Word: orbiteer
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While Sputniks I and II still orbit overhead, scientists around the world are racing through mountains of data to discover how information on the movements of the Russians' artificial moons has altered standard theories of the earth and its atmosphere. Last week scientists at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge suggested a drastic revision of an accepted notion of the earth's upper atmosphere: at about 137 miles altitude, the atmosphere may be almost nine times as dense as scientists once believed...
...Smithsonian scientists calculated the density of the upper atmosphere by studying the gradually shrinking orbit of Sputnik I. Under the old theory, Sputnik I should stay up for about 27 months before aerodynamic drag and gravity pull it down into air dense enough to destroy it by the heat of friction. But now the Smithsonian scientists think that the moon will set for good after only 3½ months, flare into destruction sometime around the middle of January...
...black skin. Around TV-3, tired Navy and civilian scientists and technicians worked carefully toward the end of an hours-long count-down-air frame, propulsion, nose cone, guidance-while liquid oxygen vented off in trailing fume. "We'll be pleased if it does go into orbit," said one of the TV3 missilemen. "We will not be despondent if it does...
What TV3 was designed to throw into orbit, 300 miles above the earth, was a grapefruit-size space satellite, 6.4 inches in diameter, the U.S.'s first. TV3 was designed as an experimental first step of Project Vanguard, the U.S.'s No. 1 pure-science contribution to the International Geophysical Year. Since the Soviet Sputniks, TV3 had also become the symbol of the U.S.'s determination to get going in the race for the conquest of space; the President himself had called attention to its approximate firing date in a post-Sputnik press conference. But even...
...sooner did Sputnik I go into its orbit last Oct. 4 than Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson, orbiting in his own familiar sphere, ordered a full-fledged tracking of U.S. preparedness. Last week, gaveling his seven-member Preparedness Investigating Subcommittee to order for the first three days of the hearing, Texan Johnson tersely outlined the Senate's objectives. Said he: "With the launching of Sputnik I and II and with the information at hand of Russia's strength, our supremacy and even our equality has been challenged. Our goal is to find out what is to be done...