Word: thors
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...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...
...gobs of a three-scoop ice cream cone were a polished aluminum sphere, the Naval Research Laboratory's Greb III solar radiation satellite, and a smaller drum named Injun, built at Dr. James Van Allen's laboratory at the State University of Iowa. Boosted aloft by a Thor-Able-Star rocket, all three satellites soared into space together. Though the launch was successful, the strong springs, meant to shove the satellites apart to follow separate orbits around the earth, did an incomplete job. Transit went its lonely way, but Greb and Injun stuck together...
...theory expounded by Thor Heyerdahl in his bestselling Kon-Tiki that the cultural traffic went t'other way, from Peru to the South Pacific, is dismissed by most experts...
Narrow Margin. Last week Mitchell got another chance. Discoverer XIV had been fired atop a Thor-Agena rocket from Vandenberg, Calif., and once again Mitchell's squadron was alerted. Mitchell slapped a cap on his red-thatched head, kissed his wife and promised: "I'll get it this time, honey." This time he did. But the margin of success was narrow indeed...