Word: orbiter
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...NASA keep the giant spacecraft in orbit...
Pioneer Venus 1 will travel more than halfway around the sun, flying outside Earth's orbit for the first three months, then crossing inside Earth's orbit for the last four months of a circuitous, 480 million-km (300 million mile) journey to Venus. This flight path will lessen the accelerating effect on Pioneer of the sun's gravity. As a result, the ship will make its approach to the planet at a lower speed than if it had taken a more direct route across space. Thus a smaller retrorocket will be needed to slow Pioneer down...
...examples of this once-over-lightly approach, the Africans cite Angola, where Washington missed an opportunity to enter a crumbling colonial situation on the side of guerrillas who at that time were outside the Marxist orbit. In the Horn of Africa, critics charge, the U.S. was apparently the last to know that Somalia was planning an invasion of Ethiopia's Ogaden region, thereby helping to create an opening for Moscow in Addis Ababa. In Rhodesia, Washington failed to put sufficient pressure on either the Patriotic Front or the Smith regime to achieve a settlement at a time when Smith...
...Pihl children, therefore, live separately from the students in the House. "They're in another orbit," says Marshall Pihl, adding that Nathaniel and Sarah know some students, especially their regular babysitters, but generally keep to themselves. "They have a strong feeling that this is their house," says their mother...
Meantime, NASA is concerned about another reminder of the varied and un predictable hazards of throwing earthly spheres into space. There has been some slippage in the earth orbit of the space agency's big Skylab space station, which was launched in 1973 and should not have begun declining in its orbit until 1983. It packs no nuclear punch, but no one would want to be near it if it falls...