Word: spacecrafts
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...moon may be dust or solid rock, or something in between, like popcorn. It may be smooth or jagged all over. It may be radioactive or covered with highly reactive chemicals. It may have properties that do not exist on earth and that earthlings cannot imagine. A two-man spacecraft to land on this unknown surface is being built by Grumman Aircraft Engineering Corp., but if it had to be redesigned at the last moment, it could shatter the whole schedule...
Tricky Rendezvous. Other engineering ifs proliferate. The moon project as it is now planned includes a rendezvous in lunar orbit, during which a small spacecraft that has landed on the moon will soar up and mate with a main spacecraft orbiting overhead. The problems involved are all but incredible. No space vehicles have yet accomplished rendezvous, even in earth orbit with bases near by and massive, quick-witted computers on hand to do their navigation. The Russians may have at least attempted the trick, but the U.S. has not, and it will not even make its first try until...
Caltech's Jet Propulsion Laboratory is admittedly far behind in its campaign to explore the moon's surface by means of unmanned Ranger spacecraft. Of the five Rangers launched so far, none has worked well enough to send back useful information. J.P.L. blames a good part of the failure on the heat treatment given the Rangers to prevent them from contaminating the moon with earthly microorganisms; but whatever the "cause, the delay is already on the books...
...Houston. One of the chief beneficiaries of NASA largesse is California, and last week its Congressmen were scurrying around Washington in anguished alarm. "We were already in trouble," said one, "but this will make it harder for us to get funds." Houston, where NASA's $200 million Manned Spacecraft Center worked a goat-gland miracle on local real estate values, is equally threatened...
...hard time deciding what astronauts and cosmonauts to send along as symbols. Perhaps the decision will be to send a mixed crew; perhaps the decision will yet be to send no crew at all. Another fruitful way to cooperate would be to mate burly Russian boosters to sophisticated U.S. spacecraft. Even exchanges of already gathered data would be valuable. The Russians know most about the effect of continued weightlessness on the human organism, while the U.S. knows most about conditions in space...