Word: rocketeers
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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PROJECT MERCURY, which will rocket a man into space, will cost $100 million more than the $250 million that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration originally estimated. Increases are for more expensive capsules, boosters, and a bigger range of operations...
From the NASA base at Wallops Island, Va., a Little Joe rocket (a cluster of eight solid-fuel rockets) took off with a full-scale astronaut capsule perched on nose. No man was inside it, only a rhesus monkey named Sam and a collection of meal worms, bacteria, molds and other biological samples. Strapped to a kind of cocoon lined with plastic foam sat Sam the monkey, riding in astronaut's "chair." Sam and cocoon were enclosed in an inner, air-conditioned " logical package," thick with straps, wi and instruments to test Sam's reactions...
When the Little Joe reached 150,000ft., the escape rocket fired, pulling capsule free from the main rocket subjecting Sam to a brief jolt of 17-19g. The capsule coasted up to 55 miles altitude, then arched down. A parachute lowered it safely into the sea, 200 miles away from Wallops Island...
...flight of Monkey Sam was not momentous; it was merely one of the minor but essential steps that must be taken before a rocket climbs into space carrying an astronaut (scheduled for late 1961).But it proved that if anything goes wrong on the early upward leg of such a flight, man can bail out and live...
...President Saul Robbins: "Instead of the old Buck Rogers fantasy of flapping from one planet to another with a vaporizing gun, we're emphasizing land-based space. Children have to have something they can understand. Outer space is too futuresque for them." To duplicate the thrill of a rocket launching, Louis Marx & Co., world's largest toymaker, is offering a Cape Canaveral Missile Base set (list price: $7.98), with a phonograph record of actual launching countdowns. Ideal's Electronic Fighter Jet (list price: $19.95) simulates a jet cockpit, with "radar" and shooting rockets...