Word: spacecrafts
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...must learn to negotiate, just as he once learned to travel on water. A satellite that merely goes round the earth is like a raft floating helplessly down a river. Only when primitive men learned to guide their rafts with sails or paddles did they achieve "capability" on water. Spacecraft must accomplish equivalent guidance before space navigation is a reality. Discoverer, manufactured by the Lockheed Aircraft Corp., is a major U.S. system for achieving the assorted techniques called "capability...
...Mercury and Saturn could, they argue, be better used for the near future on instrumented vehicles. Says Iowa's Van Allen: "It is still much more effective to build instruments to make scientific observations than it is to support and maintain a man comfortably and helpfully in a spacecraft...
...even the dissidents agree that the day is not too far off when man will have a valid function in space. As instrumented spacecraft get more and more sophisticated, it becomes more and more difficult to transmit, record, digest and interpret their food of raw data. The best solution at present is to put small computers in the spacecraft. One kind, called a "Tele-bit," translates the data from the instruments into figures that are sufficiently simple to send over the transmitter and can go directly into a big ground computer. But when spacecraft begin to work at such distances...
Russian space scientists last week scored a new first of sorts. They admitted that something went wrong with one of their spacecraft...
...visible at dawn and dusk. Its three radio transmitters made it easy to track electronically. Four days after the launching, a moon-watch team at Sacramento, Calif, reported that the spaceship had apparently separated into three parts. Soon Air Force and Smithsonian trackers at Cambridge, Mass. concluded that the spacecraft had thrown off small parts, perhaps seven in all, and was on a new and higher orbit whose apogee (high point) had risen from 208.6 miles to 418.5 miles above the earth...