Word: orbital
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...three-man moon crew had been aboard, they would still have been safe enough. The makeshift maneuvers successfully inserted the third stage and the unmanned Apollo 6 spacecraft into a 218-mile by 113-mile elliptical orbit (instead of the planned 115-mile circular orbit). But there was more trouble to come...
Mysterious Breakup. When controllers ordered the third-stage engine to restart-in an effort to shove it from its parking orbit to a distance of 320,000 miles on a simulated moon trip- nothing happened. Still attempting to salvage the mission, the controllers next separated Apollo 6 from the dead third stage and used the spacecraft's engine to push it to an altitude of 13 822 miles. From that height, it plunged back into the atmosphere and parachuted to a safe landing and recovery in the Pacific Ocean. Later, NASA reported the orbiting third stage mysteriously broke into...
...picking through telemetry attempting to discover what had gone wrong with the previously reliable Saturn. Preliminary analysis suggested that the two second-stage rocket engines might have been damaged during the separation of the first stage and that an electrical malfunction had prevented the third stage from restarting in orbit The misfires dimmed NASA's hope that the next Saturn shot would carry three astronauts into orbit. Instead, if further diagnosis shows that the rocket's ills are serious, it may be necessary to prove them cured in another unmanned flight...
...discover an identical black monolith, apparently buried over four million years before, completely inert save for the constant emission of a powerful radio signal directed toward Jupiter. The scientists examine it (touching it tentatively as the apes did) at a moment when the earth and sun are in conjunctive orbit. They conclude that some form of life on Jupiter may have placed the monolith there and, fourteen months later, an expedition is sent to Jupiter to investigate...
Died. Colonel Yuri A. Gagarin, 34, Soviet cosmonaut, who on April 12, 1964 became the first man in space with a one-orbit flight aboard Vostok I; in the crash of an unannounced type of plane, also killing Colonel Vladimir S. Seryogin, 46; near Moscow. Short (5 ft. 3 in.) and stocky, the son of a rural carpenter, Gagarin won his pilot's wings in 1957, the year of the Sputnik, shortly after was tapped for the first class of cosmonauts. His historic 89-minute orbit of the globe made him Russia's greatest hero since World...