Word: crafting
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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...
...from landing, Young pulled back the stick to check his dive. Only Columbia's stubby wings and slightly flared underbelly were giving it lift. But, to his delight, he found the craft far more aerodynamically buoyant than expected. Nineteen seconds before landing, he dropped his wheels...
...astonishing complexity of the craft's design, in its peerless performance certainly in the cool performance of its astronauts-possessors of what Tom Wolfe calls "the right stuff"-Columbia was a much needed reaffirmation of U.S. technological prowess. It came at a moment when many Americans, and much of the world as well, were questioning that very capability. The doubts grew out of a succession of U.S. setbacks: from the defeat in Viet Nam to the downed rescue helicopters in the Iranian desert, from the debacle of Three Mile Island to Detroit's apparent defenselessness against the onslaught...
...fine style. A dozen or so of its 31,000 heat-shielding tiles had come unstuck during the thunderous ascent. But during its glowing, 2,700° F plunge through the atmosphere, a maneuver that has been likened to riding inside a meteor, not one was lost from the craft's underbelly. Only a few tiles were gouged and chipped, apparently by pebbles and other desert debris kicked up by the wheels after touchdown. After an initial going-over at Edwards Air Force Base, the shuttle will be placed atop a modified Boeing 747 for a slow...
...process of preparation: Pre-1700 Europe: The Gracchi, the Norman Conquest, and The Peasants' Revolt of 1525: Modern Europe: The French Revolution, Sigmund Freud. The Iran Crisis: America: American Slavery. The Origins of the Cold War, and The American West; Historiography: Positivism and Anti-positivism. Historians and Their Craft...