Word: astronautical
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...exploded on lift-off. No one cared, except the insurance companies that covered the payload, because there was no crew aboard. NASA's insistence on sending a crew on every shuttle flight means risking precious human life for mindless tasks that automated devices can easily carry out. Did Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon really have to be there to push a couple of buttons on the Mediterranean Israeli Dust Experiment, the payload package he died to accompany to space...
Shuttle missions are always a mix of symbol and substance; the Challenger had the schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe; Columbia had Ilan Ramon, the first Israeli astronaut and a decorated F16 pilot, whose mother and grandmother were Auschwitz survivors. He hoped that his adventure would be a happy respite from a hard winter for his embattled country: Israel could travel with him, to feel safe in a borderless universe. Even a Palestinian Authority spokesman had wished for his safe return. "We flew over Jerusalem," he said in an interview from space. "Israel looked so small and beautiful." He had asked Prime Minister...
...were adventurers long before they became astronauts. Before Kalpana Chawla was born, her mother had been hoping for a son. "But out came Kalpana," her mother told the Week magazine in India, "who has achieved more than a boy could." Kalpana decided she wanted to be a space engineer by the time she was 14 and was the only woman to study aeronautics at Punjab Engineering College. Still, the idea of going to America was a shock to the members of her traditional family, and they agreed only on the grounds that her brother Sanjay would come with...
...space shuttle Columbia ever heard was Scotland the Brave by the 51st Highland Brigade. That was the wake-up song beamed up by NASA on the morning the ship was supposed to return to earth. The day before it had been Shalom Lach Eretz Nehederet, for Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon. Thursday morning it had been John Lennon's Imagine. Scotland the Brave was for mission specialist Laurel Clark, Scottish by extraction...
...schedule, got a weather report and recalled that he had left his fur hat at Camp David. He had learned a bit about Iceland, he noted, from Tom Clancy's novel Red Storm Rising, which vividly depicts the island's crucial importance to NATO. He also remembered an astronaut's saying that the moon was nicer than training in Iceland...