Word: orbits
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Then, on Day 4, passengers will orbit the earth five to eight times. Sitting in cozy armchairs, they will be served meals and enjoy views of the scenery through the windows and on video screens. Officials say they'll encourage people to unstrap themselves and to experience the weightlessness of space...
...themselves into training. When it came time for their shuttle missions, they imitated precisely the cadences and vocabularies they had heard so many times on television beaming in from their weightless heroes. "That's affirmative," one camper would say, all business, laconic: "You are a go for nominal de-orbit burn." They caught just right the astronaut's modulations of stoical understatement and occasional jubilant gee whiz. "We're bringin' this bird home!" the commander of one mission cried when he was go for re-entry...
...Reagan's stack of $1,000 bills. Pressed on around the Department of Agriculture. What pikers! They have only 240 million bushels of surplus corn stored away. A nod down Independence Avenue to NASA. It would take one of their space shuttles nearly a year and a half in orbit reeling out end-to-end dollar bills to equal the current Debt...
...million miles before its billion-mile cometary odyssey. Measuring 5 ft. tall and 5 1/2 ft. in diameter, the drum-shaped spacecraft was launched on Aug. 12, 1978; as one of three vehicles in the International Sun-Earth Explorer project, it was named ISEE-3 and designated to orbit a sun-earth libration point (where the gravitational pull of the sun precisely nullifies terrestrial gravity) 930,000 miles from the earth. Its mission: to study the effect of the solar wind on the earth's magnetic field. Yet even as ISEE-3 sniffed at solar breezes, its flight director, NASA...
...deployed the next day, would probably be disabled by solar radiation while it sat unprotected in Discovery's open payload bay. The solution: AUSSAT was launched only 6 1/2 hours later, shortly before ASC1, a commercial satellite, was successfully deployed as planned, both on the first day in orbit. LEASAT 4, another orbiting link in the Navy's communications system, followed on schedule two days later...