Word: orbiter
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...alternatives, he turned to "Project Defender," a $100 million-a-year operation under Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency, now has 200 civilian contractors at work exploring other anti-missile possibilities. Among them: spraying the path of a missile with pellets to damage the warhead, or putting into orbit anti-missile stations that would detect and kill ICBMs as they leave their launching pads...
From the Sky. Although it was only 15 hours in orbit before it relayed a phone call between A. T. & T. Board Chairman Frederick R. Kappel in Maine and Vice President Lyndon Johnson in Washington, and although it has already bounced TV programs between the U.S. and Europe, Telstar is only an experimental communications satellite. A large part of its equipment is devoted to studying radiation, micrometeorites, and other potentially troublesome features of space. It was placed deliberately on an elliptical orbit (apogee 3,502 miles, perigee 593 miles) so that it could report from many different altitudes...
Sixth Payoff. Soon after Telstar was launched, NASA's global tracking network reported it on a perfect orbit. At Andover, anxious scientists heard with relief that its telemetering system was working precisely as planned, reporting no trouble at all. But during its first five 158-min. orbits, Telstar did not come within practical line-of-sight distance of the big ear in Maine. The sixth orbit was the payoff. It was 7 p.m. in Maine when the satellite raced toward the U.S. Calculations showed that it would pass close enough to Maine to hear a command...
...many more satellites; some signals would pass through two or more relays before reaching their destinations. The higher the satellites circle, the fewer of them would be needed. If a communications satellite were placed 22,300 miles above the earth, it would take exactly one day to complete each orbit. Thus it would keep pace with the earth's rotation and stay above the same spot on the map. Advocates of such "synchronous" communications satellites point out that three of them would be enough to cover most of the earth...
...fast-changing vernacular of the space age LOR (Lunar Orbital Rendezvous) has suddenly become one of the big words in U.S. space doctrine. Last week the National Aeronautics and Space Administration announced that the first U.S. astronauts will attempt a LOR trip, i.e., land on the lunar surface by piloting a small "bug'' down from a mother ship parked on an orbit around the moon (TIME, June 22). After a spot of exploring, they will take off again in the bug and rejoin the mother ship for the return trip to earth. NASA now thinks that this bizarre...