Word: orbits
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Eurodétente" regardless of the tensions between Moscow and Washington; yet they clearly could not maintain a business-as-usual approach in the face of another Soviet invasion, this one chillingly near by. Brezhnev and his Kremlin comrades would love to seduce the Europeans from Washington's orbit, and to maintain Communist rule in Poland merely by the posturings of force. But no one doubts that if necessary they will resort to its use, just as they did in Afghanistan last December and in Czechoslovakia twelve years...
...first the Soviets want to get Poland back into a steady orbit. With 35 million people, Poland is by far the largest satellite, "the 'India' of the Soviet empire," in Bialer's words. It is also strategically vital, the buffer and transportation link between the Soviet Union and East Germany, where 19 Soviet divisions guard the bloc's western flank. The Gdansk agreement, which created the independent unions last Aug. 31, has kept the Soviets in a state of intense anxiety -and for good reason. Solidarity overnight became a third major power center in Poland, along...
...born engineer who first proposed solar satellites twelve years ago. Foreseeing a day when oil would run out and other fossil fuels would become scarce, he suggested placing two giant arrays of solar cells, each about half the size of Manhattan, 22,300 miles above the earth in geosynchronous orbit; there the structures' orbital speed would match the planet's rotation, thus holding the solar powerhouses over the same spot on the ground. Bathed in almost perpetual sunshine, the cells, like those already used to power weather and communications satellites, would convert the sun's energy into...
...Looking like great Erector Sets, the structures, about six miles long and three miles wide, would be made of long thin beams actually manufactured in space out of rolls of aluminum or carbon-fiber strips about as thick as the wall of a beer can. In the weightlessness of orbit, nothing stronger would be needed...
...rugged planet, look at rocks with its TV eyes and dig up samples with its shovel. Engineers at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., now are working on a robot that will be able to take off from the space shuttle, reach an ailing satellite in orbit and repair it. The Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C., similarly, is building a robot that can be sent out aboard an unmanned submarine to find and repair crippled vessels undersea. Robots are already at work in the manufacture of tanks, aircraft, guns and ammunition...