Word: orbiteer
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...born engineer who first proposed solar satellites twelve years ago. Foreseeing a day when oil would run out and other fossil fuels would become scarce, he suggested placing two giant arrays of solar cells, each about half the size of Manhattan, 22,300 miles above the earth in geosynchronous orbit; there the structures' orbital speed would match the planet's rotation, thus holding the solar powerhouses over the same spot on the ground. Bathed in almost perpetual sunshine, the cells, like those already used to power weather and communications satellites, would convert the sun's energy into...
...rugged planet, look at rocks with its TV eyes and dig up samples with its shovel. Engineers at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., now are working on a robot that will be able to take off from the space shuttle, reach an ailing satellite in orbit and repair it. The Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C., similarly, is building a robot that can be sent out aboard an unmanned submarine to find and repair crippled vessels undersea. Robots are already at work in the manufacture of tanks, aircraft, guns and ammunition...
Rockets, which are also driven by exploding chemicals, can exceed these sonic limits because the combustion takes place in the projectile itself. But rockets also operate under handicaps. So large are the fuel requirements for reaching orbital speed of 8 km (5 miles) per sec. that no one has yet been able to place a payload into orbit totaling more than 1% of the weight of the vehicle on the ground...
...shuttle's problems are also a source of grief to planners of another major scientific effort: the placing in orbit around earth of a ten-ton, 96-in. space telescope. Scanning the heavens above the obscuring atmosphere, and radioing back its findings, the robot telescope could greatly extend astronomy's observable universe, allowing stargazers to see farther and deeper into space. The telescope might even be able to pick out the faint traces of planets orbiting nearby stars...
...could lose ground-especially in relation to the U.S.S.R., which space experts, like military men, are concerned about. Although the Soviets have not fared well in their unmanned explorations, except for landings on Venus, they are surpassing the U.S. in manned space projects. By launching men into orbit every few months, they have accumulated nearly twice as many man-hours in earth orbit as the U.S. Warns Senator Harrison Schmitt, a geologist and former astronaut soon to become chairman of the Senate's space subcommittee: "The Russians are ahead on the knowledge of how people can perform in space...