Word: orbiter
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...examples of this once-over-lightly approach, the Africans cite Angola, where Washington missed an opportunity to enter a crumbling colonial situation on the side of guerrillas who at that time were outside the Marxist orbit. In the Horn of Africa, critics charge, the U.S. was apparently the last to know that Somalia was planning an invasion of Ethiopia's Ogaden region, thereby helping to create an opening for Moscow in Addis Ababa. In Rhodesia, Washington failed to put sufficient pressure on either the Patriotic Front or the Smith regime to achieve a settlement at a time when Smith...
...Pihl children, therefore, live separately from the students in the House. "They're in another orbit," says Marshall Pihl, adding that Nathaniel and Sarah know some students, especially their regular babysitters, but generally keep to themselves. "They have a strong feeling that this is their house," says their mother...
Meantime, NASA is concerned about another reminder of the varied and un predictable hazards of throwing earthly spheres into space. There has been some slippage in the earth orbit of the space agency's big Skylab space station, which was launched in 1973 and should not have begun declining in its orbit until 1983. It packs no nuclear punch, but no one would want to be near it if it falls...
...Russians, by contrast, seem less advanced in the use of solar energy and employ nuclear power supplies more frequently in earth orbit. Furthermore, to generate high power (100 kilowatts or more), they use a fission process, which produces radioactive strontium 90, cesium and iodine - all far more threatening to human life than the alpha particles generated by the U.S.'s plutonium 238 fuel...
Both the U.S. and the Soviets normally shoot their satellites' nuclear power packs into high orbit (600 to 900 miles) after their use has ended. At present, there are 16 Soviet and eight American nucle ar power supplies in these "parking" or bits. These highfliers may circle the earth safely for up to 10,000 years, and while their radiation will not have decayed completely when they start to come down, its potency will be sufficiently diminished so that the danger is likely to disappear...