Word: erector
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Silently drifting across the sky, it will resemble nothing so much as the imaginative creation of an inventive youngster with an Erector set. It will consist of sleek metal cylinders, winglike panels, sinewy aluminum beams and long, cranelike arms. But in the eyes of President Reagan, there is nothing really far out about the bizarre-looking object. If he has his way, it will be circling the earth by the early 1990s...
Like pieces of an exquisitely machined Erector set, these parts can be fitted together in different ways. For its debut next week, Spacelab has been configured in what designers call its "long module": the two cylinders have been mated to form one continuous workshop, about 13 ft. in diameter and 23 ft. in length. Positioned between the extended cylinder and the shuttle's tail assembly is a single pallet, holding 18 experiments, involving such equipment as cosmic-ray detectors, spectrometers and TV cameras. On future flights, as the experimental load increases, the tunnel can be lengthened and additional pallets...
Eleven years ago a small, unmanned spacecraft looking like the product of a child's Erector Set took off from Florida on a historic mission. Equipped with primitive electronic eyes and other instruments, Pioneer 10 flew past the giant planet Jupiter, providing the first startling close-up view of that distant world. Now the surprisingly durable robot, whose working parts were designed by its builder, TRW, to last only two or three years, has scored another remarkable achievement. Propelled by a gravitational boost from Jupiter, it has become the first man-made object to leave the solar system...
DIRECTOR Harold Prince, trying to bring some fluidity to the production, relies heavily on the mechanics of an extremely mobile set to permit his cast movement. At best, he creates the seamy atmosphere of a Hogarth woodcut. But his ingenious erector set wears thin, and his staging occasionally seems more suited to a Greenwich Village opera society. Even Prince's chillingly stark Prologue becomes cheapened in retrospect, as the Sweeney leitmotif is repeated ad nauseum. Ultimately imagination turns to calculated effect--blasting whistles, billowing smoke, showering blood--that titillate, but never deeply touch...
Weighing up to 50,000 tons apiece, solar satellites would have to be built in space itself, with materials carried aloft by a new generation of craft considerably larger and more powerful than the NASA space shuttle. Looking like great Erector Sets, the structures, about six miles long and three miles wide, would be made of long thin beams actually manufactured in space out of rolls of aluminum or carbon-fiber strips about as thick as the wall of a beer can. In the weightlessness of orbit, nothing stronger would be needed...