Word: spaceship
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...earth-moon trip. The two payloads will rendezvous on orbit and prepare for departure for the moon. If preliminary tests make this system look too difficult. Webb proposes to fall back on direct ascent, using a giant Nova booster with 12 million Ibs. of thrust to toss a manned spaceship to the moon without the complication of orbital rendezvous. In either case, the spaceship will land on the moon after braking its descent with retrorockets. then take off for the earth from the moon's surface, perhaps parking briefly in a lunar orbit before starting the long voyage home...
...space travelers still seem to think they are primarily airplane drivers. Like Colonel John Glenn before him, Commander Scott Carpenter soared into orbit with remarkably little faith in his capsule's automatic positioning equipment. He spent all but a few minutes of his five hours aloft "flying" his spaceship by hand, changing its attitude while in orbit with squirts of peroxide steam, at one point using two systems at once. As a result, he all but ran out of fuel, almost fouled up the delicate business of re-entry into the earth's atmosphere (TIME, June 1). Even...
...most purposes there are handier ways to communicate, but Dr. Tomiyasu has his eye on a notoriously difficult communication problem. When a missile nose cone or a spaceship slams down through the atmosphere, it surrounds itself with a sheath of plasma (hot, ionized gases) that repels radio waves. Space scientists well remember that during the most critical period of Colonel John Glenn's return to earth from his orbital flight, the radios of his Mercury capsule were blacked out for seven minutes by the plasma sheath. Laser light, if strong enough, can penetrate plasma, and Dr. Tomiyasu believes that...
...result of the collisions might well be radio waves strong enough to be detected far off on the earth. Bright Target. Another result is probably an extremely bright aurora. No human has seen this spectacle because Jupiter always shows the earth an almost entirely sunlit face. If a spaceship from earth ever cruises behind the dark side of Jupiter (never less than 460 million miles away), the crew may see a ring drawn around its darkened magnetic pole in brilliant auroral light. That bright target will illuminate the safest landing spot, the hole in the doughnut, where the explorers will...
...inspected the capsule. Kennedy ?on his first trip to Canaveral?seemed fascinated, and Glenn, in matter-of-fact "hangar talk," described the tense moments when he was reentering the atmosphere. During the inspection, Mrs. John Glenn Sr. expressed some motherly concern over the lack of space in a spaceship: "I'd think your feet would go to sleep lying there so long." John reassured her that in a weightless state there is no feeling of discomfort. "I meant before you went off, while you were waiting there," commented Clara Glenn. Explained her son patiently: "Well, you can exercise...