Word: orbital
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...become one of the world's great industrial powers, but the life of the ordinary Russian is still drab and cramped. He dreams of material progress that is an everyday fact in the West, and it sometimes seems to him that it is easier for his country to orbit a cosmonaut than to turn out a decent pair of shoes. Despite killing, coaxing and collectivization, Russia has been unable to solve her agricultural problems, and still does not produce enough food to meet the needs of a rising population. The bitter ideological split with Red China has cracked open...
Rendezvous. Gemini's primary purpose is to practice rendezvous in earth orbit, a job of navigation and maneuver that will be controlled largely by ground-based computers. Only after the Gemini capsule and its target satellite have come within sight or radar range of each other will the pilot take charge. Even then a small computer will tell him how to make the two courses intersect. During the final approach, he will really "fly" the capsule. When sufficient experience has been accumulated, he will mate capsule with target, perhaps orbiting with it and taking advantage of its fuel stores...
...with asteroids increases, thinks Kohler, space voyagers may hitchhike on them, finding shelter from radiation, and perhaps fuel or structural material. Even a small asteroid will provide a steady base for telescopes. If an asteroid is traveling roughly parallel to the earth, it might be steered into an earth orbit. Then it could be hollowed out and used by spacemen as a roomy, steady, well-shielded satellite base...
...bunches of 100 million at the rate of 60 bunches per second. At 16 places in the ring, there are radio-frequency powered acceleration cavities. Each time the electron bunch passes through a cavity, its energy increases. The electron pulses thus receive discrete "kicks" of energy as they orbit, until they have finally reached the energy level desired for any particular experiment. The machine is capable of pushing electrons up to an energy of six billion electron volts. At that energy level, the electrons are travelling at 99.999,9996 per cent of the speed of light, and their mass...
This accelerator will overcome the most serious objection to a circular machine: the tremendous quantity of energy that is radiated as the electron revolves around the track. For a fixed orbit radius, the radiation losses increase with the fourth power of the particle energy. Eventually, the point is reached where most of the accelerating energy is lost immediately as radiation...