Word: orbit
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...space walk is the latest in a long string of Soviet firsts: the first spacecraft in orbit, the first animal in space (a dog), the first man in space, the first woman in space, the first man to walk in space. And with this latest flight, Savitskaya has tallied yet another: the first woman to return to space. Two years ago, the cosmonaut-researcher conducted experiments in astrophysics, medicine and biotechnology aboard Salyut-7. Again an American was upstaged: Sally Ride was planning to become the first two-time female astronaut when she joined Kathy Sullivan on the shuttle this...
...monitored at least 20 tests of the Soviet ASAT weapon: a 150-ft.-long S59 rocket, which uses radar to home in on its target. It is not very effective at altitudes beyond 1,000 miles. All but 18 of the 100-odd U.S. satellites orbit higher than that, and some key ones are 22,300 miles away (where they remain in geostationary orbit over a single spot on earth). The Soviet rocket would take up to 90 minutes to intercept a target on the weapon's first orbit. Because it uses radar, the system is vulnerable to electronic...
...balls fly from his body: Mogwai in fetal form. Gizmo's mutant offspring look and act like Munchkins reborn as Hell's Angels. They have disgraceful eating habits; they turn the greeting-card village into a South Bronx shambles, then send old Mrs. Deagle into fatal orbit...
Objects in low earth orbit circle freely until the slow wear of molecular friction and the force of gravity cause them to re-enter the earth's atmosphere at a blazing 18,000 m.p.h. and subsequently burn up. That was the fate of the first man-made satellite, the 184-lb. Soviet Sputnik 1, which incinerated in the heat of re-entry three months after its historic launching...
Since then 9,695 man-made objects have fallen from orbit, but the number that survived the atmospheric plunge to hit the earth is unknown. Shards have landed on more than a dozen nations, including Zambia, Finland and Nepal. As early as 1961, Premier Fidel Castro indignantly charged that a re-entering chunk of a U.S. spacecraft had struck and killed a Cuban cow. A year later, a 21-lb. metal cylinder landed at the intersection of North 8th and Park streets in Manitowoc, Wis. The debris was later identified by the U.S. Air Force as a fragment of Soviet...