Word: orbiting
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...March 13, is operational, while the U.S. is not yet fully committed to developing such a permanent space platform. The Soviets, long ahead of the U.S. in the lift capability of its superrockets, will soon have a new SL-W booster that can push 220,000 lbs. into orbit, about 3 1/2 times as much as the U.S. shuttle. The Soviets have, of course, one huge advantage: their authoritarian government provides long-term planning and consistently high funding for its priorities. "The Soviets worship only certain things," observes George Jeffs, president of Rockwell's North American Space Operations. "Lenin...
...dismisses the worries about America's current space failures as the product of small minds and faint hearts. Calling the solar system "our extended home," the document urges the U.S. to take logical, sequential steps toward colonizing space over the next 50 years. It assumes that NASA's proposed orbiting space station will be in place by 1994. Simultaneously, research would proceed on both an aerospace plane (President Reagan's so-called Orient Express), capable of taking off from runways and soaring into orbit, and a new generation of reusable rocket-powered craft that would reach orbit with a single...
...Reagan Administration has already started to reverse a disastrous decision made in 1972 by the Nixon Administration to develop the shuttle as the sole vehicle for putting both humans and payloads into orbit. Instead, the U.S. will move to a mixed launch fleet including both shuttles and expendable rockets. Ten new advanced Titan 34D7 rockets are already on order, and the Air Force wants at least ten more to provide an increased launching capability beginning in 1988. Within a week or so, a National Security Council-led Interagency Group on Space is expected to recommend that NASA severely restrict...
...build another orbiter when the whole purpose of the shuttle program has been thrown into question is illogical," contends Caltech's Murray. "The shuttle has become a substitute for a goal instead of a means of obtaining a goal." Murray and many other space specialists argue that manned flights should be confined to those missions that require a human presence. Placing satellites into orbit, they argue, rarely requires that astronauts go along on the dangerous ride...
...systems division. His firm and its chief competitor, General Dynamics, have long experience in producing rockets for the Air Force and NASA and, with the unexpected new demand for such launchers, would like to reverse their role. They would rent Government launching facilities and use their own rockets to orbit commercial satellites. The potential benefit: providing competition that would force lower launch prices and, in turn, lure more private business...