Word: spacecrafts
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...machine, the navigator of a spacecraft traveling toward a distant planet has a delicate problem: when there is no gravitation, there can be no sense of direction. In three-dimensional space, it is impossible even to tell which way is up unless sights can be taken on a pair of reference points. But how to find those two landmarks? The easily sighted sun may glaze as usual, but the familiar earth quickly fades into a background of dim, average celestial bodies...
...promising answer to the problem has been produced for the Air Force by General Precision Aerospace of Little Falls, N.J.: a device that watches the ever constant stars and uses them to keep a spacecraft from losing its way. The device is deceptively simple in conception, but like most space hardware, it is complex in construction. Essentially, it is a mechanical eye that sweeps the sky and is rigged to notice only the 50 brightest stars. Its main working part is a small mirror that rotates inside a window, scanning narrow strips of black space. When the mirror...
Beyond that. Project Gemini is already charted-a voyage that will send a two-man capsule to rendezvous with an orbiting resupply spacecraft by the end of 1964. Project Apollo is also in the works -a dream's end program to shoot a full crew of astronauts to the moon...
...Africa." Cooper flew seven times over Red China, the first U.S. astronaut to pass above that hostile land. He saw smoke curling from chimneys in Tibet, the glow of lights in Perth, Australia, even spotted his present home town of Clear Lake, Texas, near Houston's new Manned Spacecraft Center. In all. Cooper sped over more than 100 nations. To recover him promptly if he came down on foreign soil, the U.S. State Department got advance promises from some 80 embassies and 17 consulates that they would permit U.S. rescue teams to seek him. Had he landed...
Well into Cooper's second day of flight, Mercury Control Announcer John ("Shorty") Powers proudly said: "The spacecraft is still performing in almost unbelievable fashion." And then came the crisis. On his 19th orbit, while out of radio contact over the Western Pacific, Cooper reached forward, threw a switch to dim his panel lights-and saw a small indicator glow green...