Word: boosterous
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...would put the Russians firmly back into the space race. Spy-in-the-sky satellites had actually photographed the monster rocket on its launch pad, and former NASA Administrator James Webb had spoken of its existence. But last summer, according to U.S. intelligence sources, a prototype of the giant booster exploded on the launch pad at the Tyuratum space complex in Central Asia, killing a number of technicians...
...rest of the Soviet space effort has not gone as smoothly as Soyuz. U.S. officials, for example, are still awaiting the first successful flight of Russia's Nova-class booster, which is supposed to be nearly twice as powerful as Saturn 5 with its 75 million Ibs. of thrust; Nova's glitches, in fact, may well have cost the Russians the race to the moon. And there is no doubt that they find the loss embarrassing. Musing over the meaning of the Soyuz flights last week, a young Muscovite commented somewhat wistfully: "It's not much compared...
Riding atop a thundering Saturn 5 booster, the Apollo 12 astronauts will use a rocketry system virtually identical to the one that propelled Apollo 11. Yet their nautically named command ship, Yankee Clipper, will blaze its own distinctive path. Halfway to the moon, Apollo 12 Skipper Charles ("Pete") Conrad, 39, a veteran of two earth-girdling Gemini flights, will fire the spacecraft's service propulsion engine, jolting the ship out of its "free-return" trajectory. No longer able to loop the moon automatically and return to earth, should its engine falter, Apollo 12 could be lost forever...
Moments before Apollo 11 's booster lifted off from Cape Kennedy last July, Spiro Agnew declared that the nation's next major space goal should be a manned landing on Mars by the end of the century. Critics immediately retorted that the Vice President's extraterrestrial ambitions were outrunning the nation's means. Last week the President's task group on post-Apollo space objectives -which Agnew happens to head-made its chairman sound uncharacteristically cautious. It said that the U.S. could send men to Mars in the mid-1980s for not much more than...
Whenever the landing, the Mars expedition will be vastly different from the voyages to the moon. Unlike Apollo's nonreturn booster and lunar module, the vehicles that take men to Mars will be used on many voyages. "When a vehicle returns from Mars to earth orbit," said NASA Administrator Thomas O. Paine, "it will be left in earth orbit. After refueling, resupply, and providing a new crew, the vehicle would be ready to go again-back to Mars, to Venus, or on a shuttle run to the moon...