Word: orbiter
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Within the next few months, there will be three or four more suborbital manned space shots using the Redstone rocket that sent Shepard into space. But it is not the Redstone that will first take a U.S. astronaut into orbit around the planet...
...Ghana's Kwame Nkrumah deliberately edging his nation toward Communism, or is he just flirting harmlessly and neutrally at a safe distance outside the Soviet orbit? With considerable fanfare, he has added six Ilyushin planes to his little national airline, approved a new technical-aid pact with Moscow, and contracted for Soviet surveyors on the Volta River. But no publicity at all has been given to the last, most dangerous commodity just in from Russia: guns and ammunition by the thousands of tons...
Brave Dreams Again. Even in the first flush of worldwide praise, U.S. spacemen did not deceive themselves. They still have a universe to conquer. The Russians are far in front of them, and even if Project Mercury puts a manned capsule into true orbit by the end of 1961 (a hopeful schedule that few scientists take seriously), there is always a chance that the Russians will make an even more spectacular shot...
...landing on a chosen spot, not merely drifting down by parachute like the Vostok or Freedom 7. Now veteran rocketmen are talking of beating Dyna-Soar off the pad. They are suggesting a solid-fuel rocket with upper-stage rockets powerful enough to put the present X-15 into orbit. Long before the Russians get a true plane into space, the U.S. might have the X-15 circling the world. Once in orbit, the swift little rocketship could maneuver freely, change direction and altitude, cross and recross the same cities, and glide down to land on conventional airports...
...Yuri actually make the flight? U.S. certainty that he had come by his honors honestly was based on a strategic network of listening posts capable of tuning in on the actual countdown, long-range radar tracking stations that plotted the orbit of the satellite and could even estimate its size and weight, electronic eavesdropping that may have overheard Yuri's radio reports to earth, and, finally, traditional cloak-and-dagger espionage inside the Soviet Union...