Word: probing
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...outrunning all other achievements of the lusty, newborn age of space missilery, the U.S. one morning last week unleashed the powerful Pioneer moon-probe rocket from the pads of Cape Canaveral and sent it piercing space to a distance of 80,000 miles above the earth...
...Cape Canaveral was bathed in a fluffy, gently swirling fog. Cradled in its candy-striped gantry, breathing icy puffs of liquid oxygen, was the Air Force's 88-ft. Pioneer moon-probe missile. In the blockhouse, the countdown droned on for nearly 24 hours, finally ticked through the seconds to zero...
...were all but hysterical with joy. When Cape Canaveral's pencil-mustached Major General Donald Yates walked into a press conference, newsmen rose and applauded. In Hawthorne, Calif., at the Data Reduction Center of Ramo-Wooldridge's Space Technology Laboratories (the Air Force's top moon-probe contractor), Air Force officers and civilians whooped and pounded one another. In the Pentagon, top brass cheerfully poured out their delight in hourly pronouncements on Pioneer's progress...
...moon-probe Pioneer is man's first triumph in applied celestial mechanics. Earth satellites, like bullets, baseballs or missiles, need to contend with the earth's gravitation only. Pioneer was born on a higher level of technical evolution. Its projected course toward the moon took into account three of the overlapping gravitational fields (the earth's, the sun's, the moon's) that govern the solar system. To set it on its trajectory called on theoretical astronomical and mathematical lore that man has painstakingly been accumulating without practical employment since the birth of science...
...repercussions of this policy-change are only just beginning to be felt. It seems worthwhile, then, to probe more deeply into the situation which made such a step necessary; and to consider ways and means of averting the most regrettable of its effects...