Word: cockpit
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Inside the cockpit, the 50-year-old commander, with glasses specially fitted into his helmet to correct the farsightedness of middle age, took over the controls for the final critical maneuvers. Expertly, the veteran pilot guided his craft through a long, easy turn. When he completed the maneuver, the ship was lined up perfectly with a runway marked in the ancient, arid bed of Rogers Dry Lake six miles away. "Right on the money, right on the money!" encouraged Mission Control...
They can hardly outdo Young, who has now made five space flights, including a moon landing, and his rookie pilot, Bob Crippen, 43. Though their lift-off was delayed two days because of that computer failure, once they settled into the cockpit for the second try, everything went, well, like a rocket. Barely 45 min. off the launch pad, Columbia was circling the earth at an altitude of 150 miles. Before the end of the day it reached 170 miles. Meanwhile, two vessels steamed out to recover the 80-ton shells of two spent solid-fuel rockets that had parachuted...
...find the right words to express his emotions. Looking out of Columbia's windows, he said jubilantly, "John's been telling me about it for three years, but ain't no way you can describe it. It's hard to get my head into the cockpit here to do my procedures...
...many small, jetlike thrusters. Even when an astronaut is operating the controls, as in the final plunge back through the atmosphere, he is in effect flying the computers rather than the ship itself. Whatever maneuver he calls for, it is the computers that turn the commands from the cockpit into specific instructions for the flight machinery. Says Young: "A human being could never remember how to point 38 thrusters-he just couldn...
...since 1966, when Gemini 9 was delayed by an electrical malfunction, had a launch been scrubbed with the astronauts already in the cockpit. And critics used the setback to raise again what has by now become a litany of complaints about the shuttle program: it is too expensive-nearly a third higher than the original estimate. It is military oriented. Above all, it drains money away from such scientifically important unmanned space projects as the joint European-American mission over the poles of the sun and the once-in-a-lifetime probe of Halley's comet. Democratic Senator William...