Word: rocketeers
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Just after zero, the blast burst down into the undulating swamp fog; there came a cloud of fiery gold that swept smoke and flame into eddying billows. As the rocket rose roaring, 100 newsmen cheered from the observation post a mile away, and down on the nearby beaches men, women and children, camped out in tents, told each other that this was a night to remember...
...reported in with good news. Cued by the Hawthorne Data Reduction Center, the big radiotelescope station in Manchester, England picked up Pioneer within a dozen minutes, sent tracking information clacking back into the electronic data-reducing headquarters in the Space Technology Lab. But moments later, at the third stage rocket burnout, with Pioneer at maximum velocity, Canaveral scientists quickly computed speed and altitude. Had Pioneer shot up at too vertical an angle and thus been robbed of some of its getaway speed? The computations said yes. The scientists instantly decided to fire all eight vernier rockets in the fourth stage...
...moon has its own motion; it speeds around the earth on a somewhat elliptical orbit at 2,300 m.p.h.*Even more disturbing to the moon-marksmen is the rotation of the earth. In every minute, the earth rotates enough to make a 1,000-mile difference in the rocket's position when and if it reaches the moon's orbit...
...about 25,000 m.p.h.-the speed that an object would reach if it fell from an infinite distance to the earth's surface under the exclusive influence of the earth's gravitation. Since this speed is impossible in the earth's dense lower atmosphere, a rocket headed into space must start slowly and speed up to escape velocity only after it has climbed above nearly all of the atmosphere. At high altitude the necessary speed is somewhat less than 25,000 m.p.h. because the earth's gravitational pull grows weaker with distance. To reach the moon...
...trouble came in the first stage, a military Thor rocket whose gyroscopic guidance system misfunctioned just enough to make the trajectory 3.5° steeper than it should have been. This steepness reduced the advantage that was obtained from the slingshot effect of the earth's eastward rotation. Air Force experts say that a loss of speed less than 600 m.p.h. was enough to make the probe fall far short of the moon's orbit...