Word: orbited
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...enthusiasts tried anti-Skylab measures of their own. Buryl Payne, director of Massachusetts' Institute for Psychic Energetics, used a Fort Lauderdale, Fla., radio station to tie in with 150 other stations and reach some 40 million listeners in seeking a mass psychic push to nudge Skylab into a higher orbit. In the broadcast, listeners were instructed to "relax, visualize yourselves as being in contact with Skylab and then visualize Skylab as moving out into space." Despite such positive thinking, Skylab kept slipping closer to earth...
More practically, the watching world would have to depend on the men who put Skylab into space to find the best means of bringing it back to earth with minimal risk to human life. The first priority was to track Skylab's decaying orbit as precisely as possible. That is the job of the North American Air Defense Command, whose joint U.S.-Canadian computers deep within a pink granite mountain near Colorado Springs, Colo., continuously monitor the movements of 4,506 hunks of space garbage now orbiting the earth...
...choices were to be made on the basis of a complicated "hazard index," a computer calculation used to determine the final orbital paths that would take the spacecraft over the least densely populated areas. Frosch has already made one firm rule about reaching those last critical decisions: Skylab will not be sent into an orbit posing a high hazard in hopes of later reaching an orbit of lesser risk. That is because NASA is simply not certain that its efforts to select the precise final orbit will work. To do nothing in such a situation is preferable to taking...
Originally, NASA had proposed in 1968 the $2.6 billion orbiting laboratory program. At that time extra rockets capable of keeping Skylab in space almost indefinitely were considered. The craft's ability to stay in orbit would be reinforced, if necessary, by astronauts transported up to it in a convenient space shuttle, then also on the NASA drawing boards. But under budgetary pressures both vehicles were simplified?and both developed unanticipated technical problems. So when Skylab's orbit began to slip, there was no shuttle to come to its rescue...
...When Skylab was launched by a Saturn 5 booster rocket on May 14, 1973, a large section of its meteoroid and heat shield ripped away, taking one of its prematurely extended solar-energy wings with it. A second wing jammed in a retracted position. The craft both overheated in orbit and was dangerously underpowered. But in the space age's first salvage mission, on May 25, 1973, Astronauts Charles ("Pete") Conrad Jr. and Joseph Kerwin entered the overheated space lab and rigged a makeshift umbrella to shade the vehicle's bald spot, then spent a harrowing four hours outside...