Word: orbiter
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...Apollo 7 whirled through orbit after orbit around the earth last week, the growing monotony of the mission was a major measure of its success. Presented with little challenge from the well-functioning spacecraft, Astronauts Wally Schirra, Walter Cunningham and Donn Eisele fought off ennui as they plodded through the humdrum housekeeping and engineering duties necessary to prove their craft moonworthy. They fired and refired the ship's big rocket engine and practiced sighting stars through a sextant; they tested their computers and cooling system, and transmitted to a ground station the same sort of signals a lunar module...
...Schirra pulled to within a foot of the other spacecraft and held up a sign for Gemini 7's command pilot, West Point Graduate Frank Borman. It read: "Beat Army." Later, on the same flight, he reported that he had sighted "an object" going into polar orbit. "Stand by," said Schirra, "it looks like he's trying to signal us." He then whipped out a harmonica and began to play Jingle Bells. The UFO, of course, was Santa Claus...
Simulated Rescue. After firing thrusters on the attached Saturn 4B to maneuver in orbit, the astronauts cut loose the joined Apollo command and service modules while they were passing over Hawaii. "If this were the lunar mission," explained Haney, "that is aproximately the point where we might ignite the Saturn 4B to put us on a lunar trajectory." Instead, Spacecraft Commander Schirra used Apollo's control thrusters to move his craft away from the Saturn 4B and pitched the spacecraft up and around so that it was facing the rocket. He then nudged the craft to within...
...week, after they had allowed Apollo to drift about 100 miles ahead of the Saturn 4B, the astronauts fired the service module's powerful propulsion engine twice in orbital maneuvers that once more brought them to a rendezvous with the spent second-stage rocket. This operation, too, had implications for the lunar mission; if the LM should become stranded in lunar orbit on the way to or from the Apollo command moduel, the larger craft would have to seek it out and dock with it to rescue the two astonauts aboard...
Born. To Colonel Pavel Popovich, 38, Soviet cosmonaut, who became part of the world's first space duet in 1962 when his Vostok IV rocketed into orbit along with the capsule carrying Major Andrian Nikolayev; and Maria Popovich, 37, a civilian pilot: their second daughter; in Moscow...