Word: orbitals
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...lately came, traveling in only an evening suit and open waistcoat. The devil speaks of the game of village girls who persuade someone to lick a frosted ax, to which of course the tongue sticks. The devil wonders idly, "What would become of an ax in space?" It would orbit there, "and the astronomers would calculate the rising and setting of the ax." Dostoyevsky's devil was prescient, speaking a century before bright metal began to fly up off the earth and circle round it. There is something spookily splendid about evil as an ax in space...
...since an American walked in space, but the crew of the shuttle Atlantis did not seem rusty. On a first, unscheduled 4 1/ 2-hour jaunt, astronauts Jerry Ross and Jay Apt freed a balky antenna on an observatory satellite, permitting the $617 million device to be placed in orbit. The astronauts later tested sleds that haul large objects through space on a rail...
Critics counter that unmanned, expendable rockets can loft most satellites into orbit at far less cost and with much less risk than the reusable shuttle, which has been plagued by technological glitches. The argument will heat up this spring as Congress decides whether to fund a $30 billion orbiting space station. NASA plans to use the shuttle to ferry up astronauts to assemble the station, then supply it with unmanned rockets. If the lawmakers decide to scrub the station, the shuttle will be without a clearly defined role...
...liquid hydrogen is instantly converted to hydrogen gas, which then blasts out of a nozzle. The resulting thrust is two to three times as great as that generated in conventional rocket engines by the explosive mixture of hydrogen and oxygen. Much larger payloads could thus be lifted into orbit...
...NASA, with the Pentagon's blessing, decided to put the bulk of its research funds into the reusable space shuttle. Further development of conventional rocket boosters stalled. Now both agencies find themselves bumping into the limited payload capacities of the remaining rockets; NASA for hoisting its space station into orbit and the Pentagon for lifting its big directed-beam Star Wars weapons. The proposed nuclear-powered rockets would more than triple the payload of the U.S.'s most powerful booster, the Titan 4, from 20 tons to more than 70 tons...