Word: orbit
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Then last week Yves St. Laurent threw open his salon and voila! the priestesses of high fashion rocketed into orbit. "It made a week of life on gilt ballroom chairs worthwhile," wrote the Herald Tribune's Eugenia Sheppard. "St. Laurent has always known that what modern women really want to look like are little boys...
Getting the communication satellite Syncom II smoothly into its 22,500-mile, 24-hour orbit (TIME, Aug. 2) was only the beginning of the job. There was still a series of delicate maneuvers to be performed before the spacecraft could do its appointed work. Accurate guidance was needed to match Syncom's orbit to the earth's rotation; it was moving a little too fast, drifting ahead of the earth by about 7.5 degrees of longitude per day. Out on the Navy control ship Kingsport in Lagos harbor, Nigeria, engineers sent radio signals that fired jets of hydrogen...
...soon as possible. Present plans call for two satellites launched by the same rocket. They will climb to 60,000 miles, well above the influence of the earth's magnetic field. There they will separate and be jockeyed into positions about 180 miles apart on the same orbit. They will circle the earth once every 92 hours, sniffing for suspicious bursts of soft X rays. Soon other satellites will join them. If any nation breaks the test ban, the same apparatus will be ready for taking part in immediate U.S. space tests and reporting the results...
Syncom I, which was launched last February, went into near-perfect orbit, but its electronics system broke down, leaving it useless as a relay station. Last week's successor, Syncom II, did better. As the satellite climbed toward orbit more than two hours after launch, the Navy communications ship Kingsport, anchored at Lagos, Nigeria, called it by microwave radio. Syncom II answered smartly, proving that its electronics gear was healthy. The satellite even bounced a recording of The Star-Spangled Banner back to the Kingsport...
Jockey for Position. Syncom II developed some drift after it went into orbit, as was expected, but in the wrong direction. The Kingsport next ordered Syncom to fire its hydrogen peroxide rocket to correct the slow eastward drift, and actually days will pass before Syncom's delicate guidance apparatus will jockey it into an exactly synchronous orbit. Then it is supposed to swing gently in a north-south figure-eight pattern, crossing the equator over the Atlantic Ocean while radiomen below test how well it can relay messages between distant points on the distant earth...