Word: spacecrafts
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Explorer I originally achieved an orbit that ranged from 219 to 1587 miles above the earth's surface. But as a result of friction with the atmosphere--extremely thin at those heights--the spacecraft's altitude slowly dropped. When a satellite's speed decreases from orbit to orbit, it cannot counterbalance the earth's gravitational field and slowly loses altitude...
...articles, speeches and informal discussions with other scientists, he has advocated the early start of a program to send manned spacecraft past nearby planets. He has theorized that life may have once begun to develop on the moon and has suggested that it might be worthwhile to seize one of the moonlets of Mars and fly it back into earth orbit...
Singer concedes that Phobos and Deimos could be explored by visiting spacecraft. But if little Deimos, only five miles in diameter, could be brought into earth orbit, it could be investigated more thoroughly. The technology of the interplanetary move, which would be man's first rearrangement of the solar system, would be simple, Singer says. An efficient, low-thrust nuclear engine capable of firing for long periods of time could be set up on Deimos to push the moonlet out of its orbit and start it curving toward the earth. The cost would be high, says Singer...
...NASA's name ban is apparently being subverted. Without the knowledge of NASA headquarters in Washington, astronauts and technicians training for the forthcoming Apollo 9 mission (Feb. 28) began substituting descriptive nicknames for the unwieldy jargon prescribed for their spacecraft. The command and service modules-the joined conical and cylindrical-shaped units that constitute the Apollo spacecraft-were collectively dubbed Gumdrop. The ungainly, four-legged lunar module was appropriately renamed Spider. The nicknames have been used so consistently during more than a month of simulator practice that NASA may well be forced to avoid the confusion and inconvenience...
...tachyons are some day found-and somehow harnessed-Feinberg's dreamed-of trip to the distant stars may yet be possible. The Einstein barrier to higher speeds would still be unbreakable by man and his spacecraft, but with their unbelievable speeds, the particles could serve to accelerate men closer to the velocity of light...