Word: orbit
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Although rarely able to travel out of Earth’s orbit, the space program in the U.S. has been highly active over the past few decades. The space shuttle has flown nearly 130 flights, and the International Space Station is entering its tenth year of operation. However, last week, President Obama cancelled the National Aeronautics and Space Administration program to build a next generation spacecraft to travel to the International Space Station and the moon, essentially “grounding” our human space flight program There are only four more scheduled space shuttle flights remaining. Following this...
...different story when pro-Western reformer Viktor Yushchenko swept into power five years ago. His victory, millions of Ukrainians believed, would tear the former Soviet republic from neighboring Russia's orbit and set it firmly on a course toward integration with the rest of Europe. But Yushchenko and his allies failed to make good on their promises of implementing democratic reforms, ending rampant corruption and creating a better quality of life. The stirring rhetoric of the revolution soon crashed against the sobering reality of Ukrainian politics, dominated since independence in 1991 by powerful business leaders and a deeply embedded system...
...place of that program, NASA will tackle a grab bag of other projects: extending the life of the so-far unfinished International Space Station (ISS) until 2020, and spending $4.9 billion to develop better robotics, $7.8 billion to develop new flight techniques such as in-orbit fuel depots and closed-loop life-support systems, and $3 billion to develop new unmanned ships. There are no entirely unworthy objectives in that list (with the possible exception of the ISS), but there's also no clear way of getting humans back into space after 2010, once the shuttles are mothballed. What...
More problematic is NASA's planned abdication of its role as a developer of manned boosters and spacecraft. Instead, it will become a shopper, and leave the designing and metal-cutting to the private sector. To an extent, this has always been the case. The first Americans to orbit the earth blasted off aboard Atlas and Titan rockets - both built by commercial companies as missile launchers and later adapted to human flight. The Saturn moon rockets were the first designed and built exclusively for humans, but even those were contracted out. Still, it was NASA minds that drove the designs...
...addition to the private rocket game is Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX), founded by Elon Musk, better known as the man who created PayPal. SpaceX has impressed and indeed charmed NASA, and not without reason. Its Falcon 1 rocket has been launched five times; the last two successfully reached earth orbit and the last one lofted a commercial payload. What's more, the operation - with 800 employees working principally in Los Angeles and central Texas - has something of the young, hyper-caffeinated energy of the old NASA. The space agency has already inked a deal for 15 Falcon flights...