Word: astronaut
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...adding miniaturized electronics and wideband communications, says Electrical Engineeer William Bradley, the pilot can be taken out of his cockpit, the driver out of his truck. The distance between them and their work can be extended across a continent. Eventually, Bradley told the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, a more sophisticated form of telefactoring may replace human beings on many space flights-without replacing the judgments and actions that are now possible only if an astronaut is on board...
Robot in Space. In Bradley's system, a ground-based astronaut would strap himself into a control harness or frame that would be a virtual duplicate of a telefactor aboard an orbiting spacecraft (see diagram). Should the astronaut want to adjust a cabin control, for example, he would reach his arm toward a knob on a duplicate of the spacecraft's instrument panel. His every motion would be translated into electronic signals and transmitted to the telefactor in orbit. Servomechanisms on the telefactor would move its arm toward the actual spacecraft control panel. Feedback devices on the telefactor...
White was as honed for space as any astronaut could hope to be. The son of a retired Air Force major general, he once recalled that his father took him on his first airplane ride when he "was barely old enough to strap on a parachute," let him take the controls as soon as they were airborne. White naturally gravitated to West Point, graduated in 1952, earned a master of science degree in aeronautical engineering at the University of Michigan, became a jet pilot. He married a petite blonde he met on a West Point football weekend; they...
Roger Chaffee, the rookie of the Apollo team, joined the Navy after his graduation (aeronautical engineering) from Purdue in 1957, logged more than 1,800 hours flying time in jets before becoming an astronaut in 1963. During training for the Apollo mission, the boyishly handsome Chaffee came to be especially close to Grissom, at times even seemed to ape some of Gus's mannerisms. Though he prudently stayed in the shadow of his more experienced crewmates, Chaffee shared their burning ambition to land on the moon; in the den of his Houston home hangs a map of the lunar...
...came to be. The biologist wants to know if there are any vestiges of existence there that might solve the riddle of what life really is. The astronomer hopes that a definitive look at the moon could help unlock the secret of how the solar system was formed. The astronaut wants to go because it is there...