Word: orbiters
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Florida's briny ocean winds ceaselessly whine through the deserted tower on Cape Canaveral's Pad 14, where John Glenn rocketed into space on Feb. 20, 1962, to become the first American to orbit the earth. The spindly tower sways under the gusts, and bits of rusting steel are flecked into the jumble of weeds and decaying cables entwined around its feet...
Beyond next year's mission lies the $5.1 billion U.S. space shuttle-a recoverable crossbreed of spacecraft and airplane designed to ferry men, equipment and satellites back and forth between earth and orbit. One of the few signs of future activity at Canaveral is the line of surveyor stakes laid out for a new three-mile runway to land the shuttle on its returns to earth. But the first shuttle is not expected to be launched until around 1979-an eon away in spacemen's terms. Meanwhile, the hulking, $117 million Vehicle Assembly Building, which covers eight acres...
...they continued their study of the flood of data from Mariner 10 at week's end, the champagne-sipping scientists were elated by the spacecraft's performance. They now think that Mariner may have enough fuel left when it again crosses Mercury's orbit in September to guide the ship over one of the planet's poles, which were hidden from view during last week's flyby...
Tiny Pebbles. At the time of the formation of the rock, the moon had just been created, possibly by the accretion of debris in orbit around the earth. As the debris-drawn by lunar gravity and ranging in size from tiny pebbles to huge boulders many miles across-crashed into the enlarging moon, it eventually generated enough heat to turn the lunar surface into a sea of molten lava. Slowly, as the bombardment lessened, the lava cooled and hardened into a crust that was then cratered by the impact of the remaining debris. When the rain of rocks eventually ended...
...geological traces of the planet's violent beginnings. In contrast, the moon has remained largely unchanged since its last burst of volcanism, disturbed only by an occasional meteorite or a periodic moonquake (caused by the gravitational tug of the earth or sun as the moon's lopsided orbit occasionally brings the moon closer to them...