Word: orbitals
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...space program, Project Mercury, scored its greatest triumph last week, when with infinite precision, the robot-manned Mercury capsule MA4 was boosted into orbit, permitted to circle the earth, then brought down and recovered in good condition. Despite all the excitement stirred up by the short, sub-orbital flights of Astronauts Alan Shepard and Virgil Grissom, last week's achievement was far more significant...
...Atlas liquid-fuel rocket that put the capsule in orbit had been a cause of concern in Project Mercury because of two disastrous earlier failures. But last week's Atlas was beefed up for its job, and it performed perfectly; the MA4 accelerated surely into its planned orbit. Strapped in the capsule instead of a man sat an oblong box that performed most of an astronaut's functions: it consumed oxygen, excreted carbon dioxide and water vapor, and it also talked-feeding the recorded voice of NASA Communications Engineer Howard Kyle into a microphone to test the Mercury...
...Russians deliver big H-bombs? The Soviet rocket system that can loft a five-ton capsule into orbit can certainly deliver several times that weight anywhere on earth. Russian-built loo-megaton bombs would not be too heavy to be carried by rocket to New York, Washington or Phoenix. One such bomb could surely destroy New York, and its fallout would kill most people exposed within 100 miles or more downwind...
...seemed well. Separating smoothly from its first stage, the second-stage rocket Agena, with the Ranger still attached, swung into a 100-mile-high parking orbit, coasted with its engine dead. Fourteen minutes after launch, the Agena's engine reignited on schedule to boost its Ranger payload on the long route into space. Then something went wrong. Instead of burning for the scheduled 90 seconds, which would have increased Ranger's speed from 17,400 m.p.h. to the necessary 23,800 m.p.h., Agena cut out too soon. Disconnected below maximum velocity, Ranger coasted up to a mere...
Since Russia achieved the same space feat last February by sending a satellite toward Venus from a similar parking orbit around the earth, U.S. missilemen, still trying to pinpoint last week's Ranger failure, looked for consolation in the near success. At least Ranger's complex instruments were behaving perfectly, and the Atlas-Agena combination had got off to a beautiful start...