Word: spacecrafts
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...light trailing off into space. Appearing as harmless as thistledown, they were visible evidence of the sun's far-reaching violence. Stormy weather on the sun sometimes tosses out clouds of deadly particles, mostly protons, that can kill in a few minutes any humans riding in thin-walled spacecraft. So among the scientists who studied the corona were members of a new, specialized profession: solar meteorology. Their job is to learn to forecast solar weather and try to pick times when astronauts can venture safely beyond the shelter of the earth's atmosphere...
...shoot particles to the earth. They must be near the western edge of the sun or just beyond it. The particles do not move in straight lines like the beam of a searchlight. Affected by the sun's magnetism they move in complicated curves and may hit a spacecraft from many directions. For this reason, says Van Allen, a spacecraft cannot be sheltered by simply putting an umbrellalike shield between...
...Bykovsky soared through his orbit, at a speed of 18,000 m.p.h. and in an oval that ranged from 109 miles to 139 miles above the earth, he dined on roast beef and chicken, manually operated the controls of his spacecraft. From the capsule, live television images were periodically flashed to Soviet viewers. Bykovsky waved his logbook, let his pencil and other objects float in the cabin to demonstrate weightlessness. On his fourth orbit, the cosmonaut talked directly to Khrushchev in the Kremlin. Not yet a full-fledged party member, Bykovsky said: "I want to be a Communist, a member...
...Russians, of course, had earlier managed a tandem space shot, with two men. This time, though, the expectation was that they would try to "dock" the two capsules together aloft, thus possibly permitting one of the pair of cosmonauts to transfer into the spacecraft of the other. Even if this extra twist does not come off, the duo flight once again proves that Russia is at least two years ahead of the U.S. in space, and moreover, knows how to woo the world's females. Stated purpose of the Valery-Valentina feat: to study the impact of space...
Such measurements are as important to spacecraft as the celestial fixes by which oldtime navigators found their way across the oceans. If the spacecraft is guided by a mechanical navigator, the findings of the star scanner can be fed directly into the navigator's electronic brain. If the craft has a human crew, the heading can be read from dials or other display devices. One promising version of the new system will use the sun as a kind of North Pole. But as man's machines get farther into space, the scanner might locate a prominent star such...