Word: thors
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...tested most of the operational missile-age hardware of the Army, Navy, Air Force, and is increasingly a testing ground for NASA. The first operationally fired Thor was launched from Vandenberg, and so was the first Atlas to be rocketed across the Pacific. The Discoverer series was launched into polar orbit, and the 1960 recovery of the gold-plated capsule of Discoverer XIII off Hawaii marked the first time an American object had been retrieved from orbit in space...
...fire their air-to-air and air-to-surface missiles over the PMR's vast instrumentation almost every morning. Marine Corps antiaircraft missile battalions set up their Hawk batteries on the offshore islands of Santa Barbara Channel and fire away at the PMR-launched drones. British and Canadian Thor crews get their first actual experience in firing their missiles over the PMR-training they cannot get at home...
...week began with an attempt to perform a prodigious trick: to spin five satellites into orbit with one rocket shot. It failed when the second stage of the Thor-Able-Star booster misfired. Two days later, there was an effort to land instruments on the moon. It went awry when its booster developed too much power; at best, scientists estimated, Ranger III might pass within 25,000 miles of the moon-close enough, perhaps, to send back some TV pictures of its surface. Then a handsome lieutenant colonel of the Marine Corps, John Glenn, 40, eased himself into his cramped...
...operation began when a Thor rocket took off from Cape Canaveral just before dawn carrying a canister containing a tightly folded deflated balloon of plastic film and aluminum foil. This was Echo A12, an experimental successor to Echo I, the 100-ft. radio-reflector that was launched on Aug. 12, 1960, and is still orbiting the earth. Echo A12 was not expected to orbit; its job was merely to expand in space and test a new kind of aluminized film that would stay rigid after the gas that blew up the balloon had escaped through meteor punctures...
When the rocket was 150 miles up, the canister containing Echo A12 was released by explosive bolts. Retrorockets fired, slowing the burned-out Thor, while small stabilizing jets in its nose kept it pointed at the departing canister. Still aboard the rocket were cameras...