Quotes About Orbit

I may have spent long enough in your orbit to have absorbed your ferocious conviction that a happy family cannot be a mere myth or that even if it is, better to die trying for the fine if unattainable than sulking in passive, cynical resignation that hell is other people you're related to.

The sun and its retinue of planets drift as a group through the vast gulfs of space that separate the stars.

I'm urging NASA to foster the development of what I call 'runway landers.' No, that's not the name of a high stakes gambler from Vegas. It's a type of spacecraft that flies to orbit like the retiring Shuttles but then glides to a landing like an airplane on a runway. Just like the Shuttles do.

After assembly complete, when we have a larger crew on orbit, a more complex vehicle, more laboratories and more robot arms, maybe we'll have room for specialists. But right now we don't.

In addition to the vehicles currently known, the holy grail of commercial spaceflight remains a single-stage-to-orbit (SSTO) reusable spaceplane.

Changing the asteroid's velocity changes the time when the asteroid crosses Earth's orbit. After all, just because it crosses Earth's path doesn't mean there is necessarily going to be a collision. It has to cross Earth's path when the Earth is right there.

Venus and Mars are our next of kin: they are the two most Earth-like planets that we know about. They're the only two other very Earth-like planets in our solar system, meaning they orbit close to the sun; they have rocky surfaces and thin atmospheres.

The length of the blackout was not absolutely fixed. If all went well, it would last about thirty-five minutes—a bit longer if the engine fired successfully and the ship slowed to 3,700 miles per hour and settled into orbit, a bit shorter if the engine failed to fire and the ship continued to speed along at 5,800 miles per hour. If something worse happened, the radio silence would last forever.

Astronauts have been stuck in low-Earth orbit, boldly going nowhere. American attempts to kick-start a new phase of lunar exploration have stalled amid the realisation that NASA's budget is too small for the job.

Meanwhile, the night orbits in peace, graceful, lovely, having slipped her moorings, leaving the space unmarked, able to orbit, to curve firmly, until she sinks into the sweet clarity now pearling, the cushion of grasses where she will fall, gleaming from mysterious strokings, polished, glittering, mistress of surfaces.

There is a sunrise or a sunset from space every 92 minutes so there is an incredible amount of beauty to see from up there.

You know, Scooter's going to do the first separation burn; I'm going to do the second separation burn.

If we do not require a calendar to be geared to a tropical year (earth's orbit), but only that it be geared to some part of the celestial clock, then the Maya calendar was more accurate than the Julian calendar, more accurate than the Babylonian (solar-lunar) calendar; it intermeshed the gear wheels of Sun, Moon and Venus, and was based on a more accurate gear ratio than the other calendars, repeating itself only once in 52 years.

You're kidding me! Vice Admiral Horth told her com screen. The hell I am. There was just over a one-second transmission delay each way between Soissons Orbit One and Jefferson Field, and Admiral Marat's expression was less humorous even than the weapons fire in Horth's plot when he replied two seconds later. We've got a rogue drop commando in an alpha-synth, Becky, and she's boosting out of here like a bat out of hell.

Point-to-point transit via low orbit could dramatically speed up international flights, connecting the world even further. And safe, consistent space travel opens up the possibility of commercial space stations, trips to the moon and exploration beyond.

The sun does what it does because the earth tilts.

In October, 1957, Russia electrified the world with her first Sputnik. Built on plans stolen from the United States after World War II, Sputnik I, with a payload weighing 184 pounds, was successfully launched into orbit October 4th.

To the celestial Rose, who drew me into her lovely orbit. With love and gratitude, Theo.

If you can orbit the planet, why can't you see what makes the human heart happy? Is it art or is it sex? Or is it, as I suspect, just keeping going from next thing to next thing to next thing to next thing to next to next to next to next pulsating stupidly to outlast time?

The orbit of every planet is an ellipse with the sun at one of the two foci.

Once you are in the orbit of your destiny, weightlessness is the only result.

A fragile thing, brittle-looking, an objet d' art, round and perfect: but for how long? From far enough out in orbit, one has no doubt that one could drop the Earth on the floor of night and break it. An urge arises to step softly, to speak quietly, so as to keep whoever might be carrying the pretty toy from being startled and fumbling it.

Her tiny piping voice bounced down to be from a hollow ball in geosynchronous orbit.

Sure, we sparkled and glittered and flew through the world, but it was only an illusion of flight. We were trapped in the orbit of a man who was no longer truly there.