Word: orbiters
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Russia's ahead in the space race again. The world's first space-bound bureaucrat -- Yuri Baturin, a former security adviser to Boris Yeltsin -- blasted off from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan Thursday, heading for a two-week stay aboard Mir. NASA, of course, has sent lawmakers into orbit; Senator Jake Garn took a junket on the Space Shuttle back before the Challenger disaster, and John Glenn heads off in the fall. But never has America put a presidential aide in space. Can this one fly? "We can teach anyone to become a cosmonaut as long...
...handlers, "who knows when and how we'll have to bring the station down?" Officials insist that there is no cause for alarm. "We can manage the initial descent," says space-agency spokesman ANATOLY TKACHYOV, describing a plan to drop the station gradually into descending orbits. If its interlocking modules successfully separate, the station will then tumble piece by piece to earth; Moscow hopes that whatever bits of the 120-ton space station don't burn up in free fall will quietly splash down. It's not coincidental that the talk of pulling Mir from orbit comes just as NASA...
...handlers, "who knows when and how we'll have to bring the station down?" Officials insist that there is no cause for alarm. "We can manage the initial descent," says space-agency spokesman Anatoly Tkachyov, describing a plan to drop the station gradually into descending orbits. If its interlocking modules successfully separate, the station will then tumble piece by piece to Earth; Moscow hopes that whatever bits of the 120-ton space station don't burn up in free fall will quietly splash down. It's not coincidental that the talk of pulling Mir from orbit comes just as NASA...
...said Hubble was deployed by a robot arm and stayed in a low orbit, whereas AFAX will use booster rockets to leave earth's orbit for its higher, elliptical orbit...
Someday a team of men and women might board a spaceship and fly the 15 light-years to a small, low-mass star called Gliese 876. In its orbit they'll find a cold planet -- as yet unnamed -- of hydrogen and helium gases so enormous it's twice the mass of Jupiter. Newly discovered by San Francisco State researchers at the Lick Observatory in California, and further researched at the Keck I telescope in Hawaii, it's also the closest planet to our solar system ever found. There isn't another until you look 35 light-years -- 5.9 trillion miles...