Word: orbitals
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...Soviet space scientists were far more concerned with what they sent up than with what came down. Now success has forced them to equalize their interest. The North American Air Defense Command, which is responsible for tracking earth-circling traffic, counts more than 1,300 objects in orbit. These have included not only satellites but last-stage boosters, drifting bolts, and an astronaut's glove and camera. By the immutable laws of gravity, all must one day come plunging down toward earth...
...sprawling size, which isolates branch offices and gives any getaway car 1,000 escape routes, it is No. 1 in bank robberies. Because of its proximity to Mexico, it is the marijuana capital of the world. The L.A.P.D. seized 21 tons of grass last year, enough to orbit a good-size army. Because of its balmy climate, it has, notes the chief, a "twelvemonth crime culture...
Convenient Whipping Boy. Feeling somewhat besieged, policemen not only work together but spend their off-duty time together, and police families often have little social life outside the police-family orbit. "Other people generally don't like police," explains Christos Kasaras, a patrolman on Manhattan's West Side. The result is a kind of inbreed ing that tends to make police the victims of their own stereotypes...
Some time this week, the newest NASA satellite is scheduled to perform a complex series of operations in orbit. If all goes well, Radio Astronomy Explorer-A will unreel a collection of booms and antenna until it turns into a veritable space spider, with two pairs of appendages reaching 1,500 ft. from tip to tip-a distance greater than the height of the Empire State Building (which is 1,472 ft.). With those great legs foraging for information, RAE-A will act as a flying radio telescope capable of monitoring signals that even the largest earth-bound installations cannot...
...from the Goddard Space Flight Center at Greenbelt, Md. NASA scientists there had to perform a series of intricate maneuvers before they could call for the unreeling of the satellite's four main antennas. First they had to nudge the 417-Ib. satellite into a circular, near-polar orbit about 3,640 miles above the earth with precisely timed bursts of a small rocket called an apogee-kick motor. Tho operation evened out the varying gravitational tugs of the original elliptical orbit, which would have bent and distorted the antennas. Next, RAE-A's masters had to stop...