Word: orbiters
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...spacecraft accelerates to 17,000 m.p.h. Eight and a half minutes after launch, its main engines shut down. Other explosive charges spin off the empty tank and scatter its fragments like meteorites into the Indian Ocean. Finally the astronauts fire four more bursts-this time from the two smaller orbital maneuvering rockets in Columbia's tail-boosting the ship into a nearly circular orbit 170 miles above the earth. So it should go this week, shortly after the sun rises over Cape Canaveral on Friday. If there are no new hitches Astronauts John Young, 50, and Robert Crippen...
...just spent $10 billion, finished a week-long countdown, flooded a million gallons of fuel into a hundred-thousand-pound bird, and launched the whole contraption into orbit," a beer-drinking cameraman bellowed in front of the press grandstand...
...hitch. Columbia's moment of triumph made it probable that as early as April the shuttle would carry an American into space for the first time since 1975 and take its place as the world's first reusable rocket ship, flying round trips between earth and orbit...
...obvious solution is to orbit a telescope out beyond the earth's atmosphere. More than half a century ago, a German spaceflight visionary named Hermann Oberth suggested that solution. He foresaw the time when there would be rockets powerful enough to carry telescopes far out into the perfect stillness and clarity of space. In 1923 that seemed a faint dream. Now NASA is pressing ahead with just such an astronomical plan. Last month the $600 million project took a big step forward. After an intense competition, NASA chose Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore as home of the new Space...
...year to operate, more than any ground observatory. But the payoff should be enormous. Because of its power, as well as its ability to "see" frequencies of light obscured by the atmosphere, the space telescope will open whole new worlds to human experience. It may spot planets in orbit around other stars, something no current instrument has done. It should measure more accurately than ever before the distance to far-off galaxies-great islands of stars like our Milky Way. By glimpsing objects as far off as 14 billion light years, it will be capturing light that has taken...