Word: cargo
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...docks with the station. That's one way the small "divots," or scrapes--including the one near the nosewheel well--were found on Discovery's underbelly ?THE ROBOTIC ARM Discovery is equipped with a new 50-ft. (15.2-m) robotic arm that will reach out from the cargo bay to take infrared pictures of the orbiter at very close range, looking for potential problem areas ?THE PATCH KIT Discovery's astronauts will test a tile-repair technique using a sort of paste--but not, unless absolutely necessary, on damaged tiles...
...dependable means to orbit. The emphasis now must be on designing an all-new system that is lower priced and reliable. And if human space flight stops for a decade while that happens, so be it. Once there is a cheaper and safer way to get people and cargo into orbit, talk of grand goals might become reality. New, less-expensive throwaway rockets would allow NASA to launch more space probes--the one part of the program that is constantly cost-effective. An affordable means to orbit might make possible a return to the moon for establishment of a research...
...spacecraft is a metaphor of national inspiration: majestic, technologically advanced, produced at dear cost and entrusted with precious cargo, rising above the constraints of the earth. The spacecraft carries our secret hope that there is something better out there--a world where we may someday go and leave the sorrows of the past behind. The spacecraft rises toward the heavens exactly as, in our finest moments as a nation, our hearts have risen toward justice and principle. And when, for no clear reason, the vessel crumbles, as it did in 1986 with Challenger and last week with Columbia, we falsely...
...decades of use, shuttles have experienced an array of problems--engine malfunctions, damage to the heat-shielding tiles--that have nearly produced other disasters. Seeing this, some analysts proposed that the shuttle be phased out, that cargo launches be carried aboard by far cheaper, unmanned, throwaway rockets and that NASA build a small "space plane" solely for people, to be used on those occasions when men and women are truly needed in space...
...name our shuttles for our aspirations--Atlantis, Challenger, Discovery, Endeavour--the risks built into the very idea. Columbia, the fleet's pioneer, was named after an old Boston sloop that was the first American ship to circumnavigate the globe, carrying a cargo of otter skins to China. Any risk much repeated can become routine, and so it was for shuttle flights, except when they become tragic. That's when we are reminded that knowledge doesn't come easy and that many consequences are unintended, especially when we set off on an adventure...