Word: on-board
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Eyeball Maneuvers. From the time that Schirra made the final major thrust that moved his ship up toward Gemini 7's circular orbit, Gemini 6 was completely on its own, freed from direct guidance by Houston, largely dependent on its on-board computer, its radar and Command Pilot Schirra's "eyeball" maneuvering. Both Schirra and Stafford literally had their hands full. Schirra's left hand was on the OAMS (Orbital Attitude Maneuvering System) translation stick, which controls Gemini's 85-Ib. and 100-lb. thrusters, and is-in NASA parlance-"direction oriented." When he wanted...
Schirra's quiet but effective copilot, Tom Stafford, 35, is a topflight aeronautical engineer. His rapid slide-rule calculations supplemented the information supplied by the ship's on-board computer and helped keep the crew and the men in Houston on top of the spacecraft's rapidly changing position. Also an Annapolis man, Stafford decided to make his career in the Air Force, has written two handbooks on flight-testing programs...
...yawed the spacecraft and fired the aft thrusters to move it onto the same orbital plane as the phantom. After one last forward thrust to raise the apogee, Cooper had his craft in a co-elliptical orbit with the phantom Agena-close enough so that the pilot, using on-board radar and computer, could eventually bring his craft to within 17 miles below and 38 miles behind the phantom. "Mission accomplished," announced the ground controllers. To have completed the terminal maneuvers, the astronauts would have needed an actual object to sight. "One of the biggest things we've learned...
...million worth of electronic equipment. It is a mass of dull grey cabinets, closed-circuit TV equipment and banks of computers−all linked together by more than 10,000 miles of wire and 2,000,000 cross connections. The ground floor houses IBM 7094 II computers that monitor on-board systems of telemetry. On the second floor of the windowless structure is a master control room, with four rows of 20 consoles facing a huge world map on which the path of a spacecraft is projected. Above, on the third floor, is a second control room, permitting the center...
...pair of highly directional antennas pick up that radiation from objects below the plane. And since one antenna points behind the other, it picks up the same radiation at a slightly later time. That time lag, along with the plane's altitude, supplies enough information for an on-board computer to calculate the plane's ground speed...