Centaur was a second-stage vehicle then under development that would use high-energy liquid hydrogen as its fuel.
'Centaur' I thought reflected our inability to escape the eternal animal thug in all of us.
The result of the first visit, in 1949, is a photograph of Picasso drawing a Centaur with a flashlight.
The first two extra flights were deep-space missions, with Centaur boosting the spacecraft into an elliptical orbit with an apogee of some 80,000 kilometers to study navigation and reentry problems.
Last year, NASA smacked a spent Centaur rocket into a Shadowed lunar crater and blew out the first definite signs that the moon is chock-full of water.
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