Word: orbital
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Monster Rocket. Wernher von Braun, director of the NASA facilities at Huntsville, Ala., favored an earth-orbital-rendezvous technique; two or more rockets would be used separately to launch a spacecraft and fuel-carrying stages into earth orbit, where they would be assembled for a flight to the moon. Pasadena's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is most concerned with unmanned space shots, proposed that extra fuel and supplies be rocketed to the surface of the moon and then be brought together into a supply depot by a remotecontrolled tractor. The astronauts would land near...
While the various factions wrangled, Engineer Houbolt, whose work at NASA's Langley Research Center was not directly connected with space flight, was impressed by still another moon-landing technique: the lunar-orbit rendezvous. Houbolt's plan was to leave the mother craft in orbit around the moon while a light, ferrylike craft descended from it to the lunar surface carrying only one or two of the astronauts. Later, the little craft could blast off, rendezvous and dock with the mother ship, and then be left behind in lunar orbit as the astronauts returned to earth...
Luigi G. Jacchia, lecturer on Astronomy, has predicted that the 31-pound satellite will fall from orbit in April 1970, much later than Wernher von Braun and other rocketry experts predicted when the satellite was launched...
Explorer I originally achieved an orbit that ranged from 219 to 1587 miles above the earth's surface. But as a result of friction with the atmosphere--extremely thin at those heights--the spacecraft's altitude slowly dropped. When a satellite's speed decreases from orbit to orbit, it cannot counterbalance the earth's gravitational field and slowly loses altitude...
...Space" is a song about being spaced-out. It starts slowly, as a stoned-steady guitar beat reverberating through an echo chamber accompanies the cool voices that weave in and out. "My body is walking in space/ My soul is in orbit with God, face to face," the eerie voices tell us, and we can believe in their moonglow-bathed hallucinations. But no sooner is the mood established, than composer Galt Mac Dermot and lyricists Gerome Ragni and James Rado destroy it by tipping their hats to the Times Square crowd. All of a sudden the chorus hippies are yelling...