Word: orbiters
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Challenger, in a dramatic pyrotechnic display, lifted off from the moon's mountain-rimmed Taurus-Littrow valley. Two hours later, Cernan and Astronaut-Geologist Jack Schmitt reunited with Ron Evans, who was whirling overhead in America. Then, after two more days of observing the moon from the orbiting command ship, the astronauts fired themselves out of lunar orbit and began the three-day journey home. By week's end, the final U.S. expedition to the moon was headed for its scheduled splashdown this week in the South Pacific, 400 miles south of Samoa...
White-Hot Gas. The Mars expedition would make a twelve-day lunar-landing mission look like a Sunday excursion. If all could be in readiness by 1985, for example, the Mars astronauts would be blasted out of orbit on April 5, when the earth, Venus and Mars will be in ideal positions for the mission. Their craft would swing by Venus on Sept. 10, 1985, getting a valuable gravitational boost that would speed it to Mars by April 10, 1986. The expedition would depart from Mars on May 20 and arrive back in earth orbit...
...craft becomes disabled, the other can safely return all of the astronauts to earth. Unlike lunar missions, the journey will not begin directly from earth; that would require boosters too huge to be practical. Instead, the two cylindrical ships will be lofted piecemeal into earth orbit by Saturn-type boosters. There, the separate parts will be latched together. Finally, a space shuttle will bring up the astronauts as well as their fuel and supplies...
...Mars craft will come from an engine not yet developed, perhaps the proposed NERVA (for Nuclear Engine for Rocket Vehicle Applications). It consists of a small nuclear reactor that heats liquid hydrogen until it is expelled as a jet of white-hot gas. To kick out of earth orbit (which requires much less thrust than an earth launch), the 270-ft.-long ships will fire-and then discard-the two outboard NERVAs strapped to their sides; the main booster, at the center of the engine cluster, will be retained. Then, as the two ships pull away from earth orbit, they...
...satellite, dependent on Fifth Business for its orbit. Yet it is a good novel for all that-subtle, solid and funny. David Staunton, the main figure, is a successful Canadian criminal lawyer. The court in which he finds himself struggling at mid-career is not the legal kind, however, and he is not defense attorney but defendant. Staunton is a skilled professional, a rationalist, a cynic and a celibate whose pose in personal matters is to remain aloof. In reality, he lives in an increasingly overgrown clearing surrounded by an unexplored psychological jungle, whose advance he slows by drinking...