Word: orbitals
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...August, the Democratic Convention in Chicago dissolved into bloody rioting; and in each month of that exceedingly bloody year, 1,200 Americans had died in Vietnam. So people had bigger things on their minds in October when Apollo 7 - the first of the three-man Apollo ships - had orbited the Earth. And people might have been equally indifferent in December when Apollo 8 went aloft - except that Apollo 8 would be traveling a little farther than Earth orbit. (Read TIME's Top 10 Scientific Discoveries...
...would be one more black eye to the U.S. - which had lately caught up in the space race with the Soviets - in a year that had been full of them. So that summer, NASA told Borman, Lovell and Anders to cowboy up. Their original Earth orbit flight plan would be changed to a lunar orbit...
NASA has moved with uncharacteristic nimbleness in the last five years and is already cutting metal on the new machines in the hope of having crews in Earth orbit by 2015 and on the moon by 2020. Schedules have slipped some - the original plan was to launch the orbital missions in 2014 - and costs have swollen, though so far not dramatically. (See the Top 50 space moments since Sputnik...
...seven have arrived in one piece--an extraordinary success rate for a planet that historically had been a bit of a graveyard of failed missions. Currently, six ships--five American and one European--are at work on Mars, and a handful of others sleep peacefully on the surface or orbit silently above, their missions completed and their systems exhausted. While a lot of the work the spacecraft do is the quiet business of spelunking and air-sampling that thrills mostly space geeks, in recent weeks the news from Mars has been compelling...
...computer game designer and creator of the seminal Ultima role playing series. But as the son of SkyLab astronaut Owen K. Garriott, his passion has long been space flight. Now, at a reported cost of more than $30 million, he will become the sixth private citizen to travel into orbit. Garriott is preparing to join the crew of the Soyuz TMA 13 mission as a spaceflight participant, thanks to Space Adventures, a company he helped found. He spoke to TIME about his upcoming voyage from the cosmonaut training facility in Star City, Russia...