Word: parasailing
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Well, I began June in Colorado, learning to parasail over the Rockies. Turned out I was a natural, and after four days I was off to Nairobi to lead safari tours in the African jungle and study subsistence farming in low-salt areas. On June 8, I flew down to Australia to do thesis research on venereal disease in Sydney's elderly population. Picked up a couple of thousand Australian dollars and some sort of aboriginal chicken pox along...
...parasail offers the most immediate promise for the Manned Orbiting Laboratory (TIME, Aug. 6) which will bring back a capsule-ful of secret scientific and military data...
Surface Slots. On the ground, Lee Norman, NASA parasail-project engineer, sat at his instrument panel, per forming functions by remote control that might have been handled by on board astronauts. With remarkable ease, Norman sailed his descending craft for ward and back, left and right, like a pilot looking for a place to land. Control was maintained by pulling on shroud lines that closed or opened slots around the surface of the parasail. With slots closed on one side, air spilled out the other, acting, in effect, as an in efficient jet engine, shoving the chute and its cargo...
...success of the parasail, after two earlier failures, has not prompted NASA to make any plans for bringing future Gemini flights down on land. Gemini V, scheduled to go up next week, will end up bobbing in the sea like all the others...
Sense of Secrecy. There is good geographical reason for the decision. U.S. spaceships are over water as soon as they take off from Cape Kennedy; they must be equipped for emergency water landings anyway. To add parasail equipment would take up valuable weight and space. Russian engineers, on the other hand, launch their spacecraft over broad stretches of land; thus they have concentrated on ground landings. Besides, the Soviet sense of secrecy makes them want to bring down their capsules on Soviet soil, not international waters...