Word: orbiter
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...next four hours and 56 minutes, John Glenn lived through and shared with millions a day of miracles. There was beauty. "I don't know what you can say about a day in which you have seen four beautiful sunsets," Glenn said later, "three in orbit, and one on the surface after I was back on board the ship." There was the wonder of weightlessness. "This," said Glenn, "is something you could get addicted to." And there was danger: "This could have been a bad day all the way around...
Eerie World. After liftoff, the next crucial stage of the flight was the separation of the rocket and capsule at the proper angle to put Glenn into the programmed orbit. When his orbit was confirmed at the Cape, Glenn jubilantly radioed back: "Capsule is turning around. Oh, that view is tremendous! I can see the booster doing turnarounds just a couple of hundred yards behind. Cape...
Glenn speculated that the particles might be the cloud of needles the Air Force had tried to orbit last October* or that they might be snowflakes formed by the cooling of water vapor from his jet nozzles. But Glenn quickly rejected both theories. Best explanation of the phenomenon: the capsule was giving off electrically charged particles of water or gas vapor that were attracted to each other, built up the specks that Glenn saw. When Glenn later described the particles to George Rapp, a Project Mercury psychiatrist, he got the deadpan response: "What did they say. John...
During periods of darkness, he flicked on the tiny flashlights that were attached to the fingers of his gloves, directed the beams on his maps. He found he could urinate easily into the "motorman's pal," which was attached to the lining of his space suit. On his second orbit, he again ran into the field of luminous particles; he turned his capsule around at a 180° angle to see them better, but most of them were eventually lost in the glare...
...Astronaut Glenn's adventure involved far more than mere sightseeing in space. He encountered difficulties that turned his journey into a nightmare of suspense. Passing within radio range of Guaymas, Mexico, on his first orbit, his attitude control system began to act up. A small jet, designed to release hydrogen peroxide steam to keep the capsule in a stable position, was not working properly. The capsule, reported Glenn, "drifts off in yaw to the right at about one degree per second. It will go to 20 degrees and hold at that...