Word: orbiter
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Hail Columbia, officially designated a Space Transportation System (S.T.S.), and known as the space shuttle or the shuttle orbiter for short. The shuttle, to make it even shorter, is the most powerful and complicated craft ever put together by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The Apollo capsules that went to the moon are Model T artifacts in comparison. Columbia, with booster rockets and fuel tank, weighs 2.7 million Ibs.; it is controlled by computers loaded with more than 600,000 lines of exquisitely precise program codes; it has pumps the size of trash cans that can discharge superheated gases...
...shuttle that is to orbit at speeds up to 17,500 m.p.h. was trundled to its lift off site on a massive crawler-tractor that took 7½ hours to creep the 3½ miles from the Kennedy Space Center's immense Vehicle Assembly Building. NASA's delight could be detected as far away as Houston. There, a technician watching the proceedings on television at the Johnson Space Center exclaimed what many felt: "Hey! This is for real! We're back to launching birds again." It has been a long time between shots...
...Eurodétente" regardless of the tensions between Moscow and Washington; yet they clearly could not maintain a business-as-usual approach in the face of another Soviet invasion, this one chillingly near by. Brezhnev and his Kremlin comrades would love to seduce the Europeans from Washington's orbit, and to maintain Communist rule in Poland merely by the posturings of force. But no one doubts that if necessary they will resort to its use, just as they did in Afghanistan last December and in Czechoslovakia twelve years...
...first the Soviets want to get Poland back into a steady orbit. With 35 million people, Poland is by far the largest satellite, "the 'India' of the Soviet empire," in Bialer's words. It is also strategically vital, the buffer and transportation link between the Soviet Union and East Germany, where 19 Soviet divisions guard the bloc's western flank. The Gdansk agreement, which created the independent unions last Aug. 31, has kept the Soviets in a state of intense anxiety -and for good reason. Solidarity overnight became a third major power center in Poland, along...
...Looking like great Erector Sets, the structures, about six miles long and three miles wide, would be made of long thin beams actually manufactured in space out of rolls of aluminum or carbon-fiber strips about as thick as the wall of a beer can. In the weightlessness of orbit, nothing stronger would be needed...