Word: orbiter
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Robinson knows we'll see chimps back in orbit before we see a federal mandate for vacation time. But he hopes a debate on the bottom-line realities of burnout will inspire a rash of enlightened self-interest among employers. So before you see how far you can get this summer on your short vacation leash, take a trip to Escapemag.com and sign a petition. Provence, Tuscany, the Greek isles--your employer owes you nothing less. Workers of the world, unite...
...cozy up to this wing of his party? The answer, so far, is a qualified yes. In fact, some polls now show Bush with as much as a 10-point lead over Vice President Al Gore, thanks in large part to the Texas governor's skillful disengagement from the orbit of Pat Robertson and the Christian Coalition, forces he was pressed into befriending by the insurgency of primary opponent John McCain. But whether he could successfully go from a mere flirtation with the left of his party to the embrace that would come with the selection of a pro-choice...
This amateur network has run down most of the satellites--spy or commercial--that have ever been launched and are still in orbit, including what appeared to be a stealth satellite the U.S. deployed in 1990. All this info has been channeled to a website playfully called Heavens-Above.com that shows where the orbital snoops are every hour of the day or night--something that has some in U.S. intelligence circles understandably livid...
...takes patience to spot the fleeting satellites skimming across the night sky plus a certain skill at celestial mechanics to divine an orbit from these observations. But Molczan and his Web cronies have become highly proficient. Russell Eberst of Edinburgh, Scotland, has made some 170,000 orbital observations over a storied career. Mike McCants of Austin, Texas, has spent hours on end scanning the sky for lost satellites. Especially gifted is Jonathan McDowell, a researcher at the Harvard- Smithsonian Center for Astro-physics who can process orbital data like a super-computer...
Molczan insists that spying on the spies isn't really hard. For starters, he says, the U.S. telegraphs its intentions by warning mariners and aviators before every space launch. Using spherical trigonometry, the trackers plot a potential orbit and notify other amateurs worldwide where to look. That's how Eberst and others track the famous 1990 stealth satellite, despite decoys deployed to distract observers. They lost that satellite after it maneuvered unexpectedly a few months later, but even that much tracking has some spooks steamed...