Word: orbiter
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...telemetry system. Enos, who is called by his trainers "a meditative chimp," did not seem to mind. Snug in his air-conditioned nest, he waited patiently. At 10:07, the Atlas roared off its pad, climbed above Cape Canaveral and arced toward the northeast. It curved into orbit about 100 miles...
...capsule and rocket had separated, and Enos was over Zanzibar. The Zanzibar tracking station reported: "He hasn't missed a trick yet." Neither the acceleration of the roaring ascent nor weightlessness in orbit seemed to bother the meditative chimp. When colored lights appeared in little windows above his couch, he pressed the levers which, as he had been taught, would keep him from suffering mild electric shocks. Over Australia and over the Pacific, the lights appeared as scheduled, and Enos, performing properly, got no shocks. He was reported by Mexico at 11:34 and by Canaveral...
Banana Flavor. The plan was to allow Enos to orbit the earth three times before parachuting the capsule into the Atlantic. But in case of trouble, ships and planes had been deployed in eight widely separated landing places. As the capsule soared over Africa for the second time, everything was normal. While it was crossing the Indian Ocean, Enos was doing minor tasks that earned him sips of water and ten small, banana-flavored pellets, which were delivered mechanically when he pushed the proper levers. But as the capsule approached Australia, the monitor station at Muchea on the west coast...
...failure was serious because the retrorockets that are fired to slow the capsule and bring it down from orbit cannot do their job unless they are pointed in the proper direction. One of the Soviet dog-carrying satellites came to grief for just this reason. Instead of curving the satellite to earth, its retrorockets shot it into a higher orbit...
Only the Saturn booster was tested last week; the upper two stages of the rocket were dummies filled with water for ballast. Saturn is scheduled to make its first operational flight in 1964, will have enough power to orbit a ten-ton satellite around the earth or dump a four-ton load of instruments on the moon. By 1966, an advanced model Saturn, boosted by two 1,500,000-lb. North American F-1 engines, is programed to put a three-man spacecraft called Apollo into orbit around the moon. In the meantime, the U.S. hopes to start landing instruments...