Word: orbit
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...Blue Shuttle" (named for the service's color) facility at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California (completion date: March 1985). On Air Force drawing boards is the "Transatmospheric Vehicle" (TAV), more popularly known as the "space fighter," designed to take off from military bases and climb into orbit to search for enemy targets. Though the military helped persuade Congress to fund the space shuttle, the Pentagon is lukewarm about the shuttle's civilian uses. Military planners would prefer that Congress use the funds to build a new generation of heavy rocket boosters. The Pentagon's arguments include...
...SALE sign over one of the recaptured birds. NASA hopes the mission will put it into the satellite recovery business. A major hitch, of course, is that the shuttle can only climb to 500 miles, while many of the most important satellites are 22,300 miles up in geostationary orbit-that is, rotating with the earth and staying at a fixed point in the heavens. To put satellites into the higher orbit, the shuttle uses a satellite booster to fire them farther into space...
Manned spaceflight for its own sake is typical of NASA's thinking, argue critics of the agency. The function of the space program, says Astronomer Sagan, is "to put people up in tin cans in earth orbit and then bring them down again. People are going up in order to ... go up. It is a capability without a mission." Concludes Sagan: "We do not have a space program, if one assumes that a program has goals and purposes...
...were six stainless-steel chemical reactors, each about the size of a football. In them, Minnesota Mining & Manufacturing was conducting an experiment that was not as spectacular as the main mission of retrieving crippled satellites, but potentially no less important. The company was studying how organic crystals grow in orbit. By combining chemicals in containers in the weightlessness of space, 3M's scientists were hoping to make crystals purer than any on earth...
...called unified field theory, which would link the four forces of nature in a single elegant set of equations. Two of those forces are familiar: electromagnetism, which lights bulbs and makes clothes cling; and gravity, which holds humans to the ground and determines the earth's orbit around the sun. The remaining two are more exotic: the so-called strong force, which binds together the particles in a nucleus; and the weak force, which controls radioactive decay...