Word: hatched
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Brief Concern. Two hours after their liftoff, Scott and Irwin were reunited with their hardworking buddy. After passing the precious cargo of moon rocks into Endeavour and closing the hatch, Scott said wistfully: "The Falcon is back on its roost and going to sleep." In fact, it came to a thunderous end. After a brief flurry of concern because of a possible hatch leak, the astronauts cut loose the lunar module's ascent stage and sent it crashing back to the moon's surface 59 miles west of Hadley Base. Its impact jiggled all three of the nuclear...
Scott had set down the spacecraft about 400 ft. northeast of the target. An hour and a half later, Scott donned his suit and poked his head out of Falcon's top hatch. "Oh, boy, what a view," he shouted, and he proceeded to name the features he had so carefully studied on earth. Scott's descriptions were so detailed that NASA Geophysicist Robin Brett said he performed as well as a professional geologist...
...heat-scarred spacecraft settled to a soft, parachute landing on the steppes of Soviet Kazakhstan, a recovery helicopter was ready and waiting to touch down right alongside. Members of the recovery team raced to the apparently undamaged Soyuz 11, unfastened the hatch and swung it open to assist Cosmonauts Georgy Dobrovolsky, Vladislav Volkov and Viktor Patsayev. Still strapped in their seats, the cosmonauts did not respond. All three were dead. Russia's triumphant space mission, which had set new records for man's endurance in space, assembled the first manned space station and added new luster to Soviet...
...week's end London's Evening News reported that Russian scientists attending the state funeral had blamed the tragedy on the cosmonauts' failure "to seal the hatch of their spacecraft properly." The Evening News' Moscow correspondent, Victor Louis (a Soviet citizen often suspected of being a Russian agent), wrote that "human error and mechanical failure between them caused creeping depressurization in the spacemen's nine-foot cabin and deprived the astronauts of life-supporting oxygen on the final phase of their journey." During the turbulent re-entry of Soyuz, Louis said, the spacecraft...
...cosmonauts-or the ground controllers-fail to notice the opened hatch in time? "The Soyuz hatchway is not unlike a car door," Louis explained. "When the hatch is open, a signal light goes on on a console at mission control. But the light will go out when the hatch is half closed, as with a half-slammed car door." The calamity came at a time when the Russians seemed to be overtaking the U.S. in space-a remarkable comeback after they abandoned the race to land the first man on the moon. Still, the comeback was not entirely without...