Word: orbiters
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...attempt to change all that, with a spacecraft that is almost entirely reusable. But a ship that must repeatedly fly back and forth between Earth and space takes an awful beating, requiring it to spend far more time in the shop being maintained than it ever did in orbit. What's more, the configuration of such a machine-with the rockets strapped directly to the sides of the crew vehicle-puts fuel, debris and humans in awfully close proximity. Fourteen people have died as a result of that lethal propinquity...
...them. A mammoth new heavy-lift cargo booster will be assembled out of two of the shuttle's solid rocket boosters and up to six of its liquid fuel main engines. This would be used to put an unmanned lunar lander and a small upper stage rocket into Earth orbit. A smaller booster, made of a single solid rocket and a single liquid-fueled engine, would then launch the four-person crew in the command module. The astronauts would dock with the lunar lander, light the upper-stage engine, and head out to the moon. Once there, all four...
...Just as important, there's a whiff of dithering around that 13-year time frame. It was in 1961 that President Kennedy challenged the U.S. to go to the moon; eight years later we were leaving footprints there-and that was before we'd even put a man in orbit. It shouldn't take so long to go back. A contemporary program with a 13-year deadline is precisely the kind of undertaking that can be frittered into nothing if future administrations lose the interest or the revenue to keep pursuing...
...letter sent last month to NASA Administrator Michael Griffin, former astronaut Rusty Schweickart, B612's chairman, called attention to the Apophis dilemma. He urged that a radio transponder, similar to those on commercial airliners, be landed on the asteroid so that astronomers might track its orbit precisely to determine if it will pass through a keyhole, and he requested that NASA quickly estimate the time required for both landing the transponder and a subsequent deflection mission that could alter the asteroid's orbit...
...there are still some reasons for concern. As it passes so close the asteroid, tugged by Earth's gravity, will change its orbital path. That could be very bad news. If the altered orbit results in Apophis passing through any of several "keyholes," specific regions of space only about 2,000 feet across, the asteroid would then return periodically to dangerously close encounters with Earth. Passage through the keyhole that astronomers think most likely to be the asteroid's target in 2029, for example, would bring it back to the near vicinity of Earth every seven years, beginning...