Word: orbiter
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...seemed well. Separating smoothly from its first stage, the second-stage rocket Agena, with the Ranger still attached, swung into a 100-mile-high parking orbit, coasted with its engine dead. Fourteen minutes after launch, the Agena's engine reignited on schedule to boost its Ranger payload on the long route into space. Then something went wrong. Instead of burning for the scheduled 90 seconds, which would have increased Ranger's speed from 17,400 m.p.h. to the necessary 23,800 m.p.h., Agena cut out too soon. Disconnected below maximum velocity, Ranger coasted up to a mere...
Since Russia achieved the same space feat last February by sending a satellite toward Venus from a similar parking orbit around the earth, U.S. missilemen, still trying to pinpoint last week's Ranger failure, looked for consolation in the near success. At least Ranger's complex instruments were behaving perfectly, and the Atlas-Agena combination had got off to a beautiful start...
...National Aeronautics and Space Administration last week stepped up its timetable for the moment when the first U.S. astronaut will be spun into orbit around earth. NASA announced that the U.S. learned enough from its first two manned suborbital flights by Astronauts Alan Shepard and "Gus" Grissom (plus, presumably, the limited reports of the U.S.S.R.'s orbiting Cosmonauts Yuri Gagarin and Gherman Titov) to cancel a third planned suborbital ride. Thus only two apparent steps still remain before manned orbit: successfully launching an unmanned but human-dummied Mercury capsule into orbit (possibly this week), then orbiting a chimpanzee...
...very first orbit, Titov took over the manual controls of the Vostok II, checked out the systems designed to let him steady his capsule as it curved along its predetermined arc in space. On the third orbit, Titov ate a three-course lunch, squeezed out of tubes like toothpaste. On the seventh orbit, after 9¼ hours in the air, Titov passed over Moscow, radioed: "I beg to wish dear Muscovites good night. I am turning in now. You do as you please, but I am turning in." With that, Titov lay back for the programed 7½ hours...
...Change. But most U.S. scientists and space experts seemed unsurprised at Russia's feat, and not unduly dismayed. It represented no new breakthrough for Russian rocketry: having lifted Gagarin into single orbit and brought him back, the Russians needed only to use the same booster and capsule for Titov's longer flight. To scientists, the principal interest in Titov's voyage was the question of how he would stand up to the prolonged 25-hour period of weightlessness-the one condition of space travel that had yet to be duplicated, except momentarily, during ground experiments and training...