Word: solarized
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...manned program came an equal lack of enthusiasm for automated missions to explore the planets. In 1972, with help from the White House, Congress eliminated the "Grand Tour" project, which would have taken advantage of a rare (once every 180 years) planetary alignment to survey the entire outer solar system. Those missions that were approved often did not receive funding for complete analysis of the return data. Others--to map the moon and check it for metal deposits, to research solar phenomena, to rendezvous with Halley's Comet--never got past appropriations subcommittees...
Ironically, despite NASA'S concentration on solar research with Skylab, the agency's failure to anticipate the extent of sunspot activity during the vehicle's years in orbit contributed substantially to the craft's death. Russian scientists as well as America's own National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration had predicted considerable solar disturbances, including great magnetic storms and solar flares. When they erupted in 1977 and 1978, they warmed the gases in the earth's outer atmosphere, increasing the drag on Skylab. Never fully powered because of its lost solar wing and failing batteries, the craft began to slip ever...
...research experiments involving less than 200 Ibs. and measuring under 5 cu. ft. Two early takers: Film Makers Steven Spielberg and Michael Phillips (Close Encounters of the Third Kind) for a project that they are still keeping secret. Eventually the shuttle may be used for far bolder enterprises: assembling solar power satellites that can collect the sun's rays and beam that concentrated energy down to earth; erecting giant antennas that could revolutionize global communications; and putting together still other spaceships that can carry cargo and people to higher orbits, to the moon or beyond...
...have bequeathed the solar system to our children, not our great-grandchildren, and they will be duly thankful. At the very least, this gift will enable them to look back on such transient crises as energy and material shortages with amused incredulity...
...moon is only the offshore island of earth. We now know, thanks to our robot explorers, that the other children of the sun are more fantastic places than we had ever dreamed. The Voyager reconnaissance of Jupiter's giant moons has revealed what is virtually a whole new solar system of baffling complexity...