Word: orbiter
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...they have wrought and yearn restlessly to get on with what they are certain will one day come to be. In a mere quarter-century, the human race has broken its immemorial bond to the life-sustaining surroundings of the home planet. U.S. space pioneers have been able to orbit the globe, walk on the moon, ring the earth with communications satellites and send a machine nearly 1.8 billion miles to inspect the planet Uranus. Such wonders are indeed extraordinary...
...problems worsened. On April 18, a startled Air Force watched its once trusty Titan rocket explode at California's Vandenberg Air Force Base. Lost in the fiery metallic shower was a Big Bird spy satellite, intended to keep a keen polar-orbit eye on the Soviets. The explosion was the second successive Titan 34D failure within a year, after nine perfect flights. NASA bravely tried another launch, and on May 3 was dismayed when its long-reliable Delta rocket, carrying a hurricane-spotting satellite, had to be detonated over Cape Canaveral after its main engine shut down prematurely...
Suddenly the U.S. had no way to lift even a medium-size payload into orbit. Temporarily, at least, the nation's vaunted space program has been grounded, its wondrous space future receding. "How bad is it?" asked Bruce Murray, former director of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "It's really terrible --worse than some Government officials realize...
...March 13, is operational, while the U.S. is not yet fully committed to developing such a permanent space platform. The Soviets, long ahead of the U.S. in the lift capability of its superrockets, will soon have a new SL-W booster that can push 220,000 lbs. into orbit, about 3 1/2 times as much as the U.S. shuttle. The Soviets have, of course, one huge advantage: their authoritarian government provides long-term planning and consistently high funding for its priorities. "The Soviets worship only certain things," observes George Jeffs, president of Rockwell's North American Space Operations. "Lenin...
...dismisses the worries about America's current space failures as the product of small minds and faint hearts. Calling the solar system "our extended home," the document urges the U.S. to take logical, sequential steps toward colonizing space over the next 50 years. It assumes that NASA's proposed orbiting space station will be in place by 1994. Simultaneously, research would proceed on both an aerospace plane (President Reagan's so-called Orient Express), capable of taking off from runways and soaring into orbit, and a new generation of reusable rocket-powered craft that would reach orbit with a single...