Word: spacecrafts
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...first time in the U.S. manned-space program, a returning spacecraft was landing close enough to the recovery carrier to permit television coverage of its splashdown. Cameras on the deck of the Wasp picked up Gemini as soon as it loomed below the clouds, photographed its recovery by the carrier, and sent the telecast live via Early Bird satellite into millions of American and European homes. For Stafford and Co-pilot Eugene Cernan, who came "right down the pickle barrel"-within four miles of the Wasp-it was a rewarding finish to a flight that had been marred by failure...
...ungainly gadget carried no human passengers. But as it eased its complex cargo to a soft landing on the moon's Ocean of Storms last week, the U.S. spacecraft, Surveyor I, moved man himself closer than ever to a landing on his nearest planetary neighbor. In an exercise of textbook perfection, Surveyor settled down only a few miles from its planned target; its TV camera panned across the lunar landscape and high-quality pictures streamed back to earth. For a program that had languished for years in exasperating delay, expanding expenses and mounting criticism, the very first payoff...
Cushioning the Jolt. They were, Small vernier rockets near each of the craft's three legs fired to stabilize the spacecraft in a base-down attitude. When the radar sensed that Surveyor was precisely 52 miles above the moon, it fired a powerful, solid-fuel retrorocket that slowed the craft from 5,840 m.p.h. to only 267 m.p.h. in 40 seconds...
...spacecraft travel, this was surely the slowest trip on record-nine hours to cover all of 3½ miles. But as it moved from NASA's Vertical Assembly Building to launch pad 39-A at Cape Kennedy last week, the mammoth Saturn 5 rocket, an engineless version of the vehicle that will take the first U.S. astronauts to the moon, crawled through an impressive catalogue of superlatives. This was the largest rocket in the world, emerging from the largest building in the world, to travel on one of the largest self-propelled land vehicles in the world...
...looking vehicle five years ago, engineers at Aerojet's Space-General Corp. in California were aiming for space. Their Moon Walker had six legs, stereo TV for eyes, and was crammed full of detection and communications equipment. It was designed to land on the moon with a Surveyor spacecraft...