Word: orbital
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...could probably win. According to another article of the dark faith, a denuclearized Western Europe would be "Finlandized": France, Italy and Belgium, but above all the Federal Republic of Germany, would be sucked away from their traditional protector on the far side of the Atlantic and into the Soviet orbit. These countries would end up, like Finland, being allowed to manage their internal affairs as they saw fit but obliged to calibrate their foreign policies to the wishes of Moscow...
Ominously, astronomers say 1989FC will be back. Like the earth, the asteroid orbits the sun, but it takes about 380 days to do so, instead of 365. When the asteroid passes by again next April, it will probably be at a safer distance from the earth. The next time earthlings need to worry, says astronomer Brian Marsden of the Harvard-Smithsonian Observatory, who calculated the orbit based on Holt's observations, is 2015. "If our figures are correct," he says, "the asteroid will have made 25 orbits to earth's 26, and we will meet again...
...civil aviation, the deal's supporters reply that Tokyo already has entered the field with willing help from U.S. aerospace firms. Japan is developing an advanced jet engine with U.S., British, Italian and West German companies and is building a rocket that may launch a two-ton satellite into orbit...
...with Harold Adrian Russell ("Kim") Philby, whose exploits as a Soviet mole inside Britain's Secret Intelligence Service seem breathtaking enough to have been crafted by a master of the thriller genre. The son of an eccentric Arabist, Philby entered Communism's orbit while at Cambridge in the 1930s. Carefully disguising those links, he joined Britain's SIS and rose high enough in its ranks to rate consideration as its potential chief. Yet by the time he disappeared in 1963, only to surface in the Soviet Union a few months later, it was painfully clear that Philby all along...
...flight's highlight was the deployment of the $100 million Tracking and Data-Relay Satellite, which completes an orbiting communications network that will let the space agency reduce its reliance on an expensive series of ground stations. Much more was riding on Discovery, though, than a single satellite. Without a successful launch, NASA could not hope to stick to its ambitious schedule of seven shuttle flights this year. And those flights are vital to a whole series of important scientific missions, including sending a probe to Jupiter and placing a powerful telescope in orbit. Those launches, plus several other missions...