Word: stageful
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...stations reported in with good news. Cued by the Hawthorne Data Reduction Center, the big radiotelescope station in Manchester, England picked up Pioneer within a dozen minutes, sent tracking information clacking back into the electronic data-reducing headquarters in the Space Technology Lab. But moments later, at the third stage rocket burnout, with Pioneer at maximum velocity, Canaveral scientists quickly computed speed and altitude. Had Pioneer shot up at too vertical an angle and thus been robbed of some of its getaway speed? The computations said yes. The scientists instantly decided to fire all eight vernier rockets in the fourth...
...trouble came in the first stage, a military Thor rocket whose gyroscopic guidance system misfunctioned just enough to make the trajectory 3.5° steeper than it should have been. This steepness reduced the advantage that was obtained from the slingshot effect of the earth's eastward rotation. Air Force experts say that a loss of speed less than 600 m.p.h. was enough to make the probe fall far short of the moon's orbit...
Spin-Stabilization. All other hardware seems to have functioned perfectly. The second stage, a considerably modified second stage of the ill-starred Vanguard, pushed the vehicle to 188 miles above the earth while small vernier rockets, set askew, made it spin on its axis at no r.p.m. The function of this spin-stabilization, like the spin of a rifle bullet, was to keep the vehicle from tumbling on its journey through space...
...used to be said of Red China that it was repeating, stage by stage, Russia's Communist development a third of a century later. But the evidence coming out of China is that Mao Tse-tung is engaged in a more drastic experiment than Stalin or Khrushchev ever tried. The official name for it is "the people's communes" movement...
...stomped on tradition by opening the New York Philharmonic's first Thursday "preview" concerts with a clutch of jokes and song snatches in a quavering baritone (TIME, Oct. 13), stomped again at the season's second Thursday. On stage at Carnegie Hall trooped the symphony's 107 members, garbed not in the familiar spikey ties and rumpled tails, but in a Bernstein brainstorm: work clothes of off black trousers and matching tropical jackets with bandmasters' collars and white cuff piping, based vaguely on the rehearsal coats of old-line European conductors. Reaction: mixed, so far. Murmured...