Word: rocketeers
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...military bases and climb into orbit to search for enemy targets. Though the military helped persuade Congress to fund the space shuttle, the Pentagon is lukewarm about the shuttle's civilian uses. Military planners would prefer that Congress use the funds to build a new generation of heavy rocket boosters. The Pentagon's arguments include the usual one: the Soviets are already doing...
...commercial future of the U.S. space program, ominously successful. Ariane V 11, the latest effort of the eleven-nation European Space Agency, rose from the space center at Kourou in the equatorial jungles of French Guiana to an orbit of 22,300 miles above the equator. There the rocket deposited two communications satellites. One of them, like many of Ariane's payloads, was sponsored by an international communications agency. The other satellite, however, was Spacenet 2, the second device that Ariane has carried into orbit for a U.S. customer, in this case General Telephone and Electronics Corp. With...
...selling point for Ariane is its reliability. The Europeans have a string of six successful launches since June 1983. NASA, by contrast, has had some problems on all of its 14 space-shuttle missions. That discrepancy, say Arianespace executives, has done more than, enhance the European rocket's reputation: it has caused insurance companies to lower their rates for Ariane flights and raise them for space-shuttle missions. Insurers have good reason for valuing reliability. The industry paid Indonesia and the Western Union Co., original owners of the two errant satellites recovered last week by Discovery, a total...
Prices aside, Ariane has an edge over the space shuttle in doing certain kinds of work. A conventional three-stage rocket, Ariane can put its satellites into what scientists call geosynchronous orbit, 22,300 miles above the earth. The shuttle, by contrast, is designed to take payloads to near earth orbit, between 150 and 700 miles. Ariane's launch site on the equator means that a gentler trajectory, and consequently less fuel, is required to boost a payload into stationary orbit. In addition, satellites positioned farther from earth, where there are fewer molecules to cause friction, tend to last...
Arthur Rudolph was one of 118 top German scientists, including his longtime friend Wernher von Braun, who were secretly brought to the U.S. at the end of World War II. Later made manager of the Saturn V project in Huntsville, Ala., he led the development of the rocket that first took men to the moon. An American citizen since 1954, Rudolph was honored by NASA in 1969 with its most prestigious award, the Distinguished Service Medal...