Word: spaceships
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Originally, like the Russians' dummy in a spaceship, the shot had been scheduled to impress the world on the eve of the summit, but technical failures delayed...
When the Russians launched their latest satellite, they described it in some detail: it was a practice spaceship, weighing five tons (a new orbiting record), and containing a cabin with the necessary fittings to keep a man alive. There was no man on board, the Russians said, only a dummy the weight of a man. As the satellite cruised around the earth, instruments would report whether conditions inside it were right for a living man. Then the cabin would be detached and brought down to burn up in the atmosphere. The Russians said they would make no attempt to land...
...Washington that it might be more than it seemed. Washington State's well-informed Democratic Senator Henry M. ("Scoop") Jackson, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, made headlines by announcing: "There is growing reason to suspect that a man may be sitting in the Soviet 'spaceship', circling the globe at this very minute, and that the Soviets may very shortly attempt to return this man-alive-to earth." Major General John B. Medaris, the U.S. Army's former missile chief, suspected the same thing. The Russians are "not so stupid," he guessed...
Even the latest interplanetary firecracker shot off by Khrushchev's obliging scientists was a dud. Moscow Radio trumpeted the news that Russia had put a 4.5-ton "spaceship" into near-circular orbit about 200 miles above the earth. Inside the new satellite, said Moscow, was a pressurized cabin containing a dummy spaceman, "all necessary equipment for future manned flight," and about 1.5 tons of instrumentation...
...spaceship" told the world more about Russia than Nikita had bargained on. In fact, his satellite was no more a spaceship than the previous Soviet satellite had been "an automatic interplanetary station." By the Russians' own admission, when the time came for the spaceship to descend, it would "burn up in the denser layers of the atmosphere" -a journey's end scarcely calculated to appeal to live astronauts...