Word: astronauts
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...troubled space shuttle will get some up-close care tomorrow when astronaut Stephen Robinson ventures outside to trim what?s known as gap filler protruding from tiles at the nose of the ship. The procedure is a straightforward one, but it?s not without risks. What you need to know to follow the operation...
...astronauts, busy monitoring their deceleration, temperature, hydraulics and more, didn't have much time to watch the light show play out, and by the time the glow brightened from faint pink to bright pink to plasma white, the ship had arced around the planet into thick air and daylight. "It all happens so smoothly ... you hardly notice it," says retired astronaut Henry Hartsfield Jr., who piloted Columbia in the early 1980s...
Others are asking why, if a piece of foam was known to have hit the ship, an astronaut wasn't sent outside during the course of the 16-day mission to determine whether any damage had been done. Dittemore explains that this crew was not trained for that kind of extensive space walk, and even if they were and they found some damage, they could have done nothing about it anyway. "We had no capability to go over the side or under the spacecraft and look for an area of distress and repair a tile," he says...
...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...
...time the ship disintegrated. The idea that an explosive could have been smuggled aboard got no serious attention. It would be almost impossible for even the most committed terrorist to breach NASA security, all the more so with the heightened protection thrown up around a ship carrying an Israeli astronaut celebrated for having participated in the attack on Iraq's nuclear reactor...