Word: controled
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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There were many variations on the theme. New Hampshire Attorney John Ahlgren advertised "free legal services for people hit by falling pieces of Skylab" outside his Portsmouth office. But he saw a serious side to the event too. "People feel at the mercy of forces they cannot control," he explained. "Concern is mild, but it's there." An ad hoc Spokane, Wash., group called the Skylab Self-Defense Society hung a 15-ft. bull's-eye on the side of a downtown office building and suggested, "Make Spokane the target for Skylab's landing. If you give the Government...
...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). On these "passes," controllers can still make small adjustments...
...limited. On June 20, NASA's team members used up precious bursts of the spacecraft's dwindling propellant to turn its nose horizontally by 90° and into a sideways position, which exerts increased drag against its forward movement. That change gave NASA its best chance of some final control. Explained Cindy Major, 27, one of the Houston monitors: "There is more pressure now because the attitude of the spacecraft is more sensitive. There is no room for error...
While most Americans neither mourned nor feared Skylab's menacing death, some saw in it yet another in a series of examples of technology outracing man's means of control. A sequence of human and mechanical failures never envisioned by its builders had nearly caused the meltdown of a nuclear reactor at Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island. The mysterious cracks emerging in engine mountings of the DC-10 jumbo jets had led to the grounding of the fleet and America's most tragic air disaster. Now a giant spacecraft, crippled at birth six years ago, is plunging toward a premature...
...revealing and brilliant title essay, she describes a list of articles she packs when traveling. She meticulously follows the list, but always forgets her watch. She shamefacedly asks people for the time every half hour until she resorts to calling her husband at home. Her passion for asserting control, for putting things--and herself--in order is always foiled...