Word: orbits
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This is how a submarine-launched ballistic missile works: once airborne, the 60-ton missile travels out of the earth's atmosphere into sub-orbit, where it moves toward its target at a shade under 4 miles (6 km) a second. Approaching its destination, the tip of the missile splits into multiple, independently targeted warheads, each loaded with bombs up to 24 times more powerful than the Hiroshima blast, which re-enter the atmosphere in a spectacle that from the ground would resemble a meteor shower, before it resembled a thousand roaring suns...
With all that has been written about New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, few writers have been able to capture the essence of New Orleans as skillfully as Baum. Through exceptionally reported slices of life, Nine Lives reveals New Orleans as a vibrant, otherworldly land - a city in its own orbit. Beyond all the death, destruction and lives upended, one of the great jolts of the storm was that it forced a city that has always been somewhat out of step with the rest of American life to confront itself, in all its quirks and vulnerabilities. Baum's is a compassionate...
...anyone has a reason to be skittish about space debris, it's the people of Texas. It's in Houston, after all, that much of what we launch into orbit is monitored. And it's in rural Texas that much of the flaming wreckage of the shuttle Columbia landed in 2003. Sunday morning, it looked like Texas was in the path of danger again, when police received numerous reports of a sonic boom, a visible fireball and debris descending in various spots around the state. That debris, people figured, had to be space junk reentering from Tuesday's collision between...
...trouble comes when speed - or worse, the angle - of orbit changes. Things in higher orbits move more slowly than things in lower ones. A dead satellite or one that has lost gyroscopic control could go tumbling down to lower and lower orbits, colliding with objects moving at different speeds along the way. Similarly, the International Space Station and its three astronauts do, in theory, lie in the path of the debris created by Tuesday's collision, and while international space officials believe the danger to the crew is low, they do not rule...
True killer collisions occur not when spacecraft traveling in the same band or orbital plane bump each other but when there's a full-blown crash between two ships in different planes - say, between one ship in an orbit that carries it over the U.S. and Central Asia, and another in an orbit that carries it over Western Europe and Eastern Asia. That's what happened on Tuesday...