Word: spacecrafts
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...fires into space, including the man-carrying Mercury capsule, must be built as light as possible. Structure and equipment are inevitably delicate, pushed to the peak of performance. The Russians have plenty of payload to play with. They can use rugged, dependable and comparatively heavy parts. Their spacecraft can afford the luxury of parallel electronic circuits, one ready to take over if the other fails. Many of the Russian achievements in space, including their accurate control systems, can be explained by the weight-lifting muscles of their big boosters...
...flight was watched by the human astronauts who have been selected to ride in Project Mercury's spacecraft. If it had been completely successful, one of them would have been scheduled to take a similar ride in a few months. But the erratic launching behavior, the loss of retrorockets and heat shield, and the seepage of sea water into the capsule will almost surely persuade NASA to use more chimps before risking...
When space knowhow increases, says Dr. Carl E. Snyder of Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co., spacecraft may be built largely of plastics, which will fare better than metals in the hostile outer world. Snyder and W. B. Cross of Goodyear Aircraft Corp. told an Air Force space conference in Dayton that many metals "boil away" slowly in the near-perfect vacuum of space. Plastics, which are made of long molecular chains linked and tangled together, are less volatile than metals, and therefore should last longer...
Also in the visible future is the manned spacecraft that, with techniques based on military nose-cone research, will bring its human travelers safely down from orbit or from an interplanetary journey. Strangely, the manned spacecraft in some ways presents fewer problems than the ICBM. Where an ICBM enters the atmosphere at about a 20° angle with a sudden, explosive shock, a space vehicle can come into the atmosphere flat, keeping its deceleration and temperature comparatively...
Thus, if an instrument-packed spacecraft were to land softly on Mars to observe Martian weather, soil, vegetation and earth tremors, the information that it would gather might be bottlenecked forever by its slow-acting transmitter. Then, says Van Allen, will be the time "when it will be more efficient to send up a man or a party of men to make observations, digest them and transmit back what is roughly equivalent to a monograph on the subject." Only half facetiously. Van Allen has one more idea about the advan tages of men over instruments in space: "There are many...