Word: payloads
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...less intriguing but so far less precise are the shuttle's commercial possibilities. It is a working truck with a 65,000-lb. payload, but who is going to buy space in it? Communications companies, for one, are already lined up to use the shuttle for satellite launches. One advantage is price: $35 million for a shuttle launch vs. $48 million for a boost into space from a conventional Atlas-Centaur rocket. Another is that the shuttle can carry several satellites at a time. What is more, says A T & T 's Robert Latter, "you can test...
...early as next year, during the shuttle's scheduled fourth flight, it will carry an experimental military payload in its cargo bay: infra-red and laser tracking devices designed to guide future shuttle pilots to orbiting satellites for repair or retrieval-or perhaps for destruction. The experiment's disclosure has already brought a pained outcry from the Kremlin. Though the Soviets are actively experimenting with military lasers, they charge that the U.S. is planning to introduce laser weaponry into space...
...many future flights the shuttle's payload will carry a small laboratory called Spacelab to house Morre-ede's experiments as well as others in biology, physics, and astrophysics...
...exploding chemicals, can exceed these sonic limits because the combustion takes place in the projectile itself. But rockets also operate under handicaps. So large are the fuel requirements for reaching orbital speed of 8 km (5 miles) per sec. that no one has yet been able to place a payload into orbit totaling more than 1% of the weight of the vehicle on the ground...
They admit that their brainstorm has some shortcomings. Because of the shuttle's small payload, only the most hazardous fission byproducts could be considered for launch. They would also require almost foolproof packaging-probably a hardened mix of metals and ceramic encased in stainless steel spheres. As a precaution against a crash during lift-off or in the early stages of the journey, the spheres would be carried in an aerodynamically shaped container with heat shielding. That would enable them to survive a fiery plunge back into the atmosphere without spreading radioactive debris round the earth...