Word: orbits
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...balls fly from his body: Mogwai in fetal form. Gizmo's mutant offspring look and act like Munchkins reborn as Hell's Angels. They have disgraceful eating habits; they turn the greeting-card village into a South Bronx shambles, then send old Mrs. Deagle into fatal orbit...
...early warning against aerial attacks, estimates that some 3,800 pieces of junk are currently circling the earth.* Total weight of this space-age garbage: six tons. Two-thirds of the nuts, bolts, oxygen cylinders, broken solar panels, dead satellites, spent rocket boosters and other litter is in geosynchronous orbit 22,300 miles from the earth's surface, where it will remain indefinitely. One-third of the circling scrap is in low earth orbit, only 120 to 300 miles overhead...
Objects in low earth orbit circle freely until the slow wear of molecular friction and the force of gravity cause them to re-enter the earth's atmosphere at a blazing 18,000 m.p.h. and subsequently burn up. That was the fate of the first man-made satellite, the 184-lb. Soviet Sputnik 1, which incinerated in the heat of re-entry three months after its historic launching...
Since then 9,695 man-made objects have fallen from orbit, but the number that survived the atmospheric plunge to hit the earth is unknown. Shards have landed on more than a dozen nations, including Zambia, Finland and Nepal. As early as 1961, Premier Fidel Castro indignantly charged that a re-entering chunk of a U.S. spacecraft had struck and killed a Cuban cow. A year later, a 21-lb. metal cylinder landed at the intersection of North 8th and Park streets in Manitowoc, Wis. The debris was later identified by the U.S. Air Force as a fragment of Soviet...
...last February's mission, to retrieve the crippled Max. His untethered ride seemed agonizingly slow. It took him 10 min. to traverse the 200 ft. from the open cargo bay across the reach of black vacuum. The short journey was historic: an unleashed spaceman going to work in orbit...