Word: orbits
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...small fuel loads. Five thousand miles from earth, a satellite way station could be established, revolving continuously around the earth at 1,400 m.p.h. like a bucket on an invisible string. Moored alongside, the spaceship would require only 50% increase in speed to take it out to an elliptical orbit swinging half a million miles to the moon and back...
From here on, Porter implies, the engineers have little cause for optimism. With the moon, earth and spaceship all moving at high speed in their respective orbits, there could be no arrow-straight courses. The spaceship would have to be directed and launched so that its orbit coincided exactly with the moon's passing; an error in initial speed of a thousandth of a mile per second (5 ft.) might mean missing the moon altogether. For the moon's gravitational pull to take effect, the spaceship must first exactly match the moon's 2,278-m.p.h. speed...
...Aviation Age, Kurt R. Stehling of Bell Aircraft Corp. tells how he and R. M. Missert. a physicist from the University of Iowa, are studying this principle as a cheap and easy way of putting a small, artificial satellite into an orbit around the earth. The rocket would have three stages, he says, but the whole thing need weigh only 13,500 lbs., and it could be carried up 15 miles by a plastic-film balloon of 3,000,000-cu.-ft. capacity (180-ft. diameter...
...stage. There are two possible ground-control methods: beaconed radar or moving intersecting radio beams. The third, satellite stage would be unguided and would carry only a 30-lb. payload of instruments or experimental animals. According to his calculations, it would reach 18,400 m.p.h. on a slightly elliptical orbit around the earth. Its instruments, perhaps supplied with electricity by a Bell Telephone Lab's solar battery, would report air and space conditions, the effect of weightlessness, and the extent of the earth's magnetic field...
...seems now that the only way this country can keep many of the states of Europe--and most important, a united Germany--from moving into the communist periphery, if not the communist orbit, is to make equally attractive concessions. The Administration has indicated that a new era of peace may be dawning. Properly, its policies continue to be cautious. But it must learn a lesson which in these postwar years seems to have been often neglected: that caution is not incompatible with positive action...