Word: astronautical
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...winning his Air Force wings in 1966, he logged more than 6,500 hours of flying time in 45 types of aircraft, ranging from the experimental X-24B to a Boeing 747 jumbo jet to the Caribou C-7 he flew on combat missions in Viet Nam. Scobee entered astronaut training in 1978 and helped fly the 747 that carried the shuttle spacecraft between ground stations. As pilot of Challenger in 1984, he guided the spacecraft so that fellow crew members could retrieve a broken Solar Max satellite, which was repaired on board and later placed back into orbit...
Scobee carried his fascination with flying to his home in suburban Houston, where he lived with his wife June and their two children. He and Astronaut James van Hoften built a two-seat, open-cockpit Starduster plane and flew it cross-country. The craft, made of wood and fabric, had no radio. Reflecting on this convergence of his work and leisure pursuits, Scobee once observed, "You know, it's a real crime to be paid for a job that I have so much fun doing." For all his accomplishments in the skies, however, Scobee was scrupulously modest. "He just wasn...
Jarvis approached his career as an astronaut, and life generally, with that same comfortable equanimity. Selected as a shuttle crew member in 1984, he was supposed to make his first flight on Discovery last April but was dropped to make way for Republican Senator Jake Garn of Utah. Rescheduled to fly on Columbia last month, Jarvis was again disappointed when he was bumped in favor of Florida Democratic Congressman Bill Nelson...
Grissom, the second American in space, White, who made the first U.S. space walk, and Chaffee, a rookie astronaut, had been scheduled to run through a simulated Apollo launch. Suited up, they clambered into the gleaming steel cone 218 ft. above Pad 34 and hooked themselves up to life-support systems. Technicians sealed the airtight double hatch plates and pumped pure oxygen into the little chamber. The test countdown had proceeded for several hours when suddenly, over their radio link to the spacecraft, controllers heard the cry "Fire aboard the spacecraft!" followed by movements, more shouts and a sharp scream...
...first woman in space, or even the first American woman. Those honors went to the Soviet Union's Valentina Tereshkova (1963) and America's Sally Ride (1983). But Judith ("J.R.") Resnik may have been the most doggedly determined astronaut, male or female, ever to suit up. "I want to do everything there is to be done," she once said, and she came close to her goal. A gourmet cook and classical pianist ("I never play anything softly") with a Ph.D. in electrical engineering, she was working on a pilot's license before she died...