Word: orbiteer
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...Apollo's three-day homeward voyage, the astronauts had exceptionally smooth sailing. "America has found some fair winds and following seas," said Cernan after the main engine had successfully lifted the command ship out of lunar orbit. As the spacecraft emerged from behind the moon for the last time, the astronauts aimed their TV camera at the surface below and sent back the first live pictures of features on the backside that are invisible from earth, including the giant Tsiolkovsky Crater (named for the Russian space pioneer). Next day, some 180,000 miles from earth, Command Module Pilot Evans...
...Challenger, in a dramatic pyrotechnic display, lifted off from the moon's mountain-rimmed Taurus-Littrow valley. Two hours later, Cernan and Astronaut-Geologist Jack Schmitt reunited with Ron Evans, who was whirling overhead in America. Then, after two more days of observing the moon from the orbiting command ship, the astronauts fired themselves out of lunar orbit and began the three-day journey home. By week's end, the final U.S. expedition to the moon was headed for its scheduled splashdown this week in the South Pacific, 400 miles south of Samoa...
...Gentle. Little more than seven minutes after its spectacular ascent from the lunar surface, Challenger was in lunar orbit, ready for its rendezvous with America. "God, you look pretty," Cernan radioed as Challenger approached the mother ship. Evans maneuvered America so gingerly in the final phases that the first docking contact was too gentle; the latches of the docking mechanism failed to catch. The two ships came together harder on the second try and were firmly joined. Taking their rocks, films and other paraphernalia with them, Cernan and Schmitt climbed through the connecting tunnel and rejoined Evans; the moonwalkers...
...Mars craft will come from an engine not yet developed, perhaps the proposed NERVA (for Nuclear Engine for Rocket Vehicle Applications). It consists of a small nuclear reactor that heats liquid hydrogen until it is expelled as a jet of white-hot gas. To kick out of earth orbit (which requires much less thrust than an earth launch), the 270-ft.-long ships will fire-and then discard-the two outboard NERVAs strapped to their sides; the main booster, at the center of the engine cluster, will be retained. Then, as the two ships pull away from earth orbit, they...
...satellite, dependent on Fifth Business for its orbit. Yet it is a good novel for all that-subtle, solid and funny. David Staunton, the main figure, is a successful Canadian criminal lawyer. The court in which he finds himself struggling at mid-career is not the legal kind, however, and he is not defense attorney but defendant. Staunton is a skilled professional, a rationalist, a cynic and a celibate whose pose in personal matters is to remain aloof. In reality, he lives in an increasingly overgrown clearing surrounded by an unexplored psychological jungle, whose advance he slows by drinking...