Word: airing
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...depend on the men who put Skylab into space to find the best means of bringing it back to earth with minimal risk to human life. The first priority was to track Skylab's decaying orbit as precisely as possible. That is the job of the North American Air Defense Command, whose joint U.S.-Canadian computers deep within a pink granite mountain near Colorado Springs, Colo., continuously monitor the movements of 4,506 hunks of space garbage now orbiting the earth...
...assembled "go teams" consisting of NASA experts, Defense Department engineers, Red Cross aides, State Department diplomats and Justice Department lawyers?all on alert to be flown by the Air Force to any nation seeking help. China has already agreed to receive such a team if Skylab wreaks havoc there. The Russians, on the other hand, have rejected the offer. "We are responsible at law; there is no question about that," concedes one NASA lawyer...
...mechanical failures never envisioned by its builders had nearly caused the meltdown of a nuclear reactor at Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island. The mysterious cracks emerging in engine mountings of the DC-10 jumbo jets had led to the grounding of the fleet and America's most tragic air disaster. Now a giant spacecraft, crippled at birth six years ago, is plunging toward a premature end which its creators have no way to prevent...
...intention of letting Apollo 11's birthday pass unnoticed. In Washington, Armstrong, Aldrin and their stay-in-orbit partner Michael Collins will be reunited for a round of ceremonies, capped by a replay of the original moon walk late at night at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum. In Texas another old Apollo hand, Christopher Kraft, the director of the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center, will preside at space-day ceremonies; he will open a temporary post office to cancel space-commemorative stamps for philatelists. At the Kennedy Space Center, a giant...
...silica foam tiles to the orbiter's outer skin. These shield it from the blazing temperatures (nearly 3,000° F) that the ship will encounter when it re-enters the atmosphere and glides to a landing at either the Kennedy Space Center or Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. A more serious difficulty: ironing the bugs out of the shuttle's main rocket engine, which has failed to perform up to specifications and blew up at least once during ground testing. NASA Administrator Robert Frosch has told Congress that this obstacle should soon be overcome...