Word: space
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Respectful Greeting. An hour or so before Moscow's first announcement, the U.S. got its first notion of the Russian rocket from a monitoring station in Hawaii. There technicians suddenly tensed as receivers detected an unearthly new sound of the century: signals from an unidentified vehicle out in space...
...hour before word of the Russian shot, the House space committee recommended that the U.S. probe the moon with a couple of Thor-Able rockets now lying at Cape Canaveral. Even after the news from Moscow, Montana's Democratic Senator Mike Mansfield disapproved-"a sign of panic." Underlying the absence of excuses-and the absence of panic-was a general public knowledge that the U.S. had already tried to hit the moon, had failed, had been left trailing by the Russians, but not by very much...
...race for prestige and achievement in space, these complicated virtues have their drawbacks, however temporary. Said German Scientist Hermann Oberth, who had worked on the U.S. missile program: "The Russian rockets remind me of simple alarm clocks-you can throw them on the wall and they'll keep on ticking. American missiles are like expensive ladies' wrist watches that look nice but tend to stop frequently." An old missile hand at Cape Canaveral turned to a football figure. The Russians, said he, are now leading in moon shots by 7 to 6-they have converted after the touchdown...
...Speechwriter Moos headed back to Washington with a heavily marked sheaf of papers for revision, the President got set to deliver the speech to Congress this week in a setting dominated by the U.S.S.R.'s dramatic emphasis not on budget-balancing but on reaching into space...
...planet was tiny, as planets go, but it was the first ever put into the solar system by man. The Soviet Union's moon-probe missile-promptly dubbed "Lunik" by the Russians-was a giant achievement in the young history of space exploration, the first time man had ever broken anything free from the tight gravitational hold of earth...