Word: orbits
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Vandenberg Air Force Base was chosen as a shuttle facility because it offers ideal conditions for launching spacecraft into polar orbit. Shuttles lifting off from Kennedy Space Center in Florida enter a more or less equatorial orbit and fly over only part of the earth's surface. Spacecraft sent from Vandenberg into polar orbit will slice across the earth's twirling path and pass over a slightly different strip of the globe on each swing. Satellites placed in polar orbit have the capability of photographing any section of the earth. This gives them an intelligence-gathering potential significantly...
...prospect of seeing a real live network anchor on Iowa soil all that great. One of the boys at Toad's slipped in the ultimate putdown: "Watching an anchorman is like watching an astronaut in orbit: they are both weightless...
...unprecedented hue and cry. The Soviet Union was accused of all imaginable sins: an ambition to make a breakthrough to the warm seas, an intention to pocket foreign oil, etc. The actual reason for that campaign of slander was the collapse of the plans to draw Afghanistan into the orbit of imperialist politics and to create a threat to our country from the south. Now life in Afghanistan is gradually returning to normal...
...have been, they could not entirely erase the gloom cast over the mission by the loss of two sophisticated communications satellites. At week's end, NASA still could not explain why Western Union's Westar VI and Indonesia's Palapa-B2 had failed to achieve orbit, except to say that their rocket motors had apparently shut down prematurely before completing their scheduled 85-sec. "burns." The prime suspects are the bell-shaped nozzles from which the boosters' flaming gases are expelled. McDonnell Douglas, builder of the rockets, is assembling a board of inquiry to look into...
NASA also has its eyes on another first. If winds and weather are fair in Florida at the end of Challenger's seventh day in orbit - and the problem of Palapa has been resolved - the winged spacecraft will land on the Kennedy Space Center's three-mile-long shuttle runway rather than on the hard-packed sands of California's Edwards Air Force Base. Such a feat would not only go a long way toward proving the shuttle's versatility but also save NASA at least $1 million a mission, the cost of piggybacking the orbiter...