Word: astronautical
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...successful flight of the space shuttle Columbia did more than raise American spirits. It broke a Soviet monopoly. For nearly six years before Columbia 's mission, earth orbit had been an exclusive Soviet preserve. Not a single U.S. astronaut flew in space during that period, while Soviet cosmonauts set one orbital endurance mark after another, finally reaching 185 days, more than twice the duration of America's longest Skylab mission. Most of this time was spent aboard a single Soviet spacecraft, a remarkable 20-ton mobile home in the sky called Salyut...
...some years we have been led to believe that over-45 executives were heading for the scrap heap. It was a pleasure to see the magnificent control with which 50-year-old Astronaut John Young brought Columbia back to earth...
Jubilant giants, at that. "The shuttle will become the DC-3 of space," exulted veteran Astronaut Deke Slayton, boss of orbital flight-test crews, referring to the sturdy Douglas aircraft that opened new routes for commercial aviation in the mid-1930s. Columbia's maiden space voyage brought to mind the first flight of Orville and Wilbur Wright at Kitty Hawk, Lindbergh's lone-eagle crossing of the Atlantic, even the completion of the first transcontinental railroad in 1869, which would turn a land of remote frontiers into a nation. Princeton's prophet of space colonization, Physicist Gerard...
...Gagarin made the first manned space flight. But for Columbia's commander, John Young, 50, it was old hat. During the fiery, jolting liftoff, his pulse hardly climbed above 85 beats a minute; this was, after all, Young's fifth such journey, the most by any American astronaut. Allowed Young: "It shook a little sharper. The vibration was more than what we experienced in the simulator." But the rookie Crippen could barely contain his excitement-his pulse raced to 135-or find the right words to express his emotions. Looking out of Columbia's windows, he said...
...depends on computer memory and problem-solving skills. It carries six computers in all, four primary, plus a back-up and a spare. This electronic brainpower has total command of the ship, navigating it, controlling fuel consumption, firing its rocket engines and many small, jetlike thrusters. Even when an astronaut is operating the controls, as in the final plunge back through the atmosphere, he is in effect flying the computers rather than the ship itself. Whatever maneuver he calls for, it is the computers that turn the commands from the cockpit into specific instructions for the flight machinery. Says Young...