Word: orbiter
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Instead of cylinders and pistons, the Wankel engine has a single combustion chamber shaped like a fat-waisted figure eight (see diagram). Inside, it is a three-cornered rotor with curved sides. A shaft passes through the rotor and makes it move on an eccentric orbit by means of two gears. All three corners of the triangle stay in contact with the wall of the chamber at all times. To make the contacts gaslight, each corner is tipped with an inset metal strip that, as the drive shaft revolves, is pushed tight against the cavity's inner walls...
...biggest rocket the U.S. had ever launched, a three-stage Atlas-Able, was off on the U.S.'s most ambitious space shot so far. The mission: to send an intricate, 372-lb. payload of instruments into the vicinity of the moon-and if all went well, into orbit around the moon. The rocket also carried a weighty cargo of hope and national pride: Nikita Khrushchev had kicked off his trip to the U.S. with the Russian moon shot; a U.S. answer exploded on the pad while he was in the U.S. Here, on the eve of the President...
...Lost & Unfound As a step toward the goal of sending a man into space with a high probability of getting him back alive, the Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) set out early this year on a new venture: the Discoverer Program, to send satellites into orbit and then try to recover the payload capsules after they had made several trips around the earth. The Discoverer Program's score up to last week: launchings, seven; satellites put into orbit, five; recovery attempts, four; recoveries, none...
From a launching pad at California's Vandenberg Air Force Base last week, a 78-ft., two-stage Discoverer rocket soared skyward into a fine north-south polar orbit. The following afternoon, on its 17th orbit, if things went according to plan, a remote-control signal would eject the 310-lb. payload from Discoverer VIII's orbiting second-stage rocket, and the capsule would fall earthward, slowed by a 30-ft.-wide parachute...
...debate Nehru boldly declared for the first time that the neighboring independent kingdom of Nepal lies within the orbit of India's defenses against Red Chinese incursions. He said attacks on Nepal and protectorate states nearby would be considered attacks on India itself...