Word: orbitals
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...grew into a chorus near the two-minute mark, when the spacecraft successfully jettisoned its two spent solid rocket boosters. But experienced space observers did not relax until Discovery shut down its three main engines 6 1/2 minutes later, shucked off its external fuel tank, then slipped safely into orbit about 180 miles above the earth a half hour later. Declared elated space engineer John Kaltenbach: "This was the one that had to fly. It looks damn good. Oh, it just feels so good...
...space as they watched the televised deployment from Discovery's cargo bay of the $100 million Tracking and Data Relay Satellite. And so, on the first day of its scheduled four-day mission, the five-man Discovery crew achieved one of its major goals -- sending TDRS toward its designated orbit -- and seemed well on its way toward the other: a successful test flight of the newly refurbished shuttle. Discovery's leap into space seemed at last to have given the nation, as well as NASA, a long-needed catharsis, purging it of the lingering horror of the Challenger disaster, restoring...
...certainly was. As the shuttle eased into orbit, mission commander Hauck felt only delight at the immediate tasks at hand. "We're looking forward to the next four days," he said. "We have a lot to do, and we're going to have a lot of fun doing it." Several hours later, astronauts Mike Lounge and David Hilmers, manipulating controls in the cabin, raised and tilted the TDRS package in the cargo bay, and activated springs that pushed it out of the open doors into space. After Hauck and pilot Dick Covey had maneuvered the shuttle to a safe...
There, like a butterfly emerging from a cocoon, it unfolded two huge solar panels and two large umbrella-like antennas. Together with its sister satellite, TDRS-1 (already in orbit over the Atlantic), the new TDRS will give NASA the ability to communicate through a single ground installation with dozens of U.S. civil and military satellites...
...white rocket streaked into the sky. They were witness to the launching of Israel's first space satellite, which made the country only the eighth (after the Soviet Union, the U.S., France, Japan, China, Britain and India) to possess a rocket powerful enough to put a satellite into orbit. That capability, revealed by TIME in August, offers impressive evidence that Israel can launch missiles and hit targets in most Arab countries...