Word: crippen
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...always, there was in-flight banter between the astronauts and the Houston control center. When Crippen felt Houston was loading him with too many tasks at one time-realigning the inertial navigational unit, shooting a picture of the Southern Lights, confirming a message on the teletype-he asked in mock seriousness: "You mean all that right now?" To jog the astronauts awake, Houston piped in a loud country and western ditty about the shuttle called The Mean Machine. There was a somewhat more serious moment when Vice President Bush got on the radio from Washington to congratulate them on behalf...
There were also a few mi nor glitches. During the first "night" in space-actually they saw the sun rise and set once during every 90-min. orbit-Young and Crippen complained about a chill in the cabin. The temperature had drooped to 37° F. "I was ready to break out the long undies," joked one of the frozen astronauts. The problem was quickly fixed with a signal from earth that pumped warm water into the cabin's temperature control system. Young and Crippen had less luck fixing a faulty flight data recorder that had stopped mysteriously. They...
...most serious problem came on the second night when an alarm light flashed and a bell jolted Young and Crippen out of their reveries. It was a warning of a malfunction in a heating unit on one of the three auxiliary power units for Columbia's hydraulic systems, which control the landing gear and elevens. The heater keeps the unit's fuel from freezing up. A throw of a switch got it working again, but Columbia is such a masterpiece of engineering redundancy that any one of the units could have saved the day. Said Flight Director Neil...
...real "show stopper," of course, might have been the landing. But it was breathtakingly "nominal," NASA lingo for "perfect." Crossing the coast below Big Sur at Mach 7, seven times the speed of sound, or about 5,100 m.p.h., Crippen crowed: "What a way to come to California!" Young lost his cool only after he had artfully landed Columbia right on the runway's center line. Eager to make an exit, he urged Houston to get the reception crews to speed up their "sniffing" chores-ridding the ship of noxious gases with exhausts and fans. When he was finally...
Curiously, Young's and Crippen's heartbeat patterns reversed on takeoff and landing. Both are normally in the 60s. At launch Young's rose only to 85 beats a minute, while Crippen's soared to 135. Returning, Young's pulse rate zipped up to 130 as he flew the craft in. Crippen's stayed around...