Mar 2 1993
From The Space Library
Retired Admiral Thomas H. Moorer, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, writing in the Washington Times, suggested that using a floating, or "Hydra," launch system would massively lower the cost of space launches for commercial concerns and break the current space launch bottle-neck. Commercial launches now can be preempted by government launches. He noted that the Soviet Navy had used the Hydra technique to launch its nuclear armed ballistic missiles from submarines for more than 25 years. (W Times, Mar 2/93)
French scientists, led by Dr. Jacques Laskar of the Bureau des Longitudes in Paris, writing in the journal Nature, and Dr. Jack Wisdom, an astronomer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, writing in the journal Science, described the implications of chaos in the solar system. New computer simulations have revealed that over great spans of time, small gravitational disturbances from neighboring planets, combined with their own wobbly rotations, can cause significant fluctuations in the orbits and orientations of the planets, leading to, for example, great temperature fluctuations. Mars, for example, is still undergoing great variations. According to scientists, Earth may he spared such variations because of the stabilizing influence of the Moon, the only large satellite in the inner solar system. (NY Times, Mar 2/93; Time, Mar 8/93)
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