Word: orbital
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...shuttle missions in the next ten years. It has even considered subcontracting shuttle operations to an airline, and United Airlines has expressed interest. Farsighted planners are thinking about more ambitious roles for the shuttle, or its successor. In the future, such a spacecraft may carry work crews into orbit, where they will be left behind inside comfortable modules that could serve as building blocks for permanent space stations. As more components are shuttled up, these centers might begin to produce space goods, perhaps even utilize raw materials, as Gerard O'Neill suggests, from the moon or from asteroids. There...
...more distant future, such stations, like the great wheel in 2001: A Space Odyssey, could serve as a launch pad for journeys far beyond the earth, maybe to Mars. Interplanetary spacecraft assembled in earth orbit could be made of much lighter and less costly materials since they would not have to survive the stresses and friction of travel through the earth's atmosphere...
...this crucial backing, the space agency was compelled to change the shuttle's design, vastly complicating the job of building it. The Air Force insisted that the payload capacity be expanded to 65,000 lbs. (the better to carry big spy satellites). NASA also had to extend the orbiter's "cross range" so that it could glide a full 1,200 miles either to the right or left of its original orbital trajectory after re-entering the atmosphere. That would enable a Florida-launched shuttle, which travels about 1,000 miles south of Vandenberg on its first circuit...
...Pentagon hopes to replace the Titan, Titan-Centaur and Atlas-Centaur boosters that have long been used to hurl military payloads like the Big Bird spy satellite into orbit. Such rockets are strictly one-shot throwaways, costly to use (up to $75 million a launch) and not entirely foolproof (5% of the launches have failed). For the military, the shuttle is a reliable new lift vehicle that can be employed again and again to put hardware into orbit. But it is much more than that. The Air Force has long dreamed of a permanent, manned orbital platform that could...
...payloads by shuttle. Air Force planners are thinking of buying one or two shuttles for their exclusive use. They are also developing a new portable booster to be carried aboard, thus overcoming one of the shuttle's notable limitations. It can operate only in low earth orbit (at altitudes from 115 to 690 miles). But the new booster rocket, attached to satellites to be carried into space, will be able to hurl them into geosynchronous or stationary orbits at an altitude of 22,300 miles. In such orbits, a surveillance satellite's speed almost exactly matches the earth...