Word: earthly
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...mathematics of probabilities. Some 500 fragments of the huge space workshop will be dispersed over an area 4,000 miles long and 100 miles wide, a scattering that the scientists call, with anthropomorphic archness, Skylab's "footprint." Moreover, on each of Skylab's 90-minute orbits of the earth, nearly 67 minutes, or 75%, is spent over water. What all that means, contend NASA'S statisticians, is that the chance of any remnant striking a human being is only 1 in 152; the probability of any specific person being struck is 1 in 600 billion?far less than the chance...
...Skylab's orbital paths lie some of the world's most populous areas, including all of the U.S., much of Europe, India and China. Indeed, the chance of debris falling in some city of at least 100,000 inhabitants is a sobering 1 in 7. Only 10% of the earth's inhabitants can be considered totally free of any risk from Skylab's metallic fallout...
...million listeners in seeking a mass psychic push to nudge Skylab into a higher orbit. In the broadcast, listeners were instructed to "relax, visualize yourselves as being in contact with Skylab and then visualize Skylab as moving out into space." Despite such positive thinking, Skylab kept slipping closer to earth...
More practically, the watching world would have to depend on the men who put Skylab into space to find the best means of bringing it back to earth with minimal risk to human life. The first priority was to track Skylab's decaying orbit as precisely as possible. That is the job of the North American Air Defense Command, whose joint U.S.-Canadian computers deep within a pink granite mountain near Colorado Springs, Colo., continuously monitor the movements of 4,506 hunks of space garbage now orbiting the earth...
...basketball at a range of 20,000 miles. Even an astronaut's glove is being tracked. Beyond Skylab, the heaviest object aloft is now Salyut 6, the Soviets' manned spacecraft. Every month about 40 man-made objects re-enter the atmosphere, but only a fourth survive to strike the earth. There has never been a reported injury, although the fall of Cosmos 954 over northern Canada in January 1978 led to fears of radioactive contamination from its nuclear power packs (there is no radioactive material aboard Skylab...