Word: spacecrafts
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...since Galileo pointed his primitive telescope at the stars some three centuries ago has man's view of the universe been so singularly changed. In its faultless flight to the moon, the purple-winged spacecraft Ranger VII kept its mechanical eyes open, its agile electronic brain functioning all through its final dive. The sharp, clear pictures it sent home to earth were more than atonement for three years of Ranger failures; they opened a path into the future as they marked the most significant achievement of the age of space...
Building a Technology. To explore the moon at close hand with unmanned spacecraft is an incredibly ambitious project, far more difficult than sending a man on a few passive orbits around the earth. A Ranger spacecraft is all but alive; it maneuvers, it has eyes to watch the sun and the earth, it makes elaborate radio reports. It listens for orders, memorizes them, and carries them out at the proper time. And it must do all this in hostile space, where nothing behaves as it does on earth, where the slightest error may cause disaster...
...intricate exercise in perfection. The Atlas booster took off from Cape Kennedy as routinely as a commuter leaving for the railroad station. After the Atlas dropped off, the Agena second stage put Ranger VII in a parking orbit, and twenty-two minutes later, the Agena fired again, giving the spacecraft the correct speed and direction to take it to a rendezvous with the moon...
Most scientific contributions to military technology are aimed at future war, a far-off, fast-racing conflict between supersonic bombers, atom-armed missiles and man-carrying spacecraft. But more mundane problems have not been neglected by the men in laboratories. With none of the rocket-boosted publicity that swirls around multimillion-dollar projects, technicians are busily turning out new weapons to use on such nasty contemporary difficulties as riots at home and small-scale insurrection abroad. Behind all these devices is the concept of "necessary minimum force," which means no more power than is necessary to disperse rioters without killing...
...SPACE PARK. Off the beaten track, with no waiting line, here fairgoers can wander among satellites (everything from TIROS to Telstar), see the Mercury capsule that took Scott Carpenter into orbit, the 90-ft.-high Titan II-Gemini rocket and spacecraft, as well as models of the butt end of the monster rocket Saturn V, its Apollo capsule, and Lem, the lunar excursion module that will land on the moon...