Word: orbitting
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...viewers also saw the dramatic jettisoning of the Apollo escape tower, which arced high above the spacecraft before plummeting back toward earth. Finally, about 10½ min. after launch, out of IGOR's range, Apollo 7, still attached to the second-stage Saturn 4B rocket, glided into an orbit 140 miles high at perigee and 174 miles at apogee -remarkably close to the programmed 142-by 176-mile orbit. "We're having a ball." Schirra reported happily to ground controllers...
Simulated Rescue. After firing thrusters on the attached Saturn 4B to maneuver in orbit, the astronauts cut loose the joined Apollo command and service modules while they were passing over Hawaii. "If this were the lunar mission," explained Haney, "that is aproximately the point where we might ignite the Saturn 4B to put us on a lunar trajectory." Instead, Spacecraft Commander Schirra used Apollo's control thrusters to move his craft away from the Saturn 4B and pitched the spacecraft up and around so that it was facing the rocket. He then nudged the craft to within...
...week, after they had allowed Apollo to drift about 100 miles ahead of the Saturn 4B, the astronauts fired the service module's powerful propulsion engine twice in orbital maneuvers that once more brought them to a rendezvous with the spent second-stage rocket. This operation, too, had implications for the lunar mission; if the LM should become stranded in lunar orbit on the way to or from the Apollo command moduel, the larger craft would have to seek it out and dock with it to rescue the two astonauts aboard...
Near the moon, the spacecraft will be braked enough to be pulled into a 60-mile-high lunar orbit. It will make ten 2-hr. circuits while the astronauts shoot movie and still pictures of the lunar surface below. Then Apollo 8 will return to earth, using re-entry techniques tested last April during the unmanned flight of Apollo...
Come February, Astronauts James McDivitt, David Scott and Russell Schweickart are scheduled to zoom into earth orbit aboard Apollo 9, the first complete moon package to be shot into space. In addition to the Saturn 5 rocket and the Apollo command and service modules, the package will include the trouble-plagued lunar module (LM) that is destined, eventually, to land on the moon. The mission will include space walks, rendezvous and docking maneuvers, and the first transfer in space of astronauts between Apollo...