Word: apollos
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This crew flew into that anniversary and marked the moment on board. Mission chief Rick Husband called for a moment of silence. "They made the ultimate sacrifice, giving their lives to their country and mankind," he said of the astronauts of Challenger and Apollo 1, whose three astronauts died in a launch-pad fire in January 1967. "Their dedication was an inspiration to each of us." It would be cheaper and safer to explore space with cameras and computers rather than men and women. But something would be lost as well, something brave and passionate that was sent...
...tiles weren't responsible, the sheer turbulence of re-entry might have been. It's not for nothing that the first commander of a shuttle flight was Gemini and Apollo veteran John Young, widely respected as an iceman at the stick. If you're going to fly so tricky a ship, you have to be. "When you re-enter, you're moving at 25 times the speed of sound," says former astronaut Dr. Norm Thagard. Hitting the atmosphere at that velocity is "not unlike slamming into a brick wall, if you're not at the correct attitude...
...stubborn when it comes to space. Only 21 months after the Apollo 1 fire took the lives of three astronauts in 1967, NASA was flying again. The recovery time for the Challenger disaster was longer but still less than three years. Americans have suffered a lot of loss and hung a lot of crape since September of 2001, and war drums beating, they are likely to hang still more. Nations, like people, can sometimes grow too tired to be brave. At the same time, doing one thing--and doing it exceedingly well--can be a remarkable tonic. In the bright...
...steppes, a totalitarian state has mobilized all its technological wizardry (including, it is hinted, steroids) in order to claim not merely a world championship but the superiority of its system over that of the decadent West. Apolitical Rocky does not care. But his friend and sometime opponent Apollo Creed (Carl Weathers) does, and in an exhibition match (staged--plug, plug--at MGM's Las Vegas Grand), he is sadistically beaten to death by the Soviet. That, of course, gets the Italian Stallion up on his hind legs, pawing...
...shuttle program could be made self-supporting by launching as often as every two weeks. But in internal NASA memos that have leaked out, Chief Astronaut John Young charges that safety was sacrificed to "launch-schedule pressure." Young, 55, a highly respected veteran of shuttle or bits and Apollo moon flights, warned of an "awesome" list of safety problems, including a runway at Florida's Kennedy Space Center that is too short, too rough and subject to erratic weather. While gliding the 100-ton shuttle into Kennedy rather than onto the dry lake beds at Ed wards Air Force Base...