Word: planetful
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...scientists belatedly revealed that the unmanned space probe Venera 7, which reached Venus on Dec. 15, had survived its descent through the murky Venusian atmosphere and continued to function after landing. Its radio transmissions carried the first scientific data to be transmitted to earth from the surface of another planet...
...that Kennedy's promise to "pay any price, bear any burden . . . to assure the survival and success of liberty" appears, in retrospect, to have been the summons to Viet Nam. His subsequent promise to put man on the moon seems to many today an empty goal on a planet festering with pollution...
Most scientists have attributed the peculiar spin of Venus to huge tidal bulges created long ago on the surface of the planet by the sun's gravitational field. Such bulges would have acted like brake shoes on the rim of a flywheel; eventually they could have slowed the planet's rotation and perhaps even reversed it. Singer, the Interior Department's deputy assistant secretary for scientific programs, considers this explanation totally inadequate. The solar tidal effect, he says in Science, would have been far too small to account for even Venus' current rate of rotation, only...
Initially, the momentum of the errant moon would have carried it beyond Venus. Then, as Venusian gravity pulled it back, it would have again sped by the planet-but this time not so far out into space. Eventually, as the tidal forces between the two bodies increased during this strange celestial courtship, the moon would have been drawn into an increasingly smaller orbit around the planet. At the same time, Venus' spin would have been greatly retarded and eventually reversed; the planet's surface would also have become searingly hot from the friction of the tidal movements...
...Sammler's Planet, by Saul Bellow. A highly intelligent example of a rare form, the philosophical novel...