Word: orbiter
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...Deere & Co., the Illinois tractor maker, is investigating the impact of zero gravity on the molecular structure of iron. That could provide clues to making it stronger on earth. The next generation of supercomputers that make billions of calculations per second may use chips that will be born in orbit. Reason: space appears to be the place to produce ultra-pure crystals, free of defects caused by gravity, that can replace conventional silicon chips...
Alongside 3M in business ventures in orbit is McDonnell Douglas, the St. Louis aerospace company. The firm has long made propulsion systems and other hardware for the U.S. space program and the shuttle. On five nights earlier this year, McDonnell Douglas and Johnson & Johnson, the New Jersey medical-supply company, ran electrophoresis experiments, which allowed precise separation under weightless conditions of biological materials. Although one batch was contaminated, the others permitted the removal of impurities too small to be extracted on earth. One possible outgrowth: production of insulin-producing cells to control diabetes. Says Isaac Gillam, the NASA official...
...made-in-space product, tiny latex balls only a bit larger than a red blood cell, will soon go on sale. Formed in the near weightlessness of orbit in April 1983 on the Challenger shuttle flight, each of the 1,000 or so samples is exactly ten microns in diameter. Their precise uniformity makes them suitable for calibrating medical and scientific equipment or possibly destroying cancer cells. Price of the microscopic spheres: $350 to $400 each...
...shuttle's full payload for each flight up to 1988, and perhaps $100 million after that. NASA is mindful of competition from launch vehicles like the European Space Agency's Ariane series (see following story), which charges $25 million to $30 million to put satellites in orbit...
...mission that was considerably less acclaimed but, for the commercial future of the U.S. space program, ominously successful. Ariane V 11, the latest effort of the eleven-nation European Space Agency, rose from the space center at Kourou in the equatorial jungles of French Guiana to an orbit of 22,300 miles above the equator. There the rocket deposited two communications satellites. One of them, like many of Ariane's payloads, was sponsored by an international communications agency. The other satellite, however, was Spacenet 2, the second device that Ariane has carried into orbit for a U.S. customer...