Word: orbiter
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...cellophane on a pack of cigarettes. Packed accordion-fashion into the nose of a Thor-Delta rocket fired from Cape Canaveral, the 136-lb. satellite was filled with sublimating powders that expanded into gas in the direct rays of the sun and caused the balloon to inflate itself in orbit...
...orbit was a triumph of precision. Echo I was circling the earth once every 121.6 min. at altitudes ranging from 1,018 to 1,160 miles. It deviated from its planned course by only one-tenth of a degree and four miles of altitude. Visible as the brightest stars in the night sky it was quickly sighted by observers in England. Australia and Japan. After it has been bombarded by meteorites and misshapen by the cold of sunless space, it is anybody's guess how long Echo I will remain on course. But this did not diminish the jubilation...
...rocket, from Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif.; twelve times it had failed to accomplish its total mission. To prepare the way for that day when a man can be shot into space and brought back alive. Discoverer's task was to control a satellite at will in its orbit and guide it back for recovery, undamaged, at a specific point on the earth's surface...
...small. Not once had the Thor booster failed to carry its instrument-packed burden off the launching pad. Only on one occasion, when Discoverer IX was purposely destroyed 56 sec. after launching, did the second stage fail to separate and ignite. Six times the satellite was successfully guided into orbit and its instrument capsule, at an electronic command, dropped back toward earth. But none of the capsules was recovered. The other achievements seemed secondary. Public fancy fastened on perhaps the Discoverer program's least important aspect: the attempt to snare the re-entry capsule in mid-air near Hawaii...
Sweating It Out. As Discoverer XIII roared off Vandenberg's launching pad last week, it looked exactly like its predecessors. But one important modification had been made. Speculating that previous re-entry failures had been caused by malfunction of tiny rockets designed to stabilize the satellite in orbit-by causing it to spin like a bullet-Lockheed Aircraft Corp. engineers had replaced the rockets with gas jets, anxiously prayed they had guessed right. In the console-banked control room at Sunnyvale, Calif., Air Force Colonel Charles G. ("Moose") Mathison paced the floor while monitoring the countdown and alerting...