Word: glider
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...Number of minutes Eva Wisnierska, above, blacked out during the ordeal, in which she suffered only frostbite and minor bruising. The other glider, He Zhongpin, was killed by lightning...
...black sky. Diving back into the atmosphere will be a wild ride, peaking at nearly 6 Gs--twice the rush you feel on the average roller coaster. Rutan's genius is his "carefree re-entry" design: SpaceShipTwo folds up its wings for re-entry then transforms into a conventional glider for a gentle slide home to the runway...
Some dreamers chase butterflies. FRANCISCO GUTIERREZ pursues them through international airspace. This fall the Mexican hang glider flew more than 4,000 miles, following the annual migration of the monarch butterfly from Montreal to Mexico's Michoacán state in his ultralight plane. Gutierrez, 44, spent six years planning his 10-week trip and securing funding for a documentary about it in order to draw attention to the logging and pesticide use that threaten the monarch. Gutierrez overcame hardships insects don't face--like understanding foreign air-traffic controllers and fixing an overheated engine. But, now back on the ground...
...strange how we glimpse the impossible only when it fails. How can this spacecraft exist, one that leaves the earth like a ballistic missile, a fragile plane strapped to half a million gallons of explosive fuel, but two weeks later returns as a glider, swooping in wide S turns back to earth under nature's power alone? The engineers who build these things know that so much has to work so perfectly and with such precise timing that we should expect them to fail catastrophically every 100 missions or so. That's why NASA must be America's most optimistic...
...took digital-camera snapshots through the portholes. Melvill scattered a handful of M&M's and watched them float. Binnie took out a tiny model of SpaceShipOne and flew it around the cabin. Then that crazy hinge raises the wings, Earth's gravity kicks in, and SpaceShipOne becomes a glider. "It's like falling into a feather bed," says Melvill...