Word: orbitals
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...Army put up the U.S.'s first Explorer space satellites. The Air Force sent a lunar-probe rocket 80,000 miles toward the moon, at year's end fired one Atlas intercontinental missile 4,000 miles, another the full distance of 6,300 miles, still another into orbit, brought the Thor IRBM into the training stage and the hands of combat troops. The Navy sent the nuclear submarine Nautilus under the North Pole, made huge psychological warfare headlines, opened up a new strategic frontier...
...Atlas that went into orbit (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS) is technically called a 1½-stage rocket-a single engine plus ground-fired boosters. When its two booster engines stop firing, the main body, propelled by the central sustainer engine, flies out of the short cylindrical after-section that carries the boosters (see diagram). With the boosters gone, the sustainer engine has less dead weight to carry into space. In this particular model, the sustainer was designed to burn 13 seconds longer than in the regular models. Without this extra thrust, needed to put the Atlas into orbit, it would have...
...controllable vernier rockets and slight changes of the direction in the thrust of the main engine. When the Atlas had climbed above nearly all of the atmosphere, the computer told it to turn its nose parallel to the earth's surface. Other U.S. satellites were kicked into orbit by firing a final rocket from the ground at a calculated altitude. Atlas was the first satellite to be steered along the whole flight with the same engine, thus marked a major advance in controlled flight of ballistic missiles...
Sputnik Rivals. The Atlas, with its nearly 4½ tons, was widely hailed as the heaviest object to be put in orbit, but the Russians were quick to put in a counterclaim. Leonid Sedov, often an official spokesman for Soviet missilemen, declared that each of the three Soviet carrier rockets that orbited the earth weighed considerably more. These weights are not known accurately outside Russia, since the Russians maintain that only the instrument payload is important. The payload of the dog-carrying Sputnik II (instruments, dog, transmitter, etc.) weighed 1,120 lbs., v. the Atlas' 200 plus. Sputnik...
Hypothesis I. There are two major competing theories about the universe's origin, he explained. "Evolutionary" theory holds that all the matter that now exists was once concentrated in a single mass that may have been no bigger than the earth's orbit. This "primeval atom," whose density must have been something like 2 billion tons per cubic inch, disintegrated 20 to 60 billion years ago. Its matter turned into hot, rapidly expanding gas, and stayed in this condition until about 9 billion years ago. Then the gas began to condense into the billions of galaxies, each containing...