Word: orbiter
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...carrying spaceship ever launched by the U.S. worried a waiting nation. But the electronic blackout had been made familiar by earlier space shots. And despite the fact that the capsule dropped into the Atlantic about 60 miles short of its se lected landing spot, Molly's three-orbit cruise, like the moon flight of Ranger IX, was an all-but-perfect mission. By changing their course three times, Astronauts Gus Grissom and John Young demonstrated that U.S. spacemen are making noteworthy progress as they tackle the burgeoning problems of getting a man to the moon...
Even the Russians, who startled the world by letting a space traveler take a "stroll" outside his orbiting capsule only a few days before (TIME cover, March 26), have yet to claim that their cosmonauts have varied the earth-girdling curve of a spacecraft in flight.* But before men can make a lunar excursion or perform other active missions outside the earth's atmosphere, they must learn to make those orbit alterations with exquisite precision. Spaceships must be maneuvered so surely that they can meet and mate aloft; their pilots must act as accurate and reliable links...
Molly's men began work right after a tall Titan booster had tossed them into an elliptical orbit 139.2 miles at apogee, 100.1 miles at perigee. There was a pair of biological experiments to get out of the way: the fertility and growth of sea-urchin eggs had to be checked for the effects of weightlessness; human blood cells were exposed to the stress of radiation plus weightlessness. Then, as the Molly Brown curved round the bottom of the globe and came up across the Pacific toward the American coast, Gus Grissom got ready for the first orbital change...
...though, it was clear that not everything went as planned with Voskhod II. Its takeoff was normal, then it soared into a slightly more elliptical orbit than is usual for manned satellites, rising to 307.5 miles above the earth at apogee. Leonov took his vacuum stroll during the second orbit, when, as the Russians patriotically pointed out, he was over Russian soil. Then the spacecraft made 15 more orbits around the earth, followed all the while by U.S. trackers...
...carry it to one of two widely separated launch pads for blastoff. Thus, on a two-pad complex, the Air Force will be capable of readying eight rockets at once. The first specific objective of such increased speed and efficiency is to put a three-man space laboratory into orbit around the earth...