going strong...
...only about 25% less speed than the escape velocity (25,000 m.p.h.) that will free it from the earth. All the Russians needed to do was to increase slightly the power of Sputnik Ill's launching rockets or to reduce its final weight. U.S. failure to reach the moon was mainly due to the insufficient power of the launching vehicles. For the U.S. shots to succeed on their lesser thrust, every bit of sophisticated and delicate apparatus had to work perfectly, and this did not happen...
Degrees of Success. Since the Russians do not call their shots before they fire, Lunik may have been designed for several degrees of success. The most difficult would be to go into orbit around the moon, as the U.S. Air Force hoped to do with Pioneer I. But this stunt requires a small rocket to nudge the final stage into capture by the moon's gravitational field, and the Russians have not mentioned any such item. Next degree of success would be to pass around the moon and return to earth. If the Russians were trying to do this...