Word: orbiter
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...radar sensors (which can follow an object as small as a .30-cal. rifle bullet 200 miles into space), computers and special cameras with a range of 50,000 miles. The North American Air Defense Command (NORAD) can tell where every object is at any given moment. Of the orbiting objects, 251 are "useful payloads"-201 American, 43 Russian, three French, two British and two Canadian. The remaining 860 pieces are ''garbage," including Mike Collins' lost Hasselblad camera and Dick Gordon's jettisoned space pack. (Ed White's glove has dropped out of orbit...
What if all or part of an orbiting object falls to earth and harms either property or persons? Nobody has yet been hit by a piece of falling space hardware, although four years ago a 20-lb. piece of Sputnik 4 plunked down on a street in Manitowoc, Wis. (It was duly returned to the Russians after being analyzed.) Because of the inherently high velocity of any object in orbit, most pieces of space junk are consumed in their fiery plunge through the earth's atmosphere. But as man launches more and more satellites and probes-the Japanese...
...MILITARY POTENTIAL. While the advantages of orbiting spies are obvious, the potential for the military use of space itself is less clear. The U.S. and Russia pledged to the U.N. in 1963, and reaffirmed in the present treaty draft, that neither would put nuclear bombs in orbit. They were moved partly by the knowledge that such bombs would pass over any target only at widely spaced intervals, would be easier to track than ICBMs and could be delivered at best in hardly less time than the 30 minutes needed for an ICBM. Even so, this detente is subject to constant...
...ships into a slow, cartwheeling rotation around the system's center of mass-a point on the rope 35 ft. from the Gemini (see diagram). Gradually, as Gemini and Agena revolved in a giant circle, the rope stretched tight, the oscillations stopped, and the two craft continued in orbit a fixed distance apart...
...experiment clearly proved that tethered spaceships can orbit in formation without wasting fuel. Robert Gilruth, director of NASA's Manned Spacecraft Center, immediately conjured up "colonies of vehicles fastened together in ways like this." The slow rotation of the system also provided a bonus: a small centrifugal force that acted like a weak gravitational pull, causing objects to drift toward and finally "fall" on the rear wall of Gemini's cabin. It was the first artificial gravity created during a manned orbital flight. After three hours of tethered orbiting, Conrad flipped a switch that jettisoned Gemini...