Word: orbit
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...forthcoming eight-day mission is a dress rehearsal for July's lunar landing attempt. It is easily the most complex and ambitious flight yet scheduled for the U.S. manned space program. Astronauts Thomas Stafford, Eugene Cernan and John Young will spend 61 hours and 35 minutes in lunar orbit, three times longer than the Apollo 8 astronauts. Stafford and Cernan will separate the lunar module from the command module and fly it for the first time in the lunar environment, some 240,000 miles from home. During the LM's solo flight, it will descend from the command...
Spotlight on Snoopy. Then why not go all the way with Apollo 10? George Low, manager of the Apollo spacecraft program, explains that all Apollo systems have not been tested together in the vicinity of the moon. There has been no rendezvous in lunar orbit, no testing of the LM's landing radar or of the entire communications system at lunar distances. In addition, NASA scientists are recalculating trajectories and orbital paths to take into account irregularities in the lunar gravitational field that caused Apollo 8 to stray from its course. "We looked at all these things," says...
...ORBITING LABORATORIES. A byproduct of the billions spent on Apollo is the hardware to send three missions, beginning in late 1971, to a manned space laboratory in orbit some 200 miles above the earth. Saturn 4B rockets will spend their fuel and then serve as bungalow-size space stations for three-man crews. The first will include a doctor, who will study the effects on himself and his companions of 28 days under zero gravity. The crew will also try to learn how vacuum and weightlessness affect certain manufacturing processes. These include electron beam welding and the use of molten...
...back to earth, NASA would use rocket vehicles that are described as "lifting bodies." Some of them will have retractable "switchblade" wings and enough maneuverability for landings at airfields instead of in the ocean. Eventually, Administrator Paine also hopes to cut the cost of putting a pound into earth orbit from the current $500 to $50. To help achieve this breakthrough, NASA has three different rockets on its drawing boards: Tri-Maran (a reusable three-stage booster whose stages are mounted side by side instead of atop each other); Dixie Cup (with a low-cost, discardable, solid-fuel first stage...
...BEYOND THE MOON. In 1971, NASA plans to place two spacecraft in orbit around Mars. In 1973, two "Viking" missions are scheduled to make soft landings on the planet's surface. Also proposed is a Venus-Mercury "minitour" using the Venusian gravitational force to whip a satellite on toward Mercury. Perhaps most visionary of all is NASA's dream of "Grand Tour" flights to the "outer" planets-Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. The four outer planets will be aligned in such a way that a single craft launched between 1976 and 1978 could fly by all of them...