Word: orbitally
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...move the White House probably saw as an election-year head snapper, President George W. Bush sketched out a long-term vision for manned spaceflight that goes far beyond the dog paddling in near-Earth orbit to which the space agency has confined itself since the 1970s. Back on the table is human exploration of the moon; back on the table is human exploration of Mars. Swept to the floor--or at least to the side--is the overbudget, underproducing International Space Station and the increasingly creaky, increasingly lethal shuttle fleet...
...seven-month trip in a confined space can be torturous. The bigger problem is that it can also be lethal because of radiation exposure in deep space, where the absence of Earth's magnetic field leaves astronauts far more exposed to deadly cosmic energy than they are in orbit or on the way to the moon. Some kind of shielding is obviously necessary--anathema to space designers, who like to keep hardware light, but unavoidable all the same. (On the surface of Mars, tanks of water or even dirt berms could serve the same protective purpose.) The best...
...directly from Earth orbit to Mars, and it would probably be simpler and less costly," says Larry Bell, space architect at the University of Houston. "Some of us don't see the necessity of going to the moon first...
Present systems for getting from Earth's surface to low-Earth orbit are so fantastically expensive that merely launching the 1,000 tons or so of spacecraft and equipment a Mars mission would require could be accomplished only by cutting health-care benefits, education spending or other important programs--or by raising taxes. Absent some remarkable discovery, astronauts, geologists and biologists once on Mars could do little more than analyze rocks and feel awestruck beholding the sky of another world. Yet rocks can be analyzed by automated probes without risk to human life, and at a tiny fraction...
...with the part-time bass player--his wife Heidi Meredith. Both had grown up in broken homes and hoped to avoid separation. But after more than a decade together, they had devolved into chronic arguers: how to make the bed, how to make music. "We were in this decaying orbit that was going to crash and burn," says Roth. Says Meredith, 39: "It was never a question of our not loving each other. We would just completely butt heads, and then we would analyze it to death. That just got us in deeper...