Word: orbit
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...shuttle's full payload for each flight up to 1988, and perhaps $100 million after that. NASA is mindful of competition from launch vehicles like the European Space Agency's Ariane series (see following story), which charges $25 million to $30 million to put satellites in orbit...
...mission that was considerably less acclaimed but, for the commercial future of the U.S. space program, ominously successful. Ariane V 11, the latest effort of the eleven-nation European Space Agency, rose from the space center at Kourou in the equatorial jungles of French Guiana to an orbit of 22,300 miles above the equator. There the rocket deposited two communications satellites. One of them, like many of Ariane's payloads, was sponsored by an international communications agency. The other satellite, however, was Spacenet 2, the second device that Ariane has carried into orbit for a U.S. customer...
...flights and raise them for space-shuttle missions. Insurers have good reason for valuing reliability. The industry paid Indonesia and the Western Union Co., original owners of the two errant satellites recovered last week by Discovery, a total of $180 million in claims after the devices were placed in orbit incorrectly on an earlier space-shuttle flight...
Prices aside, Ariane has an edge over the space shuttle in doing certain kinds of work. A conventional three-stage rocket, Ariane can put its satellites into what scientists call geosynchronous orbit, 22,300 miles above the earth. The shuttle, by contrast, is designed to take payloads to near earth orbit, between 150 and 700 miles. Ariane's launch site on the equator means that a gentler trajectory, and consequently less fuel, is required to boost a payload into stationary orbit. In addition, satellites positioned farther from earth, where there are fewer molecules to cause friction, tend to last...
...Ariane, simplicity is an Important virtue. The European rocket releases a satellite directly into orbit, dumping the payload at the correct height. The shuttle is launched by conventional rocket and then depends on rocket boosters to maneuver the satellite to its destination. That two-step process, critics say, is so complicated that the possibility of mishap is increased. Shuttle loyalists, however, insist that Ariane lacks the flexibility of the U.S. craft, and they point to last week's retrieval as an example of its wide range of capabilities. "That's the kind of thing...