Word: orbits
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Blue Shuttle" (named for the service's color) facility at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California (completion date: March 1985). On Air Force drawing boards is the "Transatmospheric Vehicle" (TAV), more popularly known as the "space fighter," designed to take off from military bases and climb into orbit to search for enemy targets. Though the military helped persuade Congress to fund the space shuttle, the Pentagon is lukewarm about the shuttle's civilian uses. Military planners would prefer that Congress use the funds to build a new generation of heavy rocket boosters. The Pentagon's arguments include...
...SALE sign over one of the recaptured birds. NASA hopes the mission will put it into the satellite recovery business. A major hitch, of course, is that the shuttle can only climb to 500 miles, while many of the most important satellites are 22,300 miles up in geostationary orbit-that is, rotating with the earth and staying at a fixed point in the heavens. To put satellites into the higher orbit, the shuttle uses a satellite booster to fire them farther into space...
...called unified field theory, which would link the four forces of nature in a single elegant set of equations. Two of those forces are familiar: electromagnetism, which lights bulbs and makes clothes cling; and gravity, which holds humans to the ground and determines the earth's orbit around the sun. The remaining two are more exotic: the so-called strong force, which binds together the particles in a nucleus; and the weak force, which controls radioactive decay...
Salyut 7 is the latest in a series of sophisticated laboratories that the Soviets have put into orbit since 1971. Last February the three cosmonauts made a rendezvous with Salyut only one day after taking off in a Soyuz T-10 rocket from the Tyuratam space center in Kazakhstan. To maintain muscle strength during their long mission, the crew not only exercised regularly but spent part of each day in tight, constraining suits that forced their lungs and hearts to work harder. Still, when they landed last Tuesday, Soviet television showed them looking tired, with dark circles under their eyes...
...complex space station. American reconnaissance satellites have photographed two big new boosters on the launchpads at Tyuratam and new runways for the shuttle. A congressional study describes the Salyut missions as "the cornerstone of an official policy which looks not only toward permanent Soviet human presence in low earth orbit, but also toward permanent settlement of their people on the moon and Mars." The report warns: "The Soviets take quite seriously the possibility that large numbers of their citizens will one day live in space...