Word: orbiter
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...newsman's question why Cosmic III weighed 82 Ibs. less than Cosmic II, Khrushchev replied: "It's big enough for a man to eat his dinner inside." It was also roughly twice the size of the biggest satellite that the U.S. has yet managed to fire into orbit...
...Cosmic III was soon in trouble. Allied trackers around the world noted that Cosmic Ill's original orbit (only 154.72 miles above the earth at its apogee, 111.94 miles at its perigee) was the lowest yet assumed by any satellite, Russian or American, and dangerously close to the upper atmosphere. After the spaceship had made 18 revolutions around the earth, U.S. and British trackers suddenly lost contact with...
Shortly after the first Russian Sputnik soared into orbit in October 1957, Gates picked up the enthusiasm of the Navy's Polaris missile boosters, fought the civilian battles for a speedup in the Polaris program through the Defense Department and the White House. As a result, the first battle-ready Polaris sub put to sea three years ahead of the original schedule (TIME, Nov. 28). With Russia ahead of the U.S. in land-based ballistic missiles, the U.S. would be facing a formidable weapons gap in the early 1960s had Polaris not been pushed...
Among the satellites so far shot into orbit, perhaps the most useful to man was Tiros I, the "weather eye," whose pictures of the earth's cloud pattern gave a valuable overall view of global weather. Last week the U.S. launched Tiros II, to improve on the work of its predecessor. The 280-lb., drum-shaped satellite, spangled with 9,260 solar cells, went into a nearly circular orbit about 400 miles above the earth. All except one of its instruments worked fine; only the wide-angle TV camera for photographing large-scale cloud cover was out of kilter...
When Tiros II went into orbit, the narrow-angle camera started right off to take good pictures, but the wide-angle camera balked. There is some chance that it will take better pictures later, or that it can be "repaired" by deft electronic twiddling from stations on earth. Even if it never does function properly, the narrow-angle camera alone will yield valuable weather information. But the scientists who interpret the cloud pictures will have to take special pains to identify the places around the earth that are covered by its Rhode Island-size snapshots...