Sputnik, e.g

Usage examples of orbiter.

Frictional heating surrounded the racing orbiter with a blaze of ionized gases.

The orbiter was entering the atmosphere more steeply after the correction, instead of less steeply.

Wilmer and Jenny and facing away from the front of the orbiter, felt a new wave of uncertainty rising within her.

Normally the weather reports for a returning orbiter were provided by ground control, with access to metsat and to ground radar data.

By her side the orbiter was nose-down and buried deep in a bank of snow that had damped the force of its collison.

Even orbiter specialists expected a runway twice as long and wide as this one.

The chips in that orbiter were a long way from Earth when the pulse hit.

We had to adapt an orbiter using our own equipment and programs, and this was the only landing site that we could reach.

In the great orbiter mission to Mars in 1971 there had been no attempt to land on the planet itself, and since the Mariner remained aloft, taking from a distance those remarkable photographs which delighted the scientific world, there was no worry about safe landing sites.

Carl Sagan and Hal Mazursky, the superbrain, bit their lips, and white-haired Jim Martin crossed his fingers and gave the signal to detach the small lander from the bigger orbiter which had brought it safely across so many millions of miles.

Seconds before, Endeavour had reached Max Q, the point during launch of greatest aerodynamic stress, when the orbiter, thrusting against the resistance of the atmosphere, begins to violently vibrate.

Then Kittredge would pitch the orbiter around to a heads-up attitude, pointing back toward the launch site.

Now she felt the dizzying spin as the orbiter began its pitcharound maneuver, rolling tail over nose.

The orbiter was flying free now, a fat and awkward bird gliding homeward.

They were in radio blackout, twelve long minutes of silence when the friction of reentry ionizes the air around the orbiter, cutting off all communications.