Word: spacecrafts
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Although an onslaught of astronaut sniffles and sore throats at Cape Kennedy last week delayed the orbital flight of Apollo 9, an unmanned spacecraft named Mariner 6 was successfully launched from a nearby pad. Its ambitious mission: to search for evidence that life can exist on Mars...
Monster Rocket. Wernher von Braun, director of the NASA facilities at Huntsville, Ala., favored an earth-orbital-rendezvous technique; two or more rockets would be used separately to launch a spacecraft and fuel-carrying stages into earth orbit, where they would be assembled for a flight to the moon. Pasadena's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is most concerned with unmanned space shots, proposed that extra fuel and supplies be rocketed to the surface of the moon and then be brought together into a supply depot by a remotecontrolled tractor. The astronauts would land near...
...designed, built and tested before the end of the decade. For Von Braun's earth-orbital scheme, a minimum of two expensive Saturn 5 launches would be needed. Both plans called for the expenditure of as much as 100,000 lbs. of fuel merely to settle a spacecraft from 80 ft. to 100 ft. tall gently on the lunar surface. The JPL idea, while permitting the design of a smaller landing craft, would have required several separate launches and had the added risk that astronauts might be stranded on the moon if they landed too far from their previously...
...prepared for the forthcoming Apollo 9 mission, officials in Houston paid tribute to Houbolt, who quit NASA in 1963 and now works for an aeronautical-research firm in Princeton, N.J. "I just thank my lucky stars that guys like Houbolt came along," said Caldwell Johnson, chief of the manned-spacecraft-design office. "I suppose that Columbus had some help...
Explorer I originally achieved an orbit that ranged from 219 to 1587 miles above the earth's surface. But as a result of friction with the atmosphere--extremely thin at those heights--the spacecraft's altitude slowly dropped. When a satellite's speed decreases from orbit to orbit, it cannot counterbalance the earth's gravitational field and slowly loses altitude...