Take the Apollo program: No human has been beyond the orbit of the Earth since the Nixon administration.
The images from the Hubble, which has a clear view of the cosmos from its orbit above the Earth's turbulent atmosphere, will enable astronomers to gain a better understanding of black holes and the effect they have on material captured in their gravitational trap.
Similarly in 1992 the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (NAS) put forward the idea of launching 55, 000 "solar sails" into orbit around the Earth, each with an area of 100 square kilometers, the sails collectively producing the same effect as Early's single glass panel.
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Then in 1945 he published a paper proposing the concept of space stations which would orbit the Earth and be able to act as transmitters of radio waves.
Fellow tracker Ted Molczan from Toronto, Canada, has been trying to determine the precise orbit of Phobos-Grunt around the Earth, and thought on Friday he had seen the craft rise slightly.
Cremated human remains were placed in the second stage of the Falcon and will orbit the Earth.
The STARSHINE (Student Atmospheric Research Satellite for Heuristic International Networking Equipment) will orbit the Earth through the end of the year.
Apple ( AAPL) is in this model, doing just fine trading in the orbit of Planet Earth worth about a half a trillion dollars.
But there is a way to counter the increasing brightness of the Sun, the scientists believe - just increase the radius of the Earth's orbit!
"We need to get NASA out of the business of getting crew" to low-earth orbit, she told The Wall Street Journal at the time.
Yeomans and colleagues are using telescopes on the ground and in space to nail down the precise orbit of objects that might threaten Earth and predict whether the planet could be hit.
It was only half a century later, as the consequences of pushing the earth out into plebeian orbit dawned on the priests, that it became too hot to handle, or even touch.
It holds that the Moon formed from the debris kicked into orbit by the collision of a smaller proto-planet with the infant Earth.
The perigee of its elliptical orbit (the closest point it comes to Earth) has actually risen slightly, and is just above 200km.
And after the Soviet launch of Sputnik, the first artificial satellite to orbit the Earth, the United States went about winning the Space Race by investing in science and technology, leading not only to small steps on the moon but also to tremendous economic benefits here on Earth.
The risks and burdens of developing transport to low Earth orbit will thus fall to the private sector.
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Which is why Mr Robinson and others believe that the picosats currently in orbit around the earth will be the shape, and size, of things to come.
In previous missions in Earth orbit, you lost a lot of the mission time because you could not observe when the Earth itself was shining in the telescope.
However, since Ares I is capable only of reaching low Earth orbit and the space station is the only habitable thing in low Earth orbit, Ares I by itself would be a road to nowhere.
Just as with Apollo, any modern venture would need some kind of CSM element for the astronauts, together with a departure stage - a propulsion unit that could accelerate the astronauts' vehicle out of low-Earth orbit, putting it on a path to the Moon.
In October 1957 the Soviets managed to hoist a 184-pound hunk of metal with a radio transmitter into orbit around the Earth.
"This will be one step in the long road to human expansion off of the planet into low-Earth orbit and beyond, " NASA astronaut Donald Pettit, one of Burbank's crewmates aboard the station, said Friday.
Its most striking feature is to delegate the humdrum task of ferrying people and equipment to low-Earth orbit to the private sector.
At about the same time, a team of professional astronomers was pulling off a similar trick for a planet the size of Jupiter in orbit around a star 32m times farther from Earth than the sun.
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Among its other discoveries, in 2011 Wise spotted in a "Trojan" asteroid ahead of the Earth in its orbit.
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Newton was able to go from the behaviour of bodies falling to Earth to the mechanism that holds planets in orbit.
The commercial efforts to low Earth orbit, which SpaceX achieved, are only a piece of the U.S. space program.
Nasa's new Space Launch System (SLS) is a multi-billion-dollar venture to take humans beyond the International Space Station (ISS) and the confines of low-Earth orbit.
While we applaud the work that has been accomplished by the private spaceflight industry, such programs are focused exclusively on developing systems for access to low Earth orbit following the 2011 retirement of the Space Shuttle.
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The other way of doing things is for the company to retrieve smaller asteroids, put them into orbit around Earth or the moon, and then dissect them at its leisure.
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