Word: orbiter
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...long shot needed a nicety of aiming and timing. Soaring 1,000 miles toward outer space at speeds up to 17,000 m.p.h., the instrument-packed Atlas would have arced into orbit if its trajectory had been a shade lower or if its engines had cut out seconds late. But everything clicked precisely. As the earth spun beneath it, the rocket traced a twisting trajectory across the surface of the globe. It shaded the coast of Brazil, looped around the Cape of Good Hope, was heading almost due east when it dumped its payload into...
...after the launching, a moon-watch team at Sacramento, Calif, reported that the spaceship had apparently separated into three parts. Soon Air Force and Smithsonian trackers at Cambridge, Mass. concluded that the spacecraft had thrown off small parts, perhaps seven in all, and was on a new and higher orbit whose apogee (high point) had risen from 208.6 miles to 418.5 miles above the earth...
...forward-pointing retrorocket to reduce its speed. If this is done properly, the satellite will curve down into the denser air, where it will be slowed further by friction. If the retrorocket is fired in the wrong direction, it will speed the satellite up and put it on an orbit with a higher apogee. The U.S. Air Force Discoverer satellite program has suffered from just such aiming errors...
...fraction of cloud, mostly made up of hard-to-ionize elements, stopped near the orbit of Venus (67 million miles from the sun). As it cooled off, some of its material condensed into dust. The dust grains grew bigger and bigger by attracting each other, and they finally coalesced to form three planets: Mercury, Venus and Earth. Another fraction of the cosmic cloud stopped farther away from the sun, forming Mars and the moon. Since these two zones of planet formation overlapped, the earth was able to capture the moon as its satellite. The big outer planets, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus...
Even the latest interplanetary firecracker shot off by Khrushchev's obliging scientists was a dud. Moscow Radio trumpeted the news that Russia had put a 4.5-ton "spaceship" into near-circular orbit about 200 miles above the earth. Inside the new satellite, said Moscow, was a pressurized cabin containing a dummy spaceman, "all necessary equipment for future manned flight," and about 1.5 tons of instrumentation...