Word: conestoga
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...eleven-nation European Space Agency's Ariane project, which is booked solid for launches beginning late next year and running through 1985. Meanwhile, a no-frills private-enterprise launching service, Space Services Inc., successfully tested a launch rocket last summer at Matagorda Island, Texas. The prototype rocket, dubbed Conestoga I, was built in part from spare NASA assemblies, including the motor from a solid-fuel Minuteman missile. The firm's owners now plan to go into commercial service in 1984, with monthly launches starting two years later. With space technology rapidly advancing and the competition for launches beginning...
...rocket that soared upward from its launching pad in Texas last week was not very long (37 ft.) or, by modern standards, very fancy. The flight of Conestoga I, an arc 192 miles up and 326 miles out over the Gulf of Mexico, was perfect but fleeting, less than eleven minutes from blastoff to splashdown. The dummy payload was just a 1,100-lb. tank of water. Said Donald ("Deke") Slayton, the former astronaut who was flight director for the launch: "We didn't have a single anomaly in flight...
...Conestoga I was itself an anomaly. Never before had a U.S. corporation built and launched its own rocket into space. "Long live free enterprise!" shouted some of the 300 giddy spectators, dozens of them investors in the project, who gathered on a Matagorda Island cow pasture to cheer the takeoff. "It was just a glorious feeling," said David Hannah Jr., founder and chairman of Space Services Inc. of America (SSI), the two-year-old company that financed (for $2.5 million) and flew the free-enterprise rocket. "We met the objective in picture-book style...
...Government launch site." The site was, in fact, on a 19,000-acre ranch lent by Oil Mogul Toddie Lee Wynne, 85, one of SSI's main financial angels, who died a few hours before liftoff. With the, countdown under way, a launching-pad engineer wandered out to Conestoga I and, with a felt-tipped pen, scribbled on the rocket, GOD BLESS YOU, TODDIE LEE WYNNE. You can't do that at a Government launch site either...
...World War II?" In permissive California, San Quentin's main visiting room has the look of a junior high school make-out party where they forgot to dim the lights: dozens of couples, hugging, smooching, oblivious. In Leavenworth's vast mess hall, inmates grab their silverware from a miniature Conestoga and eat off red-and-white checkered tablecloths; the hoe-down amenities seem almost too perky to bear. In one dim passageway leading to an Illinois cellblock, some wry convict has painted a skillful trompe l'oeil escape route, railroad tracks disappearing into a tunnel and freedom...