Word: orbiter
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...Hughes Aircraft Co. and owned by Telesat Canada, a partly public, partly private Canadian firm, and Satellite Business Systems, formed as a joint venture by IBM, Aetna Life & Casualty Co. and Comsat. Each of the two companies will pay NASA about $9 million to launch its "bird." Once in orbit, the satellites will form links in what is rapidly be coming a vast and complex corporate telecommunications highway 22,300 miles above the surface of the earth...
...intense family pride, Maj. Brewster H. Shaw Jr. will climb aboard the jewel of America's space program sometime next September for a flight which may be the shuttle's first round-trip voyage--from Cape Canaveral, Fla. and back again. With Brewster finally having his day in orbit after five years in the space program, relatives and friends look to the shuttle with pride and excitement. The overall purpose of the ninth mission will to them to be irrelevant. However, this flight--along with the others, including this week's--will likely neither prove relevant nor exciting to others...
More than a billion miles away, just beyond Saturn's orbit, the lump of icy debris is only dimly lighted by the sun and distant stars. Even the big Palomar mirror could not have found it without a highly sensitive silicon-chip light detector called a charge-coupled device (CCD), used in place of a photographic plate. When the comet approaches for its hairpin swing around the sun in 1986, solar radiation will boil off volatile material, creating a glowing head and characteristic tail and perhaps another heavenly spectacle...
...formation. The budget-conscious U.S. has bowed out of the race to intercept Halley's comet with a robot spacecraft, thus leaving the field to the Soviets, Western Europeans and Japanese. But NASA plans a relatively cheap ($2 million) alternative: diverting an unmanned ship already in orbit for an inspection of a comet called Giacobini-Zinner, which will appear a few months ahead of its famous...
...Pentagon scientist, who last month suggested that the station "may be the forerunner of a weapons platform." That the USSR launched 125 satellites last year while NASA sent up only 18 leads Jastrow to suspect that some of the Soviet devices are actually "killer satellites that can lurk in orbit" for long periods of time until detonated from the ground. Jastrow most fears the Soviets may someday have enough such killer satellites to abruptly declare the space above the USSR off-limits to American reconnaissance satellites. This, he says, would cripple our present ability to monitor the Soviet arms build...