Word: orbiters
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...NASA Manned-Flight Director Robert Gilruth. "I think maybe this will not happen again." Growled NASA Director James Webb, "This was not an adequate performance by an astronaut." Gemini Pilots Virgil Grissom, 38, and John Young, 34, were on the carpet for something they did on their recent three-orbit mission. Gilruth and Webb told a congressional committee that the corned-beef-on-rye sandwich Young smuggled into their Molly Brown capsule and fed Grissom instead of the scientifically prepared flight diet was strictly unprogrammed. Mincing no words, the administrators decreed that henceforth "corned-beef-sandwich incidents" will cease...
...fast growing familiar with man's race beyond the confines of his own world, Early Bird reached back toward the earth and seemed to shrink it almost to room size. All by itself, the satellite blanketed more than one-third of the globe. If two more soar into orbit, for the first time in history it will be literally true that for every nation instant contact will be possible with every inhabited spot on earth...
Resetting the Clock. Columbia University Astronomer Wallace J. Eckert and Graduate Student H. F. Smith Jr. of IBM's Watson Laboratory at Columbia began by analyzing the moon's orbit with IBM's fast-figuring computers. The moon's position has been observed with precision for 200 years, so there was more than enough data to feed into the machines. After they pondered electronically for several hundred hours, weighing the effects of the earth, sun, planets and relativity on the moon's orbit, the computers reported that in a three-year cycle the moon would...
...even after this improvement, the new lunar calculations did not picture the moon behaving as expected. The plane of its orbit around the earth intersects the plane of the earth's orbit around the sun at points (nodes) that move through 360° about six times per century. The chief cause of this lunar shift is the pull of the sun's gravitation, but there are other influences too, and when all the known effects had been cranked into the equations, a discrepancy of 25 sec. of arc (.007°) per century still persisted...
...vital assumption: the moon has no heavy core like the earth's. Instead, it must have a heavy shell with lighter material inside. This would make the moon more reluctant to turn on its axis, and the extra resistance would account for its computer-calculated shift of orbit...