Word: spacemanship
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...sealed chamber with self-contained life-support systems, after a year-the duration of a manned voyage to Mars. Moreover, NASA officials claim that Soviet scientists may soon unveil a rocket big enough to fly directly from earth to the moon, land and take off again. Such brute-force spacemanship might convince the U.S. that, as Von Braun maintains, "Russia still wants to beat us in space." If that happens, the money spigot would probably open wide again, and a new race would begin...
...Life. Only a few years ago, any meaningful voyage to Venus would have been impossible. Spacemanship of such a high order involves the creation of clever mechanical beasts that can live and function for months in a hostile environment beyond Earth's atmosphere. They must obey commands from millions of miles away, a requirement that calls for radio techniques of incredible delicacy. Giant computers, only recently developed, must plot celestial courses, and enormous vacuum chambers are needed to test behavior in simulated space. These strange space creatures are almost a new type of life, comparable in zoological terms...
...week when U.S. spacemanship and missilery had won bold successes-the orbiting of Samos, the spy-in-the-sky satellite (see SCIENCE); the clean triumph of the new solid-fuel Minuteman ICBM; the Project Mercury shot and recovery of an "astronaut" chimpanzee*-President Kennedy's grim announcements seemed curiously out of phase, as if he had stumbled upon a copy of the Soviet Doomsday Book...