Word: orbiteer
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...resulted in the first human deaths in space-had recorded a series of major achievements. For nearly 24 days, the three cosmonauts had whirled around the earth in their huge, 175¾-ton Salyut space station performing scientific experiments, bantering with mission control, and even celebrating a birthday in orbit. On board both the Salyut and the attached Soyuz shuttle craft, all systems seemed to function flawlessly. Thus last week, when the cosmonauts were ordered to transfer to Soyuz and return to earth, there was little cause for apprehension...
...Orbital Acrobatics. If the behavior of the three cosmonauts aboard the Soviet Union's huge Salyut spacecraft last week seemed exuberant, there was good reason. In the past few weeks the Soviet space program has enjoyed a remarkable string of successes. Even while the cosmonauts performed their orbital acrobatics, the rugged little unmanned Russian moon rover, Lunokhod, came back to life and resumed its patrols for the eighth consecutive two-week-long lunar day. Farther out in space, two Russian spacecraft were racing their smaller American counterpart, Mariner 9, to the planet Mars. But the attention of the world...
Ever since they were beaten by the U.S. in the race to land men on the moon, the Russians have been proclaiming the importance of orbiting space stations-as platforms to survey the earth, to scan the heavens and eventually to launch manned excursions to the planets. In April the Soviets lofted Salyut, an impressive, 171-ton unmanned collection of scientific instruments (telescopes, spectrometers and other sensing equipment). But the odd, tubular-shaped laboratory, with its stubby, winglike solar panels, settled into such a low initial orbit that its lifetime was reckoned at only a few weeks. Ground controllers eventually...
...with an externally mounted TV camera. They also fired the space station's main engine, an operation accompanied by what Dobrovolsky described as "a very bright flash with a large number of white particles, like a snow blizzard." After two firings, they managed to raise Salyut's orbit to 161 by 175 miles. That increased elevation should give the space station at least another month's life-enough time for other Soyuz spacecraft to dock with...
...midweek, mission controllers at the Kazakhstan cosmodrome succeeded in raising the craft's orbit to 166 miles by 161 miles, apparently by firing Salyut's on-board rockets. Still, Veteran Space Watcher Heinz Kaminski of West Germany's Bochum Observatory calculated that the boost would keep Salyut alive only for another seven weeks at the most -enough time for more docking attempts but too short a life-span for setting up a working space station...