Word: orbiteer
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...years since NASA took over the Mercury program, its target date for getting a man into orbit and back has steadily shifted: from late 1959 to mid-1960 to late 1960 to early 1961 to mid-1961 and now to late 1961. Meanwhile, by sending the dogs Belka and Strelka into orbit last August and recovering them, the Russians have shown that it should not be much more complicated to put an astronaut into space any time they are willing to risk a man instead of a couple of mutts. "I would say that you could wake up any morning...
...space. The Russians have rockets with far greater thrust than the U.S.'s biggest. The space capsule that carried Belka and Strelka weighed five tons. The most powerful U.S. rocket available, the Air Force's Atlas, can at best put only a one-ton payload into orbit. What has delayed Mercury more than any other factor is the slow, painstaking miniaturization involved in devising an adequate capsule weighing only one ton. Because of such complications, some knowledgeable critics believe that it is high time for NASA to review the Mercury man-in-space project (cost to date...
Shortly after the first Russian Sputnik soared into orbit in October 1957, Gates picked up the enthusiasm of the Navy's Polaris missile boosters, fought the civilian battles for a speedup in the Polaris program through the Defense Department and the White House. As a result, the first battle-ready Polaris sub put to sea three years ahead of the original schedule (TIME, Nov. 28). With Russia ahead of the U.S. in land-based ballistic missiles, the U.S. would be facing a formidable weapons gap in the early 1960s had Polaris not been pushed...
Among the satellites so far shot into orbit, perhaps the most useful to man was Tiros I, the "weather eye," whose pictures of the earth's cloud pattern gave a valuable overall view of global weather. Last week the U.S. launched Tiros II, to improve on the work of its predecessor. The 280-lb., drum-shaped satellite, spangled with 9,260 solar cells, went into a nearly circular orbit about 400 miles above the earth. All except one of its instruments worked fine; only the wide-angle TV camera for photographing large-scale cloud cover was out of kilter...
When Tiros II went into orbit, the narrow-angle camera started right off to take good pictures, but the wide-angle camera balked. There is some chance that it will take better pictures later, or that it can be "repaired" by deft electronic twiddling from stations on earth. Even if it never does function properly, the narrow-angle camera alone will yield valuable weather information. But the scientists who interpret the cloud pictures will have to take special pains to identify the places around the earth that are covered by its Rhode Island-size snapshots...