Word: orbit
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...ORBIT by Wright Morris. 153 pages. New American Library...
Getting man into orbit has already repaid the effort many times. The monitoring devices needed to keep track of astronauts' physical condition have now been adapted for U.S. hospitals, enabling a single nurse to keep track of the condition of many patients perhaps half a mile of corridors away. Today, as a result of space advances, cardiac patients may wear internally implanted electronic pacemakers. Doctors are talking confidently of birth control without pills or intrauterine devices as they experiment with a space-perfected system for monitoring bodily temperature. Refined by aerospace engineers, lasers are finding more and more uses...
...price is expected to drop to $1 a pound. And when that time comes, engineers should be ready with preprogrammed manufacturing processes that will require the vacuum and weightlessness of space. Joining some of the newer, tougher metals, for example, is a devilishly difficult problem on earth. In orbit, outside any artificial atmosphere, some of them need only be touched together to make a perfect weld...
...lunar surface-only to fall back onto the moon near apogee, when the earth's gravitational force was lessened. This recurring bombardment could account for the moon's pock-marked face. Singer calculates that within a few thousand years after the encounter, the moon's orbit decayed from an elongated ellipse into a near-circular path only about 10,000 miles above the earth. At this point, it was in near-synchronous orbit...
Soon afterward, the moon's orbit began gradually spiraling outward to its present 239,000 miles. The tidal phenomena, though substantially reduced by distance, are still at work. The moon is still receding from the earth by about one inch every year. And the tidal braking effects are still at work increasing the length of the earth's day by .0018 seconds every century...