Word: center
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...NORAD calculations are being transmitted by phone to a windowless room at the Johnson Space Center, where four five-member teams take turns watching monitor screens round the clock. On one wall hangs a lO-ft.-high chart detailing the altitude of the falling lab, day by day. The room, No. 314, is far plainer than the control center from which the Apollo moon missions were directed. The watch teams receive fresh telemetric data from Skylab whenever it gets within radio range of one of five NASA tracking stations (in Santiago, Chile; Bermuda; Ascension Island; Madrid; and Goldstone, Calif...
...crucial final countdown will begin when Skylab drops to about 120 miles above earth, roughly 48 hours before its re-entry into the atmosphere. At that point, a higher-level interagency team of experts, including NASA Administrator Robert A. Frosch, will take up positions in the Skylab Coordination Center on the sixth floor of NASA headquarters in Washington. Getting his information and recommendations from the Houston center, NORAD and the Marshall Space Flight "enter at Huntsville, Ala., Frosch will make the final decisions on what, if anything, should be done to try to influence Skylab's final fall...
...manned exploration is also about to take a new turn. At Florida's John F. Kennedy Space Center, next to the giant assembly building used for Apollo 11, workers are struggling to prepare Columbia, the nation's first operational space shuttle, for launch into earth orbit some time next year. Though plagued by financial crises and technical problems, the ship should be worth waiting for. The Apollo/Saturn system, towering some 360 ft. on the pad, was discarded or destroyed in each mission. By contrast, the shuttle is designed to make repeated journeys between earth and space...
...partner Michael Collins will be reunited for a round of ceremonies, capped by a replay of the original moon walk late at night at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum. In Texas another old Apollo hand, Christopher Kraft, the director of the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center, will preside at space-day ceremonies; he will open a temporary post office to cancel space-commemorative stamps for philatelists. At the Kennedy Space Center, a giant 5-ft. by 10-ft. birthday cake will be sliced up for visitors...
...affixing 40,000 or so silica foam tiles to the orbiter's outer skin. These shield it from the blazing temperatures (nearly 3,000° F) that the ship will encounter when it re-enters the atmosphere and glides to a landing at either the Kennedy Space Center or Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. A more serious difficulty: ironing the bugs out of the shuttle's main rocket engine, which has failed to perform up to specifications and blew up at least once during ground testing. NASA Administrator Robert Frosch has told Congress that this obstacle should...