Word: rangers
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...Viet Nam-two Army officers and an Air Force captain killed when an electric mine was detonated under their Jeep; an Army major shot dead by guerrillas in broad daylight in a village ten miles from Saigon; another major caught by machine-gun fire that raked his Vietnamese Ranger battalion. The roll of American dead would grow at a swifter pace as reinforcements arrived. Said a senior U.S. official in Saigon dryly: "When you put more people in a zone traversed by enemy bullets, your casualties are going to increase...
...since Galileo pointed his primitive telescope at the stars some three centuries ago has man's view of the universe been so singularly changed. In its faultless flight to the moon, the purple-winged spacecraft Ranger VII kept its mechanical eyes open, its agile electronic brain functioning all through its final dive. The sharp, clear pictures it sent home to earth were more than atonement for three years of Ranger failures; they opened a path into the future as they marked the most significant achievement of the age of space...
Valuable as it was for its own discoveries, the flight of Ranger VII gave a tremendous boost to the entire U.S. space program. Gigantic rockets are already being built for manned exploration of the moon, but before a man dares to blast off, astronomers must learn the nature of the l And their biggest telescopes cannot tell them whether to expect fluffy dust or jagged rocks, smooth plains or pockmarked lava. Hampered by the turbulence of the earth's atmosphere, they can see nothing that is smaller than one mile across. Ranger VII's cameras, during their last...
Building a Technology. To explore the moon at close hand with unmanned spacecraft is an incredibly ambitious project, far more difficult than sending a man on a few passive orbits around the earth. A Ranger spacecraft is all but alive; it maneuvers, it has eyes to watch the sun and the earth, it makes elaborate radio reports. It listens for orders, memorizes them, and carries them out at the proper time. And it must do all this in hostile space, where nothing behaves as it does on earth, where the slightest error may cause disaster...
Building such machines meant that the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena had to build an entirely new and difficult technology. But last week's performance of Ranger VII was an intricate exercise in perfection. The Atlas booster took off from Cape Kennedy as routinely as a commuter leaving for the railroad station. After the Atlas dropped off, the Agena second stage put Ranger VII in a parking orbit, and twenty-two minutes later, the Agena fired again, giving the spacecraft the correct speed and direction to take it to a rendezvous with the moon...