Word: spaceship
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...basin's few inhabitants are already connected with military space activities and are eager to see the region regain the importance that Canaveral took away from it. Even the small cities beyond the basin's rim are not frightened by the possibility of a misguided spaceship landing in the middle of town. No other spot in the U.S., says the Bulletin, has the same natural advantages, existing facilities, and willingness to accept the risks of the space...
...waiting rocket in an eggshell-blue bus. Bulky in his orange spacesuit, Titov clambered up the gantry ladder and settled himself in the giant five-ton capsule perched on the rocket's nose. An attendant handed him a notebook labeled ''Log Book of the Spaceship Vostok II.'' With exaggerated care, Titov examined the pencil dangling from the log, and remembered: "Yuri Gagarin did not attach his pencil firmly and lost it." Then the hatch clanged shut, arid soon Vostok II lifted through the clear air to carry Titov on the longest journey ever made...
Seconds later, U.S. radar watchers knew a Russian spaceship was aloft, flashed word to Western tracking stations around the world. (In Hyannisport, it was 2 a.m.; President Kennedy had been alerted the night before that the Soviets had started a countdown for a manned shot, and was not awakened.) It was more than an hour before Tass interrupted radio and television programs to tell the Russian people of the new Soviet space triumph. By then, Titov, orbiting at 17,750 m.p.h., had finished one full 88-minute trip around the earth and dutifully reported by radio that all was well...
...this was swept aside by the joys of space. Sunshine flooded his cabin. "I saw with my own eyes that the earth was a sphere. Blue coronas on the horizons were really indescribably beautiful. The stars seemed brighter. The spaceship seemed to be standing still and the moon floating by," he rhapsodized, quoting Gogol's "dark sky over which the moon floats." Then he added: "The cosmos awaits the painters and poets...
...Moscow time, said Gagarin, he was over Africa, and the spaceship's automatic controls signaled that back in Russia preparations were being made to turn on a braking device, presumably a retrorocket. "This meant," he reported, "that the final stage of the flight had begun-the return to earth, which was perhaps more crucial than ascent into orbit and orbiting itself. I readied myself for it. I faced transition from a condition of weightlessness to new and perhaps even greater overloads. I also faced tremendous heating of the ship's outer surface on entering the denser layers...