Astronautical and Aeronautical Events of 1962 - NASA's History Office

I 18 ASTRONAUTICAL AND AERONAUTICAL EVENTS OF 1 Q 62
France and Britain, while transmission was also picked up at both
Andover and Holmedel, N.J., and relayed to American TV net-
works.
First voice transmission from space was the Christmas message
of President Eisenhower which was broadcast from USAF Project
Score satellite on December 18, 1960. ECHO I, passive communi-
cations satellite, provided a reflector for a host of communication
experiments after its launch on August 12, 1960. The moon also
had becn used as a reflector in communications experiments,
the first being a radar reflection on January 11, 1946, by the Army
Signal Corps.
July 10: President Kennedy nominated Dr. Jerome B. Wiesner to be
director of the Office of Science and Technology.
Launching of TELSTAR marked tenth straight successful flight of the
3-stage Delta rocket. The history of Delta goes back to the
Thor-Able and the earlier Vanguard, from which it acquired its
upper stages. Originally designed as an interim booster when
NASA ordered twelve Deltas from Douglas Aircraft in April 1959,
it achieved what NASA Administrator Webb called “the greatest
level of reliability of any of our launch vehicles . . . .” The
following satellites were orbited by Delta boosters: ECHO I, TIROS
11, 111, IV, and v; EXPLORERS x and XII; os0 I; ARIEL I; and
TELSTAR.
NASA Langley Research Center (LRRC) announced plans to build
a cyclotron laboratory on 1,300 acres of usAF-owned land, a
former Bomarc missile site, halfway between LaRc and Williamsburg,
Va. The laboratory will include two accelerators to
generate electrons and protons of the energies spacecraft will
encounter on deep space flights.
A U.S.S.R. Tu-1 14, world’s largest commercial airplane, left
Moscow on a survey flight for direct air route to Havana, Cuba.
When begun, the Moscow-Havana commercial service would
mark the first regularly scheduled flights of Soviet aircraft into
the Western hemisphere.
July 11: NASA press conference explained basic decision on Apollo
manned lunar exploration program: to base the next phase of its
planning, research and development, procurement, and space
flight program on the Saturn (C-5) to accomplish the initial
manned lunar landing and recovery, using the lunar orbit rendezvous
as the prime mission mode. Based on more than a year of
intensive study, the basic decision on the lunar orbit rendezvous
(LOR) mode enables immediate industrial consideration of the
lunar excursion vehicle and firm planning on early employment
of two-stage Saturn (C-IB) to test-flight the Apollo configuration
in earth orbits.
It was also announced: (1) an in-depth study of an unmanned
lunar logistic vehicle would be undertaken; (2) continued feasibility
studies would be made of the earth-orbit rendezvous
mode using Saturn (C-5) with a two-man spacecraft, with the
possibilities of a direct flight with this spacecraft; (3) continued
study would be made of the Nova vehicle (two to three times
capability of C-5).
NASA Administrator Webb said: “We are putting major
emphasis on lunar orbit rendezvous because a year of intensive