Word: flighted
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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That's the official story. Perhaps more to the point is that back in the 1960s, NASA was a place for heroes. Every time men rocketed into space, they took a greater risk than on their previous flight, reached for a more audacious and dangerous goal--and almost always succeeded. But after the four extraordinary years between 1968 and 1972, when the U.S. was sending crews to the moon, the agency retreated to the familiar backwaters of near Earth orbit. Aside from a few high notes like the Hubble-telescope repair mission and the horror of the Challenger explosion, human...
...Clad in a blue full-body garment shot through with a webwork of cooling tubes, he stepped into a NASA training room at the Johnson Space Center and glanced at a space-shuttle simulator standing in front of him. A technician then helped him struggle into a heavy orange flight suit. Stuffed into the backpack of the 90-lb. pressure garment was a huge load of survival equipment: a life preserver, an emergency food and water supply, a pair of emergency oxygen bottles, a bouquet of rescue beacons and an array of other gear...
...when Glenn goes back to the pad next October, he will go as just another crew member, a lowly payload specialist setting off for a week or so of work. But even NASA administrator Daniel Goldin seems to concede that when he inks the name Glenn onto a flight manifest, he writes more than just a name. "There is," he declared the day he announced Glenn's return to space, "only one John Glenn...
...march to the moon. Although he was 40, Glenn figured he still had a lot of flying ahead of him. When he returned to Earth, he found otherwise. Like any other astronaut, he periodically approached Bob Gilruth, head of the Mercury program, to inquire about his position in the flight rotation; unlike any other astronaut, he was routinely stonewalled. "Headquarters doesn't want you to go back up," Gilruth would say to him, "at least...
...While he's up there, perhaps Baturin can help solve Mir's acute financial crisis. He'll not be unaware of the need -- his own flight was postponed 10 days because the space agency couldn't pay its electricity bills. The entire Mir program, in fact, is in debt to the tune of $600 million. But for Baturin, whose earthbound job involved figuring out how to pay wages to the starving Russian military, that's a relatively minor cash-flow problem...