Word: orbiter
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...just as the space program was beginning to mature--and the same year that John H. Glenn Jr. became the first American to orbit the earth--Hoffman graduated from Scars dale High School. At Amherst College, Hoffman followed his scientific bent, majoring in Astronomy, and graduating first in his class,summa cum laude. Then, without skipping a beat, Hoffman arrived at Harvard to embark on three years of gamma ray research. This work took him as far away as Argentina, where he experimented with a balloon-borne gamma-ray observatory that he designed and built...
...scientists directly. The end goal is attaining a thorough understanding of how the space shuttle operates Because astronauts may spend as much as a year dealing with one particular system, each man tends to develop an area or two of expertise Hoffman has written a training manual on the Orbital Maneuvering System, which is one component of a complex guidance system that helps to control and steer the shuttle in orbit...
...reason for the industry's bright business outlook is, in a word, economy. A typical telecommunications satellite can cost up to $75 million to manufacture, launch and monitor while in orbit above the earth. But that expense is small compared with the burdens involved in laying thousands of miles of cable across a continent or even an ocean...
Scrapping over transponders is especially intense among cable television-programming companies, which see the devices as a way to cut costs and gain on the competition. For them, by far the most popular and sought-after transponders are the 24 aboard RCA's Satcom III-R, launched into orbit last November. They can carry two dozen different channels of cable TV programming. The satellite's customers include the pay TV channels Showtime and Home Box Office as well as Warner Amex and Turner Broadcasting System...
...motor from a solid-fuel Minuteman missile. The firm's owners now plan to go into commercial service in 1984, with monthly launches starting two years later. With space technology rapidly advancing and the competition for launches beginning to perk up, prices may start dropping out of orbit long before the satellites do. -By Christopher Byron. Reported by Jerry Hannifin/Washington and Stephen Koepp/New York