Word: spaceship
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Deep space, far from stars or planets, is like the pond's smooth surface. An object becalmed in its emptiness floats like a galleon in the doldrums. If the object is a spaceship with propulsive power, it can cruise in any direction, meeting practically no resistance. But it must keep away from the whirlpools: the gravitational fields that surround stars and planets. If it plunges into one of them, it may end as a puff of gas in a star or a brief streak of fire in a planet's atmosphere...
Looking at it from the other end. a spaceship that starts its voyage on the surface of a planet has a hard time climbing out of its gravitational pit. Once it has reached untroubled space, it can coast for millions of miles on its unopposed momentum...
...around each other, are not alone in space. They also orbit around the sun, and so do the other planets. A gravity chart of the solar system shows an enormously deep pit, the sun's, with much smaller pits in its slope, one for each planet. When a spaceship has climbed out of the earth's gravitational pit, it is still deep in the sun's pit. This does not mean that it will fall into the sun. Besides the comparatively small speed contributed by its own engine, it also has the earth's speed...
Radio listeners, both professional and ham, sometimes hear signals that sound as if they came from a satellite. When they check, they find that no satellite was near them. Such signals need not originate in an unannounced Russian satellite or spaceship departing for Mars. According to Owen Garriott of Stanford University, they may come from a well-known satellite that is passing over an area on the other side of the earth, exactly opposite the listener's antenna...
...simplest maneuver for a sailing spaceship, says Dr. Cotter, will be escape from the earth. The satellite will be placed in an orbit in the plane of the earth's orbit around the sun (see diagram). After spreading its sail, the satellite will be designed to have a slow turning motion, rotating once during every two trips around the earth. When it is moving away from the sun, its sail will be at right angles to the sun's light, and it will get the maximum push in a forward direction. By the time it gets...