Word: orbited
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...satellite project thought up by Engineer Wernher Von Braun, captured German V-2 expert turned U.S. Army missile brain. Von Braun planned to equip the Army's tested Redstone missile with booster rockets and use the hybrid to send a small (5 Ib.) satellite into an earth-girdling orbit...
...astonishing piece of stupidity." Levitt's argument, echoed by Army missilemen: the Army's Jupiter intermediate ballistic missile, well along in 1955, could and should have been adapted for launching a satellite (a modified Jupiter has reached an altitude of 650 miles, higher than Sputnik's orbit). But when it was made, the National Security Council decision seemed sensible enough. The U.S. had committed itself to pass on to the rest of the world, including Russia, scientific information obtained from IGY programs, so it seemed desirable, to the NSC (and to IGY scientists too) to keep Vanguard...
...care if they did." If the Administration had wanted to win the race, it could have speeded up Vanguard's schedule or got the Army going on a crash satellite program utilizing Jupiter (Army missilemen boasted last week that they could get a satellite into an orbit on a month's notice). But the Administration did neither...
...from speeding up, in fact, Vanguard lagged behind its original plan for a late-1957 launching of a 20-odd-lb. satellite (less than one-eighth as heavy as Russia's claim for Sputnik). The stretched-out schedule calls for launching smaller test satellites late this year, orbiting the first 21½-lb. ball next spring. The satellites themselves are ready to soar, reports Vanguard's softspoken, pipe-puffing Director John P. Hagen. But the launching vehicle is still undergoing tests. Its first stage, an adaptation of the Navy's Viking, has to work perfectly...
Hynek said that this unexpected motion might explain the difficulties which scientists have encountered in attempting to establish a definite orbit for the satellite...