Word: orbiter
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...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...
Despite initial Russian hints of a complex mission of long duration, U.S. scientists suspected shortly after Salyut was launched that something had gone wrong. The heavy cylindrical craft, intended as the hub of a space station, reached an orbit of only 140 by 130 miles. That meant that it was passing through the outer fringes of the atmosphere, which would slow it down and cause it to burn up in a plunge back toward earth within a few weeks...
Delay in the launch of Soyuz 10 and its three-man crew stirred more suspicions. Russian officials were apparently deciding if it was worthwhile trying to rendezvous and dock with a craft that would not long remain in orbit. When Soyuz was finally launched, it was unintentionally shot into an orbit higher than Salyut's. It took nearly two days for the manned craft to reach and dock with its target-an operation that the cosmonauts later compared to bringing a train into a large railroad station. Then, only 5½ hours later, having made no attempt to board...
...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...