Word: orbiteer
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When Soviet Cosmos 954 naval reconnaissance satellite plummeted from its orbit and disintegrated over northwestern Canada last week, it underscored an inescapable fact of the space age: we are never alone. Nor, for that matter, is the other side. Day and night, little is hidden from the intelligence-gathering techniques of the U.S. and the Soviet Union. Information is plucked from space, from the ground, from under the sea. A rundown of some of the most sophisticated methods for gathering data...
...satellite carrying a nuclear reactor to power its ocean-scanning radar and radio circuitry. The craft crashed into the atmosphere over a remote Canadian wilderness area last week, apparently emitting strong radiation. American space scientists admitted that if the satellite had failed one pass later in its decaying orbit, it would have plunged toward earth near New York City-at the height of the morning rush hour...
...blue-uniformed analysts had followed Cosmos 954 since its launching on Sept. 18, 1977. The 46-ft.-long vehicle, weighing more than five tons, was in a 150-mile-high orbit designed to cover the world's oceans from the Arctic to the Antarctic. Its parabolic radar antenna scanned the seas for ship movement, and its radio transmitters relayed the collected information to Soviet ground stations. But in mid-December, Cosmos 954 began to droop in its orbit, slipping closer to earth with each revolution. The Soviets sent the satellite a radio command that should have caused...
Last week the Soviet team had callers. From the fog-shrouded space station at Tyuratam, Kazakhstan, two more cosmonauts were launched into orbit aboard Soyuz 27. They were Air Force Lieut. Colonel Vladimir Dzhanibekov, 35, a pilot who is making his first space flight, and Oleg Makarov, 44, his civilian flight engineer whose two previous Soyuz missions included a flight that was aborted and forced to land in the snows of Siberia near the Chinese border in 1975. After chasing the blinking red and blue lights of Salyut round the earth for a day, the cosmonauts caught up with...
...five days on various experiments, Tass said. Then the two newcomers would return to earth early this week. They would leave behind Soyuz 26's Yuri Romanenko, 33, and Georgi Grechko, 46, to continue endurance tests and perhaps to break the U.S. astronaut record of 84 days in orbit. If all goes according to plan, the Soviets will have shown that they can keep a permanent observatory in the sky, staffed by relays of spaceships bringing up fresh supplies and personnel. By contrast, during the U.S.'s comparable Skylab missions in 1973 and 1974, no more than...