Word: orbital
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...words were inspiring but many a qualified scientist, even as he heard them, was moved to a vague unease. How could so rigid a time limit be set for so awesome a task? Still, the Russians had just put a man in orbit, and the disaster at the Bay of Pigs was embarrassingly fresh. A confident U.S. gesture seemed demanded by U.S. pride. "Three or four years ago, we had considerable worries about the Russians," remembers one space scientist. "Picking the man-on-the-moon program was a good choice. If we had settled for a lesser goal, they might...
Space itself is full of unevaluated perils. Until U.S. satellite Explorer I climbed into orbit in 1958, no one knew that the earth is surrounded by the Van Allen belt of deadly radiation. No one knows yet how the radiation fluctuates in position and strength, or the effect it may have on human bodies and brains...
...astronauts are legitimate space-age heroes, dedicated men who risk their lives on lean military salaries modestly enhanced by the flight pay that is partially earned in orbit: some $80 for every quick trip around the earth. But there are fringe benefits too: the seven original spacemen got about $70,000 each for selling personal accounts of their experiences to LIFE. Last week, their ranks swollen by nine new volunteers, the astronauts did just about as well with the second chapter of their story. For a total of $1,040,000, they sold the publishing rights to LIFE...
...roughly three minutes at the peak of the rocket's orbit, the spectrometer functioned in its first mode of operation, recording the intensity of ultraviolet light over a narrow range of frequencies. Three and one half scans were completed before the Aerobee plunged back towards earth...
...airglow layer from their soaring Mercury capsules and found it as bright from that vantage point as the earth under a quarter moon. Then, last May, Gordon Cooper took a special camera aloft with him and photographed the airglow as he passed over Australia on his 16th orbit. With color film twice as fast as anything available commercially, he shot a sharply defined green band 16 miles thick, distinct from the blue-white earth some 65 miles below. "It must have been a tremendous experience, seeing this wedding ring sticking up all around," says Physicist Edward P. Ney, who prepared...